Catmachine

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” – Terry Pratchett Back when I worked in the IT department of a higher education institution, many was the time a member of the university executive or administration would come into the IT offices with a brilliant new idea. This was usually something like “We need a blog!” or “We need a wiki!” back in the old Web 2.0 days when blogs and wikis were still cutting edge web technologies. When asked what we needed them for, the answer was more often than not along the lines of “Well, Warwick have got one!” In other words it was just a case of keeping up with the institutional Joneses. One of the IT management team had a very astute response to this kind of request which I’ll repeat here. “What do you need to do? Don’t come to me with a solution. Come to me with a problem.” It’s a piece of advice that I’ve started to think of recently as software houses and companies scramble to add AI to their products and services, chiefly because other ...

Most people would agree that supporting neurodiversity in the workplace is good practice from both DEI and accessibility viewpoints. An organisation with awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity – let alone policies in place – will undoubtedly be a positive nurturing environment for all employees; an example of the Curb Cut Effect in action.   Image by MissLunaRose12 via Wikimedia Commons In addition, neurodiverse people bring unique viewpoints and talent to the table. Many individuals have superb attention to detail and excel at both being able to see the big picture – which leads to unseen pattern recognition and problem identification – as well as being able to drill down into the minutiae of an issue, diagnosing and solving it. As an autistic person and neurodiversity advocate I’ve always been keen to highlight both the advantages and the challenges of maintaining a supportive environment for all employees whatever their neurotype. The flow and communication paradigms ...

As a child I was obsessed with many things. Continental Drift was one of them. I suppose it stemmed from my love of maps, especially maps of imaginary worlds such as those found in the front of fantasy novels like A Wizard of Earthsea , Lord of the Rings or some of the Narnia books. I always thought it was a shame that no map of the Great Eastern Ocean was included in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , but in retrospect that makes sense—it would have been mostly blank. I would spend hours drawing my own maps even though I don't think at any point I was planning to write an epic fantasy. I just liked drawing the maps. Some of them had peculiar features (probably inspired by The Isle of the Ear and The Hands from the Earthsea map) and all of them spanned continents, although I don't recall ever drawing a map of a complete planet. This was an odd omission given how obsessed with space I was. I can only surmise that for some reason I didn't like mixing these particu...

 It's surprising what can catch your attention and become of special interest – especially during childhood – when you've got the kind of brain that thrives on that stuff. In 1981 I narrowed my focus in on the bands appearing on Top of the Pops not least because I wanted to know when and how often Toyah would be appearing. So I became very familiar with the rules surrounding how often an artist could appear. The only way a song would be played two weeks on the trot was if it was number one. In order to get two plays (including the viewers' holy grail of both the video and a mimed studio performance) the song would have to be going up the chart three weeks in a row and ideally by leaps and bounds. To get three plays it would have to have been at least five weeks in the chart and probably be heading into the top 10 at least. I used to write down the lineups in my diary despite parental scorn. This meant I was watching when someone cheated. The Jets' song "Yes Tonigh...

Sometimes a craze is just a craze. In the 1950s they were pushing the Atomic Age and added radioactivity and atoms to branding for everything. You could even buy a toy atomic energy lab with real uranium. I am strongly reminded of the way they're adding AI to everything now whether it's useful or not. I hope that in a few years this mAInia will have died down and we can just carry on creating as we did before. In fact more than that; I'm hoping that before long we'll arrive at a point where "AI-free" becomes a badge of quality so the market will HAVE to sit up and take notice, rather than telling us we’re doing Being Consumers all wrong. However, I do like to think I'm not being New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack here. AI definitely has a place. For example, analysing large scientific datasets, archive entry labelling. You know the incredibly tedious stuff that humans would find mindnumbing or actually impossible to do. I don't think it has a place...

I like to think I’m a rational person, but nevertheless I love a good ghost story. However I have noticed a tendency for some people to seize on rationalism as Something To Believe In which seems to miss the entire point of the mindset. I think of this viewpoint as Born Again Scepticism because it most often afflicts people who were really into Weird Shit when they were younger but became disillusioned by Weird Shit’s constant failure to deliver. Born Again Scepticism espouses a kind of knee jerk “because it doesn’t exist!” holier than thou attitude to anything that isn’t scientific canon and is evangelical about deploying it. Born Again Sceptics are usually not actual scientists. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Carl Sagan – who most definitely was a scientist – said: “No matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas, least of all by scientists committed to the free exchange of ideas.”...

Language evolves we are told so there’s no point in complaining about misuse of a word or phrase. If enough people use and understand it in a certain way then that way becomes correct no matter what some old dictionary might say. It may be frustrating to those of us who like things to be neat and make sense, but you know what? Fair play to language for moving with the times and being flexible. The details of jokes and idioms also change meaning. For example, there’s a common expression that Londoners consider everything “North of Watford” to be the actual north. Most people think this is funny because Watford is actually on the edge of London, pretty much where the M1 makes a serious attempt to reach escape velocity and climb out of London’s gravity well. However I remember the expression being “North of Watford Gap” in the 1980s and 1990s which made a bit more sense as that’s a service station 65 miles further up the M1 which feels more like the gateway between the North and South. Th...

There were many odd experiences and thoughts I had over the years which I either assumed everyone felt — or if I was feeling low that it was just me. I’d usually try and discount the latter because as one of eight billion people I was fully aware I was statistically insignificant and nothing special. Either positively or negatively. Of course since my diagnosis a third and more obvious explanation presented itself. If it wasn’t a common experience (which I could usually tell if I got odd looks when trying to talk about it) then it was probably an autistic thing. Some of these were textbook, things that might even be used as diagnostic criteria; others were not on any official list of indicators but nevertheless hauntingly familiar to almost everyone in the room when I was meeting up with other autistics. I’ve just thought of another one; something which has been bothering me for years. It’s only now that I realise that they were doing a neurotypical thing all along and that I’ve only j...

This may well end up being one of the oddest and perhaps most anal-retentive blog posts I've ever written, but it's an anomaly I noticed early in life and have never been able to find a satisfactory answer for.  Perhaps unsurprisingly it involves the London Underground tube map. As I've discussed elsewhere the iconic tube map captured my imagination at an early age and it was at this early age that the anomaly itself was in full swing.  It was all to do with the way the stations were labelled. Up until the end of H C Beck's reign as tube map designer the station names on the map were all written in uppercase. Presumably all the better to read you with – although not if you have dyslexia. Unfortunately at that time accessibility wasn't high on the list of London Transport's priorities, as can be seen from the fact no stations had step free access – despite the fact that so many of them had been originally been built with lifts. Nevertheless, the all uppercase pa...

Any regular readers of this blog ( even typing that sentence makes me cringe - as if there could possibly be such a thing as a "regular reader" what arrogance on my part etc ) will have noticed that I occasionally blog about autism . This actually started before my diagnosis when I merely suspected that I was autistic, but naturally accelerated once I had the validation of the letter from a psychology professional which meant that the nagging little voice of impostor syndrome in my head had to shut the fuck up just this once. I should have it framed like a degree certificate so I can look at it every time I'm plagued by self doubt. My posts on this subject so far have been about the experience from my perspective. What it's like from the inside. How little things that I thought were just me – or which I thought were common experiences – turned out to be autistic things. There are many aspects to neurodiversity in general and autism in particular. In general I'd sa...

These days if something changes for the worse it's usually because the people behind it are cutting costs and corners. The feature that has been retired or removed simply cost too much and is now being eliminated in order to shave off a minuscule amount of expense in order to increase the profit margin by a tiny increment. Any pretence of providing good customer service and better products has disappeared from many businesses as they wring out the last few droplets of money from their business model as the pyramid scheme of "buy low sell high" collapses. However there's one kind of business where they're constantly scrambling to implement a feature which it would be far easier and cheaper to just leave out. Social media companies appear to be desperate to scramble the chronology of people's timelines despite the fact that leaving it chronological would almost certainly be cheaper from a programming point of view. Linear time is the default - it comes free with...

When considering the many worlds of the multiverse the picture that probably springs to mind, born of a thousand popular physics documentaries, YouTube videos or books, is of the universes like a sheaf of A4 paper or the pages of a book, all stacked neatly on top of one another, running in parallel, minding their own business until the science communicator sticks a sharp pencil through the stack for some reason. It's not that though. Another common mental model is of a constant bifurcation and splitting so that whenever a decision is made a new universe is created (which seems a bit of a waste if the decision is just about which pair of socks you're going to wear that day). It's not quite that either though. The multiverse is much more like a dark smoke-filled room, a continuum of possibility, probability and particles that simultaneous contains all conceivable universes and sock choices. What you decide doesn't create a universe, it just moves you into that part of the...

For a long time I was conviced that I was simply rubbish at life. Throw me into a social situation with a whole bunch of humans and I didn't have the first idea how to even begin to attempt to join in. People would seem to collapse into these stable little groups of two or three leaving me floating around like a stray electron. Against my best instincts I often tried attaching myself to these groups but joining in with the conversation was impossible. Besides, I really felt like I was interrupting. It was rude . Even if I did dare to say something I'd get odd looks. I still consider my crowning achievement in this Biggest Outsider Challenge to be when I ended up spending time standing around on my own at the very bash being held for me leaving a job I'd been in for 16 years... Now that was impressive. Of course well-intentioned people kept telling me to try harder, giving me tips and tricks, but nothing really seemed to work. I'd hear variations of "We all feel aw...

As somebody who has amassed a large number of CDs and records over the years, one of the minor problems I've come across is what to do about Hype Stickers. No, I didn't know that was what they were called until now. These are little – often very nicely printed and designed – sticky labels attached to the exterior of the CD or record. Sometimes (more often in the old days) they'd read something like: " Contains the hit single : Hitty McHitface!" but more often these days they give the name of the album and artist (and sometimes catalogue number) as the album cover design is a work of art in itself which doesn't want to be sullied by text. All well and good. However, the problem arises when said record or CD is sealed in cellophane and then the sticker is put over the top of that. You need to remove the cellophane to get at the album but that means disposing of the sticker. Which some people are fine with and all power to them. However as a collector there is d...

Earlier this week I went to the launch of a book: Conform to Deform: The Weird and Wonderful World of Some Bizzare a history of the notorious indie record label that sprung out of the mind of the teenage Stephen Pearce at the beginning of the eighties. While there I realised that Some Bizzare had been a huge influence on my musical taste and personal aesthetic, ultimately contributing the mental DNA of whatever it is that makes me me. Quite fittingly this happened by stealth. It all started when I got into Soft Cell in 1981. For some reason (well I was on holiday – a school trip to the USSR) I completely missed out on the summer of Tainted Love and my introduction to them was their far more subversive follow up single Bedsitter . Before long I'd become an obsessive as was so often the way with me and the completist in me led me to seek out the Some Bizzare album , a compilation LP (which I seem to recall may have had a "Pay no more than £2.99" or similar sticker on it?)...

There's a bus stop near the top of my road. Like many bus stops set near a junction I can't see when there's a bus coming until it appears around the corner, mere moments before I can get on. Before that and while I'm still standing there I'm left in a state of perpetual hope - my wait might be over at any second (this is one of the few stops in Brighton and Hove without a dot matrix arrivals indicator). I may have been standing there shivering in the cold or rain for what seems like forever but my delivery from that uncomfortable state is at hand and could be with me in an instant. It is after all something completely beyond my control so I'm not interested in second guessing it and am happy enough to just wait it out and let it happen. What I don't understand is those people who walk up to the corner and stare off down the main street where they can see for a least a kilometre that the bus isn't coming. They're basically dousing the fires of hope i...

At this time of year there's less sun that usual in the northern hemisphere especially at such high latitudes as the UK. We're higher than you realise here - if you draw a line due west across from Land's End you don't hit New York as the sign there might have you believe. You hit the northern half of Newfoundland in Canada. New York is more in line with Madrid. But I digress. There are less sunlit hours here in December but sometimes the sun is more in evidence. Walking along the seafront as I do in the morning on the way to work, I often get to witness sunrise itself. Sunset is often too early for me – I'm usually still working. Maybe I'll try and catch it this weekend.  Of course I don't look directly at the sun, and that's not just because I'm being well behaved. This is one of those warnings that you don't actually need like "don't set fire to your hand" or "don't bang your head against a brick wall". Any attempt ...

Wernigerode, European Tour 1995 Wendi fought her way free of the dream. It had been one of those nightmares, the irrational ones that could upset her for hours after waking up. She'd had none since the band had spent a month in Devon the previous spring and she had been hoping that they'd been banished forever by her strange experiences back then. But no. As familiar as the face of a school bully after the summer holidays, the dark red despair froze her brainstem as she struggled to open her eyes, move her limbs or do anything to escape its grip. There was shape to one side of her and she fancied it was Peter. He was speaking to her but none of the words made any sense. He shook her by the shoulder. "Hey, wake up. We're here." She ripped her eyes open. The dream's logic hung about her head in a cloud and a whimpering sound emerged from the back of her throat. Where the fuck was she? None of this made any sense. Shapes moved in front of a blinding white darknes...

The world around us largely consists of what we expect to see in it.When presented with something brand new, our brains first have to decode the signal that they get from the eyes. The picture passes through the first level filters where edges, shapes and colours are detected and assigned. After that the filters applied rely on our knowledge, memories and experience. It's only after that processing that an identity is assigned to the object. I am looking at a clock. When we're children a lot of what we see is still new to us so our sensitivity at detecting the unusual and never previously encountered is very high - a child walking into a familiar room where just one thing has been changed will spot that change almost immediately. However, as we get older we take a lot of the world as read. In particular we know our homes extremely well and it's unlikely we actually look at anything in them properly very often. This is where my glasses come into it. I wear glasses or contact...