Catmachine

There is no-one to blame. The whole feeling of being put upon by fate, the weather or other so-called acts of God comes not from reality but from the human brain's almost infinite capacity for Pattern Recognition. Pattern recognition is how life makes sense of the universe. In the case of human beings the process has become so baroque and complex that it's unsurprising when it starts to throw out anomalies. We may think we see what is in front of us but that is very far from the truth. Without the high intensity interpretation and pattern matching going on in the visual cortex of the brain, the field of view is a chaotic mess of shape and shade. Even something as simple as identifying colour is tied up with image identification and processing. As the recent furore about a certain dress and - more interestingly - the very different colour palette perceived by the Himba tribe of Namibia prove, it seems that the ability to distinguish between shades of colour is linked to...

I am currently confined to my bed by a particularly annoying cold. It seems somewhat unfair that I am suffering at all; as far as flu jabs were concerned, I've had both the Swine and the Regular. Surely that should be the medical equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card? There's nothing that common about the cold. Sure, it's widespread, but there are so many different varieties that it should surely be considered as a family of diseases rather than just one. It may feel as if I've got yet another cold , but this is the first (and only) time I've ever come across this variety, hence it's virulence. Good word that, Virulence . From the same root as Virus of course, the Latin for poison. It's quite a perfect description for them really; in many ways they are more akin to a poison than a parasitic organism. Should they even be considered alive? I've always thought not. There's certainly no method to their mechanism, they just bumble about until b...

Some days my contact lenses just won't go in. Well it's more usually just one lens that won't go in. Most of the time it's the right eye. This means, as I have different prescriptions in each eye, that over time I'm gradually building up a surfeit of left lenses. This upsets my sense of order. Entropy again. You can't get away from it. Since yesterday's post I have been thinking more about entropy and about how it seems to go against the grain when it comes to what's happening on Earth. Now I'm no physicist and I'm sure I've already committed any number of semantic howlers when talking about things that are a bit beyond me. Please, stay your patronising little chuckles-to-self. Just because I don't understand the intricacies of the theory doesn't mean I can't explore ideas and conduct thought experiments. For example, I'm boiling a beaker of water in a room in which gravity works in reverse. What do you mean gravity can...