Catmachine

As far as buying our music is concerned, we've come a long way in what feels like a very short time. These days it's far quicker and easier to buy music at the drop of a hat - furthermore there's a far greater range of music to choose from. We can pick and choose the tracks we want and best of all we don't even have to leave the house. The downside of this is of course that it can be dangerous going online drunk - a hangover is rarely improved by the discovery that one has bought the box set of Mantovani's 100 Golden Moments because it seemed like a funny idea at the time. In general this means that things are more convenient and in some small way we are conserving resources. What's more we no longer have to cart around half a metric tonne of vinyl every time we move house and lets face it those cardboard boxes were always the heaviest ones. Usually designed for transporting bananas they also had a nasty habit of disintegrating halfway up the garden path ...

Ever since moving to this city I've had a Grudging-Acceptance / Hate relationship with the local buses as anyone who has ever read my blog or followed me on Twitter or other social media will already know. I never shut up about it and am in fact surprised you're still following me. What's that you say? You're not? Oh dear. There are many reasons for this (the bus thing, not the social media thing). For a start there was the whole breaking my arm and lying about it incident which I've already chronicled in this very blog, and then there was the time that The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened occurred on the top deck of a number 25. But on the whole these specific events aren't a major part of the general unpleasantness surrounding such journeys. It's everything else. For a start where I live the nearest bus stop is on a large square - the other side of the square to the direction from which I enter it. This means that I can see my bus is already at ...

When most children play "lets pretend" they imagine a thing that isn't. Whilst I did do that as a kid, I also used to have little games in my head in which I imagined a thing that already was ... The first major incidence of the phenomenon that I can now recall was back in the seventies when we had an German exchange student staying with us, a woman studying architecture. As a favour to my parents - perhaps as a way of saying thank you for letting her stay - she took me off their hands for an afternoon on a trip to visit Welwyn Garden City and Harlow - of some significance to students of architecture and town planning as they were both "New Towns" built in the twentieth century in the commuter belt to ease overcrowding in London. Whilst we were in Harlow I started playing a strange game with myself. To clarify, this was playing a game in the sense of " let's play Star Trek " rather than " let's play Tiddlywinks ". I started ima...

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...

This morning as I dragged myself out of bed early for the first time since the seasonal break I seriously felt that the weather was taking the piss. It was the day that I was due back at work and as such already had a level of terror normally reserved for a visit to the dentist without anaesthetic. The fact that it now sounded as if there was a force ten from navarone blowing out there was merely the cyanide icing on an already unpleasant and slightly rotten fruit cake. If this had been fiction I would have concluded that this was the Pathetic Fallacy at work and that the weather was reflecting the mood of all the people in the land as they were returning to their places of work; the appalling weather itself then serving to sour these self same moods even further in a furious feedback loop... But there are few authors who could get away with this kind of thing these days. If you or I had penned this morning and then brought it along to a writers' workshop we would probably ...

A lot of the time when I was a kid, what I read was dictated by what I could find in the small SF section of Muswell Hill library or the books that I could find in the bargain bins. Once I'd outgrown Narnia, I found most books aimed specifically at children rather boring (with a few notable exceptions - Joan Aiken amongst them) and had been put off the so-called classics by having The Mill on the Floss rammed down my throat as an official text upon which I would later be tested. It took me forever to finish I can't remember a thing about it now. As has been chronicled elsewhere , this exploration of the SF genre meant that I was exposed to a lot of adult themes early - whilst grown-ups may have imagined me to be reading juvenile tales of invasions by robots from Mars I was in fact exploring unexpected worlds of cannibalism, sex with aliens and other taboos. Some of the disturbing ideas from these far out stories have stuck with me ever since. On other occasions perusal o...

So here it is, 2012, everybody's going to die. Or at least that's what the doomsday theorists would have us all believe. But better not join them in this belief otherwise you run the risk of Professor Brian Cox calling you a nobber [ 1 ]. He's got a point though. There's absolutely no basis for the now widely held suspicion that the world as we know it will end on Friday 21 December 2012 - or even that anyone ever predicted that it would. This hysteria came about because this date does indeed appear as a landmark in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar which was used by the Mayans amongst other people. The date wasn't part of any prophecy however - it was merely the point at which the digits of the calendar (which was calculated in a rather complex and confusing manner using both base-17 and base-20) rolled over to 13.0.0.0.0. For the Mayans this was the end of an era - perhaps a bit of an abstraction seeing as it lay so far in the future, but the Mesoamerican...

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...