Catmachine

Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand. The custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant, designed especially for your needs. Last time I was attempting to grope my way towards an understanding of the nature of our bodies and brains as machines by considering the eye. It was a useful exercise; and I concluded that whilst an eye might be a squashy camera, vision is not the same as the software we might use to display the images. After all a digital camera attached to computer is nothing without someone looking at it, interpreting it, being aware of it. At the moment a human mind is the only thing that can do this. Until we develop computers that can interpret and be aware of what they're looking at that is. We may not be as far off this as we might think. Whilst it's unlikely that we'll develop replicants capable of expressing wonder at having seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion by November 2019 (or soon...

Thursday 9 June 1994 What I really enjoyed back then about hitching around to see bands was being on my own. Nobody else seemed to understand that, for most people it was a social thing.  I on the other hand always got frustrated when I found someone else doing what I was doing - often before I knew what was happening I'd been pressured into travelling with people I hardly knew and having to hang out with and talk to them. This was unsatisfactory. You could never rely on other people. This was another reason my 1994 Lush expedition felt so special. There was no-one else on the road. Sure the gigs themselves were packed, but the only other people experiencing all the gigs were the band and crew. It had been so deserted walking out of Bath earlier that night I had considered lying down by the side of the road on a grassy verge and catching some shuteye, but I'm glad I didn't. In the end I made my bed by 4am and listened to my Split CD whilst...

It's rather worrying that sometimes people get so desperate for fleeting moments of superiority over others that they'll stop at almost nothing to achieve them no matter how pathetic they end up looking. Mr Clarke was one such person. A belligerent ghoul who made my life hell from 1976-1977, a so-called teacher who used to drink whiskey in the stationery cupboard between lessons as a result of which he had a large red nose which seemed to enjoy an existence quite separate from that of the rest of his face. He was almost universally hated because of his constant hectoring tone, violent outbursts against the more unruly elements in the class and sarcastic catchphrase " you just couldn't be bothered ". I suspect he knew very well just how much he was despised and feared, which is probably why he drank so much.  In retrospect he is an almost pathetic figure, but of course at the time I was terrified of him. Years later when I first heard The Headmaster Ritual ...

"There's nothing only about being a girl" Like most bad news these days I first became aware of it in the Twitter stream. There in between the hashtags, drunken utterings and missives from the afternoon in California was the sad and unbelievable news that Elisabeth Sladen was dead. I couldn't quite parse it. It didn't fit. She couldn't be dead, she was Sarah-Jane . There's talk of her being remembered fondly by Doctor Who fans of "a certain age" which I assume includes me. But for me it wasn't quite like that. I was, I suppose, a late developer so didn't develop any sort of crush on her. But this didn't matter, for me she became the definitive companion - Jamie, Zoe and Jo were all part of my young childhood imagination but Sarah-Jane was the first of the Doctor's friends I could identify with or imagine being my friend. An older sister or an aunt perhaps. At first she seemed to be written too self-consciously as a voci...

Ever since we invented computers we've started to think of our own brains as computers, dubbing the computers themselves "electronic brains". Neither is the other. Whilst I have no doubt that one day we will invent thinking machines, sentient intelligences with no appreciable difference from our own minds, at the moment we're barking up the wrong tree. In fact I would go so far as to say we're barking up a tree in the wrong forest. On a different continent. This is because the way we think about our minds and brains isn't really how they work. Perhaps unsurprising seeing as it's the brains themselves doing this thinking. We imagine we are organic computers and therefore built electronic boxes in our own mental image; how we thought of ourselves at the time. If we'd been able to build computers in an earlier age, say when the heart was imagined to be the seat of consciousness, perhaps our computers would have resembled pumps. To demonstrate the ...

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...

Tuesday 7 June 1994 Once again I found myself standing at the exit of a service station with my thumb out. Compared with the previous day's journey, today's was going to be a piece of piss. I'd got the bus from Manchester City Centre to just beyond the suburbs and made my way down country lanes to Knutsford Services where I'd sneaked in the back way and from where I was hoping to get a lift straight down the M6 to Birmingham. It didn't take that long and I did it in one hit. Once in Birmingham I had ample time to find somewhere to freshen up, get something to eat and make myself feel slightly human again. After that I went in search of the venue. It was called Edwards and I eventually discovered it tucked away in a side street slap bank in the city centre. The entrance was tall and narrow, squeezed in between two other businesses; once inside there were a couple of flights of stairs leading up to a dark nightclub decorated in black, blue and mirrors. I arrived ...

Previously on Dreaming of the Starlight: After the first gig at Sheffield's Leadmill I'd curled up in a corner of the coach station. Now read on... Sunday 5 June 1994 By the time it started getting light and other people started hanging around, I hadn't really slept. Despite the fact that this was only the first leg, I really felt I couldn't face an all day hitch to Glasgow after no sleep. Suppose I missed the gig? To go all that way for nothing would be too much to bear. Luckily having spent the night in the coach station gave me a cunning idea. I could go by coach. And so it came to pass that I ended up rolling into Glasgow on a bright June afternoon. Being able to check the locations of such things quickly and easily on the web was still a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye at this point (and the Google founders were still two years away from their groundbreaking PhD research project) but luckily I had been at the self-same venue selling merchandise for Toya...

"In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul."  Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything Sunday evenings are amongst the most unpleasant time spans it is possible to experience. Whilst both Tony Hancock and Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged may have had a problem with Sunday afternoons , it's only during the evening when things start to get really nasty and you become filled with a sense of disappointment and self loathing because once again you didn't get nearly enough done. This isn...

If you were to look at what was once my record collection, became my CD collection and now in the digital age is ascending to a higher state of MP3, you'd find that a large proportion of the music has female vocals. Perhaps not as large a proportion as there should be, but I suspect that is merely a reflection of the sexual inequality that is still as rife in the music industry today as anywhere else. However, if you were to look at a list of my favourite bands, the top ten as it were, you would find that they almost all have female vocals. This is no coincidence. To me the sound of a female voice is so much more pleasant than a male one, a woman singing has a cold, clear, and above all coherent beauty that is such a long way from the fake american accented drawl of so many male artists. This is a personal preference of course and there are exceptions to every rule. But on the whole... Yes, I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't that either. When I first started g...

Stories are always bigger and more complex when you don't know them. A clip from a new film shown on TV somehow manages to make the film appear much more epic and far reaching than it in the end it actually turns out to be. Take Star Wars . This was big news back in 1977 and endless showings of the same clips on TV somehow made me think of it as a grand epic tale with the scope and intense world building of Frank Herbert's Dune (although I hadn't read that either). Those clips. This was surely going to be the best film ever? I couldnt wait. That bit they kept showing where the two droids crash landed a spaceship in the middle of the desert. Wow. Obviously somewhere in the middle of the film; the droids on a mission of some importance that must have been interrupted somehow. But when I eventually saw the film the clips I was already familiar with from TV (not to mention the pictures on the bubble gum cards) were somehow diminished. Too near the beginning, too close tog...

Awoke early this morning and spent a miserable couple of hours tossing and turning whilst hoping that the severe headache that had me in its grip would just GO AWAY . In the end it didn't which was most unsatisfactory. I had to get up and go in search of painkillers. Luckily I didn't have to go very far - they were in the kitchen. This is a marked improvement on the occasion when, whilst still living in Astra House , I had to actually get up at 3.30am, get dressed and stagger up Preston Street and along Western Road and into actual Hove before I found a twenty four hour store where I could buy some piss weak generic painkillers (not even something with added codeine oomph). I learnt a valuable lesson that night; always keep painkillers in the house. You'd have thought that by now we'd have evolved out of tension headaches  which are no good to man nor beast. I mean, from an evolutionary point of view they're a terrible burden... Thugg the Caveman sleeps in a ...

Just as moving house had opened and closed the first book of my Tubehood, The Case of the Victorian Zodiac , so moving house once more at the close of the seventies would bring the second book, The Case of the Dism Rly , to an end and set the pieces up for the third and final book in the trilogy. We weren't moving far, just a mile or so down the road to Cranley Gardens. This was near Highgate tube and Highgate Wood (two of the primary locations of book two). Nevertheless things were very different now. For a start I was growing up. Not only had I recently discovered the allure of spiky women in general and Toyah Willcox in particular which had put an entirely different spin on things, but I'd also moved up into the senior school. This latter move was an extremely unpleasant one (at some point I will write a comprehensive blog entry explaining why), so suffice to say that I decided to continue concentrating on my inner life and as a result my enthusiasm for all things...

"God does not play dice with the universe" Albert Einstein I find it astonishing in this day and age that the whole business of "should Creationism be taught in schools?" is even discussed. It's not an issue of religious freedom - people should free to believe in whatever they like however stupid it is. It's an issue of whether what should be taught in schools should make fucking sense. By all means teach people about religion in schools ( some people believe this whilst other people believe that and sometimes people kill other people for not agreeing with them ) but anything about the way the universe actually works should be based on facts or at least as close to facts as are currently available. When something is unknown that too should be made clear. But , argue the Creationists, Evolution's just a theory too, goldarnit! No. No it isn't. It's just logic. To be honest I don't even think it should be dignified with the epithet "t...