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vol VII: Notes

2019

Notes

Sunday 27 January 2019 - Saturday 2 February 2019

[Notebook: DB 83: Physical Theology]

[page 95]

Sunday 27 January 2019

New bookshelf and freshly feathered nest. Now what?

Sophie Nicholls: Pain and Suffering: A Semantic Analysis of the

[page 96]

English Pain Lexicon (Honours Thesis, UNE)

Sophie Nicholls: Referring Expressions and Referential Practice in Roper Kriol Sophie Nicholls

From a theoretical point of view I have broken through to joy after a lifetime of bearing the burden of Christian sin, a false bureaucratic invention devised by the capitalists, colonialists, emperors and control freaks whose principal motivation is to exploit the labours of others to support their magnificence which is built not on the magnificence of the divine world but on their own delusions of magnificence built on the imperial palaces that they have succeeded in building on the backs of enslaved people. All this is a realization of the adage that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, the latest incarnations of which are things like Facebook and Google whose fortunes are built by parasitism on human communication.

Monday 28 January

The practical value of truth vs the cost of error.

Requisite variety: the space inside our heads is as big as the space outside.

[SBS On Demand] Radiance: "To be born human is to be born flawed" [the Pastor] Radiance (1988 film) - Wikipedia

Tuesday 29 January 2019

God is a body, worthy of worship like al bodies. The fundamental evil of many belief systems is that bodes are in some way evil rather than divine.

[page 97]

Wednesday 30 January 2019

The 'fulness of being' ('pleroma') means that there are no easy answers. Every decision (revelation, event) has consequences. Pleroma - Wikipedia

Real signals are unpredictable. If you can predict it it tells you nothing. Th interesting information is unpredictable, the residuals left when the predictions have done their best: predictive deconvolution. Deconvolution - Wikipedia

. . .

So really the principal question is why did I do so poorly in my last year of philosophy? Was it me or them? Where did I go wrong?

Suffering somewhat from inanition and uninspiration, maybe post influenza, waiting for the fire to come back to the lips, seeking a way into my honours year.

Thursday 31 January 2019

Lust for life = lust for complexity = potential = Cantor's theorem. Potential - Wikipedia, Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia

[Warumpi Band] My Island Home Warumpi Band

[page 98]

The hardest part of making the universe divine is he necessary unification of life and death through the necessary rejection of eternal life. Catholic Catechism, 1020 sqq: I believe in life everlasting

Friday 1 February 2019

So all psychological states are physical states. I cure my uncomfortable mouth with a sip of orange juice, my mental state (possibly) with a sip of alcohol.

Exchange rates and differentia[ble] manifolds. Samuel Brittan: Thank goodness British governments were too cowardly to take us into the euro, Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia

Procession / generation / creation, the source of being. Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1: Is there procession in God?

Saturday 2 February 2019

Feelings are facts (Damasio) Damasio: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

Copyright:

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1956, 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics.' 
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Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics: An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, Shambala 1991 Amazon.com: 'First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics ... still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels. Covering over 3,000 years of widely divergent traditions across Asia, Capra can't help but blur lines in his generalizations. But the big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things. Capra finds the same notions in modern physics. ...' Brian Bruya  
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Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics: An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, Shambala 1991 Amazon.com: 'First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics ... still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels. Covering over 3,000 years of widely divergent traditions across Asia, Capra can't help but blur lines in his generalizations. But the big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things. Capra finds the same notions in modern physics. ...' Brian Bruya  
Amazon
  back

Christie, Agatha, Murder at the Vicarage, Dodd Mead 1986 Amnazon customer review: 'Murder at the Vicarage, first published in 1930, is the book that first introduced the world to Miss Jane Marple and the cozy English village of St. Mary Mead. Every mystery fan in the world is or should be familiar with Christie's classic character of Miss Marple. This book presents her at her best and is required reading for any mystery fan. The writing is sharp, the plotting crisp and clever, there are many red herrings and the solution is very satisfying. This is Christie at her very best. Highly recommended.' Lisa Bahrami 
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Damasio, Antonio R, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt Brace 1999 Jacket: 'In a radical departure from current views on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for the making of consciousness must explain how the sense of self comes to mind. Damasio suggests that the sense of self does not depend on memory or on reasoning or even less on language. [it] depends, he argues, on the brain's ability to portray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed an ensuring survival.' 
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Feynman, Richard P, and Albert P Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, McGraw Hill 1965 Preface: 'The fundamental physical and mathematical concepts which underlie the path integral approach were first developed by R P Feynman in the course of his graduate studies at Princeton, ... . These early inquiries were involved with the problem of the infinte self-energy of the electron. In working on that problem, a "least action" principle was discovered [which] could deal succesfully with the infinity arising in the application of classical electrodynamics.' As described in this book. Feynam, inspired by Dirac, went on the develop this insight into a fruitful source of solutions to many quantum mechanical problems.  
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Hallett, Michael, Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size, Oxford UP 1984 Jacket: 'This book will be of use to a wide audience, from beginning students of set theory (who can gain from it a sense of how the subject reached its present form), to mathematical set theorists (who will find an expert guide to the early literature), and for anyone concerned with the philosophy of mathematics (who will be interested by the extensive and perceptive discussion of the set concept).' Daniel Isaacson. 
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Kreyszig, Erwin, Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications, John Wiley and Sons 1989 Amazon: 'Kreyszig's "Introductory Functional Analysis with Applications", provides a great introduction to topics in real and functional analysis. This book is part of the Wiley Classics Library and is extremely well written, with plenty of examples to illustrate important concepts. It can provide you with a solid base in these subjects, before one takes on the likes of Rudin and Royden. I had purchased a copy of this book, when I was taking a graduate course on real analysis and can only strongly recommend it to anyone else.' Krishnan S. Kartik  
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' 
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Nielsen, Michael A, and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2000 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002. 
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Schiff, Leonard I, Quantum Mechanics, McGraw-Hill 1968 Preface: 'This volme has a threefold purpose: to explain the physical concepts of quantum mechanics, to describe the mathematical formalism, and to provide illustrative examples of both the ideas and the methods.' 
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...' 
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Papers

d'Espagnat, Bernard, "Quantum theory and reality", Scientific American, 241, 5, November 1979, page 128-140. 'Most particles or aggregates of particles that are ordinarily regarded as separate objects have interacted at some time in the past with other objects. The violation of separability seems to imply that in some sense all these objects constitute an indivisible whole. Perhaps in such a world the concept of an independently existing reality can reatain some meaning, but it will be an altered meaning and one remove from everyday experience.' (page 140). back

Deutsch, David, "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, , A 400, 1985, page 97-117. 'It is argued that underlying the Church-Turing hypothesis there is an implicit physical assertion. Here this assertion is presented explicitly as a physical principle: 'every finitely realizible physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing machine operating by finite means'.'. back

Gruber, Nicolas, James N Galloway, "An earth-system perspective of the global nitrogen cycle", Nature, 451, 7176, 17 Janurary 2008, page 293 - 296. 'With humans having an increasing impact on the planet, the interactions between the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle and climate are expected to become an increasingly important determinant of the Earth system.'. back

Heimann, Martin, Markus Reichstein, "Terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics and climate feedbacks", Nature, 451, 7176, 17 Janurary 2008, page 289-292. 'Recent evidence suggests that, on a global scale, terrestrial ecosystems will provide a positive feedback in a warming world, albeit of uncertain magnitude.'. back

Kump, Lee R, "The rise of atmospheric oxygen", Nature, 451, 7176, 17 Janurary 2008, page 277-278. 'Clues from ancient rocks are helping to produce a coherent picture of how Earth's atmosphere changed from one that was almost devoid of oxygen to one that is one-fifth oxygen.'. back

Pan, Jian-Wei, et al, "Experimental test of quantum nonlocality in three-photon Greenberger_horne-Zeilinger entanglement", Nature, 403, 6769, 3 February 2000, page 515-519. 'The results of three specific experiments, involving measurements of polarisation correlations between three photons lead to predictions for a fourth experiment; quantum physical predictions are mutually contradictory with expectations based on local realism. We find the results of the fourth experiment to be in agreement with the quantum prediction and in striking conflict with local realism'. back

Links

Alex Matthews-King, International treaty needed to stop "big food" industry driving obesity and climate change, report says, ' Lobbying by multinational corporations and trillions in government subsidies for unsustainable agriculture and fossil fuels are driving obesity, malnutrition and climate change, a major report has warned. Taxes on red meat and subsidies for more efficient crops that could feed many more people are among the measures proposed by the Lancet Commission on Obesity report. Drafted by an international panel of 43 biologists, climate scientists and policy experts, it also calls for a global treaty to limit the influence of “Big Food” which is hamstringing moves to more sustainable diets and lifestyles.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1, Is there procession in God?, 'As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God.' back

Bra-Ket notation - Wikipedia, Bra-Ket notation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Bra-ket notation is the standard notation for describing quantum states in the theory of quantum mechanics. It can also be used to denote abstract vectors and linear functionals in pure mathematics. It is so called because the inner product (or dot product) of two states is denoted by a bracket, , consisting of a left part, , called the ket. The notation was invented by Paul Dirac, and is also known as Dirac notation.' back

Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia, Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In elementary set theory, Cantor's theorem states that, for any set A, the set of all subsets of A (the power set of A) has a strictly greater cardinality than A itself. For finite sets, Cantor's theorem can be seen to be true by a much simpler proof than that given below, since in addition to subsets of A with just one member, there are others as well, and since n < 2n for all natural numbers n. But the theorem is true of infinite sets as well. In particular, the power set of a countably infinite set is uncountably infinite. The theorem is named for German mathematician Georg Cantor, who first stated and proved it.' back

Catholic Catechism P1, s2, c3, a12, I believe in Life Everlasting, '1021 Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ. The New Testament speaks of judgment primarily in its aspect of the final encounter with Christ in his second coming, but also repeatedly affirms that each will be rewarded immediately after death in accordance with his works and faith. The parable of the poor man Lazarus and the words of Christ on the cross to the good thief, as well as other New Testament texts speak of a final destiny of the soul--a destiny which can be different for some and for others.' back

Chris Mooney & Jonathan Newton, Arctic Cauldron, 'Katey Walter Anthony has studied some 300 lakes across the tundras of the Arctic. But sitting on the mucky shore of her latest discovery, the Arctic expert said she’d never seen a lake like this one. Set against the austere peaks of the Western Brooks Range, the lake, about 20 football fields in size, looked as if it were boiling. Its waters hissed, bubbled and popped as a powerful greenhouse gas escaped from the lake bed. Some bubbles grew as big as grapefruits, visibly lifting the water’s surface several inches and carrying up bits of mud from below. This was methane.' back

Deconvolution - Wikipedia, Deconvolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In mathematics, deconvolution is an algorithm-based process used to reverse the effects of convolution on recorded data. The concept of deconvolution is widely used in the techniques of signal processing and image processing. Because these techniques are in turn widely used in many scientific and engineering disciplines, deconvolution finds many applications. In general, the objective of deconvolution is to find the solution of a convolution equation of the form: f ∗ g = h Usually, h is some recorded signal, and f is some signal that we wish to recover, but has been convolved with some other signal g before we recorded it.' back

Emily Smith, Exporting feral animal meat could rduce tensios simmering on the front line of pest crisis, ' But Territory-based pest controller Stuart Barker believes marrying up economic interests with ecological ones could pave a path forward. His idea is to create an environmentally oriented export market, using revenue from the export of feral animal meat to keep its population at the lowest sustainable level. It would also put authorities in a better position to detect a biosecurity threat, which he said currently could go unrecognised for months in feral populations and cost billions to eradicate. It's an idea CSIRO research scientist Justin Perry has been exploring for years. "I think it can be done," he told the ABC. 'We're still grappling with it' In recent years, Mr Perry worked with Indigenous communities on Queensland's Cape York Peninsula, exploring the development of a wild pig industry that could be marketed for its social and environmental values. ' back

Hilbert space - Wikipedia, Hilbert space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The mathematical concept of a Hilbert space, named after David Hilbert, generalizes the notion of Euclidean space. It extends the methods of vector algebra and calculus from the two-dimensional Euclidean plane and three-dimensional space to spaces with any finite or infinite number of dimensions. A Hilbert space is an abstract vector space possessing the structure of an inner product that allows length and angle to be measured. Furthermore, Hilbert spaces are complete: there are enough limits in the space to allow the techniques of calculus to be used.' back

Holly Williams, Pushkin Theatre are bringing a scorching Brecht play to Britain. But first, they has to lay some Soviet ghosts, ' When Roman Abramovich saw Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre’s production of The Good Person of Szechwan in Russia, he knew by the interval that he wanted to bring it to London. “So I said – well, wait till the end!” recalls their artistic director Evgeny Pisarev with a smile. And well he might smile: he knew the second half of the production of Bertolt Brecht’s classic, directed with blazing vision by Russian director Yury Butusov, was even stronger than the first. Now, the show is indeed about to arrive in London: it plays at the Barbican as part of a mini-season of work by the Pushkin Theatre, alongside a radical take on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and a stage version of Chinghiz Aitmatov’s story Mother’s Field. ' back

John Vidal, The miracle method for sustainable rice that scientists dismissed, 'The fragrant jasmine rice growing on the left side of Kreaougkra Junpeng’s five-acre field stands nearly five feet tall. Each plant has 15 or more tillers, or stalks, and the grains hang heavy from them. The Thai farmer says this will be his best-ever harvest in 30 years and he will reap it four weeks earlier than usual. . . . Junpeng is part of a pilot project to see if it’s possible to grow more rice with less water and fewer greenhouse gases. The dramatic difference between his two crops points a way to help the world’s 145 million small rice farmers, and could also greatly reduce global warming emissions from agriculture. ' back

Philip Brian Tabuas, An Inside Look at the Aftermath of a Deadly Vale Dam Break, 'The search for survivors continues after a dam owned by Vale SA burst, burying a community in rural Brazil. Rescue efforts were temporarily halted early Sunday amid warnings of increased water levels that could cause additional flooding and further spread waste across the region. Friday's accident at the Feijao mine in Brumadinho is the country’s second deadly dam break in just over three years. As of Sunday night, authorities have confirmed 58 dead and hundreds still missing. The threat adds pressure to the world's largest iron ore producer as the company faces questions on accident prevention. It is also a test of President Jair Bolsonaro's new administration and environmental reform plans. Vale’s ADRs fell in New York Friday, and authorities leveled a combined $3 billion in blocked funds and fines against the company as the human and ecological costs mount. ' back

Pleroma - Wikipedia, Pleroma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Pleroma (Greek πλήρωμα) generally refers to the totality of divine powers. The word means fullness from πληρόω ("I fill") comparable to πλήρης which means "full",[1] and is used in Christian theological contexts: both in Gnosticism generally, and by St. Paul the Apostle in Colossians 2:9 (the word is used 17 times in the NT).[2] Pleroma is also used in the general Greek language and is used by the Greek Orthodox Church in this general form since the word appears in the book of Colossians. Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, view the reference in Colossians as something that was to be interpreted in the Gnostic sense.' back

Potential - Wikipedia, Potential - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Potential generally refers to a currently unrealized ability. The term is used in a wide variety of fields, from physics to the social sciences to indicate things that are in a state where they are able to change in ways ranging from the simple release of energy by objects to the realization of abilities in people.' back

Radiance (1988 film) - Wikipedia, Radiance (1988 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Radiance is a 1998 Australian independent film. It is the first feature film by Aboriginal director Rachel Perkins about three indigenous sisters who reunite for their mother's funeral. The film is based on the play written by Louis Nowra. ' back

Samuel Brittan, Thank goodness British governments were too cowardly to take us into the euro, ' A traveller on the continent of Europe had until a few years ago the experience of crossing many borders. For some adolescents and young people this was a thrill; for others a confounded nuisance. Part of the experience was the need to change from one money into another. Now both the thrill and the nuisance have vanished. A single currency prevails over most of the continent west of the old Iron Curtain with the notable exception of Norway.' back

Sophie Nicholls, Referring Expressions and Referential Practice in Roper Kriol (Northern Territory, Australia), ' In this thesis I describe aspects of referring expressions and referential practice in an English-lexified creole language spoken in the Ngukurr Aboriginal community, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Kriol has substrate influences from seven traditional Aboriginal languages. Dialects of Kriol are spoken in Aboriginal communities across the Top End of Australia; with estimates suggesting more than 20,000 people speak it as a first language. The language has a low status and in many contexts, such as health, medical and legal contexts, it frequently goes unrecognised as a legitimate language requiring interpreters. There is no comprehensive grammar of Kriol and as yet, there have been few in-depth studies into its structure and use. I investigate referential expressions in Kriol from various perspectives, using tools from a range of theoretical frameworks and research traditions, including descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, information structure, and ethnopragmatics. The thesis provides an integrated description of how referential expressions are structured and how they are used in spontaneous talk to meet communicative needs. A further goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that there is significant continuity of referring strategies from Kriol's Aboriginal substrate languages. The data used in this study consists of a corpus of spontaneous discourse between two or more speakers, elicited material, and consultation with Elders on cultural issues relevant to language use. ... Each chapter contributes original description of the Kriol language. By combining a number of theoretical perspectives, the thesis offers an integrated description of the structure and function of referring expressions.' back

Spectrometer - Wikipedia, Spectrometer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A spectrometer (spectrophotometer, spectrograph or spectroscope) is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify materials.' back

Taylor Adams and Adam B. Ellick, How We Made and Invisible Crisis at Sea Visible, ' An ambitious Opinion Video project produced across three continents — in collaboration with a pioneering forensic research group — shines a spotlight on the more than 16,000 migrants who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014.' back

Warumpi Band, My Island Home 1988, Six years I've been in the city
And every night, I dream of the sea
They say home is where you find it
Will this place ever satisfy me?
For I come from the saltwater people
We've always lived by the sea
Now I'm out here west of Alice Springs
With a wife and a family

And my island home
My island home
My island home
Is waitin' for me

In the evening the dry wind blows
From the hills
And across the plain
I close my eyes and I'm standing
In a boat
On the sea again
And I'm holding that long turtle spear
And I feel I'm close now
To where it must be
My island home, is waitin' for me

For I come from the saltwater people
We've always lived by the sea
Now I'm out here west of Alice Springs
With a wife and a family

And my island home
My island home
My island home
Is waitin' for me

In the evening the dry wind blows
From the hills
And across the plain
I close my eyes and I'm standing
In a boat
On the sea again
And I'm holding a long turtle spear
And I feel I'm close now
To where it must be
My island home, is waitin' for me

My island home
My island home
My island home
Is waitin' for me

My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home
My island home

A very famous song from a brilliant group. Sometimes it is forgotten that the Warumpis wrote the alternative Australian Anthem "My Island Home", although it is actually about Elcho, a small island in Arnhem Land, Australia. Original lineup was: George Burarrwanga (known in life as George Rrurrambu & George Djilangya), the Butcher brothers and Neil Murray. Sadly George died of lung cancer in 2006. I do not claim any particular rights to this. My sincere thanks to the rights holders for allowing these to be shown. back

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