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It has been a strange month and I found that I didn’t listen to a lot of new music. I have been a bit down and when that’s the case I tend to take refuge in music that I know well, stuff that cheers me up. I have listened to last month’s fave a lot, Nelly Furtado’s “The Spirit Indestructible”. I said a lot of nice things about it but it probably didn’t come over in my writing just how much I really liked it.

Tonight, despite feeling a bit under the weather, I went to Stevenage to watch Portsmouth play a League One game at the Lamex Stadium. In addition, I met a “person off the internet” for the second time in a week – this time Tom, a friend of a friend from Facebook: our shared passions being Portsmouth FC and really cool music. We met at King’s Cross and caught a packed train to Stevenage, a non-descript dormitory town that was even more non-descript than I remember St Albans being. I’m glad I went, even though Pompey lost. It’s funny how sitting in a shed in the cold watching your team lose counts as entertainment!

This is another mathematics post that does not actually feature any equations or graphs. It is intended to set the way clear for writing regularly about nonlinear systems. This in itself is a precursor to writing more about mathematical biology as biological systems are inherently complex and nonlinear. I am reading P. G. Drazin’s textbook on Nonlinear Systems and this post is a glossary of terms from the start of the book laid down here because I wanted to remember how to typeset definition lists in Markdown (though in the end I (ab)used <h4> tags because it looked better).

I had a bit more time to listen to this month’s albums because I was on holiday for two weeks. I didn’t manage to write about them while on holiday though! In fact I bought and listened to a few more, but I will save them for next month. The albums I will discuss now (in order bought) are:

Over my holiday I read "Even The Dogs" by Jon McGregor. I've not quite finished it yet but that will at least prevent me from giving away spoilers. I am not sure I would want to give any spoilers anyway because it is unrelentingly grim so far. Perhaps there is a happy ending but both you and I will have to read it to find out.

Although I have put off finishing my UNO game for over eighteen months, I thought I would get started with another pet project of mine: making a Carcassonne game. This is not a serious affair, there is an excellent app of Carcassonne available for those of you who have iOS devices (it works particularly well on the iPad). The game just strikes me as having the right level of complexity to be a taxing yet attainable project. I’d also like to understand strategies for playing the game and what better way to evaluate strategies for games of chance than to have a simulator to play all those millions of games that you don’t have time to play?

It’s rather spooky but shortly after deciding to write about Nelly Furtado’s “Folklore” as the next understated classic, I found out that she has a new album out this week. As a result, I have been listening to a lot of her music while writing this post, and I’ve been enjoying it too.

Album Digest August 2012 is also from the stack of albums that I mentioned last month. I chose this selection (along with the Passion Pit album) because the colours looked good together in the mosaic of covers that I make each month. Last month’s digest was about the right amount of detail so this will be another briefer digest. These are all good albums but not ones that will change your life, they'll just happily sit alongside it. They are:

“The Gone-Away World” is a novel by Nick Harkaway. It’s about a world slightly askew to our own in which the powers-that-be have deigned to unleash a weapon that simply wipes the enemy out of existence. Unfortunately the enemies also have the same weapon and there are terrible consequences to the extent that the very fabric of reality is threatened. If you don’t already know what reification means, you will by the end.

“I see the people working and see it working for them.” (Sat In Your Lap)

Just a short album digest this month. I bought a stack of CDs and am parcelling them out over the next few months (together with important additional releases as they crop up). This is in the hope that I can write more considered pieces about each one. This month I’ve grouped together albums with monochrome covers and a BT album from June that I found out about recently. These albums are not just linked by their artwork, they also form a cohesive whole. As a result I dispense with reviewing each album in depth. As usual there is a playlist at the end.

Three fantastic albums for Album Digest June 2012: