Catmachine

As a child I was obsessed with many things. Continental Drift was one of them. I suppose it stemmed from my love of maps, especially maps of imaginary worlds such as those found in the front of fantasy novels like A Wizard of Earthsea , Lord of the Rings or some of the Narnia books. I always thought it was a shame that no map of the Great Eastern Ocean was included in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , but in retrospect that makes sense—it would have been mostly blank. I would spend hours drawing my own maps even though I don't think at any point I was planning to write an epic fantasy. I just liked drawing the maps. Some of them had peculiar features (probably inspired by The Isle of the Ear and The Hands from the Earthsea map) and all of them spanned continents, although I don't recall ever drawing a map of a complete planet. This was an odd omission given how obsessed with space I was. I can only surmise that for some reason I didn't like mixing these particu...

 It's surprising what can catch your attention and become of special interest – especially during childhood – when you've got the kind of brain that thrives on that stuff. In 1981 I narrowed my focus in on the bands appearing on Top of the Pops not least because I wanted to know when and how often Toyah would be appearing. So I became very familiar with the rules surrounding how often an artist could appear. The only way a song would be played two weeks on the trot was if it was number one. In order to get two plays (including the viewers' holy grail of both the video and a mimed studio performance) the song would have to be going up the chart three weeks in a row and ideally by leaps and bounds. To get three plays it would have to have been at least five weeks in the chart and probably be heading into the top 10 at least. I used to write down the lineups in my diary despite parental scorn. This meant I was watching when someone cheated. The Jets' song "Yes Tonigh...

Sometimes a craze is just a craze. In the 1950s they were pushing the Atomic Age and added radioactivity and atoms to branding for everything. You could even buy a toy atomic energy lab with real uranium. I am strongly reminded of the way they're adding AI to everything now whether it's useful or not. I hope that in a few years this mAInia will have died down and we can just carry on creating as we did before. In fact more than that; I'm hoping that before long we'll arrive at a point where "AI-free" becomes a badge of quality so the market will HAVE to sit up and take notice, rather than telling us we’re doing Being Consumers all wrong. However, I do like to think I'm not being New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack here. AI definitely has a place. For example, analysing large scientific datasets, archive entry labelling. You know the incredibly tedious stuff that humans would find mindnumbing or actually impossible to do. I don't think it has a place...

I like to think I’m a rational person, but nevertheless I love a good ghost story. However I have noticed a tendency for some people to seize on rationalism as Something To Believe In which seems to miss the entire point of the mindset. I think of this viewpoint as Born Again Scepticism because it most often afflicts people who were really into Weird Shit when they were younger but became disillusioned by Weird Shit’s constant failure to deliver. Born Again Scepticism espouses a kind of knee jerk “because it doesn’t exist!” holier than thou attitude to anything that isn’t scientific canon and is evangelical about deploying it. Born Again Sceptics are usually not actual scientists. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Carl Sagan – who most definitely was a scientist – said: “No matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas, least of all by scientists committed to the free exchange of ideas.”...

Language evolves we are told so there’s no point in complaining about misuse of a word or phrase. If enough people use and understand it in a certain way then that way becomes correct no matter what some old dictionary might say. It may be frustrating to those of us who like things to be neat and make sense, but you know what? Fair play to language for moving with the times and being flexible. The details of jokes and idioms also change meaning. For example, there’s a common expression that Londoners consider everything “North of Watford” to be the actual north. Most people think this is funny because Watford is actually on the edge of London, pretty much where the M1 makes a serious attempt to reach escape velocity and climb out of London’s gravity well. However I remember the expression being “North of Watford Gap” in the 1980s and 1990s which made a bit more sense as that’s a service station 65 miles further up the M1 which feels more like the gateway between the North and South. Th...

There were many odd experiences and thoughts I had over the years which I either assumed everyone felt — or if I was feeling low that it was just me. I’d usually try and discount the latter because as one of eight billion people I was fully aware I was statistically insignificant and nothing special. Either positively or negatively. Of course since my diagnosis a third and more obvious explanation presented itself. If it wasn’t a common experience (which I could usually tell if I got odd looks when trying to talk about it) then it was probably an autistic thing. Some of these were textbook, things that might even be used as diagnostic criteria; others were not on any official list of indicators but nevertheless hauntingly familiar to almost everyone in the room when I was meeting up with other autistics. I’ve just thought of another one; something which has been bothering me for years. It’s only now that I realise that they were doing a neurotypical thing all along and that I’ve only j...

This may well end up being one of the oddest and perhaps most anal-retentive blog posts I've ever written, but it's an anomaly I noticed early in life and have never been able to find a satisfactory answer for.  Perhaps unsurprisingly it involves the London Underground tube map. As I've discussed elsewhere the iconic tube map captured my imagination at an early age and it was at this early age that the anomaly itself was in full swing.  It was all to do with the way the stations were labelled. Up until the end of H C Beck's reign as tube map designer the station names on the map were all written in uppercase. Presumably all the better to read you with – although not if you have dyslexia. Unfortunately at that time accessibility wasn't high on the list of London Transport's priorities, as can be seen from the fact no stations had step free access – despite the fact that so many of them had been originally been built with lifts. Nevertheless, the all uppercase pa...