A Little Black Magic Power

THERE was a time when gardeners across the country were copying Sissinghurst and Hidcote and planting gardens and borders full of white flowers.

Well, times change and now black flowers are all the rage. And, boy, do they look good. Deep, rich and sultry, black flowers captivate gardeners and non-gardeners alike. The buds on my Dusky Challenger iris are poised to burst open in a display of shimmering black satin, and my black pansies are not far behind.

In fact, there are quite a few varieties of pansy which are supposed to be black: Bowles Black has tiny flowers with a yellow eye, Molly Sanderson has large flowers and Black Moon has even bigger flowers. But let them self-sow around the borders and they will soon begin to look more purple than black.

The black hollyhock is one of the most familiar black flowers. It comes with either single or double flowers and both varieties are stunning.

Some columbines are also nearly black, such as William Guinness, sometimes know as Magpie, a dramatic black and white bicolour.

Black scabious, such as Chile Black and Ace of Spades, are becoming more widely available in garden centres: its pretty buttons keep coming for weeks and weeks. Another iris which comes in a black variety is Iris chrysographes, a neater, more upright species than many other irises. Black Knight is the one to look out for - it's gorgeous.

While not quite black, there are other rich-coloured beauties available.

Chocolate-scented Cosmos atrosanguineus is the colour of Bourneville chocolate - definitely a candidate for a tub on your patio. Sweet william Sooty has deep crimson flowers and leaves of a similar shade.

There is, however, one rather obvious problem with black flowers: they don't really stand out in the garden. They are best planted close to paths and seating areas where they can be appreciated in close-up. Grouping them with sympathetic plants also helps, but there are two schools of thought on this. Some say the best approach is to plant them with silver or golden foliage - the black flowers will

show up well against the pale contrast. Silver helichrysums and artemisia are good partners, and a background of silver elaeagnus or sea buckthorn is ideal.

Yellow or gold foliage partners include the new Cotinus Golden Spirit (mentioned last week). Golden elders are also good background plants, while for something lower, there are golden euonymus and yellow-leaved lamiums.

The opposing faction insists that black flowers are best grown with purple and crimson foliage, creating a whole planting of sultry sumptuousness.

Try purple-leaved cotinus, purple phormiums and berberis, deep- red maples and the blackest plant of all, Ophiopogon planiscapus Nigrescens, which has black leaves, not flowers. Long, slender and pure black, except right at the base, this neat ground cover spreads slowly but with impressive determination - I've seen it emerge through the tarmac at Kew Gardens. And the ebony leaves shine beautifully in the sunlight.

Black and almost-black flowers such as irises (above), pansies (below left) and cosmos (below right) are rich and sultry additions to any garden

Read all about it

Many of the plants mentioned can be found in garden centres, otherwise you should find most in the new edition of The Plant Finder (Dorling Kindersley, 12.99; www.rhs.org.uk).

There's also a book on black plants called Black Magic and Purple Passion, self-published by Karen Platt (15.99, including p&p). It's available from Karen Platt, 35 Longfield Road, Crookes, Sheffield S10 1QW.

Plant food giveaway

FEEDING houseplants regularly is crucial to their health and wellbeing, yet many gardeners never bother. To help you realise what a difference feeding makes, we've arranged with the Scotts Company for a free bottle of Miracle Gro House Plant Food to be sent to every reader who wants one. Not just the first 50 readers, but everyone who applies.

To receive your free houseplant food, write your name and address on a postcard and send it to Miracle Gro Houseplant Offer, 57 Kingsway Place, Sans Walk, London, EC1R 0LY.

Offer closes 30 June; expect delivery in July.

Gardening week

Stake tall dahlias (right) before they fall over. Use 4ft stakes, then mulch with 5 to 7 1/2 cm of weed-free organic matter.

Shade the greenhouse with Coolglass to keep the temperature down and prevent your plants being scorched.

Feed azaleas, rhododendrons, pieris and other lime-hating plants in containers with Miracid liquid feed.

Layer camellias by pulling a low branch down to the soil and weighing it down with a large stone.

Split flag irises when the flowers are over and replant the fattest pieces with a fan of leaves.

Cut back the foliage by half.

Remove suckers on roses by tearing them away from the root, not cutting them off with secateurs.

Sow extra sweetpeas for late flowers for the house.

Cut back early-flowering perennials to encourage fresh new foliage; water them well if we get a dry spell.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

Removing the "Black Magic" from DSPs - Technology Information

By now everyone knows that the digital signal processor (DSP) is the enabling technology behind the ubiquitous digital revolution. Although you may not even be aware of using them, DSPs are embedded in almost every product you use on a daily basis, consider: digital cellular phones, fax machines, high-speed modems (V90 and xDSL), handheld communicators, digital audio players and so forth. Just think about it for a moment -- it would be impossible to implement such products without DSP techniques and DSPs -- a dull life indeed!

Although DSPs are embedded in almost everything, using and designing with DSPs is not particularly straight forward. It requires knowledge of communications theory and detailed mathematics rather than computer science. Because DSPs do the repetitive and complex mathematical designing, they are considered by many engineers more of an art than a science -- to be exact, DSP technology is thought of as "black magic."

The truth is that designing with DSPs is indeed complex and not necessarily intuitive -- there really is an element of black magic to it. Part of the problem lies in the fact that over the years engineers and programmers have striven to simplify their lives through the use of high-level languages such as C/C++ for the tasks of designing with and programming processors. This high-level language design approach works particularly well for x86 and RISC processors -- nowadays almost no one designs and programs in assembly language.

No so with DSPs. Because almost all DSP tasks are real time (think of a cellular phone -- instantaneous, real-time communications), DSP programs are still written in assembly; thus the stigma of black magic. Using C/C++ high-level language isolates the engineer from the underlying physical system, not so for assembly language. Programming in assembly absolutely requires that the engineer has an intimate knowledge of the system, the DSP architecture, the algorithms used, the critical paths in the system and the time-critical portions in the algorithms (indeed, DSP designs are done in the time domain, not in the frequency domain.)
So how does one remove the black magic? DSP cores may be the answer. These cores are designed a priori to be used as coprocessor to a host engine -- for example, a Pentium for PC applications or a RISC for embedded applications.
In addition to being a coprocessor to the RISC, the DSP core comes along with a library of preprogrammed, common and most often used DSP routines (FFT, IFFT, FIR, IIR, Taylor Series, convolution ... ugh!, and so forth); each is designed and optimized by experts, and they are accessible by way of C-language function calls from the host processor.
Nice, but what does it mean? Simple, designer's nirvana! Because the DSP cores are a coprocessor to the host processor and are accessed through C-language calls directly from the host, this effectively hides the complexity of using DSPs from the designer. Think about it for a moment -- what this means is that the engineer can now develop the applications program for both the host processor and the DSP completely in the C-language, without touching DSP assembly code. This is a major and significant achievement in designing with DSPs. The bottom line: no more black magic.
Irving Gold is the vice president of marketing at Massana Inc.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Cahners Publishing CompanyCOPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

On the Kamasutra

The Kamasutra, which many people regard as the paradigmatic textbook for sex, was composed in North India, probably in the third century C.E., in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India. There is nothing remotely like it even now, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated; it was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking.

The Kamasutra is known in English almost entirely through the translation by Sir Richard Francis Burton, published over a century ago, in 1893. A new translation that I have been preparing, with my colleague Sudhir Kakar, for Oxford World Classics, reveals for the first time the text's surprisingly modern ideas about gender and unexpectedly subtle stereotypes of feminine and masculine natures. It also reveals relatively liberal attitudes to women's education and sexual freedom, and far more complex views on homosexual acts than are suggested by other texts of this period. And it makes us see just what Burton got wrong, and ask why he got it wrong.

Most Americans and Europeans today think that the Kamasutra is just about sexual positions. Reviews of books dealing with the Kamasutra in recent years have had titles like "Assume the Position" and "Position Impossible." In India, Kamasutra is the name of a condom; in America, one website offered The Kamasutra of Pooh, posing stuffed animals in compromising positions (Piglet on Pooh, Pooh mounting Eeyore, and so forth). The part of the Kamasutra describing the positions may have been the best-thumbed passage in previous ages of sexual censorship, but nowadays, when sexually explicit novels, films, and instruction manuals are available everywhere, that part is the least useful.

The real Kamasutra, however, is not the sort of book to be read in bed when drinking heavily, let alone held in one hand in order to keep the other hand free. The product of a culture quite remote from our own, it is in fact a book about the art of living: about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs - and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. In the Burton translation, read now in the shadow of Edward Said, it seems to be about Orientalism. Read in the wake of Michel Foucault, it seems to be about power, and in the wake of Judith Butler, about the control of women and the denial of homosexuals. I do not think these are its primary concerns, but it certainly is about gender, and to that extent Said, Foucault, and Butler are essential companions for us as we read it today.
We can learn a lot about conventional Indian ideas of gender from the Kamasutra. The author, Vatsyayana, describes typically female behavior: "dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness." The closest he has to a word for our "gender" is "natural talent" or "glory" (tejas) [at Z.7.22]: "A man's natural talent is his roughness and ferocity; a woman's is her lack of power and her suffering, selfdenial, and weakness."
What happens when people deviate from these norms? The Kamasutra departs from conventional contemporary Hindu views in significant ways.
First, it has what appears to be a third gender: "There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman's dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness. The one in the form of a man, however, conceals her desire when she wants a man and makes her living as a masseur"
[2.9.1 - 6]. Though the Kamasutra quickly dismisses the cross-dressing male, with his stereotypical female gender behavior, it discusses the fellatio technique of the closeted man of the third nature in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing a physical act, and with what might even be called gusto [ 2.9.6 - 241.
In addition, the book's long passage about the woman playing the role of a man while making love on top of a man blurs conventional Indian ideas of gender. Vatsyayana acknowledges that people do, sometimes, reverse gender roles: "Their passion and a particular technique may sometimes lead them even to exchange roles; but not for very long. In the end, the natural roles are reestablished" [2.7.23]. This switch of "natural talents" is precisely what happens when the woman is on top [2.8.6], a position that most Sanskrit texts refer to as the "perverse" or "reversed" or "topsy-turvy" position (viparitam). Vatsyayana never uses this term, referring to the woman-on-top position only with the verb "to play the man's role" (purushayitva). Even while she is playing that role, however, she mimes her own conventional gender behavior [2.8.6]: "And, at the same time, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop."
A thirteenth-century commentary (by Yashodhara) spells out the gender complications: "She now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent, demonstrating her ferocity. And so, in order to express the woman's natural talent, even though she is not embarrassed, nor exhausted, and does not wish to stop, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop." Now, since Vatsyayana insists [at 2.8.39] that the woman "unveils her own feelings completely/when her passion drives her to get on top," the feelings of the woman when she plays the man's role seem to be both male and female. Or, rather, when she acts like a man, she pretends to be a man and then pretends to be a woman.