Catmachine

These days if something changes for the worse it's usually because the people behind it are cutting costs and corners. The feature that has been retired or removed simply cost too much and is now being eliminated in order to shave off a minuscule amount of expense in order to increase the profit margin by a tiny increment. Any pretence of providing good customer service and better products has disappeared from many businesses as they wring out the last few droplets of money from their business model as the pyramid scheme of "buy low sell high" collapses. However there's one kind of business where they're constantly scrambling to implement a feature which it would be far easier and cheaper to just leave out. Social media companies appear to be desperate to scramble the chronology of people's timelines despite the fact that leaving it chronological would almost certainly be cheaper from a programming point of view. Linear time is the default - it comes free with...

Everyone has experienced The Confusion. We all know what it's like. We're on our way home from work after a long day. It's later than it should be. We're sitting on the top deck of an overlit bus. Outside it's dark and it's pissing with rain, the hateful hiss of tyres on wet tarmac a cosmic background radiation to our fatigue. Red traffic lights shout their noiseless commands into the chaotic evening, fragmented into violent splatters by the rain drops on the window. Sleep drags at the back of our eyeballs and we close our eyes, leaning our head against the glass. But the vibration of the engine makes dropping off impossible, our skull reverberating from hundreds of tiny impacts. The traffic is moving so slowly it would probably be quicker to get off and walk, but there's the rain to contend with so we stay on board until the last possible moment.  It's only a short walk from the bus stop to our flat but even that's more than enough time to g...

Previously I detailed how a lot of my younger life revolved around trips up and down the North Circular Road or A406. Now read on...  The move to Muswell Hill another six years later took us back upstream along the North Circular.  Now it lay separating us from Colney Hatch and the sprawling Victorian asylum where I would do voluntary work in the Library in between school and university. It still felt like a canyon separating the familiarity of Muswell Hill with its record shops and paper round routes from the strange environment of Friern Barnet (I often wondered how this differed from Normal Barnet and whether this implied that their might be other similar districts of London like Friern Walthamstow or Friern Putney). It was after coming back from university that I renewed my acquaintance with the A406. I moved to Leytonstone which was the furthest east along the North Circular I had yet lived - and also a little far away from it. A couple of years later the move to Wa...

We are told that time and space are merely aspects of the same thing, just narrow ways of looking at space-time, a four-dimensional continuum. And this makes sense and is all very well. The only problem is that you can't move to another moment in time in the same way that you can to another position in space. It's not as if you can hop on a bus to last week. However sometimes  movement in space can simulate aspects of time travel. As long as you have somewhere to go that you haven't visited in years. Last month I went to Muswell Hill for the first time in around twenty years. This north London suburb was where I spent a large segment of my youth so in many ways stepping off the bus onto the Broadway was like stepping from the TARDIS. Of course it helped that it was a dark evening and that I couldn't see quite how much things had changed.  There was just as much of the familiar shape of the landscape present to fool me into thinking I was back in the nineties or ea...

For some reason I have been unable to blog this year aside from that one in January which was, basically, just me going on about something in the same way as I would if it came up in conversation in the pub. It's not that I haven't been trying. I have in fact started writing several entries but they all petered out before reaching a publishable state and have ended up abandoned in the drafts folder gathering virtual dust as they slowly become less and less relevant. The one about how we were all Ferengi now which led to the one about how I enjoyed Deep Space Nine the most of all the Star Trek series. The one about the brain's remarkable talent for pattern recognition which could probably explain so much about the human experience if only I could finish it. The one about how arbitrary so called "round numbers" are when you come to think of it. The one about anthropomorphising things. All these entries will be lost in time like tears in rain... if I leave the...

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve written a blog whilst miles up in the air, but it has been a while. In fact it’s been a while since I flew anywhere at all – and even then it was the same place I’m heading for now. Why the gap? I don’t know I just don’t seem to have had the time or inclination to go anywhere abroad. Plus my passport ran out a couple of years ago. But the thing is that’s just an excuse, I like travelling about and part of my MO these days is to ensure that I keep doing different things in an attempt to fool my brain into thinking time is lasting longer. Or perhaps when I do different things time is lasting longer. It’s all subjective after all. Anyway I thought it was about time I wrote another blog entry as I don’t yet have one for May 2014 and that month is nearly over. It’s a far cry from the days when I used to blog on an almost daily basis. In those days my blog was something I used to look forward to and I enjoyed uncovering fresh topics to...

One of the advantages of living where I do is that it is relatively easy to go out in London in the evening during the week and get back in time to get a reasonable amount of sleep before going to work the next day. All very convenient but one downside of this practice is that it means sometimes I have to catch one of the late trains back. One of the Drunk Trains. We've all experienced the Drunk Trains. The ones that run after the pubs and theatres have turned out and as a result are full of people whose social skills have been dulled by the liberal application of alcohol to the brain cells. Now I like a drink as much as the next person, but even when I have been drinking I don't take it out on other people. I don't start trying to guilt trip them into engaging me in inebriated conversation with an undercurrent of menace lest they appear a humourless party pooper. I don't, I would hope, turn in to an Aggressive Drunk. A lot of people do though, which is why the dr...

At times like this it is sometimes very handy to know the future. Certain aspects of it anyway. All I am trying to find out is what the weather is going to be like over the next four days or so. Shouldn't be too difficult in this day and age. There are any number of up to the minute websites all too keen to tell me what the forecast is and if that's not enough, there's also an app for that. No bother at all. Except that none of them agree with each other. They don't even agree with themselves from minute to minute and  right now  the little icon on the phone screen is blatantly contradicting what I can quite clearly hear rattling on the skylight above the bed. It's raining again. As has been the case for the entire history of humanity, it is still quicker and easier to stick your head out the window. The big problem of course is that you can't stick your head out of the window into tomorrow. Predicting the future has been an overriding obsession of the ...

I miss the Sunrise. I miss waking up and instantly knowing how long it is until I have to drag my sorry carcass out of bed to face first the computer world (for my early morning brain workout) and then the outside world as I travel to my place of work (which - if I am feeling energetic - involves my early morning body workout). The problem with waking up and it still being pitch black out there is that you have no idea how much time you have left before the alarm clock (in my case it's an app, but the principle is the same  - and no matter how pleasant an alarm tone you have chosen you will come to hate it) assaults your ears forcing you to get out of bed. You could have hours in which to fall back asleep and have more dreams or it could be less than five minutes until the alarm is due to go off. Let's face it, by the time you actually get motivated to check the time it's usually the latter. You lie there in full wakefulness dreading the noise that is due to come you...

Our lives are slowly being stolen from us an hour at a time. I am of course rather predictably complaining about Daylight Saving Time . Well I would at this time of year. However, I think it is something worthy of study. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. But how come we only ever notice them going forward? I'm serious. In the autumn when the clocks return to GMT where they should remain (it is, after all, based upon the Sun being overhead at the Prime Meridian at noon) you don't even notice. For all the talk of " a whole extra hour in bed " time seems normal and certainly come Monday morning, getting up for work is just as difficult (or easy, depending upon the temperament) as it ever was. There is no discernable difference. However, in the Spring when they are advanced an hour in a bid to give golfers more time on the green it couldn't be more noticeable. Despite it not seeming so bad...

I get the feeling that I have already mentioned the whole issue of waking up just before the alarm clock goes off in this blog. It's exactly the kind of thing that it would have occurred to me to write about in the early days when I was doing it regularly. Back in that heady time I used to get up at 6.30am, tap away at the keyboard and then hit PUBLISH POST without a second thought. Given that I'd so recently dragged myself up out of sleep it isn't at all surprising that I'd end up writing about alarm clocks. Nowadays I plan things more and write a blog entry over a couple of days so alarm clocks aren't so fresh in my mind. It's odd when it happens though, this preemptive waking. Depending upon how deeply you've been asleep you snap or drift into wakefulness and wonder what it is that has roused you. Sometimes it almost seems as if you heard an alarm clock going off in the next room or at least dreamed that you heard one. And then it actually goes off...

I don't have any wisdom teeth. I didn't have them taken out or anything, they're just not there and never were.  I am a mutant.  One of the first things some people say upon hearing about this unusual state of affairs is usually a hilarious variant on the " Why am I not surprised? " gag - the implication being that I'm a bit daft and lack wisdom. Of course that's all a bit arse over front and back to tit. As we all know very well they're called " wisdom " because they appear later in life when (presumably) one has accumulated some.  They're not called " wisdom " because their appearance imparts it, nor because their eruption makes you stagger about calling for Mr Grimsdale (unless that's your dentist's name). Age and wisdom used to be inextricably linked. Not so much nowadays. Anyone who hates Thugg the Caveman and his illuminating antics should skip to the end of the next bit. In Thugg's day reaching the rip...

They've done it again. They keep changing things. Both Google and Wikipedia have had a minor makeover almost simultaneously. It's most disconcerting. They're not immediately obvious changes, it's quite a subtle thing, but you get the distinct impression that both websites are now made of translucent molded plastic and perfumed mist instead of paper and card. Of course no matter how disconcerting it is right now, we will all soon get used to it and in a years's time if they suddenly reverted to their previous state we'd suffer from severe dislocative shock. Just like the physical landscape , these virtual worlds become part of our mental furniture. Everything our minds are is made up of and sculpted by our perceptions of the various worlds around us and the models of them we build in our heads. The infant digital universes that have been springing up in our environment in recent years may not be as conspicuous as the material world, but the internal mode...

The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilisations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it. The Fermi Paradox Why haven't we come across any aliens yet? I'm talking about convincing scientific proof, not garbled " ...them thar moon-critturs been done abducted me ag'in ..." reports from the likes of Cletus Hickson in Bumfuck, Arkansas . It feels right that aliens should exist. Surely by now we should have come across some hard evidence? A belief in aliens is older than our knowledge of the wider universe. Even before we had any idea that there existed worlds other than our own we had a concept of non-human intelligent beings. These concepts were quite distinct from our ideas of other humans. Even if Thugg the Caveman had taken a gap year before going to The University of Central Ugland and had trekked across Europe and down i...

Time for another metablog entry. I hope you don't mind. A major problem with writing this off the top of my head first thing in the morning is that I end up rambling. Not that there's anything wrong with rambling per se, but if I'm not careful I'll end up repeating myself as the themes, memes and mania that appeal to my mind push themselves to the fore. Plus there are now enough of these entries to make checking through them all a far from trivial affair. If I suspect that I might have mentioned something on a previous occasion do I really have the time to read back through 70,000 words in order to avoid repetition and the subsequent enraging of the over-sensitive? The other day I was convinced I'd already mentioned the popular meme that " every cell/atom in our bodies is replaced every seven years " more than once, but it took me ages to confirm this. And the practical upshot of all this tedious searching (and it was long-winded; the search function on ...

"If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves." Mark Twain Somehow I find myself already sitting here by the window at home with the daylight fading on the final twenty four hours of my precious time off. It doesn't seem fair somehow. It's almost as if I've hardly had any time off at all and yet simultaneously it manages to seem quite a while since I was last at work. It's always the same at this time of year. One of my main problems is that the maximum time I can take off in one chunk is around two weeks which, what with the weekends, amounts to sixteen days in total. This might sound like a lot but in reality it's only just about enough time for my mind and body to recover and for me to start feeling even remotely human again. But then of course I only get to experience this refreshed feeling for one day at most before having to restart the whole cycle of running myself into the ground again. That's the trouble with having a so-c...

It's that strange time of year again, when, due to the odd way I visualise numbers and dates , I start to get (santa) claustrophobia. There is something about the period between Christmas and New Year that feels the wrong size. The whole of the final quarter of the year seems to be a build up to the festive season, which whatever your belief system and curmudgeonity-level is at least a break from the day to day grind of everyday life and a chance to relax and recharge the batteries. What's more, if you're fortunate, you get over a week off work gratis without having to use up any valuable leave days. Then after the blowout of 25th December you crawl up through the trapdoor into 26th and realise there's nowhere to go. It's not so much another storey like the rest of the weeks have been, but the attic of the year, and not one that's been given a swanky loft makeover either - this is the old fashioned kind with bare beams, darkness, spiders, old cardboard boxes, ...