Catmachine

When the weather is bad - especially when this involves wind and rain - my initial reaction is that I want to punch god in the face. There are a couple of rather big problems with this urge. Firstly I am not by nature a violent person and if I ever did end up planting a fist in someone's face I'd probably feel bad about it for years afterwards.  Even if I could conquer the guilt, I still couldn't cope with being in a fight because I'd get my arse kicked.  Even if my opponent wasn't an omnipotent being who created the universe. This brings us to the second of the big problems.  I don't believe in god so the urge would be impossible to carry out even if I worked out for months and took a course of empathy removal drugs. The urge is still very strong though.  I think it's based on the raw anger I feel when confronted with weather of this kind.  Logically of course there's no reason to get cross about something beyond human control and normally I rem...

As I have so often remarked I don’t cycle into work nearly as often as I should. After all the reasons for doing so are many and varied. It’s greener for a start and saves me money that would otherwise end up in the pockets of Brighton and Hove Buses. And most importantly, it is at least a nod towards making me fitter. I know that in an ideal world should go down the gym of course, but never seem to have the time. However seeing as I have to spend at least 90 minutes a day travelling, I might as well make the most of those minutes getting exercise. Unfortunately the arguments for not cycling are far more persuasive. It’s dark. Often it’s cold and wet. I’m tired. I’m lazy. And perhaps, most importantly, I usually end up as a seething chamber of suppressed rage by the time I reach the end of my journey. This is not because I have an exaggerated sense of self importance and sense of entitlement when it comes to my position on the road. This is because so many other cyclists, pedestria...

These days the name of Alan Turing is associated as much with computers as the name Isaac Newton is with gravity. Quite rightly so. Whilst his work on cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park during World War Two might cause some to consider him a shadowy figure in the world of twentieth century espionage, I would like to think that in the long historical view it will be a thought experiment of his that will be remembered most of all - the Turing Test . In its simplest form the test states that if an interrogator having a conversation over a keyboard (online chat, basically) with a second party cannot distinguish between a real person and a computer program, then the computer (program) could be said to be thinking. Even though this once thought experiment has now been carried out in reality, (most notably at the Loebner Prize which has been carried out annually since 1991) no-one yet wants to stick their neck out and claim that a machine has definitely passed and ipso facto can think. ...

It is surprising how seriously some people take fiction sometimes. The word canon  originally meant the books of the Bible that were official and contained the true scriptures as laid down by the various churches and faiths who concerned themselves with such things. It has since been sequestered by the enthusiasts of various fictional worlds to mean the events and stories that officially "happened" in that universe. When a fictional world or universe is created often additional spin off fiction is produced - initially to capitalise on any possible popularity of the franchise and turn a tidy buck. Some early examples of such works were the Star Wars novels Splinter of the Minds Eye  and Han Solo at Stars End  which were churned out shortly after the success of the original Star Wars film (the one that is now rather dully referred to as A New Hope ). Despite claims on the covers that these novels were " from the adventures of Luke Skywalker " they really d...

These days there is no excuse for not knowing the answer to trivial questions. The answer is always on the end of a google and we now have google at our fingertips most of the time. However, it is sometimes more fun not to know something. I have no idea what the Elgin Marbles actually are and I prefer it that way. I know that they're in the British Museum, I know that people think that the UK should return them to Greece, but I have absolutely no desire to type the phrase " Elgin Marbles " into a search engine and dispose of my ignorance. This is because what I imagine they might be is more fun. When I was a kid I had one of those furry pencil cases; mine was orange and I didn't use it to keep pencils in. Oh no, I used it for my collection of marbles.  I was obsessed with marbles. In retrospect it was a short lived obsession, but it seemed all consuming at the time.  It was symptomatic of the wider craze sweeping the school; in the playground in between lessons...

I'm sure this has happened before. Do you think it has happened before? Don't you remember reading a blog entry by me on the subject of déjà vu? However in this case it actually has. I did indeed write about déjà vu back in September 2009 . I'm not intending to go over the same ground here, but recently woke from a dream with some new insights into what might make this bizarre sensation, this mental feedback, tick. In the original blog entry I hypothesised that déjà vu was caused by the short term memory (in other words the current experience, the present, the now ) being misidentified as long term memory. This does make some kind of sense. However doesn't explain one of the stronger sensations that can be experienced during a promnesiac episode. Often my experience of déjà vu is not so much I'm sure this has happened before but rather I am sure that I have dreamed this before . This makes me inclined to think that déjà vu may be the activation of a system ...

As a child I was absolutely terrified by skeletons in general and skulls in particular. I am curious now as to where this fear sprang from. Of course skulls are associated with death but as a very young child death is something you are blissfully unaware of. Is the fear of the skull something built in, an instinct that evolved over time or is it something that is learned? Very young children do learn to recognise faces very early on, and smiles in particular. You would expect that a baby's instinct upon being presented with a skull would be to smile - the skull is, after all, a very simplistic representation of a smiling face. One way of testing this would be to experiment with babies and pictures of skulls but this could very well turn out to be unethical and cruel should the findings of the research be that that a fear of the old bone face is not learned but is in fact built in... It could well be built in. In prehistoric times human bones would generally only be found in...

If you will forgive this entry for being a little meta, it is always nice when someone comments on a blog entry. On the whole I mean this unreservedly. Whether positive or negative, having taken the time to write something underneath means that they've read it, a fact which is much more satisfying than endless hours spent poring over Google Analytics. Generally the comments fall into three camps. First are the Me Toos . These are people that generally agree with (or very occasionally feel enlightened by) the content of the entry so much so that they feel moved to express this, often citing incidents from their own experience which match or mirror those being discussed in the main entry. Then there are the No Buts . These people disagree with some or all of the points covered and furthermore have the facts the prove it - their experience is very different from that depicted in the blog, and they can say why. Finally there are the Nit Pickers . Their response is not as broad...

I was interested to read today's Guardian article about the journalist who was stopped from writing down the prices of items in Tesco so much so that I even made a comment below the article. I had assumed from it and from some of the other comments that followed that photography would be even less welcome in Tesco stores and wondered what this meant for the manufacturers and promoters of goods who have started putting QR Codes on their products in the name of marketing. Still, I thought, it's only Tesco. However, a couple of hours later I was to discover that this attitude was more widespread than I thought. I was passing through Churchill Square Shopping Centre and spotted a mildly amusing notice on a shop front which, as is my wont, I took a snap of. See above. I was immediately accosted by a security woman who told me that I wasn't allowed to take photographs. I was so taken aback by this that I stood there for a few seconds before walking across to where she...

When I was growing up it seemed to be a fairly common thing for children's heroes to be footballers. My friend Shamus expressed an admiration for Alan Ball although I suspected that this was just because his name was Ball. Shamus was obsessed with all things football related, so a footballer actually named Ball... well there was no choice really. It was lucky that the Arsenal centre forward Booty McGoalmouth was only a figment of my fevered imagination. I didn't have such heroes. Football didn't interest me and I had no idea who Cyril was nor what his nice one entailed. My heroes were Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Doctor Who, Charles Darwin and Mr Spock. This meant that had I ever fallen into a coma my parents would have had a bit of trouble getting one of them to come to my bedside and try and rouse me seeing as they were either dead or fictional (although I expect Tom Baker would have given it a go in character). However I did meet someone when I was twelve who,...

In the aftermath of the unrest of the summer of 2011 one might be forgiven for thinking that civilisation is collapsing around our ears and that we are facing the end of days. Except that this kind of doomsaying itself is nothing new and has existed for as long as mankind has been keeping records of it. An excellent article in The Economist put it far better than I could and suggested that perhaps Grand Theft Auto is no more responsible for the moral decline in today's youth than Chaplin's early silents were for the Great Depression . If anything such invective merely demonstrates that if one thing is inevitable it's aging. The old will always disparage the young because they are angry about getting old. The answer to " are you getting old or is it crap? " is invariably " You're getting old ". Or is it? I work at the same educational establishment where years ago I studied for a degree. Back then things seemed so much simpler, so much more bl...

Like many infuriating things, it happened on a bus. Perhaps I travel on buses too often these days. Given the attitude of the local bus company and the various ways I have been treated by them over the years from outright lying to abusive emails , perhaps I should simply take my custom elsewhere? Easier said than done. They have a virtual monopoly in the area and on days when cycling is not an option (say when the weather decides to drop lakes on the city from a great height or when I have several errands to run either before or after work) what else am I supposed to do? I usually sit upstairs. This is partly a hangover from childhood where not only is sitting upstairs more exciting but also something that inexplicably my parents never wanted to do, and partly because on the whole there tend to be more seats up there. Perhaps some people experience the same disinclination to climb the cramped staircase as my parents did. Sometimes it gets crowded; that's unavoidable. So...

I wonder whether they still get children to memorise poems in school? I used to find this terrifying. At that age I hadn't heard of the memory techniques that make such feats easier and as such used to struggle. One of the ones I recall having the most trouble with began " I must go down to the sea again... ", but to be frank I don't think I can be blamed for this failing. Besides,  the protagonist of this verse sounds arrogant and demanding: " And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by " Oh, that's all is it? An enormous vehicle just given to you, gratis, and then you actually want a celestial body some light years distant to be simply handed to you on a plate simply because you haven't got any idea where you are going? Repetition seems to be the key to remembering something and as such the only poem I still remember is the one that was drummed into me on a daily basis for as long as I went to school. No doubt you know it too. ...

I fail to see the evolutionary advantage of procrastination. The bulk of human behaviour can be traced to an evolutionary advantage at some point in the past, even if it's one that no longer applies. Wanting to gorge oneself on carbohydrate and sugar rich food ? Yes, an advantage in times of scarcity. Xenophobia ? Repugnant these days but undeniably an advantage in days when you and the tribe in the next valley were competing for the same food source. Love? But of course, love leads to sex and sex leads to children; miniature copies of yourself to act as vessels which will carry your DNA down the road of time into the future. There's no intent here, it's all cold mathematics . Those people who were greedy / xenophobic / loving simply survived marginally better than those that weren't, with the result that the world now consists of us, their descendants. And rather annoyingly we now have to unpick all that instinct because some of it is quite clearly a supernormal s...

Some two years ago or less when this blog was concerning itself with the nature of consciousness I wrote an entry about the so called " Cartesian Theatre " and the flaws inherent in this dualistic model of the self. To reiterate: the theatre is based on the idea that all your senses - vision, hearing, touch, smell - are sending signals down your nerves and into the brain. Once in the brain these multiple media are combined by some mental home entertainment system into a presentation for the consumption of the actual Self .  Lord Consciousness sits in a large leather swivel chair at the controls of the brain, waving a cigar around in one hand, universal remote in the other. This feels right. It's how we imagine ourselves, a mini-me occupying the seat of sentience. It's what we feel we really are. The problem is that what feels right is very often wrong. Flat earth? Wrong. Sun goes round the earth? Wrong. Perhaps even though it feels that our real self is a pilot ...