Catmachine

Of course I believe in coincidences. They happen all the time. What I am doubtful about is that they mean anything. For a start if they meant something then they wouldn't be coincidences by definition. Furthermore as discussed in a recent blog the human mind is trained to see patterns in things above everything else so any such interpretation should be taken with a pinch of salt. But sometimes you wonder. At the beginning of 2014 I finished the first draft of my latest novel. Like the previous one it was partly set in and around the music industry, this time in the early nineties. The central character  - who'd been a supporting character in the previous one - was the singer in an indie band, a band described in the book as shoegaze but with more aggressive vocals than was usual. I must admit that when I was first writing I didn't know exactly what the band (Beam - a very nineties name, I could almost see the logo on the t-shirts) sounded like although I knew that I ...

Not that long ago by the timescale of the universe there was no-one on Earth to observe anything. The solar system had been in existence for billions of years and the various bodies within it had long settled into their orbits with clockwork precision. Close in to the parent star smaller rocky bodies circled in the light, ring fenced by a zone in which gravitational perturbation had prevented any single body coalescing from the thousands that still swarmed within. Beyond that larger bodies formed chiefly of gas orbited in stately majesty, themselves circled by vast extended families of smaller bodies. And out on the fringes of the system lay further belts of small rocky and icy worlds some of which circled the star in a wildly eccentric manner. Occasionally one of these most distant of the star's children would fall inwards, jets of gas and vapour blown from their surfaces by the solar wind in tails millions of miles long. None of the bodies in the solar system or beyond ha...

I can't believe that it's already five years since I wrote the first blog in the I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan  series, a series which turned into a book self-published on kindle and paperback . Five years now is very different from five years back then. As a Teenage Toyah Fan five years was the gap between my first Toyah LP The Blue Meaning  and the realise of Minx - five long years of adventure many of which are detailed in the book and which at the time seemed to last forever. Whereas this last five years seems to have lasted just a few months in comparison. That is not to say that the most recent half-decade was without incident - far from it. The self publishing was an adventure in itself which gave me far more confidence in my writing as a whole and contributed to the fact that I have now had several short stories published (with more on the way). Fingers crossed for the novels as well... Plus since writing those first blogs - quite by coincidence - there was a re...

There is no-one to blame. The whole feeling of being put upon by fate, the weather or other so-called acts of God comes not from reality but from the human brain's almost infinite capacity for Pattern Recognition. Pattern recognition is how life makes sense of the universe. In the case of human beings the process has become so baroque and complex that it's unsurprising when it starts to throw out anomalies. We may think we see what is in front of us but that is very far from the truth. Without the high intensity interpretation and pattern matching going on in the visual cortex of the brain, the field of view is a chaotic mess of shape and shade. Even something as simple as identifying colour is tied up with image identification and processing. As the recent furore about a certain dress and - more interestingly - the very different colour palette perceived by the Himba tribe of Namibia prove, it seems that the ability to distinguish between shades of colour is linked to...

Of course when I first got referred to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy I was delighted. For too long it had been that whenever I mentioned problems with anxiety, panic and terror to my GP I was prescribed drugs - not a bad thing in itself but generally lacking. The SSRIs for depression tended to make me put on weight and the beta-blockers for panic were more of a short-term solution. I wanted to get to the root of the problem and it seemed that the Holy Grail was some kind of therapy, getting to talk to someone. It was of course difficult to get my GP to refer me and even when she did she warned that there would likely be a long waiting list. By the time I eventually got to see someone my life had changed somewhat and I had made plans to leave my day job which was one of the major causes of the anxiety I suffered. I had no illusions that this would be a cure all, some kind of magical fix, but I did feel that I was taking control of my own life and that made a big difference. I fi...

Ah, I'll do it when I get home , I think excitedly. And I visualise it in my head, sitting at the computer and doing the thing which has just excited my mind whether it is writing, coding or photoshopping. Except in my head I am still sitting at my computer in my old flat even though I moved out of there a couple of months ago. The human brain maintains a model of the world around it and when things change in reality it takes far longer for these changes to percolate into the mindscape of the head. The older you are the longer it takes for these changes to kick in. In dreams of course it takes even longer. When asleep I still seem to be living in the house I lived in as a teenager (although oddly am the age I am now). These mind quirks dragging me back into the past have of late caused me to become increasingly worried about dropping dead although I suspect that turning fifty also has a lot to do with these concerns. When I was a kid the idea of being fifty was the same as ...

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...

What with all the furore surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who back in November 2013 you might have thought that the programme had celebrated enough anniversaries for now. After all - fifty one and a bit years on from the first episode? Nothing that special. But today, 25 January 2015, sees the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of what is probably my favourite run of sixteen episodes (four stories in the old money) from the show. There are of course stories and episodes that I like more than that, but this particular period - from 25 January to 10 May 1975 - was the most consistently enjoyable time for me watching. There is a danger that in writing this I will go over old ground but checking back on the Dimensionally Transcendental Confession blogs covering the relevant period it appears that I restrained myself from going into too much detail. It was almost as if I knew I was going to write this blog five years hence. My enjoyment of these particular four mon...

Previously... Top of the Pops was the centre of the musical week but as more and more bands begun to produce promotional videos the mimed performances were often a disappointment as you wanted to see the video. This early eighties over-experimentation with video didn't go unnoticed by the satirists - nowadays they can't show a retrospective of early eighties music without wheeling out the Not The Nine O'Clock News parody Nice Video, Shame About the Song . But even though I did like Not the Nine O'Clock News and thought that the parody was well observed in places I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the writers didn't quite "get" it and were probably in the process of turning into a parental generation banging on about the rubbish that young people listened to in the name of music today. Or rather the rubbish that they watched. By now everyone had to have a video and inspiration was beginning to wear a bit thin. Having scored an unexpected ...

Like Doctor Who , Top of the Pops was always a part of my childhood for as far back as my memory goes. It was just something that was always there, and my infant brain saw it in much the same way as Winter, Spring the Sun or the Moon. I remember dancing in front of the large black and white television in the family flat in Birmingham much to the amusement of my parents plus Tony and Jill, the couple upstairs who didn't have a TV but always came down on Thursday evening to watch. Personally I couldn't quite see what was so funny about my dancing - I had decided that it must consist of clenched fists bounced up and down in front of me - but I enjoyed the music and the experience plus I was getting attention so it was all good. There was always music around whether it was the records my parents would put on - the Beatles (interesting if sometimes scary) or Bob Dylan (inexplicably sad because I thought the combination of his voice and the harmonica sounded like crying) but ...

I am a rationalist and were it not for the fact that I prefer not to define myself by what I don't believe in you could probably call me an atheist because most of my world view coincides with most of the world view of an atheist. I say most of because I think there are exceptions. Whilst I do not agree with the lazy but oft repeated mantra that "atheism is just like another religion" there are certain aggressive aspects of behaviour I have observed in atheism that I also don't agree with. Of course one could argue that they're just down to human nature rather than any flaw in the atheist argument - after all we are all human whether or not we believe in a god or gods. One particularly distasteful atheist argument is the "religion is a mental illness". I don't think this is a valid analogy for many reasons. In general people choose religion - or have it forced upon them as children - and can change their minds about it later. Furthermore th...

Do you ever have dreams in which there are two versions of the same person? The strangest thing is that in the dream you don't really notice. It's really quite odd - there's Jack and of course there's Jack as well. Often one of them is a lesser instantiation - they have less talent or inspire less fear. You say I thought Jack was frightening but they're nothing compared to Jack! Sometimes it's something less negative - Jill will show you something and you think That's interesting - I bet Jill would like that, I'll have to remember to tell her about it! This last one sometimes occurs in real life - when Jill shows you something just for a second you think that Jill would be interested and resolve to tell her before remembering that the notion is ridiculous. It must be caused by an error in brain processing. A person is probably represented in the memory space by a complex object with myriad properties and associations. Perhaps sometimes two ver...

Things may have changed a lot when it comes to listening to music. Whilst the fact that I have no idea what is in the charts these days is most likely to be an indication of advancing age than anything else, it does nevertheless feel that people aren't as into music as much they used to be. Whilst the tribes seem as strong as ever ( Belieber or Directioner ?) it's more disposable and the energy seems to be missing. However I can't really judge without being young myself and the only experience I have of that was in the past. It was exciting back then - all these new things to discover. The absence of an internet meant that information was far more difficult to come by and therefore far more precious. You scoured the music press for the smallest clipping. And as for the music - well without YouTube , SoundCloud , Spotify , Last.fm , illegal and legal downloads you simply had to wait. Sometimes if you were lucky a DJ - John Peel or Kid Jensen, sometimes even Peter Powell ...

So the World Cup is upon us again? I can't entirely believe it. Surely all that business with the vuvuzelas was only last year? Or a couple of years ago, maximum. Four years ago is just... stupid. Not that it makes a huge difference to me anyway as I am not now and never have been interested in football. This is a fact that occasionally people seem to find hard to get their heads around. Every so often when meeting someone in a social situation they will ask What team do you support? When I tell them I don't follow football they look at me as if I've just told them I haven't got a head. I must admit that from the outside the whole football fandom thing does look insanely complex and it's a relief that I have never been into it as it's probably a lot of work. But on the other hand it does seem to give people a lot of pleasure and for that reason I can't justifiably complain about its existence. The world isn't created and run for my benefit and ...