The Long Game (by alaric)

I've written before about my plethora of projects and how I'm trying to spend more time on them, and to focus on ones that can produce immediate rewards (such as Ugarit) at the cost of longer-term ones (such as ARGON).

However, I have projects I can't even start on without access to massive resources. I have them Far Out Beyond The Back Burner, just in case I gain the resources required to start them within my lifetime, but without any great expectation of doing so.

I'm listing them in an approximate order based on what ones I think would be easiest to start, and would in turn make later ones more approachable.

Molecular nanotechnology

I'm hoping for a proper Drexlerian revolution of molecular manufacturing. A post-scarcity economy of cheap diamond and home production of anything you can download or design a plan for, as long as it doesn't require exotic atoms (which only really rules out nuclear devices; no big deal).

Post-scarcity is always a relative term, however. Sure, we'd be in a world where we can use solar power to directly convert our own waste products back into all the goods we currently hunger for; where a small patch of land gives you enough space to plant a tiny nanotech seed (that anybody else on Earth can make for you at practically zero cost) to grow yourself a solar array and then use the energy from it to harvest raw materials from the ground and air to make yourself a house that provides a level of material luxury beyond what even the richest humans alive right now can have. But we'd still need some kind of economy to buy land in the first place, and to buy skills and services (from designing things you can tell your home to build for you to entertainment).

I hope that my skills as a designer of intricate systems would be held in high regard in such a world, so I don't need to spend too much time working. As a molecular assembly unit can just be fed a design and sit making it overnight, I won't need to spend my time laboriously making complex machinery; I want to focus as much as possible on spending my time designing the machinery and software for my next steps.

Get offworld

However, although I'll still need money to buy services, I have some plans that would require large amounts of material, and that might be expensive as the human population rises. So I'd focus my available resources on building one of those tiny nanotechnological seeds and firing it into space, to start converting asteroids into nano-replicators, under control from a nice radio dish I'd command my house to grow. I wouldn't be the only person to think of this, and I could expect territorial claims to start appearing around the solar system pretty sharpish, so it would be good to start quickly.

I might stay living on Earth, or try to build a large spacecraft and relocate to orbit if that's practical. However, my physical location will be largely irrelevant, and more so in later stages of the plan.

Artificial intelligence

Having to work so that I can hire the services of humans to fill in gaps in my design skills, or just to save me time so I can progress my plans faster, is a bottleneck. And a risk, as the rest of the human race may not react rationally to the emergence of a post-scarcity world and start wiping itself out. One way out (which is rather speculative, as I don't know if it would work) would be to turn all that asteroid mass I'm converting with my space probes into solar-powered computers and setting them the task of evolving intelligence in a simulated neural network or rule engine. Rather than doing lots of hard thinking about the nature of intelligence, I'd brute-force it - a massively parallel genetic algorithm trying to find a configuration of the simulation which can answer questions I'd feed into it. I'd train it on a mixture of my own questions and exercises from textbooks in fields of interest to me. With a large enough training set, I should be able to evolve a system that's a general function from questions posed in English with access to the background knowledge implied by the kinds of textbooks I trained it from, to answers in English. If it worked, I would have an artificial intelligence, without an artificial sentience.

That difference is quite profound. Artificial sentience opens up ethical questions: should it have the rights of a person? But I have no need to create a mind in the image of my own, with desires and awareness of time and sensory capacity and a continuity of consciousness based on memory of past events. All I need is a function from question to answer, that can be embedded into software that needs it. I can ask it questions beyond the scope of its training (if I manage to evolve it to be sufficiently general) by including appropriate textbook material in the question.

I could use it to solve problems by posing them as questions, firstly. But I could also use it for intelligent automation; systems could react to events by feeding the nature of the event, as well as background information about the situation and relevant history, in as part of a question as to the best course of action to follow to meet some defined goal.

Weak life extension

I may be lucky to get this far within my lifespan as it stands, but I don't want to risk any further, so I will have been learning (or assembling reference material for my AI) about human biology sufficient to cure ailments, and decelerate or reverse the process of aging, in case I need a bit more time to complete the next stage.

Accelerated consciousness

We think by exchanging pulses between the neurons in our brains. The neuron is a cell that, beyond the normal structures required of a functioning cell, contain one or more long thread-like structures called axons, which enable the neuron to connect to other neurons elsewhere in the brain; and the connection points, which are called synapses. We're still a bit vague on exactly what happens inside the synapses; we have an idea of their properties, but we can't really test it well enough to see if it's complete. Hopefully nanotechnology will let us put probes inside working neurons and examine them better.

But fully mapping the function of the synapse can come later. I'll start with a lower-hanging fruit: mapping the functioning of the axon.

Signals travel through axons at about eight metres per second. Signals travel through copper cable at about two hundred million metres per second. If I could inject nanomachines into my cranium that would trace out the neurons, finding the synapses and the axons that join them together into the neuron, and bypassing the axons with insulated copper cables carrying electronic signals directly between the synapses, I would significantly increase the speed at which I thought.

The danger would be timing dependencies in the brain. If a neuron fires, sending a pulse down a long axon, while the same pulse also travels via shorter axons through one or more extra synaptic junctions, then changing the speed of propogation down axons without changing the speed of processing of synapses would result in the relative timings of the effects of the initial firing arriving at the destination differing. So I'd start by having my electronic bypasses insert a delay to more exactly simulate the original axons at first, and try selectively decreasing it in various parts of my brain first, to see what happened (and with an automatic return to normal timings after fifteen seconds, like when you change the resolution on your display and the OS isn't sure if you can then actually see the dialog asking you if the result is OK).

In the worst case, I'd have to take time to study the synapse so I could model it in an electronic system and thus create a timing-perfect electronic model of my brain, but that would take longer. It is necessary for later steps in the plan, but it would be nice to reap the benefits of accelerated consciousness sooner than that, in order to make better use of my time.

It's hard to say how fast I could make myself go. The hard limit (if the response of the synapses was irrelevant to the speed of thought, and axon delays were the limiting factor) would be that I would think two hundred million divided by eight, which is twenty five million, times as fast. At that speed, anything that wasn't moving at a good fraction of the speed of light would appear immobile to me. I would seem to be frozen, stuck in an immobile body, and I'd probably go mad from boredom and claustrophobic panic. So I wouldn't do that. Since I'd already tapped all my axons, I'd divert my peripheral nervous system to a virtual body in a 3D computer simulation. Then I could do all the thinking and planning and designing and reading and writing I wanted to. Of course, fetching stuff from the Internet would be a pain; if I sent out an HTTP request to Wikipedia for some information, it would take a long subjective time for the response to come back. Likewise with communicating with friends by IRC and email.

But even if removing axon delays only made my thoughts happen ten or a hundred times as fast, due to synapse delays being significant, I'd still need to go into a virtual world to live without the slowness of my physical body trapping me. And unless it was only a few times as fast as normal living, I would find myself spending a lot of time waiting for the world outside to react to my latest HTTP request or other action.

So I would probably program my control software to make my synaptic delays infinite - suspending neural firing - until something interesting happened (or a timeout occurred; I'd want to wake up at least once a millisecond just to see what was happening through my real eyes, in case there was an explosion in progress or something else I needed to attend to).

I'd probably want to automate management of my body. Walking by taking note of my inner ear and eyes a hundred times a second and deciding what impulses to send to my muscles would be hard work; I'd need to automate it to the level of choosing a direction of motion and a desired body position and facial expression and letting the computer walk for me, checking up on it ten times a second or so. I'd want to be able to tell my mouth to speak a sentence and leave it to get on with it, and whenever I checked up on my body I'd replay to the past few seconds of recorded audio and video so that I could discern speech directed at me.

Driving my physical body might take only a tiny fraction of my time. So why not drive several? I could control heaps of robot bodies at the same time, by just examining the state of each in turn, via radio links. I could be an entire team of robot ninjas infiltrating a building at the same time. That would be awesome.

However, interacting with computers would be a pain. As much faster as my brain was, computers would be correspondingly slower. My 3D virtual world would need to be quite basic, even with a massively parallel nanotech computer rendering it and only needing to render my foveal region in full resolution, or it just wouldn't be able to generate frames fast enough for me. Waiting milliseconds for a web browser to actually render a page into an image would be intolerable. I would need to run very simple software on very fast processors if I wanted interactive responses.

But either way, my main limiting factor - time to design things - is now significantly relieved.

Mind transfer

But the logical next step is to get rid of those synapses, and entirely replace my brain with an electronic version. This would gain me the rest of the speed improvement available. Also, an electronic synapse would probably be smaller than the real thing, and it wouldn't need the body of the neural cell any more, so I could make my entire brain much smaller, thereby gaining an extra few times speed by just removing the distances those two hundred metre per second electrical impulses have to travel.

But being a fully digital simulation would have other benefits. My neural interconnection map and synaptic states would be a string of bits that could be transferred and a new electronic brain built and initialised from. This could be used to back me up in case of the physical destruction of my brain and body. It could also be used to work around the annoying consequences of communications delays being so notable when living at twenty five million times the normal speed; I could transmit my brain state into deep space and have my brain constructed there in order to get hands-on with some process, then send it back afterwards (or resume the old version still at home if the transferred copy is lost or corrupted somehow). If I build a solar antimatter refinery and made enough antimatter to send a nanoseed probe to Alpha Centauri at nearly light-speed (which might take a decade or so), and had it build an installation there, I could even visit it at the cost of four years of unconciousness while I was in transit each way. But that's nothing compared to the costs and risks of sending my physical brain there and back.

In principle I could duplicate myself and run multiple instances of myself in parallel, but I don't think I'd need to - with accelerated consciousness, I don't think that thinking time would be my bottleneck any more. A reason to run clones of myself at great distances in order to have more real-time interaction with events over a large area might develop, but I don't know of any reason why I'd need to do that, offhand.

Acausal near-godhood

So, assuming I've managed to not kill myself by tinkering with my brain, and I've not run into competition with other humans and been imprisoned or destroyed by them, I'm now a disembodied intelligence able to simultaneously operate bodies anywhere within a few tens of light-milliseconds of wherver I'm currently sentient from, and able to migrate between brains at the speed of light, and to be fairly immortal due to having backup copies of myself that activate if the "currently live me" stops checking in every millisecond. Arguably, I will have crossed some kind of technological singularity, as tinkering with my own cognition has made me able to out-think any normal human being (or team thereof), purely by being able to research and plan my actions in great detail - in the time it takes a visual signal to travel from the eye to the brain of a normal human being. But the post-singularity me would still be perfectly comprehensible to a normal human and vice versa; it is the quantity of my thought which will improve, not the quality.

Perhaps I will have had to leave the solar system of my birth by now, in order to keep my freedom from other humans, or whatever becomes of governments and corporations in a post-scarcity world, trying to lay claim to resources I need for my plans. But ideally I'll still be in touch with a happy brotherhood of humans rather than striking out alone or with a small circle of like-minded family and friends.

However, this next stage will probably have to happen in another solar system. Even if the rest of the human race isn't particularly hungry for energy and I can have the entire output of the Sun, that might not be sufficient. And if my experiments fail, I might destroy the solar system. So this step probably needs to happen in other star systems.

Basically, I want to implement time loop logic. There's a number of ways that might allow us to send a single bit of information back in time, and that's all I need. Perhaps I can string a cable (or send a photon) around a rapidly rotating singularity, or a uranium atom spinning in an intense magnetic field, or through the centre of a ring singularity, in order to create a timelike trajectory. Or some trick involving quantum mechanics. I'll try them all, and any others I or my AI manage to come up with.

Now, being able to build a hypercomputer with time-loop logic, and being able to solve NP problems in polynomial time, would be pretty neat. But that's not the eventual goal. Rather than just implementing pure functions such as prime factorisation in the hypercomputer, I want to perform I/O. With side effects. From inside a time loop.

You see, the consistency principle which underlies time-loop logic can be justified in quantum mechanics; in the presence of a time loop, the wave function of a contradictory state cancels itself out and becomes zero because of the link between its past and future. This is used to ensure that the desired answer arrives out of the negative delay gate in the first place, by ensuring a contradiction if it doesn't.

But what if we have a sensor attached to the computer, and arrange to have a contradiction if the value of the sensor is not equal to a desired value? Situations where the physical system monitored by the sensor would fail to produce that value are contradictory, so the physical system's wave function cancels them out and we can only have the desired states.

That gets interesting if the sensor is measuring the speed of light in a vacuum. What we have build is known as a "reality editor" and grants the owner godlike powers.

Of course, the equipment is part of the time loop, so the physical system being measured changing is not the only possible non-contradictory outcome; there's also the possibility that your equipment might just fail. Since the quantum mechanical odds of your equipment failing are probably much higher than those of the speed of light changing, you will almost certainly get an equipment failure rather than destroying the universe by altering its fundamental constants and causing all the matter to collapse to a point.

So let's set our sights a little lower. How about moving on from nanotechnology to femtotechnology? Tinkering with the energy levels inside atomic nuclei is tricky, but if we can build a sensor to tell if we've managed it, we could use a time loop to force the hand of physics. We can work out the chance of quantum tunnelling producing the desired state by pure luck alone, and make sure that the chance of our equipment failing is below that - by duplicating it. Don't forget we have the matter and energy of entire star systems to hand. Make trillions of time loop devices with their own sensors, all observing the same system. Make it more likely for the system to enter the desired state than all the time loop devices failing together.

So the time loop reality editor cannot provide complete omnipotence; it's limited by the probability of a complete system failure, and can only cause events which are more probable than its own failure, so it would be rated up to a certain improbability level (in a manner that sounds slightly familiar...). Indeed, in case of miscalculation of the probabilities or sheer bad luck causing a device failure rather than the desired event, it would be wise for each time loop unit to have a "circuit breaker" that is the most likely part to fail and can be simply reset, rather than risking more permanent, hard-to-diagnose, or violent failure modes of a device containing a significant amount of stored energy in one form or another.

An interesting possibility is of using the reality editor to not only make, but design, things. Rather than building a sensor that checks if a working femtocomputer processing element is created, create one that tests whatever is standing on the target platform is a fully working computer meeting certain design requirements, and see what appears. As the quantum-mechanical basis of the reality editor will tend to favour the most likely, and therefore generally simplest, solution, some interestingly optimal designs might result.

Perhaps the first thing to try and make is a more compact and powerful reality editor?

Oh, and negative delay gates will enable faster-than-light communications, so I can interact with my ever-expanding interstellar empire in real time now.

Hopefully, that will be enough to keep me busy and occupied until the heat death of the universe starts to loom. At which point, hopefully I will have figured out how to:

Create new universes

Probably by tinkering with black holes or something, if not by turning as much of the mass in the Universe as possible into a giant reality editor. Either way, make a new universe with a new entropy gradient I can use to power my ongoing experiments.

Krav Maga (by alaric)

I've always enjoyed combined mental/physical challenges. As a child, I often entertained myself with things like getting from one part of the house to another without touching the floor. This required planning, and finesse; the combination was exhilerating.

I enjoyed my time in the Combined Cadet Force, as many of the exercises we were set involved this combination; and I particularly enjoyed being in the school shooting team. Especially when we went out to electronic target ranges and did exercises involving running to checkpoints with an assault rifle, diving into the prone position, inserting the magazine, shooting at targets as they popped up, and then running to the next checkpoint. It was like playing Time Crisis!

However, that kind of thing has been missing from my life for the past decade or so. Also, I've been spending far too much of my time sitting in cars or at desks, with my main exercise being carrying heavy objects (such as sleeping children) for short distances. I was feeling a keen desire to exercise more.

Then about a year ago, Jean started doing Ju Jutsu, and I started to wonder about taking up a martial art. I remember, many years ago, a friend saying he was taking up Krav Maga, an interesting-sounding Israeli martial art that grew from self-defence techniques in the Jewish gettos of Hungary before World War 2.

However, my searches found no nearby Krav Maga groups; the nearest was in Bristol. So I gave up on this idea for the time being. But a few weeks ago I spotted a poster in a shop window in Cheltenham advertising local Krav Maga courses; sure enough, a group had started!

So yesterday evening, I turned up to give it a try.

It's delightfully pragmatic; most of the attacks seem to revolve around wacking your attacker as hard as you can in the softest bits of them you can reach, then running away. The first skill I started practicing was how to kick somebody in the groin, punch them in the face twice in quick succession, pull them down hard onto your rapidly-rising knee into their stomach, elbow them in the kidneys, and end up behind them (running away, of course), in one smooth motion. We then proceeded to have a try at being pinned from behind by one person while another ran at you from the front; there is a technique to escape the grip and leave the person gripping you curled up in a painful ball on the floor, but doing it while also dealing with the person coming at you from the front makes it a lot more interesting. There were also some more abstract exercises in dealing with large numbers of people coming at you, avoiding being cornered or surrounded, and getting them to get in each other's way. That involved some physical activity in keeping moving, but it was mainly a mental exercise, observing the paths of the attackers and planning your movements.

The practising was good exercise in itself, but we also did a bit of general fitness exercise, largely as part of the warm-up before getting into the practice. I left feeling tired but lively, and today I've been feeling the ache of growing muscle over much of my body, so it's been a good work-out.

I got on well with the other students, who were very helpful with the new people in their midst; and the instructor seems to be a truly intriguing and inspiring person!

It was good challenging fun, so I'm going to keep going, hopefully switching to the Gloucester group that will be starting on Mondays in September!

I turned up in a shirt and trousers, straight from the office, but most of the people there had track suits. Black ones, and t-shirts with martial-looking imagery on, were particularly popular. The contrarian in me is now wondering if I can get a glittery pink tracksuit in my size...

ORG-mode and Fossil (by alaric)

I'm always moaning about how I have too many ideas and not enough time, so it's quite important to me to manage my time efficiently.

My biggest concern, with many projects on the go at once (and I don't just mean fun personal projects, I'm including things my family depends upon me for as well), is that I'll forget something important I'm supposed to do. And I'm also concerned that I'll forget a fun personal project, so that when I do get a moment, I can't think of anything to do, or that I spend my time on something that doesn't get me as good a reward for the available resources as I could have had.

Therefore, I've always been a big fan of "To Do" lists in one form or another. I've tried a few apps to manage TODOs for me, from the excellent personal information management facilities of the Palm Pilot to Things on the Mac, but I've tended to find such things restrictive. For a long time I had a complex OmniOutliner setup that also computed my timesheets with AppleScript, which suited me well; indeed, I've still yet to completely migrate all of the content out of that file (tricky now I no longer have a Mac, but I've looked at the underlying XML file and it seems reasonably parseable), and I think it still contains some notes about ARGON that I've not written up anywhere else!

However, I've had the most success with text files, adding hierarchic structure with headings, so it was fairly natural for me to try Org Mode one of these days. For those not in the know, this is an Emacs package designed to help you organise things with hierarchically-structured plain text files. You write heading lines prefixed with an asterisk, indicating the level of nesting by adding more asterisks, and Org helps by syntax-highlighting the header lines, hiding entire subtrees so you can see the large-scale structure, editing operations to cut and paste entire subtrees (properly adjusting the levels to match where you paste the subtree too), and so on.

But that's just the start. That's what it inherits from the Outline Mode it's based on.

What Org Mode adds on top of that is really hard to list. You can add workflow tags (TODO -> INPROGRESS -> STALLED -> DONE, for instance; you get to define your own little state machine), along with optional priorities, to mark some headings as tasks requiring attention (and obtain a report in the "agenda view" of all headings in certain states, ordered by priority, for instance). You can attach tags to headlines (and use them as filters in the agenda). You can attach arbitrary key-value metadata lists to headings (which are folded down into a single line, and opened up on request, so they don't clutter it), and use those to annotate things with deadlines, or scheduled dates, and have a calendar view in your agenda. Or use the key-value properties to filter the agenda view. Or have Org Mode automatically record a log book of state transitions of a task in the metadata. Or take metadata keys out and display them as extra columns in the hierarchy of headings, in a manner reminicent of OmniOutliner. You can embed links to other files that can be opened in Emacs; if it's an org-mode file you can link to a heading by a unique ID, or you can link to any old text file by line number or by searching for nearby text. There's a feature you can use, while editing any file, to create an Org-Mode heading containing text you are prompted for and a link to the place you were at in the file you were editing, timestamped, inserted under a specified heading of a specified org-mode file, so you can trivially create tasks referencing the file you're working on. Or you can embed executable elisp code to perform arbitrarily complex operations.

I'd been using Org Mode for a while, but I wasn't really using it properly; I had a whole bunch of .org files for different areas of my life, but it was sometimes difficult to fit things into the taxonomy. However, lately, I've had a big tidy-up of my home directory.

I've migrated old projects from Subversion or Git into Fossil, for a start, so now all of my projects - open-source ones at Kitten Technologies, and personal ones, are in their own Fossil repos, which means they have their own ticket trackers for their individual tasks. But each and every one of them has a heading in my new single tasks.org file, which is a unified repository of things I should, or would like to, think about. Fossil projects have a single heading, tagged with "FOSSIL", that lists the place in my home directory where I have the repo working copy, and the URL of the master repository on my server; ŧhis exists to prevent me from forgetting about a project.

I've migrated our long-standing home wiki (mainly a repository of recipies and other such domestic stuff) into the inbuilt wiki of the Fossil repo I already use to store documentation about the house, such as network configuration, a PDF of the plans from the Land Registry, and stuff like that; and the ticket tracker in that repo is now the domestic TODO list. Running the Fossil web interface for that repo off of the home fileserver means that Sarah and I can share the Wiki and task list. And I've configured the Fossil user roles so that anonymous users can't see anything too sensitive.

So in general I've moved as much as I can to Fossil repositories, combining versioned file storage and ticket tracking with a wiki as appropriate; and my tasks.org exists to act as an index to all of them, and to store actual task list items for things that don't naturally map to a fossil repo, although I may find ways to deal with those as well (for instance, I have a fossil repo I use to store my org files, encrypted password database, household budget, address book, and the like, that I'm not using the ticket tracker on; that could be used as a place to put my general administrative tasks as tickets).

However, although putting tickets in the repositories that store individual projects is conceptually neat, and allows for third parties to interact with my task list for open-source projects on Kitten Technologies, it does mean that I have a lot of separate task lists. tasks.org means I won't forget about any of them, but I still have no simple way of knowing what the most urgent or interesting task out of all of my twenty-five repositories is. That's not a great problem in itself, but the next logical step will be to use the automation facilities of Fossil to pull out the tickets from all of my repos and to add them into tasks.org as tasks beneath the corresponding Fossil project heading (including the ticket URL so I can go and edit them easily), so I can see them all consolidated on the agenda view...

Part of this process which has been interesting, though, is digging out various old TODO lists (such as the aforementioned OmniOutliner file) and project directories scattered over archives of old home directories and consolidating them. I've found various projects I'd forgotten about, and neatly filed them as current projects or into my archive tree as old projects (and, oh, how I look forward to being able to put things like that as archives into Ugarit, automatically cross-referenced by their metadata...). Having brought everything together and assembled an index reduces the horrible, lingering, feeling of having lost or forgotten something...

Cornbury Sunday 2012 (by sarah)

There are a lot of photos here, just click on any you want to see bigger 🙂 (WARNING lots of CUTE)

Sunday Morning at Cornbury Music Festival loomed large and again I was the first to rise,s o I went to the lovely on site showers and then went and bought Kava Coconut milk from the brilliant site store and began making breakfast and stuff. Jean had instructed me not to run away again as she didn't like me being missing Saturday morning when she woke up!

Though the baby didn't stay over with us again as she is still so chesty she did have a good explore of the campsite 🙂 Whilst her sister decided to roll down the hill in her sleeping bag - this is traditional for camps we are on. Last day come rain or shine she gets to find a hill and roll! This time she was disgruntled as I wouldn't let her go any further and there were spiky plants she was worried she would roll into!

We didn't see the giant rainbow birds again but we did see some Road Rage Grannys ridding their shopping trollies - Jean thinks it might have been the same people just doing a new pretend.

We had a go at Welly Wanging - Alaric almost won me a pair of wellies but the welly skidded half an inch over the line and it had to be the whole welly in the circle 🙁

Mary Mary not quiet a fairy, has lots of flowers you know! She also kept trying to run off with other toddlers which was fine until they got pushy as toddlers do and being small she was being bowled over by babies 3 months her junior!

Alaric really wanted to make a fish as did I but Jean didn't so Al went and made one anyway but just the frame as we didn't want to be taking a gluey drying thing home with us!

I love stilt walkers! This time it was a larger than life Lord who kept trying to join in the Morris Dancing!

Jean has a habit of finding people who will blow bubbles for her - this I found is quadrupled when she has her sister with her!

We still could not find any childrens ear defenders so Jeany did not want to go to near the stages but that didn't stop her and Mary from dancing to the songs!

The girls loved the ribbon maze which Jean had spent large parts of the festival making as she did last year at the festivals!

We liked the Morris Dancers especially as they had girl ones dressed in funky blacks highlighted with different colours and there was a Big Cheese too who actually had a cheese hat 🙂 I had to stop the girls trying to join in, I spotted the symptoms - wiggling and inching forward in the hope mummy and daddy wouldn't notice. But big sticks and stomping feet wouldn't mix well with little girls so I had to be mean!

Mary managed to join in the crafts this year - well painting - with just a little help. Jeany was so excited to be helping Mary to paint!

There was one group of people running the most fantastic kids workshops! This was the Going Native one which Jean loved!

She even made a bow and arrow which she got a bit annoyed with having done actual archery - there was a feather and no knock on the end of the arrow. No arrow rest she could cope with but no knock....

Here is a pic of my family festivaling it 🙂

I ran the sock puppet making so Jean made several - this is her with one of her creations whilst wearing her angry birds hat from Wychwood Festival.

And then after face painting and candyfloss and Jean winning a badge from the Qi elves for her question about recursive acronymes (it was her own question too! I was relieved that it was a different set of people to the ones I'd asked my question off!). It was time to go - with me moaning about a certain Will Young who's lovely voice was mullering once again, one of my favourite songs - warrble warrble - how much warrble? rolls eyes.

Saturday of Cornbury (by sarah)

If you want to see bigger versions of the photos just click on them.

Rainbow Birds - Jean had us tracking these birds all over the place! Though she was worried they were going to lay an egg on me due to a seam on their bum 🙂

We had a lovely breakfast at the campsite before we headed off to run my workshop.

Jeany's photography

We had a very sleepy Jeany after she had done loads of crafts so we had a late lunch with iced drinks from Cafe Nero were we heard the lovely Yvonne Lyon.

Later on we went to the Riverside Stage and everyone was fed up with my camp food so we bought some noms to eat whilst watching the acts.

I thought the singer here had an amazing voice. I think they were called Satsangi.

We then wizzed over to the SongBird stage to catch Hugh Laurie and The Copper Bottom Band (although due to the Qi tent I kept saying we'd seen Stephen Fry but amazingly everyone knew who I ment :/ )

If I lost Jean and Al I could just wonder over to the Alpro Bowl and find them every single time.

Ecover were there again with a cool dome for yoga and stuff, we played games and painted a giant ECOVER. Jean and Al came 7th out of 2000 odd players on the game last we checked 🙂

This is Dave - he was the brains behind security and had a great time dancing at the main stage.

After Alaric accused me of always taking photos of random bits of plastic I went back to the camp site and took a photo of some plastic.

I just had to photograph these guys.

Whilst I was doing my sock puppet workshop these guys did the most amazing fairy workshop!

This was the outside of the kids zone - it was fantastic!

Jean loved the Morris Dancers so we kept stopping to watch them though we only saw the women dancing the whole weekend!

Saturday like Friday saw a rainbow!

The only thing Jean asked for during the day was a toffee apple so as she had been so good we bought her one 🙂

This tent was next to us and Jean as predicted - loved it 🙂 Her and Daddy want me to do similar to our tent :/

Rainbow!