Catmachine

I just entered a competition the first prize of which is a journey into space. I am under no illusions about winning, but it is nice to have these little possibilities hanging there in the back brain giving us cause to imagine just how wonderful would it be if only...  Millions of people do the National Lottery every week for instance and the chances of winning that are far less likely. So you never know, I might win. And of all the things I really want to do, number one by a long way has always been leaving the planet, if only temporarily. I dream about space travel on a regular basis and am eternally disappointed in the non-arrival of the future that was promised us in our childhood. OK so we have a different future, an amazing one that we could never have imagined back in the seventies. The internet, a whole extra dimension, has been added to human experience in the most significant technological development since Gutenberg and yet... It's not as good as space travel, is...

Increasingly these days I find myself waking up in the night and worrying about death. Worry is far too mild a word for it. Blind panic would be more appropriate. Logically of course I know there is nothing that can be done to escape it. Intellectually I can be certain that the idea of an afterlife was only made up, initially to stop people going insane with fear and spending all their time in a blue funk instead of getting on with whatever it was they needed to do in order to be a valuable member of society and perpetuate the species. After a while the concept was adapted in order to control people and make them obey out of a fear of the quality of the place they would be allocated after shuffling off this mortal coil. My fear is not this kind of fear, the fear of Hell. It's just the fear of Not Being. But I'm not quite sure why this fear is so strong. When I cease to be I will have ceased to be and there will be no me. There will be no me to know that I'm not there. ...

Sometimes it seems that we will stop at nothing to find external reasons for avoiding doing what we really didn't want to do anyway. We know that we didn't want to do it but we tell ourselves that we would have done it nonetheless, if only it hadn't been for the thing with the stuff or the fact that the situation was thus. Case in point. I ended up Not Cycling into work yesterday morning. The official reason (that is to say the reason I went snuffling after so I could hold it up in front of me like a Get Out Of Jail Free card or an FBI warrant) is that my current bike is a write off. Well, according to the Bike Doctor at work anyway when I took it to him for a checkup. Never mind the fact that I managed perfectly well to cycle home after this grim news or the fact that despite this I originally planned to cycle in yesterday as "one last journey" on the ailing bike. The real reason was that I wanted to carry on reading Neal Stephenson 's Anathem , large c...

There's nothing quite as interesting as one's own dreams but the downside of this is that there's nothing potentially as boring as other people's. However one interesting thing about anyone's dreams is that if they write them up before falling asleep they may find that this captures details which they then completely forget. The next time they awake from consciousness they  won't remember them. At all. This may be to do with the way consciousness divides up time between the long and short term memory. I suspect that the short-term memory consists of "today" or in other words the amount of time since the last sleeping. This is how we distinguish today from yesterday. Today is now , we are conscious and living on our wits; memory of things that happened earlier that day feel very different from the memories of things that happened the day before, even though the difference in time between them is negligible. The important thing is that they happene...

GILES IS A NAZI MOTHERFUCKER These words were sprayed in two foot high white letters along the redbrick fascia of my school on a major trunk route through North London. I would imagine that tens of thousands of people saw this heartfelt statement, because even though the school authorities did their best to scrub away the obscenity, the letters remained visible as ghosts on the brick beneath the tall Victorian classroom windows for many years afterwards. I often wondered about the motivation for this graffiti. "Giles" was the Headmaster and an inoffensive figurehead whom I always thought of as a bit like a cut-price version of a minor member of the royal family. I didn't consider such an ineffectual individual worthy of such bile. Furthermore the words had been written, so it was whispered, by a boy who had been expelled for some misdemeanour or other. I really didn't understand this. As far as I was concerned being at the school was a nightmare, the claustrophobic ...

This week I started cycling into work again for the first time in ages. The weather had improved, it was no longer even remotely cold and I basically couldn't come up with any further ways of putting it off. Leaving early it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it might be, but on the other hand it did remind me of something about the way my brain works. During the cycle journey I am fully physically occupied. My brain is also very busy; calculating a trajectory here, making sure I obey the traffic lights there and ensuring I don't end up under a juggernaut due to a miscalculation whilst shooting round Vogue Gyratory. However these activities don't entirely occupy the brain. Whilst they're not unconscious autonomic responses they are below the threshold of language, which means that throughout the journey my thought processes are racing and my internal madman is monologuing at a million miles an hour coming up with reams of subvocal garbage and the odd gem. At on...

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...