You shouldn't let poets lie to you.

The title of this post is attributed to Björk. It's from a video where she's basically talking nonsense about how a TV works.

As seems to be the case with Björk, even when she's talking nonsense she strangely makes a lot of sense.

At the end of the video, she states "You shouldn't let poets lie to you." Yet poets often lie to tell a truth.

Belief and truth are quite strange concepts that are to some extent interchangeable.

What is truth?

For someone who is religious, belief provides Truth. And so things such as I am the way and I am the truth make sense. You just have to believe.

For the more scientific among us, Truth is defined through theory and experiment. Applied as the scientific method.

If we can theorise something and we can create an experiment that is reproducible and consistent with our theory we say the theory is true. This is still belief. We believe in the scientific method to define our truth. This relies on our mutual agreement on certain things. The wavelength of light that we call red is about 650nm, we agree it is red. If I suddenly decide to call 650nm light blue, that's my choice and it is still true to me. Blue light then has a wavelength of 650nm. The problem is unless I get a wide consensus for this new Blue light everyone else will claim I am a liar when I state Blue light has a wavelength of 650nm. You're also free to continue expanding on that such that "Red light has a wavelength of 650 nanometres" becomes "Blue fish has a radius of 650 scorpions". By this point rather than being called a liar, you are now being called mad. It's just the consensus of the symbolism used that makes one true and one insanity.

The biggest difference, in my experience, between the scientific truth and the religious truth is that people who really believe in scientific truth don't believe it is absolute. It is the best answer so far. I believe that if science came up with evidence for a creator then most scientific believers would be quite happy with that. A large part of cosmology and physics is taken up with the search for a creator. We're not talking of a silver-bearded old man in the clouds here but the lowest possible level of definition that is an explanation of how all this came to be.

Religious belief uses a similar concept (that the Truth is the answer given). The difference being that religious truth is usually not subject to challenge. Once a belief is formed it should not be challenged nor updated in the face of evidence but should be taken at various levels as the truth; whether that be the literal truth or a guide to the truth. This is mostly defined by whoever is your spiritual leader. You are not expected to question it. The "ultimate answer" is already there. God did it. And you do not question God.

If religious belief was not subject to questioning though there would be only one variation of any particular major religion once it had formed. It is from this fact (there are many variations on each and every major religion) that we can derive that religion itself (read organised religion) has little to do with spirituality in most cases and far more to do with government of a body of people. On that basis, it shares more in common with tribal and barbarian cultures and their government than anything else.

Anyway, it's all poetry (science and all) and it uses lies to tell a truth.

The atom is not a big ball in the middle with lots of smaller balls flying around it, but it's a good model to simplify the complexity and it provides a way for us to understand atoms. It is not the truth though. It's poetry, an elegant way to say something about the world we live in. I'm fairly sure that covalency would have been a lot harder to grasp at school if we'd been taught about the nuclear forces and string theory.

Light has a wavelength, this is true. However light is not made of waves, it is made of particles; photons. Particles do not have a wavelength. So we are not saying that photons have a wavelength, we are saying the observable effect of photons we call light has a wavelength. If we try and observe the photons we can't actually say what their wavelength is. What we can say is the observation of photons as a wave has a wavelength. We don't say this, we simplify the truth to be Light has a wavelength. Red light particularly so :).

Science and religion both have their poetry, I personally believe that scientific poetry is far more amazing and far more elegant than anything I've read on religion. All my waffle above really comes down to it's okay to lie to provide a truth, both in religion and science, and the lie should be believed because most of what we hold as true is a lie but it serves as a practical model to work with.

I just believe that you should also question the lie and that puts me firmly in the science camp.

So back to Björk. "You shouldn't let poets lie to you.", I disagree. You should let poets lie to you, but always question their lies and particularly their motives.

Sir Charles The Creeper

So there's a wedding on the horizon.

It's 6 weeks away and you get the bright idea to make a soft toy for the wedding present that consists of 1,236 one inch squares.

Are you mad?

Well yes we obviously are; isn't he cute.

Sir Charles The Creeper - Completed

So how do you go about making this?

Stuff

Go here and buy the pattern.
http://www.arixystix.com/blog/2011/05/28/minecraft-creeper-plush/

Then get yourself a partner who is as silly as you and willing to spend hours making a toy (she did all the sewing here, and there is a lot of sewing) and who can provide input and ideas to help solve problems along the way.

If you can't find any friends that don't mind being clubbed over the head, chained to a table and and whipped until they assist you then try asking nicely and you might get a Pete, as we did.

You'll also need some aluminium wire.

Some suitable shades of material and cutting tools.

And a fair amount of patience.

The Process

You cut the strips as in the above picture and then cut those strips into squares, as can be seen in the little box.

Once you've done about 200 or so squares of each of the 6 colours of satin. You then get busy pinning them back together in the right combinations.

And sew.

This is the rinse and repeat bit of the project. You will be pinning and sewing for hours. Get a good lineup of movies together and get ready for some cosy evenings.

Look it's almost a leg.

Just a bit more.

And eventually you will have a leg.

This will have taken an incredible amount of time and you'll be thinking at this point is it really going to take this long. The answer is Yes it will. Best get more movies lined up.

Only three more of those to go then...

Time passes. A shrill wind whistles through the eaves. 
You are pinning small satin squares sat at a kitchen table. 
A small helper called Pete assists you.
>

Suddenly, as if by magic, you get to do something else.

Plier time

For the next part we produce a wire frame to support the legs and cut some foam to fill the legs out with.

The result looks something like this.

This then rapidly becomes a complete part.

You then go back to hours of pinning and sewing, more foam cutting.

After a few more evenings of labour you will have all of your major bits together and if you carefully balance them you can fool people into thinking it's finished.

There's still quite a bit to go though. More films required.

We need to fit the neck joint into the base of the head and then sew the body to the base and the head to the bottom panel of the head.

Charles needs somewhere to live and to be stored when he's being moved.

Something like this should do.

I grabbed a copy of the door texture from the minecraft jar, edited it a little to account for the fact my door opens in the middle and printed it out onto a piece of A4. It wasn't my intention to copy it but to use as something to get an impression from. I didn't want reproduction accuracy as much as getting the right feeling.

I removed any labels from the box trying to do as little damage to the surface as possible. I covered the entire box in masking tape to give it a consistent surface finish. After that it was a case of cutting out the windows.

From that point on it was a case of mixing colours, plastering it with lashings of paint and then painstakingly covering the front with squares of brown shades in a fairly random manner.

It's quite hard to avoid falling into patterns.

The inside was coated with black and then highlighted with a purple glitter paint to give an effect much like obsidian.

With the final squares in place on the doors it looks like this.

And the obsidian inside

All that's left to do really is put some kind of catch on the front to keep the doors closed.

We also made some little papercraft creepers that we were going to take to the wedding and leave dotted around the place for people to find.

We promptly forgot to take them with us.