HODGE-PODGING

Yeah, yesterday was a hodge-podge of a day.

I put in a shift with DM 3 in the morning and managed to cull 500-odd words as I tried to get a sex-scene right and then worked on a couple of chapters involving Nikolai Kondratieff. Nikolai's one of my favourite characters. In the Real World he was a Russian economist famous for developing the idea that economic activity in capitalist countries moves in 54-year cycles from boom to bust. He was eventually purged by Stalin.

When I was younger he was quite a hero of mine (come to think of it, it's a little sad to have an economist as a hero...I should have gotten out more!). I was fascinated by the idea that by examining history it might be possible to accurately extrapolate the past into the future. Of course, the world being such an indeterminate environment with so many people interacting in such unpredictable ways accuracy has always eluded us; the maths is simple too complex. Asimov touched on this in the Foundation Trilogy with Hari Sheldon and psychohistory but I was always worried by how Sheldon overcame the problems of free-will and scale (it was the Galactic Empire he was talking about, after all) in making his predictions.

The Demi-Monde is another matter as it's a closed system (the Boundary Layer sees to that) and hence Kondratieff with the help of Michel de Nostredame and his HyperOpia difference engine can make reliable predictions about Future History. That is if it wasn't for those damned elusive and very InDeterminate Daemons.

I've digressed! I was going to say that in the pm I got back to reading the DM 1 bookproof hunting for errors. Fortunately for me, Nell was also proofing and found a couple of real beauts of mistakes so they will go off to Quercus today.

Then at 9 pm the Rees family gathered for the last episode of 'The Big Bang'. Together with 'Have I Got News for You' and 'University Challenge' these are the only things we all will watch (though Ellie seems addicted to 'Friends'). Oddly the girls seem to have forgotten about their 'Lost' DVDs - they gave up at Series 3. I'm pleased: at the end of Series 2 the writers had run out of ideas big time.