FLICKER OF RECOGNITION

Dick Pountain/ Idealog286/ 9th May 2018 14:38:14

Their casual dropping of the “e” was a bravado touch (and I don’t imagine it had anything to do with Oulipo) but when I joined in 2006 I still found Flickr rather an odd name, simply because for we Brits a “flick” is a motion picture rather than a still. OK, Flickr did later admit video content, but it remains overwhelmingly a platform for still photography. And it’s not half so odd a name as SmugMug.

SmugMug is the US firm which back in April bought Flickr from its previous owner Yahoo, and recently emailed me, first to assure me that my Flickr account would remain unchanged for the forseeable future, then to invite me to try its own offering (which to my surprise was founded in 2002, two years before Flickr).

Regular readers may recall that I’m a dedicated Flickr user, with 1856 photos and other graphics displayed there. I’d have to confess though that my dedication has been, er, flickering somewhat over the last year or two, because getting pictures seen on Flickr feels increasing like a chore. The reason is simply the site’s success: it currently holds well over 10 billion pictures, and has 75 million users who upload as many as 25 million more pictures per day. Put another way, there are more Flickr users than the UK population, so getting a picture seen is much like stepping out into the street and waving it above your head.

Flickr’s organising principle is the photostream: your pictures get displayed in strict chronological order, so only the most recent, head of the stream, gets broadcast to your followers. Each picture becomes progressively less visible as time passes. Flickr’s Groups are the way around this. There are over ten million of these, created by users on specific themes: I’m in 221 of them, from birds, flowers and water to surrealism, abstract art and the disturbing. Putting a picture into groups gets it far more views than merely leaving it on your photostream for people to find. Unfortunately, due to that torrent of fresh content, many groups impose restrictions - for example only one or two pictures per day - and many also demand that you comment on some number of other people’s pictures for each of yours posted (to discourage spamming and careless use).

I like to make picture sequences that need to be seen together, but to get enough attention on Flickr I need to post them into at least 20 groups, most of which will only permit one or two a day, and require up to three comments. Hence it can take several days to post them all, and half-an-hour each day to add the comments (even using short-cut macros).

It’s becoming a chore, so I often put a sequence into a Facebook album instead, with just one on Flickr. However Facebook is an awkward platform for pictures, so I decided to check out SmugMug’s 14-day free trial.

SmugMug is all about selling your pictures, which I wouldn’t mind doing (and which Flickr has never achieved). Instead of a photostream you get a customisable website that looks highly professional, with its own URL for potential customers (Flickr has a slightly unfriendly face for non-members). However you pay for these services, a monthly fee that rises with the promotional features you require, and 15% of any sale goes to SmugMug.

The Basic plan at $4 is twice what I now pay on Flickr, while the Power ($6), Portfolio ($16) and Business ($30) plans would need to sell a lot of pix for me to break even.

It was viewing the sample sites that made up my mind. Most showed portraits, family pictures or postcard scenes, like those high-street photography shops you still see in many small towns. I realised that I’m not actually a photographer at all, just someone who employs a digital camera and computer software to make images. I don’t aim at the perfection of professional photographers, I don’t enter competitions, and I don’t share the dominant aesthetic on Flickr which is for over-saturated, over-sharpened photos that hit you in the eye.

My favourite among the famous photographers is Saul Leiter, who worked for Vogue but for his own pleasure preferred the out-of-focus, the eccentrically framed, the sudden splash of highly emotional colour. I heavily process my pictures to make them look more like paintings, I fiddle with fractal images in Sumo Paint for hours until something catches my eye, usually through colour as much as form. What pleases me is unlikely to be what would sell. Posting to Flickr is a chore, but then so is stretching a canvas. It’s art, innit.

[Dick Pountain would be delighted if you viewed his creations at https://www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/ and it won’t cost you a penny]

MAKE ME A UNICORN?

Dick Pountain/Idealog 285/ 08 April 2018 11:18

In recent weeks I've been thinking a lot about the future, which is sort of surprising when the world's politicians are conspiring to make us wonder whether there'll even be one. It feels to me as though a bunch of technologies that we once thought revolutionary, then took for granted, are all at once maturing so as to deliver on their original promise.

It started as I was reviewing Greg Milner's book "Pinpoint", about the history of the GPS system. An excellent read, it tells you about those non-obvious applications for which GPS is used most, beyond the sat-nav on the dash of your car: agriculture, transport logistics, timing (and of course delivering smart bombs, for which is was originally invented). I concluded that, unlike the telescope or telephone, GPS actually enhances the planet rather than our senses. Its signals are just there, for anyone who chooses to capture them and hence discover exactly where they are and when.
Next I visited a Virtual Reality show called Future Tech Now at Islington's Design Centre. I've been writing about VR for 25 years now, and know all the jokes about how this years is... but it feels as though this year really is. It was a small show, of small firms, with VR kit that worked, was cheap and did interesting, fun or useful stuff. Learning how to suture a surgical incision from another continent (Medical Realities and Global Health Informatics); a thrilling and bone-shaking augmented VR ride from the top of the Shard to ground level down a huge twisty-loopy slide (Happy Finish); and a tiny drone with sub-match-box-sized camera that delivers full VR to your phone via Google Cardboard, for under £100 (Microdrone/Extreme Fliers). 

Perhaps most provoking of all was the Teslasuit, which has nothing to do with Elon Musk (I do hope they have a good IP lawyer). It's a gaming/simulation accessory developed by a firm based in the UK and Belarus, which provides all-body haptic feedback and motion-capture, in a very interesting way. I'd followed this sort of application through 20 years-worth of CeBITs, watching electric motors, pneumatics and hydraulics all come and go, rejected as too dangerous in case of failure. The Teslasuit uses transdermal stimulation, tiny electrical voltages applied to pads in its lining that affect your touch and temperature sensitive nerve ends to fool you into feeling an external force - without the risk of breaking your arm with actual forces.

Next, Jennifer Doudna's "A Crack in Creation", the book I wrote about last month, has the nowadays-compulsory lengthy subtitle which I forgot to mention, "Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution". Note well that "unthinkable". Doudna explains that the CRISPR/Cas 9 system she pioneered makes it possible to assemble a gene-editing kit for around $2000, which anyone who's prepared to do a lot of homework could employ in their kitchen or bathroom. You no longer need a million-dollar DNA sequencer, nor to send off, wait months and pay $50,000 to have a string of custom DNA made. You can buy capsids - small rings of RNA that encode CRISPR and Cas 9 - off the internet for more like £100. With my background, if I ever get bored writing Python programs I could maybe buy a shetland pony and start designing a unicorn. 

The final prod to my imagination came via a story in Nature about solar geoengineering, injecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect away sunlight and combat global warming. A group of scientists from those developing nations who have most to lose are in favour. No-one can know what unwanted effects it might have, but if you're going to be underwater in 20 years anyway, it might seem worth a shot. 

There is a common thread linking all these phenomena, and it's the same old idea I've been flogging to death in this column for ever, the difference between atoms and bits. VR technologies are getting good enough to build wholly convincing worlds in the realm of bits, that is, inside our heads. Meanwhile GPS, geoengineering and gene editing will enable people, both good and bad, to modify the real world of atoms in ways that are potentially terrifying and devastating. It's hard to say which road is the more risky. 

One could be optimistic and hope that with judicious control over their use, some combination of both approaches would make for an incredible new world. On the other hand a bunch of CRISPR-capable terrorists might cook up the bug that will eradicate all of us (or just the ones they don't like). What's certain is that our current generation of leaders are utterly incompetent to make the necessary decisions. 

[Being a boy, Dick Pountain isn't all that into unicorns and would really prefer a flying monkey]
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PATCHES ON YOUR GENES

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 284/ 7th March 2018 11:29:07

When I was 8 or 9 one of my Christmas presents was a lavishly illustrated book called “How And Why It Works”, which explained everything from airliners to oil-wells to reflecting telescopes. It immediately became my favourite, along with a nature book about curious animals like the echidna. My course in life was set right there and then. I just wanted to know how everything works – including you and me – so I became a biochemist, and then through a series of flukes a computer nerd.

Books can still have that sort of effect on me, but fairly rarely nowadays, and when one does I occasionally write about it here. The last time that happened was back in August 2016 when "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean B. Carroll overcame my reluctance to get to grips with Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo Devo). That book helped me understand that all living things are indeed computational systems, but not in naive way that the AI brigade would have us believe. Every living thing contains a genetic apparatus which combines a database of inherited features with a collection of distributed, self-modifying, real-time processors and 3D printers whose outputs are flesh, blood and bones, leaves, bacterial cell walls, and also those nerves and brains that AI concerns itself with.

Well, it’s just happened again. I’d been vaguely aware for several years of a revolution in the technology of gene editing, one that will enable us to actually reprogram this system for ourselves (for better or for worse). But as with Evo Devo, I’d pushed it to the back of my mind, unwilling to tackle the mental effort needed to understand. What’s fortified me this time around is a short article (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/rupert-beale/diary) in the London Review of Books by Dr Rupert Beale, a scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which explains in admirably lucid and non-technical fashion the new techniques of CRISPR.

Beale’s knows his stuff because he researches bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. It was work on phages around 20 years ago (by a Danish industrial yoghurt company among others) that triggered this revolution. Bacteria, though just single cells, have evolved a very simple immune system – whenever they survive a phage attack they snapshot a chunk of its genetic sequence into their own DNA as a memory of the crime. In any future infection a bacterium can recognise that sequence and use an enzyme called Cas9 to snip it out, thus killing the invading phage. These snapshots consist of “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, or CRISPR for short.

Those of you involved in computer security (hi Davey) might recognise this as much the same mechanism used by AV software to detect computer viruses from their “signature” code sequence. Molecular geneticists can now deploy the combination of CRISPR and Cas9 as tools to cut-and-paste gene sequences into the DNA of other creatures besides bacteria, up-to-and-including homo sapiens. In practice they don’t actually snip out target genes but rather disable

them: Cas9 cuts the DNA strand but the host cell repairs it, over and again until it makes a mistake so that gene stops working. Knock out all 20,000 genes in the human genome one at a time, and you can build a vast library of gene-removed cells, for example to test cancer chemotherapy drugs by finding which genes are involved in a response. As Beale explains: “With CRISPR-Cas9 techniques we can kill genes, switch them on and, if we are lucky, replace bits of one gene with another. It doesn’t stop there: the guidance system can be employed to perform almost any function that can be bolted onto a protein.” In other words CRISPR will make it possible to directly code the human genome, and we’ll soon be seeing patches that cure specific genetic diseases, add resistance to infections and more. Patch Tuesday could eventually become something you do at your local clinic as well as on your PC.

Of course the risks as well as the benefits of such patching will pretty quickly become apparent (hopefully they’ll not be as bad as Windows 10). CRISPR has become big business and there are ongoing squabbles over the patent rights between various corporations and universities. Jennifer Doudna, a leading CRISPR researcher at Berkeley, in her excellent popular book “A Crack in Creation”, tackles some of the ethical problems that will arise as we supplant “the deaf dumb and blind system that has shaped genetic material on our planet for eons and replace it with a conscious intentional system of human directed evolution”. If GM lettuces created a ferocious worldwide protest, expect way more at the prospect of GM babies...

OUT THE WINDOW

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 283/ 9th February 2018 09:38:21

A few days ago my Chromebook told me it would like to reboot in order to update its operating system. I‘d just made a cup of tea at the time (Bai Mu Dan if you’re interested). I hit the power button and nervously watched the progress bar – a habit picked up from 30 years of Windows use – and it finished updating while the tea was still hot. With the reboot completed a pop-up informed me that I could now download and run Android apps on the Chromebook. That was worth another biscuit (Biscoff Lotus if you’re interested). 

Running Android apps on the Chromebook had been an ambition for most of the previous year, but up until now it had involved techie adventures in developer mode that I didn’t feel like attempting. The first driver of this ambition was a need to program in Python on the machine, satisfied instantly by downloading the Android version QPython3. It compiled and ran everything I’ve written under Windows, the only change required being to prefix any file paths with “/storage/emulated/0/” (of which more later). 

Almost as strong was a desire for certain Android apps I’d come to depend upon, like the PC-Pro-Award-winning Citymapper which enables me to navigate through London with unprecedented ease. I had tried the browser-based version for Chrome, but it was so inferior to the Android app in UI terms, particularly the interactivity of the maps, that I preferred to use it on my phone or tablet. And that brings me to the main point of this column: just like Windows native applications, Android apps nowadays exploit the hardware (especially screen real-estate) so much better than browser-based versions that there’s no contest. 

Another application I use every day is Spotify, on which I listen to music at home via Windows or Chromebook, while walking on heath or park on my phone. But until this update I had three different versions of the Spotify client, differing from one another in various ways, some subtle, some downright infuriating. The Windows version is still the most complete in that it supports playlist folders to organise my scores of lists, and also drag-and-drop to rearrange these folders and their contents. The Android version has folders that aren’t drag-and-drop, but does support a new UI with a taskbar at the bottom that’s easier to use on small phone screens. The browser version I’d been using on the Chromebook is a nightmare that doesn’t support folders at all and steamrollers them into un-navigably flat lists which aren’t even complete: the Artists tab only displays a fraction of what’s there. Spotify is nowadays ambivalent about playlists and deprecates them in favour of its newer, non-hierarchical Your Music (Save| Songs| Artists| Albums) system, hence this bodge which I thoroughly enjoyed uninstalling.

The combination of Google Contacts, Calendar and the ever-increasingly-wonderful Google Keep ensures that all my appointments, addresses, notes and other important data are always automatically synced between Windows, Chrome and Android machines – I can even do voice dictation on my phone and have it there waiting on the desktop when I get home. 

So what about writing? Well, the answer is that I’m writing this column in Google Docs. Running Android means that I could now have Microsoft Word, but in truth I’d stopped using MS Office even under Windows several years ago, in favour of LibreOffice. Google Docs does everything I need except for its lack of simple macros. Under Windows I used an external app Macro Express, plus a few Word Basic scripts. I’ve found an almost complete replacement in a Chrome extension called ProKeys that stores ‘snippets’ of text, complete with placeholders and automatic date and time stamping, which covers 90% of what I want to do. It can’t do my text editing macros – swapping pairs of letters or words under the cursor – but I can’t be bothered to learn Google Docs’ JavaScript API and will do without. 

Is there a downside? Well yes, the confusion of three different file locations, the default My Drive in the cloud, the small local Download drive and a completely separate local Android drive. Apps mostly hide this from you, but it really is time Google did that long-promised merger of Android and ChromeOS. As a grizzled pioneer of the personal computer revolution I’ll never be entirely happy having everything in someone else’s cloud and will always want local copies of current work and vital data, so here’s a suggestion. A merged OS (ChromDroid?) might have a file attribute that takes these three values:

  l = local only
  c = cloud only
  s = local first, then sync to cloud

Give me that and Windows would go right, er, out the window.

PLASTIC BRAINS

Dick Pountain/Idealog 282/05 January 2018 15:06

Feels to me as though we're on the brink of a moral panic about overdependence on social media (particularly by children), and part of it hangs on the question "are digital media changing the way we think?" The wind-chill is sufficient to have Mark Zuckerberg sounding defensive instead of chipper, while several ex-Facebook gurus have gone almost gothic: Sean Parker believes the platform “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” while Chamath Palihapitiya goes the whole hog with “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works”. 

Now I'm as partial to a shot of dopamine as the next person - I take mine mostly in the form of Flickr faves - and have also been known to favour destroying how society works a little bit. However I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit this one out because I firmly believe that *almost everything the human race has ever invented* changed the wiring of our brains and the way we think, and that this one isn't even really one of the biggest. For example discovering how to make fire permitted us to cook our food, making nutrients more quickly available and enabling our brains to evolve to far larger size than other primates'. When we invented languages we created a world of things-with-names that few, probably no, other animals inhabit, allowing us to accumulate and pass on knowledge. Paper, the printing press, the telegraph, eventually, er, Facebook. 

One of the most intriguing books I've ever read is “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (1976) by the late Julian Jaynes, a US professor of psychology. He speculated that during the thousands of years between the acquisition of speech and of writing around 1000BC our minds were structured quite differently from now, that all our thoughts were dialogues between two voices, our own and a second commanding voice that continually told us what to do. These second voices were in fact the voices of parents, tribal leaders and kings internalised during infancy, but we experienced them as the voices of gods - hence the origin of religion. Physiologically it was the result of fully experiencing both brain hemispheres, with the right one semi-autonomous and conversing internally with the left. Writing and written law eventually rewired this ancient mind structure, leaving us with the minds we now possess which experience autonomy, the voice of gods being relegated to the less insistent voice of conscience which we understand belongs to us (unless we suffer from schizophrenia) and may ignore if we choose to. 

Crazy? Plausible? Explanatory? Testable? It's well-written and deeply researched, so much so that Richard Dawkins in “The God Delusion” says it's “one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.” Me too. 

A rather slimmer book I just read - "Why Only Us, Language and Evolution" by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky - is equally mind-boggling. Their argument is too complex to explain here, related to Chomsky's perennial concern with the deep structure of language, what's inherited and what's learned. Recent research in evolutionary developmental neurobiology suggests that a single mutation is sufficient to differentiate our language-capable brains from those of other primates: an operation the authors call "Merge" which combines mental symbols in hierarchical rather than merely sequential fashion. Our languages go beyond other animal communication systems because they permit infinite combinations of symbols and hence the mental creation of possible worlds. Birds create new songs by stringing together chains of snippets: we absorb the syntax of our various languages via trees rather than chains. Language arrived thanks to a change in our brain wiring and it lets us think via the voice in our head. 

We used to believe that our brain wiring got fixed during the first three or four years of life, while we learned to walk and talk, then remained static throughout adulthood: we now know better. Learning, say, to play the cello or to memorise London streets as a cabby detectably alters brain structure. Our ever-increasing dependency on Sat Nav to navigate from A to B may be jeopardising our ability to visualise whole territories, by shrinking it down to a collection of "strip maps" of individual routes. Fine so long as you remain on the strip, not so if one wrong turn sends you into a lake. Were a war to destroy the GPS satellites we'd end up running around like a kicked ant's nest. Being rude, or liking, each other on Facebook really is some way from being the worst risk we face.

AI NEEDS MORE HI

Dick Pountain/Idealog  281/05 December 2017 11:32 

I got suckered into watching 'The Robot Will See You Now' during Channel 4's November week of robot programmes, and shoddy though it was, it conveyed more of the truth than the more technically-correct offerings. Its premise was a family of hand-picked reality TV stereotypes being given access to robot Jess (whose flat glass face looked like a thermostat display but was agreed by all to be 'cute') and they consulted he/she/it about their relationship problems and other worries. The crunch was that C4 admitted Jess operates 'with some human assistance', which could well have meant somebody sitting in the next room speaking into a microphone... 

Never mind that, the basic effect of Jess was immediately recognisable to me as just ELIZA in a smart new plastic shell. ELIZA, for those too young to know, was one of the very first AI natural language programs, written in 1964 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT (and 16 years later by me while learning Lisp). It imitated a psychiatrist by taking a user's questions and turning them around into what looked like intelligent further questions, while having no actual understanding of meaning. Jess did something similar in a more up-to-date vernacular (which could have been BigJess in the next room at the microphone). 

Both Jess and ELIZA actually work, because they give their 'patients' somebody neutral to unload upon, someone non-threatening and non-judgemental - unlike their friends and family. Jess's clearly waterproof plastic carapace encouraged them to spill the beans. Neither robot doctor need understand their problem, merely to act as a mirror in which the patient talks themself into solving it. 

Interacting with Jess was more about emotion than about AI, which points up the blind alley that AI is currently backing itself into. I've written here several times before about the way we confuse *emotions* with *feelings*: the former are chemical and neural warning signals generated deep within our brains' limbic system, while feelings are our conscious experience of the effects of these signals on our bodies, as when fear speeds our pulse,  clarifies vision, makes us sweat. These emotional brain subsystems are evolutionarily primitive and exist at the same level as perception, well before the language and reasoning parts of our brains. Whenever we remember a scene or event, the memory gets tagged with the emotional state it produced, and these tags are the stores of value, of 'good' versus 'bad'. When memories are retrieved later on, our frontal cortex processes them to steer decisions that we believe we make by reason alone. 

All our reasoning is done through language, by the outermost, most recent layers of the brain that support the 'voice in your head'. But of course language itself consists of a huge set of memories laid down in your earliest years, and so it's inescapably value laden. Even purely abstract thought, say mathematics, can't escape some emotional influence (indeed it may inject creativity). Meaning comes mostly from this emotional content, which is why language semantics is such  knotty problem that lacks satisfactory solutions - what a sentence means depends on who's hearing it.

The problem for AI is that it's climbing the causality ladder in exactly the opposite direction, starting with algorithmic or inductive language processing, then trying to attach meaning afterwards. There's an informative and highly readable article by James Somers in the September MIT Technology Review (https://medium.com/mit-technology-review/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony-b9ed5a261da0), about the current explosion in AI capabilities - driverless cars, Siri, Google Translate, AlphaGo and more. He explains they all involve 'deep learning' from billions of real-world examples, using computer-simulated neural nets based around the 1986 invention of 'back-propagation' by Geoffrey Hinton, David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams. He visits Hinton in the new Vector Institute in Toronto, where they show him that they're finally able to decipher the intermediate layers of multilayer back-propagation networks, and are amazed to see structures spontaneously emerge that somewhat resemble those in the human visual and auditory cortexes. Somers eschews the usual techno-utopian boosterism, cautioning us that "the latest sweep of progress in AI has been less science than engineering, even tinkering [...] Deep learning in some ways mimics what goes on in the human brain, but only in a shallow way". All these whizzy AI products exhibit a fragility quite unlike the flexibility of HI (human intelligence). 

I believe this fundamental fragility stems from AI's back-to-front approach to the world, that is, from its lack of HI's underlying emotional layer that lies below the level of language and is concurrent with perception itself. We judge and remember what we perceive as being good or bad, relative to deep interests like eating, escaping, playing and procreating. Jess could never *really* empathise with his fleshy interrogators because, unlike them, he never gets hungry or horny...  

THE MAPLOTUBAZON TRIANGLE

Dick Pountain/Idealog 280/29 October 2017 10:57

Living in 21st-century London poses many threats to the health of elderly gentlemen, from acid-flinging scooter thugs to spice-addled footpads, but these dwindle into statistical insignificance for me personally compared to the threat of getting lost in the Maplotubazon Triangle - the seductive maze of online tech retailers that encourages one to squander money without even leaving the house. 

The mid-life collecting impulse that afflicts many males with disposable incomes is a pretty well-understood pathology, which often manifests itself through fast cars, motorcycles or vintage electric guitars. I try to resist it myself, partly out of principle but also from a certain parsimony towards the confiscatory prices that prevail in these adult-toy markets. However I'm still vulnerable because I do enjoy playing guitar. I don't collect guitars as such, being satisfied with two I purchased years ago - a 1984 Gibson Blue Ridge acoustic and a 1987 Fender MIJ (Made in Japan) ‘Hendrix re-issue’ Stratocaster, plus a more recent Hofner Beatle Bass replica. I do however have an unhealthy relationship with effects pedals, provoked by my doomed desire to emulate Bill Frisell, who deploys delay, looping and reverb as instruments in their own right. 

It's not that I actually collect pedals either, already having (most) of the ones I want, but rather that I need to connect them all into a *system*, the ergonomics of which have become a bit of an obsession. I have five pedals that need connecting: an Akai Head Rush delay/echo/looper (bought after I first saw KT Tunstall); a Zoom MRT-3 drum machine, which in addition to hundreds of preset patterns lets me use its pads interactively; a Zoom G1on multi-effect processor; a Belcat tremolo pedal and a Rowin twin looper. I can play guitar(s) and drum patterns into the looper, then play over it like a one-man trio.  

The problem is the vast number of ways you can connect these up: which should go before which, parallel or series, which can be bypassed? It's even forced me to draw flow charts. Do I need tremolo on the drums? No. All these pedals ultimately feed into a small Marshall practice amp and the "glue" that holds them together is a dense thicket of short jack leads, 9v power leads and mixer boxes. And sniffing all this glue is what caused me to be cast away in the Maplotubazon Triangle - I have a branch of Maplins just down the road, I have a highly-active Amazon account, and I watch guitar-pedal porn on YouTube.  

This whole enterprise means waging war against two powerful enemies, mains-hum and impedance mismatch, my Scylla and Charybdis. Try new configuration, works until I add in one last pedal and then it hums. Bung in another £17 Maplins passive 3-channel mixer and the hum goes away, but I lose 40dB and the volume knob on my Strat behaves like an on/off switch. Put active mixer back in and it hums when you turn the third knob... Spend hours reading specs and user reviews of multi-pedal power supplies on Amazon, but never actually settle on the one to order. Will its power leads be long enough? Will it really be hum-free? Agony...

There's a deeper level of OCD still to which I've not succumbed, yet, namely to open up the boxes and alter their gubbins with a soldering iron. I've tasted this forbidden fruit via a YouTube video about hacking the MRT-3 to add an 8-socket patch panel and noise generator. I'm pretty damned good with a soldering iron (mine's a Draper butane-powered cordless one, if you're interested (which I'm sure you are)) but no... just no.

You may wonder whether there's any purpose beyond all this fiddling, and the short answer is yes. One day, once it all works well enough to navigate in real-time with confidence, and assuming that occurs within my lifetime, I'd like to perform in public. All pedals attached with velcro, just a single mains plug, hoick the rig down to The Green Note open-mike night and treat them to 15 minutes of space-age howls and twangs. You may wonder why I don't just find two human musicians who are into electronic, effect-heavy, free-jazz guitar music. I would, but it seems most of them are working part-time on remote unicorn ranches. 

And anyway, I'm almost there now. I've just discovered a configuration that works hum-free and loud so long as I use three separate wall wart power supplies. That being the case I've ordered, from Amazon, a Caline 10-way isolated power supply, which should fix me up for sure. I just found 1,140 YouTube videos, half of which say it's the bee's knees and half of which say it's crap, so a 50:50 chance...


[Dick Pountain has been a good boy in 2017 and would like Santa to bring him a DigiTech PDS-8000 Echo-Plus]