// Having Fun Better // 30.03.25
Don’t be surprised or get upset when you have to eat shit. Get comfortable with it.

Alone with the Alone
If you are alone in a room, what is in that room with you? What are you, really, as a matter of experience? And where are you? And where is the room? Are you in it, or is it - in some sense that is philosophically and scientifically interesting - in you?

How bad was this? Can I cope with it? What do I do next?

I'm roleplaying interactions with people; doing a lot of mind-reading.

// A Solved Problem // 25.03.25
Dude, it’s right fucking there.

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.” - Henry James

"Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does." - John Steinbeck

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” - William Faulkner

// The Tables Turned // 09.03.25
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books.
Or surely you'll grow double.
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks.
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head.
A freshening lustre mellow.
Through all the long green fields has spread.
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife.
Come, hear the woodland linnet.
How sweet his music! on my life.
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher.
Come forth into the light of things.
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth.
Our minds and hearts to bless.
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health.
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood.
May teach you more of man.
Of moral evil and of good.
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings.
Our meddling intellect.
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things.
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art.
Close up those barren leaves.
Come forth, and bring with you a heart.
That watches and receives.
- William Wordsworth, 1798.

// We Rush Past Our Experiences // 02.03.25
"By the end of an average day, how much we've seen, how much we've felt. If we were able to give some of that a little space, how much lighter we would feel. We live so much, yet we experience so little. We see so much, yet notice so little." - AdB.

It's extraordinary how often nature is invoked to sell things that are killing nature. Item number one in evidence: the car.

It’s much easier to fool Americans than to convince them they’ve been fooled.

Embrace the Unknown
When dinner is finished and the oblongs of light in the cottage windows are indigo-blue, the children are put to bed, their hair stiff with sea water.

// Think Slow // 13.02.25
Our fast-thinking system is an incredible tool. It allows us to drive cars, compare prices, recognize friends at a distance, and play sports. But its availability makes us lazy. Why do the hard work of thinking through a problem when we can just “go with our gut”? In any decision of consequence, it’s good policy to slow down, get out of the stimulus-response cycle, and let your slow thinking catch up. That’s not to say we should disregard our gut - just don’t let it take the wheel.

Speaking to others before acting is a great way to slow your thinking.

The people screaming the loudest about wasteful government spending are always the first to demand government help in a crisis.

// Nexus // 06.02.25
Power lies at the nexus where the information channels merge.

Evolution has adapted our brains to be good at absorbing, retaining, and processing even very large quantities of information when they are shaped into a story.

Why are we fighting each other?
The information network has become so complicated, and it relies to such an extent on opaque algorithmic decisions and inter-computer entities, that it has become very difficult for humans to answer even the most basic of political questions: Why are we fighting each other?

Misinformation is an honest mistake, occurring when someone tries to represent reality but gets it wrong. Disinformation is a deliberate lie, occurring when someone consciously intends to distort our view of reality.

On Exactitude in Science
Society functions through an intricate web of rules, institutions, and customs that accumulated through trial and error over a long time. Nobody comprehends how they are all connected. Democracies have spent generations cultivating these assets. It would be foolish to abandon them just when we need them most. An ancient tradition may seem ridiculous and irrelevant, but abolishing it could cause unanticipated problems. In contrast, a revolution may seem overdue and just, but it can lead to far greater crimes than anything committed by the old regime. Witness what happened when the Bolsheviks tried to correct the many wrongs of tsarist Russia and engineer a perfect society from scratch.

It is telling that, as of 2024, Qatar’s much bigger neighbors, and the world’s hegemonic powers, are letting the tiny Gulf state hold on to its fabulous riches. Many people describe the international system as a jungle. If so, it is a jungle in which tigers allow fat chickens to live in relative safety.

The jury on Blake’s satanic mills is still out
As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, Luddite doomsday scenarios did not come to pass, and Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” ended up producing the most affluent societies in history. Most people today enjoy far better living conditions than their ancestors in the eighteenth century. It took more than a century of misery before most people realized that the industrial empires were a terrible idea and that there were better ways to build an industrial society and secure its necessary raw materials and markets.

In the nineteenth century, China was late to appreciate the potential of the Industrial Revolution and was slow to adopt inventions like railroads and steamships. It consequently suffered what the Chinese call “the century of humiliations.” After having been the world’s greatest superpower for centuries, failing to adopt modern industrial technology brought China to its knees. It was repeatedly defeated in wars, partially conquered by foreigners, and thoroughly exploited by the powers that did understand railroads and steamships.

Ultimately, each individual has a different perspective on the world, shaped by the intersection of different personalities and life histories.

// Meditations For Mortals // 28.01.25
One: Decide who you want to be. Two: Act from that identity immediately.

Action isn’t a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive.

Life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one. However much we might sometimes long to outsource the task of living, we never can.

This way of being feels less like lying on a beach in the sun and more like striding over hills, with the wind and the rain in your face: not effortless, maybe not even always that pleasant, in a conventional sense; but bracing, invigorating, and vital.

Beyond the mountains, more mountains
Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.

To be human is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, and so, the future destroys the present.

"One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done." - Marie Curie.

Four Thousand Weeks
"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present." - Marcus Aurelius. Marcus’s phrase ‘if you have to’ is a useful reminder that most of the bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.

Like driving a car at night, you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

It's a fool's errand to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on everyone around you feeling OK too.

What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming?
Act on a generous impulse the moment it arises. The point isn’t to try to render yourself more generous than you already are, but just to notice the moments when you naturally and effortlessly feel that way anyway, then not to screw it up with overthinking. The simplest way to do that is to move fast. Each time the thought to give arises, act on it. Then notice what happens. Before you know it, you’re a person who acts more generously - without ever having had to become a more generous person.

Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. Every book makes a mark, even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.

It was a central insight of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in the ‘bad faith’ of believing yourself trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of your freedom.

There is a certain kind of man who clings to a commitment-free existence because he’s scared of the sacrifices entailed by taking life more seriously. He can be a charming sort of person to be around, until one day he’s the dubious fifty-something in a bar full of 25-year-olds, having frittered his real future away on fantasies of an unlimited one.

// Creation Lake // 18.01.25
Keep a list of those who have been martyred to joy, lost to it. Do not be on that list.

Few things worth doing are easy. Any habit that offers pleasure becomes a hassle if you need it to get from hour to hour.

Emma Cline's Harvey
Life was in many ways worse these days, but you had to admit: God had given people the tools they needed to be happy.

Their departure was already set in motion. Pretty soon he would be waving at their car as they pulled away and left him alone, and then that was exactly what he was doing. He lingered outside in the driveway, the barn jacket zipped up, his bare head cold, his nostrils sharpening with frigid air. The house next door, the house of Don DeLillo, was silent, all the windows black. No car in the driveway, no signs of life. Where had he gone, Don DeLillo?

Swimmers' High
Being a pro means repetition until it's rote.

Claude's Joke
Here's a joke about staying calm and not worrying too much:
A woman was known for worrying about everything. One day, her husband said to her, "Dear, I've got a solution for your constant worrying. I've hired a professional worrier for you. From now on, he'll do all your worrying for you."
The wife was thrilled. "That's fantastic! But how much does he charge?"
The husband replied, "He charges $50,000 a year."
The wife exclaimed, "$50,000 a year? How in the world are we going to afford that?"
To which the husband calmly responded, "Let him worry about that!"

// The Extraordinary Benefits And Disturbing Risks Of The New Weight-loss Drugs // 12.01.25
There are two kinds of drugs: drugs that don’t work, and drugs that have side effects.

Chewing is a necessary brake on overeating. Eat until you feel you are 80% full. It takes time for your body to sense you’ve had enough, and if you hit a sense of fullness when you are still eating, then you’ve definitely had too much.

I am a ferociously self-critical person. Left to my own devices - without constant stimulation and connection and activity - my mind can easily flip into a frenzy of condemning myself. Being overweight perhaps provided me with a safe-ish outlet for my self-criticism. When those negative thoughts came, I could turn them onto my body, and criticize myself for my eating. This wasn’t a pleasant process, but it provided a familiar racetrack on which my negative thoughts could be allowed to run. Once that racetrack was taken away, and my negative thoughts couldn’t be focused on my body, they started to gallop more widely across my life.

// Don’t Be A Slave To Whatever You Think Next // 01.01.25
Having an audience reveals what a track needs. Just having someone come in the room, stand by you, and listen to the tune, makes you hear it for the first time. - Bonobo.

He took a great throat-pulsing swig from his beer bottle, the chill bitter fluid sluicing down his throat, contentment spreading through his veins with the alcohol. - William Boyd.

// The Crowd's Back In It // 01.12.24
"When people come in contact with you, do they feel insecure or inspired? Do you leave people cold or comforted? Do you bring joy, harmony, love?" - Scott Galloway

"To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether." - David Whyte

// The Antidote // 24.11.24
Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with much more calm than the one he is headed for.

We tend to remember having been happy in the past much more frequently than we are conscious of being happy in the present.

The worst thing about any event is usually your exaggerated belief in its horror.

On Trying Too Hard to Be Happy
Tranquility is not achieved by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances.

People think that they should always like what they do, and that their lives should be trouble-free. Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom.

Struggling to escape your demons is what gives them their power. Clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to eliminate all possibility of an unhappy one, is the cause of the problem, not its solution.

Bad Weather
Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky. Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don’t worry about clear mind; it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes. You must not be attached to the coming and going.

We do not try to forcefully detach ourselves from the feelings, thoughts and expectations that arise in our mind. We don’t try to force anything into or out of the mind. Rather, we let things rise and fall, come and go, and simply be. There will be times in meditation when we’re relaxed, and times when our minds are agitated. We do not seek to attain a relaxed state, or to drive out our agitated and distracted mind. That is just more agitation.

What Would Seneca Do?
We chronically undervalue negativity and the ‘not-doing’ skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.

It’s not very useful to point out that a fear is illogical. It doesn’t make it go away. Feel the fear, and do it anyway.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. - John Stuart Mill.

// Set The Boy Free // 17.11.24
Inspiration does exist, but it has to find you working.

Once I saw that I was giving myself the gift of freedom from something that was no longer fun, and giving myself something good, as opposed to thinking that I was denying myself something nice, I kicked drinking into touch for ever and never looked back.

I never mistook hardship for virtue or associated poverty with romance, nor did I want to go back there.

'The Iron Lady' abolished free milk for schoolchildren and was a woman so contemptuous you really had to wonder if the nation hadn’t lost its collective minds in electing her leader of the country. In the short time she had been in power there was already a change in the community I grew up in, as families suffered unemployment and a sense of real apprehension took hold. She had a colossal ego, and her philosophy relied on the very worst aspects of human nature. She knew that if you put people under enough hardship, they would turn away from each other in order to protect their own interests. Her vision, like that of all Conservative governments, was truly cynical in that it relied on fear, greed and indifference towards others – like someone choosing their new two-car garage over the needs of the unemployed father of three next door – and the terrible consequences of her vision would affect British people for a very long time.

// Release The Tiller // 24.10.24
I take two-steps-forward, one-step-backwards, on the road towards unclenching.

// Hotspur // 10.10.24
Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.

O Brother
I head off to the bathroom where I lock the door and set about stealing a pauper’s bliss.

I didn’t yet know that playing at something was an essential step on the road to becoming it. I didn’t know either that loving doing it meant that I already had an essential component of the writer’s make-up in my toolbox: you are most fully alive when alone.

// Walking with Sam // 04.10.24
Our internal caprices create our individual experiences as much or more than the country we cross or the people we encounter.

I don’t usually stumble and rarely fall. If for no other reason than I am so mortified when I do, I’m conscious of my surroundings in order to prevent such a humiliation. And on the odd occasion when I do take a spill, my tendency is to bounce back on my feet instantly in order to dispel unwanted and embarrassing attention.

It’s age that brings an awareness of the luck of life, how the tiniest membrane can be the difference between a calamity causing enduring hardship and the near miss that allows us to press on, clinging to delusions of invincibility, with the potentially catastrophic incident soon forgotten.

There’s something about the intensity of youth, coupled with its audacity, that exerts a power often dismissed by those who’ve grown older and forgotten their own reckless early days.

No good comes from any conclusions drawn at 4a.m. I know this, but am unable to quiet my mind.

// Open // 20.09.24
A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.

I can’t promise you that you won’t be tired, but please know this; there’s a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired. That’s where you’re going to know yourself.

No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

This run, even if it brings on heatstroke, will give me peace of mind tonight in that all-important ten minutes before I fall asleep. I now live for that ten minutes. I’m all about that ten minutes. I’ve been cheered by thousands, booed by thousands, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those ten minutes before you fall asleep.

// Mania // 29.08.24
Some people inhabit their bodies more profoundly than others.

You can’t trust a rendition of a course of events by any narrator who knows how the story ends.

I’m afraid that in my experience trying to keep from getting angry almost never works. It wasn’t working.

// Swartzva Swartzva // 27.08.24
If you can choose joy over jealousy, happiness over hate, love over resentment, positivity over negativity, then you have the tools to make the best of any situation, even one that feels like failure.

Do What You Say You’re Going To Do
They are able to blow our minds when the lights go on because they’ve done all the shitty, hard work when no one was watching. This is where we need to get to.

Work Your Ass Off
There a direct relationship between effort and outcome. There is no substitute for putting in the work.

// Jimmy Carr // 19.08.24
"There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go." - Joan Didion

OCD is the ritual of religion stripped bare of a belief system. And it looks a lot like crazy.

Be Bold and Mighty Forces Will Come to Your Aid
If we put off doing anything risky for long enough, fear will attach itself. Then what happens is that fear will attract even more fear until the fear becomes so big it starts to obscure the thing you mean to do.

"We become brave by doing brave acts." - Aristotle

Compromise, I Insist
Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.

Good judgement is the result of experience and experience is the result of bad judgement.

The opposite to addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s purpose. Once you’ve got something to do and someone to be - your ‘why’ - the need to distract yourself diminishes.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Prioritise Later
We get better in tiny increments. You can get frustrated with the speed of your progress, but what’s the point? You might as well enjoy it, because you can’t rush it. Nurture a high boredom threshold.

"One doesn’t realise the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy is to be tied." - C. S. Lewis

One day your mum put you down and never picked you up again.

Pretending to be a better person and being a better person are indistinguishable to the casual observer. Pretend to be happy and after a little while you might just be happy. The mask becomes the face.

Some people will hate you just because you don’t hate yourself.

// Not Judging, Just Reporting // 29.07.24
The less you give a fuck about what other people think, the more peaceful you'll feel.

The past is the present. It's the future too.

More viewer than doer
"It's probably true that music is older than language." - John Williams

"You only need 6 people to carry your coffin." - Alex Ferguson

// The Restless Republic // 29.06.24
"It hath been found by Experience ... That the Office of a King in this Nation, and to have the Power thereof in any Single Person, is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the Liberty, Safety, and publick Interest of the People." (1649)

In the year 1500 just over 50 books were printed in England. In 1600 the number was 300. Come 1648 more than 2,300 titles poured off the presses in a single year. Perhaps 30% of all men and 10% of all women could read, with over double those percentages in the capital. This readership was offered an addictive weekly news fix, that involved them as never before, in the turbulent goings-on of their kingdom.

Since the first coffee shop had opened in the early 1650s the ‘Arabian bean’ had taken the capital by storm and by 1659 the ‘Turkish drink’ was sold on ‘almost evry street’. Sitting on wooden benches at long tables customers sipped coffee, drew on pipes stuffed with the leaves from Virginian tobacco plantations and thumbed and debated newspapers filled with dispatches from Europe and beyond.

In the summer of 1658, Covent Garden hosted its very first opera – complete with music, singing, perspective scenery and theatrical special effects.

Monck’s view that once you had decided on a course of action, even if with reluctance, it paid to espouse it with enthusiasm.

Agreeing on what to reject was the easy part.

// Weirdo // 25.06.24
It’s really difficult to imagine her not having all the exact same thoughts as I do.

The thing about watching real people, not TV or a film, is that you realise how ugly we all actually are. Men with big bellies and short legs, women who’ve put the wrong-colour foundation on, their too-tight bras digging into back flab. I love them.

// Humanly Possible // 15.05.24
Education should train a person to be at home in the world, in tune with fellow humans, able to make friends, act wisely, and share the light of knowledge while treating all people with courtesy.

To use language well is about more than adding decorative twiddles; it is about moving other people to emotion and recognition.

It’s all Greek to me
This word pagan, originally meaning “peasant” or “country bumpkin,” was used by Christians to describe all pre-Christian religion, but especially that attached to the old Roman gods. Relations between the two traditions had always been strained, hence the eagerness of early Christians to literally stamp the Roman temples and statues out of the landscape. The relationship mellowed with time, however. It became clear that pagan traditions were so interwoven with Christian ones in European culture that they could not be fully untangled again.

Dulce bellum inexpertis - “War is sweet to those who have not experienced it”.

Montaigne writes that each of us is a bearer of the human condition in its 'entire form'. This is why we can recognize ourselves in the experiences and characters of others, however much we diverge from them in cultural attitudes or background.

Bentham flippantly defined a poem as writing with lines that failed to reach the margin.

Fear was the greatest enemy of happiness, and religion was one of the biggest sources of fear. The idea of using such phrases as “God-fearing” in a positive sense repelled him.

Wilhelm liked to claim that he never read a newspaper: “You are sure to hear what is important, and can spare yourself the rest”.

// The House Of Mirth // 04.05.24
The Custom of the Country sounded the death knell of the “marriage plot” that had invigorated countless narratives in centuries past. The once-high stakes of choosing a spouse are dramatically lowered when every mistake can be - and is, by Undine - undone by divorce.

It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

When Raymond ceased to be interested in her conversation she had concluded it was the way of husbands; but since then it had been slowly dawning on her that she produced the same effect on others. Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to see her.

She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She remained insensible to the soft spell of the evening, noticing only the heat and dust.

Hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them.

He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather’s whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.

Affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings.

Archer was burning with unavailing wrath: he was exactly in the state when a man is sure to do something stupid, knowing all the while that he is doing it.

// Read, Write, Own // 27.04.24
January 1, 1983 is a date most people regard as the birthday of the internet.

The cloud is just someone else’s computer.

Computation costs money.

Software composability is a property describing code that is reusable so developers can more easily extend, adapt, and build on what exists.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS)
Protocol networks like email and the web, are open systems controlled by communities of software developers and other network stakeholders. These networks are egalitarian, democratic, and permissionless: open to anyone and free to access. In these systems, money and power tend to flow to the network edges, incentivizing systems to grow around them. Corporate networks are networks that companies, instead of communities, own and control. These are like walled gardens with one groundskeeper; they’re theme parks controlled by a single megacorp. Corporate networks run centralized, permissioned services that allow them to quickly develop advanced features, attract investment, and accrue profits to reinvest in growth. In these systems, money and power flow to the network center, to companies that own the networks, and away from users and developers at the network edges.

The web and email are the last free havens on mobile phones.

Early film directors shot films like plays. Effectively, they were making theatrical productions with better distribution models. Filmmaking changed only after true innovators realized the potential for a visual grammar native to the new form.

There are around nine million musicians on the streaming service Spotify, yet fewer than 18,000 - less than 0.2% - made more than $50,000 in 2022. Most of the revenue generated went to streaming services and music labels.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

// The Smirk // 24.04.24
To spend time with her mother was to get a running commentary on the contents of her mind – an incessant barrage of thoughts and sub-thoughts and random observations, each in itself insignificant but cumulatively overwhelming.

The kind of smirk that wants you to see it and to imagine what lies behind it.

// Zero Day // 13.04.24
Zero day is a term used to identify software bugs for which no fix exists.

A slowly booting computer is often a sign of infection.

A string analyzer is a program that dumps any data values in the file that could be represented with a printable character.

Cinema Speculation
It takes a magnificent filmmaker to thoroughly corrupt an audience.

When Jaws came out in 1975, it might not have been the best film ever made, but it was easily the best movie ever made.

It is so metaphorically perfect as to be suspect as legend-building public relations.

// Technology, Metaphor, And The Search For Meaning // 09.03.24
Today, as AI continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals. If there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic. We spent centuries denying consciousness in animals precisely because they lacked reason or higher thought.

In later centuries, metaphors for human nature became increasingly mechanical. To be human was to be a mill, a clock, an organ, a telegraph machine. The computational theory of mind was merely one in a long line of attempts to describe human nature in purely mechanistic terms, without reference to a perceiving subject.

It is a mistake commonly made of introverts that in the absence of external behavior, it’s safe to conclude there’s nothing going on between the ears.

// Only A Brit Can Drop The Bard // 27.02.24
Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee!
And when I love thee not
Chaos is come again.

“Most people are other people, their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” - Oscar Wilde.

The Guest
So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.

// Bullshit Jobs // 26.02.24
Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed - that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society?

The more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Our society has reached the point where not only is the social value of work usually in inverse proportion to its economic value, but many people have come to accept this situation is morally right - they genuinely believe this is how things ought to be. That we should reward useless or even destructive behavior, and, effectively, punish those whose daily labors make the world a better place.

"I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything." - Nikola Tesla.

Very wealthy people almost invariably dislike their neighbors
If 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.

One could argue that the whole financial sector is a scam of sorts, since it represents itself as largely about directing investments toward profitable opportunities in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it does very little of that. The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with government to create, and then to trade and manipulate, various forms of debt.

During most of the twentieth century, large industrial corporations were very much independent of, and to some degree even hostile to, the interests of what was called “high finance.” Executives in firms dedicated to producing breakfast cereals, or agricultural machinery, saw themselves as having far more in common with production-line workers in their own firms than they did with speculators and investors, and the internal organization of firms reflected this. It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes - that is, the upper echelons of the various corporate bureaucracies - effectively fused. CEOs began paying themselves in stock options, moving back and forth between utterly unrelated companies, priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off. This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers, who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.

"Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis. I know them. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. These people have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in a quite literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise." - Jeffrey Sachs.

All-Party Parliamentary Groups
If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad - taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops - the first reaction is invariably to create a “fact-finding commission” to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it’s a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that any of this was happening (this, of course, is rarely true); second of all, it’s a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it. (This is usually not true, either.) A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not.

"I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think." - George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London.

// 48 (or Fewer) Laws Of Power // 14.02.24
You cannot repress anger or love, or avoid feeling them, and you should not try. But you should be careful about how you express them, and most important, they should never influence your plans and strategies in any way.

"Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves. They always think of their own case as soon as ever any remark is made, and their whole attention is engrossed and absorbed by the merest chance reference to anything which affects them personally." - Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860.

Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion.

If you are gloomy, gravitate to the cheerful. If you are prone to isolation, force yourself to befriend the gregarious. Never associate with those who share your defects - they will reinforce everything that holds you back.

The Spider King
Louis XI (1423-1483) had a weakness for astrology. He kept a court astrologer whom he admired, until one day the man predicted that a lady of the court would die within eight days. When the prophecy came true, Louis was terrified, thinking that either the man had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy or that he was so versed in his science that his powers threatened Louis himself. In either case he had to be killed. One evening Louis summoned the astrologer to his room, high in the castle. Before the man arrived, the king told his servants that when he gave the signal they were to pick the astrologer up, carry him to the window, and hurl him to the ground, hundreds of feet below. The astrologer soon arrived, but before giving the signal, Louis decided to ask him one last question: “You claim to understand astrology and to know the fate of others, so tell me what your fate will be and how long you have to live.” “I shall die just three days before Your Majesty,” the astrologer replied. The king’s signal was never given.

Lying
If you believe that deceivers are colorful folk who mislead with elaborate lies and tall tales, you are greatly mistaken. The best deceivers utilize a bland and inconspicuous front that calls no attention to themselves. They know that extravagant words and gestures immediately raise suspicion. Instead, they envelop their mark in the familiar, the banal, the harmless.

"If you have reason to suspect that a person is telling you a lie, look as though you believed every word he said. This will give him courage to go on; he will become more vehement in his assertions, and in the end betray himself. Again, if you perceive that a person is trying to conceal something from you, but with only partial success, look as though you did not believe him. The opposition on your part will provoke him into leading out his reserve of truth and bringing the whole force of it to bear upon your incredulity." - Arthur Schopenhauer.

// 2 Is The Only Even Prime Number // 09.02.24
Women are what families are built around.

That was how she kept you away. By having sex with you. It was so backward from what you thought, from everything you'd ever been told about women and life and how love was supposed to work. It was some trick she did. Some way of keeping herself hidden. By giving me the thing that guys always want, she slipped away, escaped into the ocean fog, vanished at the very moment I thought I'd possessed her. And oh my God, how I wanted to possess her. Still. Even now. Even when I knew better and had been warned and knew that nothing good could come of it.

// Ode On A Grecian Urn (1819) // 06.02.24
More happy love! more happy, happy love!

// Retro Futurism // 26.01.24
"You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing everything with logic. If words control you, that means anyone can control you. Breathe, and allow things to pass." - Bruce Lee.

// Soul Tender // 24.01.24
We are all, by nature, somewhat solipsistic. Each of us has more access to our thoughts and feelings than anyone else's. Since your internal data predominates, you can't help but think others must be getting that info too. Recognising that most people are more focused on themselves than you might sound depressing, but it's liberating. People can't read my thoughts or parse my motivations! Most of the time they're not even trying to! Relax. Once you absorb this, you'll have more cognitive energy left over for thinking about others.

We can find ourselves dwelling, anxiously, on a clumsy comment we made to a friend or a terrible mistake we made at work. But most of the time, one incident won't change the opinion your friends or colleagues have of you, and they probably noticed it less than you anyway. People form their opinions of those they know on a pattern of behaviour over months or years, and not on the anomalies, which loom much larger in your mind than in their's. Sure, if you keep on making the same 'mistake' then people will begin to judge you differently, but it's the average that counts, not the single data point. So don't stew on it. I often recall this quote from Tender Is The Night: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.” Most of your friends just don't update on you very much.

// Babylon // 23.01.24
Simon Cowell can't write a song. In the world of Simon Cowell, we'd have no music. Somebody has to do the building.

// Wild Oats - Philip Larkin // 22.01.24
About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers
But it was the friend I took out.

And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn,
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt.
In my wallet are still two snaps
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.

// England In 1819 - Percy Bysshe Shelley // 11.01.24
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn - mud from a muddy spring,

Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay.

Religion Christless, Godless a book sealed;
A Senate, Time's worst statute unrepealed,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day.

// Get Back On The Path // 09.01.24
It only takes 5 minutes to break the cycle. 5 minutes of exercise and you are back on the path. 5 minutes of writing and the manuscript is moving forward again. 5 minutes of conversation and the relationship is restored. It doesn't take much to feel good again.

// Questions From A Worker Who Reads (Bertolt Brecht, 1935) // 01.01.24
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.Who erected them?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?

Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?

Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.

So many questions.

// Against The Grain: A Deep History Of The Earliest States // 31.12.23
Measured by the roughly 200,000-year span of our species, the Anthropocene began only a few minutes ago.

The literal meaning of “parasite” from the original Greek root, is “beside the grain”.

Only 240 human generations have elapsed since the first adoption of agriculture and perhaps no more than 160 generations since it became widespread.

Southern Mesopotamia was the heartland of not one but several related state-making experiments between roughly 3,300 and 2,350 BCE. Like China's Warring States period or the later Greek city-states, the southern alluvium was the site of rivalrous city-polities whose fortunes waxed and waned. Among the best known were Kish, Ur, and, above all, Uruk. Something utterly remarkable and without historical parallel was taking place here. On one hand, groups of priests, strong men, and local chiefs were scaling up and institutionalizing structures of power that had previously used only the idioms of kinship. They were creating for the first time something along the lines of what we would call a state, though they could not possibly have understood it in those terms. On the other hand, thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers were being, as it were, repurposed as subjects and, to this end, counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control.

Fire
Hominids' use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for the use of fire is dated at least 400,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier still, long predating the appearance of Homo sapiens.

The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind's oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. “Tool” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semidomesticate”, appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene.

It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the importance of cooking in human evolution. The application of fire to raw food externalizes the digestive process; it gelatinizes starch and denatures protein. The chemical disassembly of raw food, which in a chimpanzee requires a gut roughly three times the size of ours, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it. The effects are enormous.

Fire was the key to humankind's growing sway over the natural world - a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide.

Wild sheep
I have always been personally offended when sheep are used as a synonym for cowardly crowd behavior and a lack of individuality. We have, for the past 8,000 years, been selecting among sheep for tractability - slaughtering first the aggressive ones who broke out of the corral. How dare we, then, turn around and slander a species for some combination of normal herd behavior and precisely those characteristics we have selected for?

As late as 1800 (before the steamship or railroad) it was about as fast to go from Southampton, England, to the Cape of Good Hope by ship as it was to go by stagecoach from London to Edinburgh.

More than two-thirds of hospitalizations in industrial countries, it is claimed, are for iatrogenic illnesses: medical conditions that result from previous medical interventions and therapy. One might say that our current environmental ills are largely iatrogenic.

Wolf-dogs
Why was it that Homo sapiens was a more successful invasive than Homo neanderthalensis, who, after all, had fire and cooking as well? One answer, different from that of higher fertility, is that the decisive difference rests with another tool, the domesticated wolf that allowed Homo sapiens to become a vastly more efficient hunter of big game rather than largely a scavenger. There is a persuasive case that “wolf-dogs” had been tamed - or had attached themselves to Homo sapiens - more than 36,000 years ago, when the two hominids lived in close proximity. This was also the time when most large game animals, owing to Homo sapiens' use of dogs for hunting, were in steep decline or extinct. Why Homo neanderthalensis did not then also domesticate the wolf is a mystery.

There is a famous Russian experiment in the taming of silver foxes: By selecting the least aggressive (most tame) from among 130 silver foxes and breeding them to one another repeatedly, the experimenters produced, in only 10 generations, 18% of progeny that exhibited extremely tame behavior - whining, wagging their tails, and responding favorably to petting and handling as a domestic dog might. After 20 generations of such breeding, the percentage of extremely tame foxes nearly doubled to 35%. The behavioral transformation was accompanied by physical changes such as lop ears, piebaldness, and a raised tail that some see as linked genetically to the decrease in adrenaline production.

// Blind Spot // 30.12.23
"Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. If I find that some particular thing is causing me stress, that's a warning flag for me; what it means is, there's something that I haven't completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find, as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call or send the first email message or whatever it is that we're going to do to start to address the situation, even if it's not solved, the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring." - Jeff Bezos.

// Demon Copperhead // 23.12.23
It's amazing how much time you may find on your hands, once you're freed up from tracking down your next fix, chasing the means for your next fix, bootlegging scrips, dipping out, ganking, pheeming, chewing chains, raving with Jesus, trying to find a new dope boy, and steering clear of the old ones that would eat your liver with gravy if they could be bothered. The perks of sobriety.

Nobody Rides You Like You Ride Yourself
Is it the hardest thing I've ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they're locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?

Triggers are seeded into the dirt of your every day: a song on the radio, a taste in the mouth, the cherry-soda smell of methadone that can be injected straight from the bottle. Drug tests are easier to fail at than any other subject.

Kid Born to the Junkie is a Junkie
A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we're meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don't pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

// The Truth // 22.12.23
The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.

Ultimately men are more attracted to sexual availability than they are to beauty.

Since adolescence, we've been trained as men - by our friends, by our culture, by our biology - to desire women. It seems unreasonable to expect us to just shut it off forever once we get married. Legs are long, breasts are soft, and forever is a long time.

If I'd had the chance to speak uninterrupted as a child and express myself and truly be heard, I'd probably be much healthier.

Loneliness is holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.

// Now The Weather // 10.12.23
Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, life is only a dream, and we are the imaginations of ourselves. Now, here's Tom with the weather.

// Paranoid Park // 03.12.23
One thing I'd learned; When you think you're about to totally lose it, if you can just hang on a few more minutes, a few more seconds, things turn normal again.

When you really get going, writing is like talking to your best friend, except they can't interrupt you or tell you what an idiot you are.

Before the security guard, almost everything I did was natural. I woke up, I went to school, I hung out with my friends. I never thought about what I was doing, or why. Now I was always thinking. I never just did stuff. I was always checking myself, watching what I said and did. Which made every day like going to work. It was like my whole life had become a really hard job.

When there was all this dark stuff in my brain, all these things I could never speak of, or tell anyone about. Any place could be a prison, I realized, if your head wasn't right.

That was the thing about secrets, they drove you insane. They really did. They isolated you. They separated you from your tribe. They destroyed you eventually. Unless you were strong. Unless you were very, very strong.

I watched the people on the street as we drove around more. Because he was a cop, Detective Brady could drive anywhere he wanted. He pulled onto River Walk and drove on the bike path. We moved slowly through the bike-riders and joggers. People would get pissed at a car being there, until they looked in the car and saw Brady's face. Then they turned around and minded their own business.

// Seize The Fire // 01.12.23
British sailors were known as ‘limeys' for the reason that they drank citrus juice drinks. Nelson would sip lemonade as he died.

By 1790 there were 14 London morning papers and another in the evening. The first Sunday paper began production in 1799. Papers were read at breakfast and as a result an English tradition had already begun: conversation at breakfast was never ‘of a lively nature'.

The Duc de Rochefoucauld considered the English the cleanest people in Europe. They were also immensely sociable, milling through the streets in crowds. ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly thinking there was a mob,' Horace Walpole wrote, ‘and it was only nymphs and swains, sauntering and trudging.' It was a hard-drinking country. There were 16,000 drink shops in London; William Pitt, who had been administered daily glasses of port as a sickly child, was by the 1790s a four-bottles-a-day man (although the port was not so alcoholic and the bottles smaller than ours.) People horded into taverns, where, according to Dr Johnson, ‘the true felicity of human life' was to be found.

// A Lie About My Father // 29.11.23
I was happy being alone, enjoying the quiet of who I am when I am not with others.

I have no idea what goes on in the human heart, but I do know, if I know anything, that men and women love for different reasons. I imagine most men love what pleases them, and think no more of it - but for women, love is an imaginative act, a choice, an invention, even.

It's hard work, being happy.

Petty Mortifications
I couldn't imagine marriage was a very satisfying state: like a nautilus shell, it seemed an intricate, unknowable thing; it concealed all manner of secret hurts and slights, every variety of private betrayal and unspoken disappointment. I think I suspected, even then, that nobody should carry all the blame for that state of affairs. I may even have realised that no one can know the inner workings of a marriage: it was a matter of a hundred private moments, all the lies and blows and failures, real or imagined, that went unwitnessed and unrecorded, till the crisis that others see, after years or decades – the breakdown, the affair, the drink problem – appears to come out of nowhere.

Everything good that had ever happened had seemed so inasmuch as it resembled a scene in a book or a film. Everything else had been vivid and messy and unacceptable. No wonder we lie, I thought, as I wandered around the streets where my father had come closest to being at home. We want life to be good.

// The Lord So Cometh As A Thief In The Night // 28.11.23
"Restrict thy overmuch delite in these transitory pleasures of this world." - Samuel Ward's private diary, 1595

Keep the dopamine in the money until you're ready to buy the jet-ski.

Thessalonians 5:8
Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.
Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.
For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night.
But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation.

// The War We Never Fought // 16.11.23
Drug taking is a sensual pleasure sought for its own sake, separated from any effort or responsibility. It smothers thought and dilutes discontent. It is the purest form of self-indulgence because it is the pursuit of present pleasure. The search for present pleasure has replaced an older purpose - the pursuit of future happiness - often achieved through self-denial and sacrifice.

// Googled // 15.11.23
It took telephones 71 years to penetrate 50% of American homes, electricity 52 years, and TV three decades. The Internet reached more than 50% of Americans in a mere decade; DVD penetration was faster, taking just seven years. Facebook built up a community of two hundred million users in just five years. Because the digital realm is made up of bits, it does not run out of supplies or have space constraints.

Robert Louis Stevenson understood a broader truth when he wrote: “No man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantomagoric chamber of his brain, with all the painted windows and storied walls.”

// Nobody's Fool // 13.11.23
Remaining uncertain can be aversive and does not necessarily come naturally, but it is a habit we should cultivate whenever we can. We don't need to distrust everything we hear, but we should make a practice of taking a beat, remaining uncertain, and asking ourselves, “Is that really true?”.

If there are 23 people in a room, the odds exceed 50% that a pair of them will share a birthday. Yes, any individual's birthday could be any one out of 365 days. But with 23 in the room, there are 253 possible pairings of two people: 23(n of people) × 22(n of possible pairs) ÷ 2(for the pair).

It can pay to seek more information. Even if we don't receive it, the fact that the facts were hard or impossible to find is itself information.

If you ask people to generate a random number between 1 and 10, a disproportionate number will pick 7.

Whenever you hear someone use quantum mechanics to explain human behavior, you should turn your bullshit detector all the way to 11.

When we exercise rather than watch a movie, or save money rather than spend it, we sacrifice something now in order to receive future benefit.

Appreciate the Value of Noise
It is unfortunate that noise gets a bad rap because we should expect to see it, and we should notice its absence. In any complex system, where many factors contribute and interact, performance in the short term should vary a lot; we shouldn't expect to see long-run averages reflected perfectly in short-term returns. Asking “Where is the noise?” can trigger us to investigate suspiciously smooth performances.

Whenever you read that a new study shows huge benefits from a single brief experience, remember to compare its “active ingredients” to other, more established approaches to solving the same problems. Complex problems usually require multipronged solutions, if they are solvable at all, and rarely yield to the proverbial “one simple trick.” We should meet any claim that contradicts this principle with a demand for the strongest level of evidence.

According to the Dutch firm Ultrascan, advance-fee scams, of which the Nigerian prince is only one variety, collectively took in $9.3 billion in 2009 alone.

// Inside Story // 13.11.23
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.

// The Algebra Of Happiness // 11.11.23
Pay special attention to things that bring you joy that don't involve mind-altering substances or a lot of money. Whether it's cooking, capoeira, the guitar, or mountain biking, interests and hobbies add texture to your personality. Being “in the zone” is happiness. You lose sense of time, forget yourself, and feel part of something larger.

The number one piece of advice seniors would give to their younger selves is that they wish they'd been less hard on themselves.

If substances are getting in the way of your relationships, professional trajectory, or life - address it.

Nothing wonderful, I'm talking really fantastic, will happen without taking a risk and subjecting yourself to rejection. Serendipity is a function of courage.

Take a ton of pictures, text your friends stupid things, check in with old friends as often as possible, express admiration to coworkers, and every day, tell as many people as you can that you love them. A couple of minutes every day - the payoff is small at first, and then it's immense.

// Discipline Equals Freedom // 10.11.23
That is what I want you to be afraid of: Waking up in six days or six weeks or six years and being no closer to your goal. You have made no progress. That is the nightmare. That is what you really need to be afraid of: Being stagnant. So, get up and go. Take the risk, take the gamble, take the first step. Take action. Don't let another day slip by.

Everyone wants some magic pill - some life hack - that eliminates the need to do the work. But that does not exist. No. You have to do the work. You've got to hold the line. You've got to make it happen.

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma, or a hideous dream." - Brutus, plotting to kill Caesar.

// Jane Eyre // 08.11.23
Life was yet in my possession, with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.

The housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment.

To the end of turning to profit the talents which God has committed to your keeping; and of which He will surely one day demand a strict account.

// The Coming Wave // 03.11.23
In the words of John McCarthy, who coined the term 'artificial intelligence, “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” AI is - as those of us building it like to joke - “what computers can't do.” Once they can, it's just software.

Intelligence can be understood as the ability to generate a range of plausible scenarios about how the world around you may unfold, and then base sensible actions on those predictions.

Age of Hyper-Evolution
Your smart speaker wakes you up. Immediately you turn to your phone and check your emails. Your smart watch tells you you've had a normal night's sleep, and your heart rate is average for the morning. Already a distant organization knows, in theory, what time you are awake, how you are feeling, and what you are looking at. You leave the house and head to the office, your phone tracking your movements, logging the keystrokes on your text messages and the podcast you listen to. On the way, and throughout the day, you are captured on CCTV hundreds of times. After all, this city has at least one camera for every ten people, maybe many more than that. When you swipe in at the office, the system notes your time of entry. Software installed on your computer monitors productivity down to eye movements. On the way home you stop to buy dinner. The supermarket's loyalty scheme tracks your purchases. After eating, you binge-stream another TV series; your viewing habits are duly noted. Every glance, every hurried message, every half thought registered in an open browser or fleeting search, every step through bustling city streets, every heartbeat and bad night's sleep, every purchase made or backed out of - it is all captured, watched, tabulated. And this is only a tiny slice of the possible data harvested every day, not just at work or on the phone, but at the doctor's office or in the gym. Almost every detail of life is logged, somewhere, by those with the sophistication to process and act on the data they collect. This is not some far-off dystopia. I'm describing daily realty for millions in a city like London.

The law of accelerating returns describes feedback loops where advances in technology further increase the pace of development.

'Red Teaming' is proactively hunting for flaws in AI models or software systems. This means attacking your systems in controlled ways to probe for weaknesses and other failure modes.

Neural Networks
Deep learning uses neural networks loosely modeled on the human brain. In simple terms, these systems 'learn' when their networks are 'trained' on large amounts of data. In the case of AlexNet, the training data consisted of images. Each red, green, or blue pixel is given a value, and the resulting array of numbers is fed into the network as an input. Within the network, 'neurons' link to other neurons by a series of weighted connections, each of which roughly corresponds to the strength of the relationship between inputs. Each layer in the neural network feeds its input down to the next layer, creating increasingly abstract representations. A technique called backpropagation then adjusts the weights to improve the neural network; when an error is spotted, adjustments propagate back through the network to help correct it in the future. Keep doing this, modifying the weights again and again, and you gradually improve the performance of the neural network so that eventually it's able to go all the way from taking in single pixels to learning the existence of lines, edges, shapes, and then ultimately entire objects in scenes. This, in a nutshell, is deep learning.

To get a sense of one petaFLOP, imagine a billion people each holding a million calculators, doing a complex multiplication, and hitting equals at the same time.

Passing a Modern Turing Test would involve something like the following: an AI being able to successfully act on the instruction “Go make $1 million on Amazon in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.” It might research the web to look at what's trending, finding what's hot and what's not on Amazon Marketplace; generate a range of images and blueprints of possible products; send them to a drop-ship manufacturer it found on Alibaba; email back and forth to refine the requirements and agree on the contract; design a seller's listing; and continually update marketing materials and product designs based on buyer feedback. Aside from the legal requirements of registering as a business on the marketplace and getting a bank account, all of this seems to me eminently doable. I think it will be done with a few minor human interventions within the next year, and probably fully autonomously within three to five years.

Attention Map
LLMs take advantage of the fact that language data comes in a sequential order. Each unit of information is in some way related to data earlier in a series. The model reads very large numbers of sentences, learns an abstract representation of the information contained within them, and then, based on this, generates a prediction about what should come next. The challenge lies in designing an algorithm that knows where to look for signals in a given sentence. What are the key words, the most salient elements of a sentence, and how do they relate to one another? In AI this notion is commonly referred to as 'attention'. When a large language model ingests a sentence, it constructs what can be thought of as an 'attention map'. In the attention map, every token bears some relationship to every token before it, and for a given input sentence the strength of this relationship describes something about the importance of that token in the sentence. In effect, the LLM learns which words to pay attention to.

When IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it used the so-called brute-force technique, where an algorithm aims to systematically crunch through as many possible moves as it can. That approach is hopeless in a game with as many branching outcomes as Go.

The idea that technology alone can solve social and political problems is a dangerous delusion. But the idea that they can be solved without technology is also wrongheaded.

Global challenges are reaching a critical threshold. Rampant inflation. Energy shortages. Stagnant incomes. A breakdown of trust. Waves of populism. None of the old visions from either left or right seem to offer convincing answers, yet better options seem in short supply. It would take a brave, or possibly delusional, person to argue that all is well, that there are not serious forces of populism, anger, and dysfunction raging across societies - all despite the highest living standards the world has ever known.

EBay and PayPal's dispute resolution system handles around sixty million disagreements a year, three times as many as the entire U.S. legal system. 90% of these disputes are settled using technology alone.

Easy profit, not for the first or last time, had made people greedy and foolish.

// Chip Wars // 02.11.23
Integrated circuits became known colloquially as a 'chips' because each one was made from a piece chipped off a circular silicon wafer.

The semiconductor industry was globalizing decades before anyone had heard of the word, laying the grounds for the Asia-centric supply chains we know today.

When we look five years out we hope to be building 5G networks and metaverses, but if Taiwan were taken offline we might find ourselves struggling to acquire dishwashers.

By the 2000s, it was common to split the semiconductor industry into three categories. 'Logic' refers to the processors that run smartphones, computers, and servers. 'Memory' refers to DRAM, which provides short-term memory, and 'Flash' (also called NAND), which remembers data over time. The third category of chips is more diffuse, including analog chips like sensors that convert visual or audio signals into digital data, radio frequency chips that communicate with cell phone networks, and semiconductors that manage how devices use electricity.

Throwing Shade
Making realistic graphics requires use of programs called shaders, which tell all the pixels in an image how they should be portrayed in a given shade of light. The shader is applied to each of the pixels in an image, a relatively straightforward calculation conducted over many thousands of pixels. Nvidia's GPUs can render images quickly because, unlike Intel's microprocessors or other general-purpose CPUs, they're structured to conduct lots of simple calculations - like shading pixels - simultaneously. In 2006, realizing that high-speed parallel computations could be used for purposes besides computer graphics, Nvidia released CUDA, software that lets GPUs be programmed in a standard programming language, without any reference to graphics at all.

Since the 1960s, all mass-produced transistors have been 2-D. This means that the source, the drain and the channel connecting them all lie flat on the same plane. On new 3D transistors, called a FinFET (pronounced finfet), the channel protrudes from the surface in a ridge or 'fin' and the result is that it has not one, but three sides in contact with the overlapping gate.

For many years, each generation of manufacturing technology was named after the length of the transistor's gate. The 180nm node was pioneered in 1999, followed by 130nm, 90nm, 65nm, and 45nm, with each generation shrinking transistors enough to make it possible to cram roughly twice as many in the same area. This reduced power consumption per transistor, because smaller transistors needed fewer electrons to flow through them. Around the early 2010s, it became unfeasible to pack transistors more densely by shrinking them two dimensionally. One challenge was that, as transistors were shrunk according to Moore's Law, the narrow length of the conductor channel occasionally caused power to “leak” through the circuit even when the switch was off. On top of this, the layer of silicon dioxide atop each transistor became so thin that quantum effects like 'tunneling' - jumping through barriers that classical physics said should be insurmountable - began seriously impacting transistor performance. By the mid-2000s, the layer of silicon dioxide on top of each transistor was only a couple of atoms thick, too small to keep a lid on all the electrons sitting in the silicon.

// Skippy Dies // 01.11.23
Working in a secondary school is like being trapped with a thousand billboards, each one shouting for your attention, but, when you look, with no idea what it is they want to tell you.

History is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit.

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein.

// The Story of Us // 26.10.23
Imagine if all of human history were written down in a book called The Story of Us. If every page covered 250 years of history, the book would be about 1,000 pages long. What we consider ancient history is really just the very last pages of the story. The Agricultural Revolution starts around page 950 or 960, recorded history gets going at about page 976, and Christianity isn't born until page 993. Page 1,000, which goes from the early 1770s to the early 2020s, contains all of U.S. history. If you were reading The Story of Us and turned the page to 1,001, everything would seem to be coming to a head, with many storylines suddenly converging. You'd be glued to the book, needing to find out what happens to this species. Except we're not reading The Story of Us - we're living inside of it, as its characters. We're also its authors, writing the story as we go along.

// How To Blow Up A Pipeline // 26.10.23
If you want to emit as much CO2 as possible, go on a flying binge. One single flight from London to Edinburgh emits more CO2 than the average Somalian does in a year. There are 56 countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York.

If SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have ranked seventh for CO2 emissions. The incessantly growing share of SUV sales offset all gains from fuel efficiency and electric vehicles.

// The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress // 06.10.23
Newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world's knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. These are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights.

In 2011, more than 95% of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV. A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.

Teleological (directed by purposes or goals)
People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many” and by rough guesstimates. They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology. They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence. They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them. They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck. People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty.

For all the flaws in human nature, it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits. Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. Not coincidentally, these were the major brainchildren of the Enlightenment.

Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition and lifetime habits of reading.

Napoleon, that exponent of martial glory, sniffed at England as “a nation of shopkeepers.” But at the time Britons earned 83% more than Frenchmen and enjoyed a third more calories, and we all know what happened at Waterloo.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

// English Monsters // 06.10.23
And birds and trees and flowers without a name, All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came.

I lift the top sometimes, put my head inside and use the instrument as a time machine. The smell of dust and velvet. The ferrous shimmer of the strings. Those obedient hammers ready to nod forward and change the air. Close your eyes, inhale, listen for the tremors of all the music that has travelled through it, and you might drop out of the here and now and visit any moment in the instrument's history.

Children don't analyse, they only experience.

// Utterly Impartial History Of Britain // 16.07.23
Walpole was the master of the compromise; his solutions rarely excited anyone but worked just well enough so that everyone could live with them.

The only war that Britain lost during its period as top dog led to the creation of the country that would eventually replace it.

Compare the stability of our own lifetime to the experience of someone born in 1760; they witnessed the entire transformation of their world from an agricultural society to an industrial one; after a thousand years in the same rural district their family moved from the countryside to some strange, rapidly growing city; they were answerable to a factory-owner instead of the local aristocracy; suddenly they had soot all over their faces instead of cow dung.

The Peterloo Massacre was a national scandal. Percy Shelley was inspired to write ‘The Mask of Anarchy': Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.

Britain's ultimate victory over the Nazi Empire came exactly two thousand years after Julius Caesar arrived near Dover with his own ideas about a European superstate. (55 BC to AD 1945).

The Norwegian humiliation provoked fury in the House of Commons. Chamberlain was taken aback by the level of anger on his own side; quoting Oliver Cromwell, one senior Tory declared, ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!'.

// Open Heart, Not Survival Heart // 16.07.23
Humans have been around for a long, long time - according to the most recent estimates, between 200,000 and 300,000 years.

Politics deals with fairness, resource distribution, and groups of people competing for power—concepts that the Primitive Mind is programmed to freak out about because they were fundamental to ancient survival.

The real test of any argument is how well it stands up to rigorous criticism. When you're confident in your viewpoint, you love a chance to throw it into the ring with other arguments and show off its strength.

If you've ever studied philosophy, you've come across the concept of a telos, which is an end, a goal, a purpose. The telos of a church is to serve Christ, so there are crosses - the representation of that telos - all over the church walls. The telos of many modern universities is truth - that's why it's such a common motto and why the Harvard campus is plastered with the veritas seal.

They're just events. Don't make life a war of insisting things go your way. That's what everybody wants, and things will never coincide to everyone's liking.

Humans are pattern-seeking creatures because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to do so. In the past, false negatives could have been deadly, such as if a human failed to spot a predator or a poisonous plant. False positives, on the other hand, were less costly, as they would simply mean that the human wasted some time or energy investigating something that turned out to be harmless. This evolutionary bias towards spotting patterns can lead to problems in modern times, when false positives can be just as costly as false negatives. For example, people may be more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or to see faces in inanimate objects, even when there is no evidence to support these beliefs.

The royal palace in Europe that pulls in most tourists is Versailles, and the French got rid of their monarchy in 1848. We could probably get more tourists into Buckingham Palace if the royals were no longer there.

Something really, terribly bad might be happening that could make our actual lives legitimately worse in the future, but we have a prisoner's dilemma on our hands - it's much, much better for all of us collectively to make a change, but for each individual CEO, lobbyist, or politician, there's more to personally gain from maintaining the status quo. People like to say, “this is the world our children will live in and we're botching it for them,” but for the people with the power to change something, their particular children will be best off if they make the most money possible. The situation is stuck.

The Law of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985 - because the former was a more advanced world - so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.

// Oceanic // 16.07.23
If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it.

I'm strongly affected by the sun. When it's a bright day, I feel energized. When it's gloomy, I'm gloomy. On those overcast days, it helps to tune in to the fact that the sun is still there. It's just hidden behind a thicker layer of clouds. At noon, the sun is high in the sky, regardless of how light or dark it is outside. In the same way, regardless of how much we're paying attention, the information we seek is out there. If we're aware, we get to tune in to more of it. If we're less aware, we miss it.

Marcel Proust lined his walls with sound-absorbing cork, closed the drapes, and wore earplugs. Kafka too took his need for silence to an extreme - “not like a hermit,” he once said, but “like a dead man.” There is no wrong way. There is only your way.

It helps to realize that it's better to follow the universe than those around you.

Self-doubt lives in all of us. And while we may wish it gone, it is there to serve us. By accepting self-doubt, rather than trying to eliminate or repress it, we lessen its energy and interference.

All art is a work in progress. It's helpful to see the piece we're working on as an experiment. One in which we can't predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment.

The Buddhist concept of 'papancha' translates as preponderance of thoughts. This speaks to the mind's tendency to respond to our experiences with an avalanche of mental chatter.

Formulating an opinion is not listening. Neither is preparing a response or defending our position or attacking another's. To listen impatiently is to hear nothing at all.

Art is above and beyond judgment. It either speaks to you or it doesn't.

The suggestion to be yourself may be too general to be of much use. There's being yourself as an artist, being yourself with your family, being yourself at work, being yourself with friends, being yourself in times of crisis or in times of peace, and being yourself for yourself, when by yourself.

It helps to keep in mind that language is an imperfect means of communication. An idea is altered and diluted through its mistranslation into words. Those words are then further distorted through our filter as we take them in, leaving us in a world of ambiguity. It requires patience and diligence to get past the story of what you think you're hearing and get close to understanding what's actually being said. When receiving feedback, a useful practice is to repeat back the information. You may find that what you heard isn't what was said. And what was said may not even be what was actually meant.

Each of us has our own way of seeing this world. And this can lead to feelings of isolation. Art has an ability to connect us beyond the limitations of language.

// Less Smart, More Heart // 16.07.23
No one with the slightest acquaintance with the human race could possibly conclude that human beings always pursue their own best interests by means of rational calculation. The primrose path to perdition never ceases to attract.

In 1949, China had more opiate addicts than the rest of the world put together, the exact figure being in the nature of things unknowable, but possibly in the region of 20,000,000. In short order, Mao gave addicts a strong motive to give up and the rest of the population a strong motive not to start. He shot the dealers out of hand, and any such addicts who did not give up their habit. The carrot for addicts was life and the stick was death. It would not be going too far to say that, within a mere three years, Mao produced more cures than all the drug clinics in the world before or since, or indeed to come. He was the greatest drug worker in history.

In a couple days you will be cleaned up, clothed, your stomach settled, your vision cleared. You will walk around the main building in your bathrobe and your slippers, with your herbal tea and your daily schedule in your pocket. Your daily schedule: drug and alcohol classes, drug and alcohol counselling, drug and alcohol group therapy sessions. There's not a lot of variety of subject matter. But that's what it is. Spring Meadow. Rehab. That's your first twenty-eight days. In some ways, those are the easiest.

I wave and walk up my driveway. By the time I'm inside I've forgotten the entire evening.

The world is so strange. And yet, things happen pretty much like you know they will.

Open heart, not survival heart.

Take a hot bath that night, brush my teeth in my brightly lit bathroom, crawl into my clean bed of fresh linen. Outside it is cold and raining. Stewart is out there somewhere sleeping on concrete.

// The Master Algorithm // 16.07.23
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?

After more than two thousand years of self-examination, we have arrived at a characterization of intelligence that can be boiled down to this: Humans are intelligent to the extent that our actions can be expected to achieve our objectives. Machines are beneficial to the extent that their actions can be expected to achieve our objectives.

A cost function typically measures some deviation from a desired behaviour.

All those Hollywood plots about machines mysteriously becoming conscious and hating humans are really missing the point: it's competence, not consciousness, that matters.

It is extraordinarily difficult for an organism to decide what actions are most likely, in the long run, to result in successful propagation of its genes, so evolution has made it easier for us by providing built-in signposts.

An agent, that is, something that acts.

Complex algorithms can be built by using simpler ones as building blocks called subroutines - for example, a self-driving car might use a route-finding algorithm as a subroutine so that it knows where to go. In this way, software systems of immense complexity are built up, layer by layer.

Games had been a proving ground for AI since the '50s, when computer scientists built the first automated chess players. In 1990, researchers marked a turning point when they built a machine called Chinook that beat the world's best checkers player. Seven years later, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer topped chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. And in 2011, another IBM machine, Watson, eclipsed the all-time winners on Jeopardy!

China was treating artificial intelligence like its own Apollo program.

AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol was China's Sputnik moment.

Just to rub it in, a version of AlphaGo called AlphaZero recently learned to trounce AlphaGo at Go, and also to trounce Stockfish (the world's best chess program, far better than any human) and Elmo (the world's best shogi program, also better than any human). AlphaZero did all this in one day.

As a practical matter, one can never be absolutely certain of any empirical question unless the answer is already known. Fortunately, certainty is completely unnecessary for action: we just need to know which action is best, not which action is certain to succeed.

Of the three basic physical capabilities required for a useful domestic robot - perception, mobility, and dexterity - the latter is most problematic. As Stefanie Tellex, a robotics professor at Brown University, puts it, “Most robots can't pick up most objects most of the time.”.

For every move that AlphaGo makes on the Go board, it performs millions or billions of units of computation, each of which involves adding a branch to the lookahead search tree and evaluating the board position at the end of that branch.

Whereas a human can read and understand one book in a week, a machine could read and understand every book ever written - all 150 million of them - in a few hours.

History has shown that a tenfold increase in global GDP per capita is possible without AI - it's just that it took 190 years (from 1820 to 2010) to achieve that increase. It required the development of factories, machine tools, automation, railways, steel, cars, airplanes, electricity, oil and gas production, telephones, radio, television, computers, the Internet, satellites, and many other revolutionary inventions.

In the EU, Article 22 of the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, explicitly forbids the granting of authority to machines in such cases: The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

The EU's GDPR is often said to provide a general “right to an explanation” for any automated decision, but the actual language of Article 14 merely requires meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject.

Article 3 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”.

Scalable is a term from computer science; a process is scalable if you can do a million times more of it essentially by buying a million times more hardware.

Keynes suggests that striving is one of the “habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations” rather than one of the “real values of life.” He predicts that this instinct will gradually disappear. Against this view, one may suggest that striving is intrinsic to what it means to be truly human. Rather than striving and enjoying being mutually exclusive, they are often inseparable: true enjoyment and lasting fulfilment come from having a purpose and achieving it (or at least trying), usually in the face of obstacles, rather than from passive consumption of immediate pleasure. There is a difference between climbing Everest and being deposited on top by helicopter.

Around ten million years ago, the ancestors of the modern gorilla created (accidentally, to be sure) the genetic lineage leading to modern humans. How do the gorillas feel about this?

Driving is a simple task with only local impacts, and the AI systems currently being built for driving are not very intelligent. For these reasons, many of the potential failure modes can be anticipated; others will reveal themselves in driving simulators or in millions of miles of testing with professional drivers ready to take over if something goes wrong; still others will appear only later, when the cars are already on the road and something weird happens.

There are some systems being contemplated that really cannot be switched off without ripping out a lot of the plumbing of our civilization. These are systems implemented as so-called smart contracts in the blockchain. The blockchain is a highly distributed form of computing and record keeping based on encryption; it is specifically designed so that no datum can be deleted and no smart contract can be interrupted without essentially taking control of a very large number of machines and undoing the chain, which might in turn destroy a large part of the Internet and/or the financial system. It is debatable whether this incredible robustness is a feature or a bug. It's certainly a tool that a superintelligent AI system could use to protect itself.

Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence, presents the same underlying idea in a different form, which he calls the orthogonality thesis: Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal. Here, orthogonal means “at right angles” in the sense that the degree of intelligence is one axis defining an intelligent system and its goals are another axis, and we can vary these independently.

Competing to be the first to achieve human-level AI, without first solving the control problem, is a negative-sum game. The payoff for everyone is minus infinity.

The tendency of animals to short-circuit normal behaviour in favour of direct stimulation of their own reward system is called 'wire-heading'.

I. J. Good's prediction of an intelligence explosion is one of the driving forces that have led to current concerns about the potential risks of superintelligent AI. If humans can design a machine that is a bit more intelligent than humans, then - the argument goes - that machine will be a bit better than humans at designing machines. It will design a new machine that is still more intelligent, and the process will repeat itself until, in Good's words, “the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”.

More than one hundred billion people have lived on Earth. They (we) have spent on the order of one trillion person-years learning and teaching, in order that our civilization may continue. Up to now, its only possibility for continuation has been through re-creation in the minds of new generations. (Paper is fine as a method of transmission, but paper does nothing until the knowledge recorded thereon reaches the next person's mind.) That is now changing: increasingly, it is possible to place our knowledge into machines that, by themselves, can run our civilization for us.

The ability of humans to manage their computational activity so that reasonable decisions get made reasonably quickly is at least as remarkable as their ability to perceive and to reason correctly.

The system cannot generalize from a few examples, as a human does, because it has no way to express the general rule.

We directly perceive not the identity of objects but (aspects of) their appearance; objects do not usually have little license plates that uniquely identify them. Identity is something our minds sometimes attach to objects for our own purposes.

In AI we use the term 'belief state' to refer to an agent's current knowledge of the state of the world, however incomplete and uncertain it may be. Generally, the belief state - rather than the current perceptual input - is the proper basis for making decisions about what to do. Keeping the belief state up to date is a core activity for any intelligent agent.

Reconstruct where I am, what I am supposed to be doing, and why - a bit like a laptop rebooting itself, I suppose.

Humans become more fluent at cognitive tasks with practice, as various subtasks that originally required thinking become automatic. Without it, human conversations would be limited to one- or two-word responses and mathematicians would still be counting on their fingers.

// A Nontrivial Problem // 10.04.23
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." - John Milton, Paradise Lost

"Don't wait for approval from your neighbour, because your neighbour may be waiting for you." - Sly Stone

Plasma is a form of matter that is heated to such an extent that electrons are stripped from atoms, creating a gaseous soup of charged particles.

// Joyce Carol Oates // 01.04.23
When I was young, I yearned to be alone, and I got my wish. Now I am older, and the danger is past.

Naming - the most crucial aspect of one's life, the name you bring with you, as blatant as a face - should not be the province / choice of others. Essentially, your parents are strangers to you. It is not reasonable that strangers should name you.

They were catholics, the marriage endured even when love wore out, frayed like much laundered cloth in which stains remain.

// Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick 2 // 28.03.23
"A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time - most people don't even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are." - Sam Altman

"Self-belief must be balanced with self-awareness. I used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it. Now I try to always listen to it with the assumption that it's true, and then decide if I want to act on it or not. Truth-seeking is hard and often painful, but it is what separates self-belief from self-delusion." - Sam Altman

// Admirable Evasions // 23.03.23
All he did was to remember like the old and be honest like children.

Man is not so much a problem-solving animal as a problem-creating one. Pascal said that all of Man's misfortunes come from his inability to sit quietly in a room: but he did not claim to have found a way to enable him to do so, or suggest that this inability comes from anything other than his inherent nature.

"I am a man", wrote Terence; "I find nothing human uninteresting". Thanks to the progress wrought in human self-understanding by psychoanalysis, our dictum has changed. It is now: I am a man; I find nothing about me uninteresting.

Freud hit upon a brilliant method of keeping analysands loyal: if you make a treatment long and expensive enough, people will always find that it did them at least some good, for otherwise they would have wasted their time and money, and would look foolish - even to themselves.

The Werther effect was named for an epidemic of suicides by young men all round Europe after the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the romantic hero kills himself because of impossible love. It now refers to the increase in the number of suicides after publicity is given in newspapers or on television to a suicide. Research shows that the suicide of a celebrity has a Werther effect four or five times larger than that of an unknown person.

La Rochefoucauld said that some people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard of it.

“An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” - Edmund in Lear

This seems to me about as likely as Francis Fukuyama's end of history, which lasted but a few months.

As Francis Bacon said, “Reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

// Babysitter // 11.03.23
The only uncorrupt politician is one who hasn't yet been approached.

Only the weak fall in love, they see no way of living otherwise.

A magical component to alcohol; a kind of shorthand, if you've been a practiced drinker you can anticipate its effect immediately, like one who, knowing her destination, feels immense relief and anticipation as she sets out. As it's said that a drug addict feels the anticipatory thrill of the high, just assembling drug paraphernalia in her hands, these sacred tools, preparing to inject the magical solution into her veins.

It is always like this in Y.K.'s presence: Hannah is drawn to emulate him as a torn sheet of paper is drawn into the wake of a speeding vehicle.

// The Square and the Tower // 10.03.23
Man is indeed a social animal, and the misanthrope is shunned as well as shunning.

Robert Burns's song Naebody
I hae a penny to spend,
There, thanks to naebody;
I hae naething to lend,
I'll borrow frae naebody.
I am naebody's lord,
I'll be slave to naebody;
I hae a gude braid sword,
I'll take dunts frae naebody.
I'll be merry and free,
I'll be sad for naebody;
Naebody cares for me,
I care for naebody.

John Donne memorably put it in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

According to the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar, our larger brain, with its more developed neocortex, evolved to enable us to function in relatively large social groups of around 150 (compared with around fifty for chimpanzees). Indeed, our species should really be known as Homo dictyous ('network man').

If the basic reproduction number (how many other people are newly infected by a typical infected individual) is above one, then a disease becomes endemic; if it is below one, it tends to die out.

// Zucked // 06.03.23
Want attention online? Say something outrageous. This phenomenon first emerged decades ago in online forums such as The WELL, which often devolved into mean-spirited confrontation and has reappeared in every generation of tech platform since then.

So compelling is the experience of using a smartphone that it has altered the relationship between device and human.

The products enjoyed network effects, which occur when the value of a product increases as you add users to the network.

The magic of 5G is not going to be more bandwidth to phones; it will be in enabling pervasive 4G-level bandwidth at one-tenth the cost.

"Every aspect of human technology has a dark side." - Margaret Atwood

Pick a Card, Any Card
Social media combine concepts from psychology and persuasion, like propaganda, with techniques from slot machines, like variable rewards, and tie them to the human social need for approval and validation in ways that few users can resist. Like a magician doing a card trick, the computer designer can create the illusion of user control when it is the system that guides every action.

Facebook (along with Google and Twitter) has undercut the free press from two directions: it has eroded the economics of journalism and then overwhelmed it with disinformation.

One of the most important vectors for innovation was personalization, with the goal of delivering a unique experience for every user, where traditional media offered the same content to everyone. Stuck with inflexible product designs and an inability to innovate rapidly, traditional media could not keep pace.

The slavish tracking of Twitter by journalists, in combination with their willingness to report on things that trend there, has made news organizations complicit in the degradation of civil discourse.

Facebook and the other platforms are real-time systems with powerful tools optimized for behavior modification.

Downstream Consequences
The rationale for early exposure - preparing kids for life in a digital world - has been negated by evidence that screen time impedes childhood development to a far greater degree.

We used to think that kids were safer playing with technology than playing outdoors. We were wrong.

It is hard to accept that great harm can come from products we love - and on which we have come to depend - but that is where we are. Our parents and grandparents had a similar day of reckoning with tobacco. Now it's our turn, this time with internet platforms and smartphones.

GDPR: Global Data Protection Regulation
The US Constitution does not guarantee a right to privacy, but the European Union has stepped into the breach with the Global Data Protection Regulation, which inverts the data relationship between platforms and users. It guarantees EU citizens and residents ownership of their own data and requires opt-in for a wide range of uses of user data. The regulation protects EU citizens no matter where they are in the world, including in the United States. The most valid criticism of GDPR relates to its impact on startups, which may be considerable. Given their relative economic advantage and likely benefits in terms of user trust, you might expect the major platforms to embrace GDPR. Instead, they are doing what they can to minimize the reach of GDPR, as Facebook did when it moved 1.5 billion user profiles from its processing center in Ireland - which is part of the EU - to the United States, where most would be beyond the reach of the regulation. Both Facebook and Google have used their design skills to craft dialogue boxes that minimize the number of users who opt in for GDPR protection.

In the eighties, the philosopher Neil Postman predicted that television would entertain us to death. He did not live to see the smartphone prove his argument with an exclamation point.

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." - Albert Einstein

"Freedom is a fragile thing and never more than one generation away from extinction." - Ronald Reagan

// Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI // 22.02.23
"The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves." - Norbert Wiener

We are losing transparency with the deep-learning style of machine learning. It is fundamentally a curve-fitting exercise that adjusts weights in intermediate layers of a long input-output chain.

On September 11 1933, renowned physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with utter confidence, 'Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.' On September 12 1933, Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction. A few years later he demonstrated such a reaction in his laboratory.

Technological prediction is particularly chancy, given that technologies progress by a series of refinements, halted by obstacles and overcome by innovation. Many obstacles and some innovations can be anticipated, but more cannot. In my own work with experimentalists on building quantum computers, I typically find that some of the technological steps I expect to be easy turn out to be impossible, whereas some of the tasks I imagine to be impossible turn out to be easy. You don't know until you try.

When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, the most powerful room-cleaning robot was a Roomba, which moved around vacuuming at random and squeaked when it got caught under the couch.

We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI.

// The Metaverse // 14.02.23
To philosophers like John Locke, identity is better understood as continuity of memory. If so, then we can never have a virtual identity if everything we do and have done is forgotten.

When Will The Metaverse Arrive?
Ask yourself: When did the mobile internet era begin? Some of us might date this history from the very first mobile phones. Others might point to the commercial deployment of 2G, the first digital wireless network. Perhaps it really began with the introduction of the Wireless Application Protocol standard in 1999, which gave us WAP browsers and the ability to access a (rather primitive) version of most websites from nearly any 'dumbphone'. Or maybe the mobile internet era started with the BlackBerry - the first mainstream mobile device designed for on-the-go wireless data. Most people, however, would likely say that the answer is linked to the iPhone, which arrived almost a decade after WAP and the first BlackBerry.

The first wave of electrification began around 1881 with Thomas Edison's electric power stations in Manhattan and London. Yet while Edison was quick to commercialize electricity - he had created the first working incandescent light bulb two years earlier - demand for this resource was low. A quarter century after his first stations, an estimated 5% to 10% of mechanical drive power in the United States came from electricity. But then, rather suddenly, the second wave began. Between 1910 and 1920, electricity's share of mechanical drive power quintupled to over 50%. By 1929, it stood at 78%. The difference between the first and second waves was not what portion of American industry used electricity, but the extent to which that portion did - and designed around it.

The Metaverse will only become 'the Metaverse' if it can support a large number of users experiencing the same event, at the same time, and in the same place, without making substantial concessions in user functionality, world interactivity, persistence, rendering quality, and so on. Just imagine how different - and limited - society would be today if only 50 to 150 people could attend any given sporting match, concert, political rally, museum, school, or mall.

Skeuomorphic *
Today, less than 5% of video gaming revenue comes from advertising. In contrast, most major media categories, such as TV, audio (inclusive of music, talk radio, podcasts, and so on), and news generate 50% or more of their revenues from advertisers, rather than audiences.

Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has argued that the dominant business model of the internet era has been breaking down anything made of atoms into bits.

Audio - one of the simplest media categories to deliver over IP - remains a mostly non-digital medium, with terrestrial radio, satellite radio, and physical media comprising nearly two-thirds of US recorded music revenues in 2021.

* What is Skeuomorphic Design?
Skeuomorphism, in the sense of interface design, refers to a design which imitates the form of an object in real life. The intention behind skeuomorphic design is that by making something familiar, users don't have to learn how to use it from scratch. A popular example of skeuomorphic design is Apple's initial design for their calculator application.

// Atomic Habits // 13.02.23
It is easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don't need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it. You just need to get your reps in.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.

Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.

Better All The Time
An average experience preceded by high expectations is a disappointment. An average experience preceded by low expectations is a delight.

When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing.

When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering.

Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper.

The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

There have been a lot of days I've felt like relaxing, but I've never regretted showing up and working on something that was important to me.

Happiness is simply the absence of desire
Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state. However, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. As Caed Budris says, 'Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.' Likewise, suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You're simply observing and existing.

As Machiavelli noted, 'Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.'

// The KLF // 12.02.23
The story of our evolution is essentially the story of us retreating from the natural world into the mental one.

In quantum physics, the observer is entangled with the observed in such a way that choices made by the observer can alter the object that is being observed. The passage of information between the pair is the important element here, but does the observer have to but does the observer have to be 'conscious' as we understand it? When you put a cold thermometer in a glass of hot water, the thermometer both measures the temperature of the water, but it also affects it: it cools it down a little. Here the final measurement produced is a product of both the observer and the observed, but thermometer is not conscious. Or if it is, it hides it well. Ultimately, the need for awareness in an observer is a moot point. If it turns out not to be necessary, consciousness will hardly have been disproved. Instead, it will have just wriggled out of the picture again.

Quantum physics is so alien and baffling that it can be trotted out by non-scientists to justify all sorts of freaky claims.

"There is a contradiction I had long felt to be at the heart of human existence: that we are totally trapped and totally free at the same time." - Jimmy Drummond. This is the contradiction between the material world of causality and the idea of free will. According to causality, if you put details of all the atoms at the beginning of time into a sufficiently impressive computer, it could calculate all of future history. This does not instinctively fit well with our sense of ourselves as independent agents with the ability to make choices. Drummond adopted the mantra, 'accept the contradictions' in order not to worry about this. As he wrote, 'I decided to accept the total contradiction that everything from the big bang to the end of time is preordained in every sense and we are totally free to do whatever the fuck we want'.

Robin the hood
The art world is a very different place from the music industry. It is considerably less sure of itself. The music industry knows that the power of a perfect song is universal and that there is no way to deny. This is why it can absorb any attack. The art world is on far shakier ground.

// Our Final Invention // 03.02.23
When asked if Watson can think, David Ferrucci (IBM's chief scientist) paraphrased Dutch computer scientist Edger Dijkstra: “Can a submarine swim?” That is, a submarine doesn't swim as a fish swims, but it gets around in the water faster than most fish, and can stay down longer than any mammal. In fact, a sub swims better than fish or mammals in some ways precisely because it does not swim like a fish or a mammal - it has different strengths and weaknesses.

Meat Space (programmer lingo for real life)
When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.

Named for the 18-century mathematician and minister Thomas Bayes, Bayesian statistics' main idea is that in calculating the probability of some statement, you can start with a personal belief. Then you update that belief as new evidence comes in that supports your statement or doesn't.

As philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests, we may not possess minds that can understand our own minds. Mankind's intelligence probably isn't the greatest possible. But it might require intelligence greater than our own to fathom our intelligence in full.

Chase glory into the cannon's mouth
Many of the best and best-funded researchers receive money from DARPA. Not to put too fine a point on it, the “D” is for “Defense.” It's not the least bit controversial to anticipate that when AGI comes about, it'll be partly or wholly due to DARPA funding. The development of information technology owes a great debt to DARPA. But that doesn't alter the fact that DARPA has authorized its contractors to weaponize AI in battlefield robots and autonomous drones. Of course DARPA will continue to fund AI's weaponization all the way to AGI.

"In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines." - George Dyson

Neither signal-boosting nor virtue-signaling
Zero day vulnerabilities are holes in the computer's operating software that no one has discovered yet, holes that permit unauthorized access to the computer.

Good told his friends that God threw coincidences at atheists like him to convince them of his existence.

// The Machine Stops // 21.01.23
All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse to unchallenged.

Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body.

// The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is // 15.01.23
With the rise of the internet, global human society has passed into a stage of overproduction of cultural goods. We had already long been living with the overproduction of material goods, however unequally distributed.

Data farmer or data cow?
Corporations will manipulate people into behaving as if they were video-game players, and these same people will adopt an understanding of their own freely chosen pursuits in life as if life were a video game.

China's delivery of Tik Tok to the West has been described as “revenge for the Opium Wars,” sending back, after a century and a half, a new sort of addictive drug that also threatens to exacerbate geopolitical instability.

// Watling Street // 14.01.23
The English Channel formed around 8,000 years ago, when sea levels rose after the last ice age. That rush of water also revealed the White Cliffs, so their arrival in history and the birth of the island of Britain were one and the same event. They are thought to be the reason for the name ‘Albion', the earliest known name for these islands, which means ‘white island'.

A nation state is a political construct and most of the world's current nations were created in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our current United Kingdom dates back to 1801, and the individual nations within the UK are far older. This longevity makes it easy to forget that our nations are also abstract political entities.

Canterbury marked the site where Augustine planted Christianity in English soil. Augustine of Canterbury was a monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 597. He is considered the "Apostle to the English" and a founder of the English Church.

Canterbury Cathedral was the Disneyland of its day, a destination visitors were drawn to that physically represented the stories of their culture.

Tyburn Gallows
The Tyburn Gallows was intended as a warning to law-abiding citizens and an expression of royal power, yet the crowds and prisoners subverted this. The crowd came for a good show, and many prisoners were prepared to give them one. The condemned were able to get the crowd onside by laughing at their predicament and mocking the authorities. The procession from Newgate to Tyburn was only about three miles, but it could take up to three hours, especially if a popular prisoner was enjoying the attention of the crowds and stopping off at the inns along the way for a drink, as was their right.

Hangings were intended as a form of theatre in which the royal court displayed its authority over subjects, yet the crowd responded with an alternative, opposite theatre, one in which they refused to be afraid or intimidated. Those last moments at the centre of the laughter and approval of the crowd were, for some prisoners, the high point of their life. They held the same attraction as an appearance on a modern reality-TV programme. The prize was a brief moment of attention and fame in a life that knew neither, before inevitable oblivion arrived. The British public, perhaps, have not changed a great deal. I suspect ex-contestants of Big Brother or The X Factor would understand how, when the cry of ‘Hats off! Hats off!' rang out across the crowd before the moment of execution, it was not intended as a mark of respect. It was to allow those at the back to get a better view.

Given the number of pickpockets who worked the crowd, there is little evidence that public executions worked as a deterrent.

The Dive Inn
We have the British weather to thank for the fact that we can find welcoming safe havens whenever we arrive in a strange town or village. As it rained all the time, this left our Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ancestors at a loss as to how to spend their evenings. If they wanted to get out of the house, that realistically meant going into somebody else's house. For this reason, enterprising folk opened rooms in their homes to the public at large and sold drinks to make it worth their while. Visitors were welcome to enter certain rooms of these ‘public houses', but they could not walk into the private part of the house. This boundary was called the ‘bar', because they were barred from going beyond it.

If our history tells us anything it is that Britishness is cultural, not genetic. Aliens from far-off galaxies, if they settled in Ipswich, would be down the pub moaning about the weather in a generation or two.

The Anglo-Saxon invasion contributed only about 5% of the English gene pool. For all that the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons changed England drastically, it was far more an invasion of culture than it was of people. As a result, the operating system of our noosphere became the flexible, adaptable English language. Perhaps this is why we are now so good at absorbing new things.

I accepted the situation philosophically
The act of a hand touching the ground has significance in Buddhism. A demon tried to get the Buddha away from the tree under which he achieved enlightenment by claiming he had no right to be there. The Buddha responded by simply touching the ground. This small act was enough for the spirit of the earth to confirm that the Buddha was exactly where he should be. Touch the ground anywhere and that's where you are.

Einstein said that the space-time continuum had four dimensions. It's often said that the fourth dimension is time, but that's not strictly accurate. Time is not the fourth dimension, but our perception of time is almost like the shadow of the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is a physical dimension like all the others, it's just that we perceive it as the passage of time.

Children always add a random element to proceedings. This is the joy of visiting anywhere as a family.

Land must be an asset that benefits the many, not the few
In the 1910 ‘People's Budget' David Lloyd George famously asked, ‘Who made 10,000 people owners of the land and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?' It's a question that brings to mind the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who said that ‘The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.' Balzac's words are more famously known in the simplified form they take as the epigraph to Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather: 'Behind every great fortune there is a crime'.

Britain still has the most concentrated land ownership in Europe. A third of the UK is owned by 1,200 aristocrats and their families. 36,000 people, or 0.6% of the population, own half of the rural land in England. Despite the widely held belief that Britain is ‘full' and that it is in danger of being ‘concreted over', only 6% of the UK's land use is classed as urban, with 94% rural.

Many places in the world use variations on land-value taxation, including Australia and Denmark. It has been shown to work well, in that it makes the land market more stable and efficient. It is less bureaucratic and it is one of the hardest taxes to avoid, because you can't hide land. It works like this: those who own land pay a yearly tax, which is based on the amount of land they own and not how it is developed. That fee is based on the local market price of land, which would encourage economic growth and land use in the north, where land is cheaper. The idea is to prevent people hoarding land as something to pass down to as yet unborn ancestors, and instead make it available for those who have need of it now, such as young farmers or entrepreneurs.

Looking at our largest landowners, I cannot honestly say that I believe they ‘own' the land they claim in any meaningful way, except legally. I am sure that deep down they recognise this too.

Paul Dacre, ex-editor of the Daily Mail, received £460,000 from the EU between 2011 and 2016 for his ownership of a Scottish grouse-shooting and fishing estate, plus a second estate in Sussex. His readers may turn a blind eye to exploiting European money, but they do not take kindly to those who ‘scrounge' from the British taxpayer.

The few who benefit from our land laws have a disproportionate voice in politics and media.

Betteridge's Law
For any headline that asks a question, the answer is always ‘no'.

Following the passing of the UK Investigatory Powers Act 2016, every person in Britain has each website they visit recorded, along with every phone call and email. This information is available to authorities ranging from the taxman to immigration officers.

You can draw a line across a country and divide it. But not just one line. Keep going and, if you have sufficient imagination, you need never stop. Line after line, divide after divide, split after split: if you do this for long enough you realise that the country isn't being fractured by all those lines you cast on it. It remains whole but is just being perceived from different perspectives. Individuals that you define as being different under one divide are defined as being the same under another. So, are those people the same or different? The answer you choose reveals more about what you are focusing on than about the people themselves.

Sir Names
Ever since Harold went down with an arrow in his eye at Hastings in 1066, no English dynasty has taken the English throne. Following the Norman and Plantagenet dynasties, who came from what is now France, the crown passed to the Welsh Tudors, the Scottish Stuarts, the Dutch William of Orange and the German Hanoverians and Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.

Before the Norman Conquest, English people did not use surnames. Some Saxon nobility followed the Celtic practice of referring to themselves as the ‘son of ' their father. If Bill was the child of Ben, for example, they might be called Bill O'Ben in Irish, Bill ap Ben in Welsh or Bill McBen in Scottish Gaelic.

Lacking land, the names the Saxons used were commonly based on occupations, such as ‘Baker' or ‘Cooper'. In this way, around the thirteenth century, ‘Sir names' evolved into surnames. In the origin of surnames, the English define themselves by what they do, the Celts define themselves by their ancestors, and the nobility define themselves by what they own.

The passage is narrow, and the ceiling is low. It is a reminder of how much smaller people were in the past.

An Anglo-Saxon coronation stone gave Kingston upon Thames its name.

// Love and Let Die // 10.01.23
It takes confidence and maturity to refuse to take ourselves seriously.

Western progress implies that the student will eventually supersede their teacher. In Indian philosophy however, perfection was in the past, so the aim is to recover an awareness of what has been lost.

If it was possible to play hip-hop or techno to the people of the 1930s, their incomprehension of what they were hearing would illustrate starkly how much our daily lives have changed.

The 1944 Education Act was a key part of the post-war progressive roadmap. The Act paved the way for bright children from less wealthy areas to attend more aspirational schools.

In December 1961, the Minister of Health Enoch Powell announced that the oral contraceptive pill would be prescribed via the NHS. This is not perhaps what Powell is best remembered for, but it may be the most significant thing he did.

He had been rich all his life - he just hadn't realised it
The level of support for fascism among the British upper classes in the 1930s is a subject that few aristocratic families want to dwell upon. When examples emerge, they seem shocking - such as the 1933 photograph showing Queen Elizabeth II, at the age of seven, performing a Nazi salute, having been taught to do so by her mother.

It helps the elite maintain their belief in their own superiority if they play sports where they don't have to compete with the working class.

There are truths in that screaming
The Beatles spoke directly to the emotional part of their audience, a part of them that the rest of the world failed to recognise or acknowledge. For teenage girls who owned a portable record player, they could take the singles into the privacy of their own bedroom, where they would be alone with those voices. It was a type of intimacy unknown to earlier generations. They came into the lives of teenage girls with all the force and purity of first love - that period after the heart has opened, but before experience has taught us to build walls around it for our own protection. The love these first fans felt for the Beatles could be almost overwhelming. What real-life boys at school could compete with them? There were four to choose from, which provoked endless conversations and complicated shifting allegiances between groups of friends. When girls got together, they recognised the same depths of feeling in each other, and that recognition acted as a confirmation that what they were feeling was real. This created a feedback loop of escalating emotion, an energy that had to be vented somehow. And so, the screaming started. How could they not scream? No one can keep all that inside.

Yoko was some distance from Lennon's usual 'type', which was blonde, curvy and seductive - the Brigitte Bardot archetype. Perhaps Lennon's meeting with Bardot shortly after his relationship with Ono began was a factor here. Invited to meet her at her hotel, he was so nervous that he took acid beforehand and was unable to speak. Bardot talked to her friends in French instead and John returned home early, calling the meeting a ‘terrible night'.

"If everyone who had a gun just shot themselves there wouldn't be a problem." - George Harrison

Mull of Kintyre is still the bestselling non-charity UK single, and is unlikely to ever lose that title.

For those familiar with the character of Bond from the films, encountering him in the books can be difficult. The films spare you from the interiority of Bond, and the coldness and cruelty of his thoughts are largely missing from the on-screen action. Once you encounter them in print it is hard to see Bond in the same light again.

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson

// Lessons // 14.12.22
The heart of wisdom was not to care too much.

Never exactly carefree
Many people wasted their twenties or their whole lives in offices, on factory floors and in pubs and went nowhere beyond the beaches of southern Europe. So it had been worthwhile to be carefree, live hand to mouth and not be like everyone else. The very point of being young. Whenever he caught himself thinking or saying things like that, he knew it was himself he needed to convince.

To feel ambivalence in such a civilised context was agreeable.

// William Blake vs the World // 28.11.22
The world as we see it is a self-portrait. We not only see with the mind's eye, we smell with the mind's nose and taste with the mind's tongue.

The English Radical Tradition
Because there is much more recorded information about those at the top of society, historians invariably spend more time analysing them. There was a brief historical time when the political views of wider sections of society were recorded. This was a period of a few decades before the English Civil Wars, when censorship broke down and the thoughts and ideas of the poor made it onto the printed record. Although this was over a century before Blake was born, it is striking how many of his ideas are identical to, and seem to originate with, seventeenth-century radicals.

As the historian Christopher Hill has noted, the poor were not stupid, and resentment about the unequal structure of society has existed for centuries. He writes, 'there was a greater background of class hostility in England before 1640 than historians have normally recognized'. Hill's work paints a picture of a recognisably British discontent, never far from the surface, which emerged from a population who saw themselves from 'a very different perspective to how they were imagined by the gentry'. He portrays a people marked by a lack of deference, who were quick to display a distrustful or mocking attitude to the clergy and nobility.

One factor in this was the rise of what were called 'masterless men'. In the hierarchical medieval feudal system, it was assumed that men and women were loyal to the lord who owned the land they lived on. But large parts of the population were becoming increasingly mobile, moving around the country as opportunities for work dictated, and hence had no 'lord' to speak of. Masterless people were not just the traditional vagabonds or gypsies, but included itinerant craftsmen, labourers, actors and performers, traders, pedlars, foresters, the unemployed and demobbed soldiers.

Once freed from rigid social hierarchy, masterless men and women could only look to themselves for guidance. In effect, they were forced to see themselves as their own masters. Many made their way to London where they had more options to make a living. As early as 1602, it was estimated that there were 30,000 masterless men and women in London alone. This was a significant demographic, and their anti-hierarchical worldview would have made an impression on the wider London population. In a population that already had a healthy scepticism of the nobility, such views would not have been overly controversial.

As the country moved towards the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, these attitudes became increasingly widespread. As one account of the life and death of Charles I from 1651 noted: 'The present hatred of the citizens was such unto gentlemen, especially courtiers, that few durst come into the City, or if they did, they were sure to receive affronts and be abused'.

Many British people who were educated about history at school and consume stories of British history through books and television have never heard of the English radical tradition. It sits in the blind spot of establishment media, which is far more enthused about Tudors, Victorians and the Second World War.

When we think of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, what usually comes to mind is high society. Thanks to the novels of Jane Austen and others, and the popularity of TV adaptations, we imagine the era as a time of balls, bonnets and grand houses. We are aware that the Industrial Revolution was occurring at the time, of course, but few find this as fascinating as Austen's world of fashion and labyrinthine social politics. The wider politics of the era, from the clashes of the Whig and Tory parties to the Napoleonic Wars, the growth of colonialism and events such as the Peterloo Massacre, all tend to be secondary in the popular imagination.

Jerusalem
In the introduction to Blake's epic poem Jerusalem he writes, 'The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin: he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviour's kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men! I pretend not to holiness! yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse.'

True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods - these are the types of decisions in which our true politics are expressed.

The Eight-Circuit Model
The eight-circuit model of consciousness is a hypothesis by Timothy Leary. The fifth level is called the neurosomatic circuit and deals with feelings of bliss, pleasure, wellbeing and the recognition of beauty. It involves sensual awareness of the body and is sometimes called the rapture circuit. Logic, purpose and utility become irrelevant in the face of overwhelming aesthetic experience. Importantly, there is a sense of detachment from the worldly concerns of the first four circuits. Our past and future, and our worries and responsibilities, fade away until they seem of little importance. The sense of self produced by the default mode network and other brain structures is dialled down and weakened. This circuit matches what Blake alled Beulah, a state of grace likened to a temporary earthly heaven.

Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) became one of London's leading tourist attractions and its patients were essentially exhibits in a heartless human zoo. There was little concern about how this might impact them, although preachers were banned from visiting on the grounds that their sermons tended to make the inmates madder. This profitable entertainment was eventually stopped in 1770.

Much can be implied from Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel in which God is depicted emerging from or lying upon a strange pink cloud which is an exact, anatomically correct cross section of a human brain. Michelangelo may have been prepared to hint at this idea, but he was wise enough not to state it outright.

Blake enjoyed a level of freedom that modern-day children would find incomprehensible. From the evidence of his later recollections and work, it can appear that, to his innocent child's eyes, unburdened by responsibility, he was free to explore paradise. Britain was at peace between Blake's fifth and seventeenth years, so he grew up believing this was the natural condition of the world.

// Love Your Enemies // 05.09.22
Overhear someone make a snide remark about you? Respond with kindness. Want to say something insulting about people who disagree with you? Take a breath, and show love instead. That sounds great, you may be saying, but what if I don't feel it? It doesn't matter. It is what we do that most often determines how we feel, not the other way around.

There are certain things that happy people do. They get up and move around, get out of the house, engage with other people, and smile.

When people ask, “Are you on my wavelength?” they usually mean it as a metaphor. Uri Hasson's brain imaging shows that this isn't just a metaphor; it's a real physiological phenomenon. You can literally get on the same wavelength as other people by telling a story. The fact that our brain activity moves in lockstep during storytelling is one of the best secrets to deeply understanding others. Unifying leaders, take note. Start your next speech with a personal story.

Reactive people make love a feeling. Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions.

Try to understand another's point of view before offering your own. Never listen only to rebut.

“A difference in politics should never be permitted to enter into social intercourse, or to disturb its friendships, its charities or justice.” - Thomas Jefferson

How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds
We need to bring the information we let into our consciousness more into line with what we can change. If we cannot do anything, it may truly be better not to know.

// Mind & Body: Mental Exercises for Physical Wellbeing // 25.08.22
We largely dwell in suspicion of one another. We are quick to fill with anger and mistrust. We are ready to imagine the darkest things about strangers. Rarely do we surrender to benevolence or smiling tenderness towards our fellow humans.

Pontificating on weighty matters
We are idiots now, we were idiots in the past and we will be idiots in the future. There is no other option for a human.

Cosmic humility
We can gain relief from the thought of the kindly indifference of spatial infinity, where no one will notice and where the wind erodes the rocks in the space between the stars.

Prior to the 1960s, few people in human history had ever thought that having a flat stomach or minuscule thighs was a recipe for beauty. One of the oldest representations of humans, the Venus of Willendorf, routinely emphasised qualities that would be disdained by the magazines of today. Similarly, in classical times people had no problem with a few folds around the midriff, ample thighs, sturdy wrists and flat feet.

We can almost hear the grim laughter down the ages.

// Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence // 05.08.22
Science teaches us that every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it. With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.

I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you've been given. To stop running from whatever you're trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.

Bind Yourself to the Mast
The key to creating effective self-binding is first to acknowledge the loss of voluntariness we experience when under the spell of a powerful compulsion, and to bind ourselves while we still possess the capacity for voluntary choice.

Perceiving children as psychologically fragile is a quintessentially modern concept. In ancient times, children were considered miniature adults, fully formed from birth. For most of Western civilization, children were regarded as innately evil. The job of parents and caregivers was to enforce extreme discipline in order to socialize them to live in the world. It was entirely acceptable to use corporal punishment and fear tactics to get a child to behave. No longer. Today, many parents I see are terrified of doing or saying something that will leave their child with an emotional scar, thereby setting them up, so the thinking goes, for emotional suffering and even mental illness in later life. This notion can be traced to Freud, whose groundbreaking psychoanalytic contribution was that early childhood experiences, even those long forgotten or outside of conscious awareness, can cause lasting psychological damage. Unfortunately, Freud's insight that early childhood trauma can influence adult psychopathology has morphed into the conviction that any and every challenging experience primes us for the psychotherapy couch.

Amusing Ourselves to Death
The reason we're all so miserable may be because we're working so hard to avoid being miserable.

Why do so many of us living in rich nations with abundant material resources nonetheless operate in our daily lives with a scarcity mindset?

Honesty enhances awareness, creates more satisfying relationships, holds us accountable to a more authentic narrative, and strengthens our ability to delay gratification.

Man's Infinite Appetite for Distraction
“The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant, failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.” - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

You might think that religious organizations and other social groups that are more relaxed, with fewer rules and strictures, would attract a larger group of followers. Not so. 'Stricter churches' achieve a larger following and are generally more successful than freewheeling ones because they ferret out free riders and offer more robust 'club goods'.

One of the biggest risk factors for getting addicted to any drug is easy access to that drug. When it's easier to get a drug, we're more likely to try it. In trying it, we're more likely to get addicted to it. The current US opioid epidemic is a tragic and compelling example of this fact. Likewise, decreasing the supply of addictive substances decreases exposure and risk of addiction and related harms. A natural experiment in the last century to test and prove this hypothesis was Prohibition. Prohibition led to a sharp decrease in the number of Americans consuming and becoming addicted to alcohol. Rates of public drunkenness and alcohol-related liver disease decreased by half during this period in the absence of new remedies to treat addiction. There were unintended consequences, of course, such as the creation of a large black market run by criminal gangs. But the positive impact of Prohibition on alcohol consumption and related morbidity is widely underrecognized. The reduced drinking effects of Prohibition persisted through the 1950s. Over the subsequent thirty years, as alcohol became more available again, consumption steadily increased.

// More Honored in the Breach than the Observance // 31.07.22
Horatio:
Is it a custom?

Hamlet:
Ay, marry, is 't.
But to my mind,
though I am native here, And to the manner born,
it is a custom, More honour'd in the breach than the observance.

// Why the West Rules - For Now // 29.07.22
100,000 years ago the West was characterized by relatively advanced technology and even hints of humanity, while the East looked increasingly backward; but when fully modern humans moved out of Africa 60,000 years ago they swept all this away. By the time the last ice age reached its climax 20,000 years ago, “east” and “west” were just directions in which the sun rose and set. Far more united the little bands of humans scattered from Britain to Siberia than divided them. Each band foraged and hunted, roaming over huge areas as plants ripened and animals came and went. Each must have known its territory intimately and have told stories about every rock and tree; each had its own art and traditions, tools and weapons, spirits and demons. And each surely knew that their gods loved them, because they were, in spite of everything, still alive.

Wherever the new humans went, they seem to have wrought havoc. The continents where earlier ape-men had never set foot were teeming with giant game when Homo sapiens arrived. The first humans to enter New Guinea and Australia encountered four-hundred-pound flightless birds and one-ton lizards; by 35,000BCE these were extinct. The finds from Lake Mungo and a few other sites suggest that humans arrived around 60,000BCE , meaning that humans and megafauna coexisted for twenty-five millennia, but some archaeologists dispute the dates, putting humanity's arrival just 40,000 years ago. If they are right, the great beasts disappeared suspiciously quickly after humans arrived. In the Americas, the first human colonists 15,000 years ago met camels, elephants, and huge ground sloths; within 4,000 years these, too, were all extinct. The coincidence between the coming of Homo sapiens and the going of the giant animals is, to say the least, striking.

It is easy to imagine heavily muscled, low-browed Neanderthals watching the quicker, talkative newcomers painting their bodies and building huts, then struggling to repeat these actions with their clumsy fingers, or perhaps trading freshly killed meat for jewelry.

Producing breast milk prevents ovulation
One of the paintings at Chauvet is 30,000 years old, making it one of the earliest traces of modern humans in western Europe.

5,000 years ago, the fact that Portugal, Spain, France, and Britain stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic was a huge geographical disadvantage, meaning that these regions were a very long way from the real action in Mesopotamia and Egypt. By five hundred years ago, however, social development had risen so much that geography changed its meanings. There were new kinds of ships that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, which abruptly made sticking out into the Atlantic a huge plus. It was Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English ships, rather than Egyptian or Iraqi ones, that started sailing to the Americas, China, and Japan.

4,000BCE - the domestication of plants and animals converged in the ox-drawn plow. Nearly 6,000 years would pass before humans added significant new energy sources to this package by harnessing the power of coal and steam in the industrial revolution.

How childishly rewarding is a comprehending audience
If we take a fairly commonsense definition of religion as belief in powerful, supernatural, normally unseen beings who care about humans and expect humans to care about them, this seems to apply to so many societies that some evolutionary psychologists think religion is hardwired into the human brain.

The Silk Road linked China to Rome
The Silk Road was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century.

// Sweetbitter // 25.07.22
Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us; the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We've tamed it, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood.

I was part of a cult that equated beauty with virtue.

That whole afternoon tumbled back to me with a rush of embarrassment. Not at the memory, but at the ease with which whole afternoons were forgotten. The way thousands of wounds and triumphs were whittled down to only the sharpest moments, and even those failed to remain present.

Sometimes my sadness felt so deep it must have been inherited.

// Bittersweet // 22.07.22
"Our heart is restless until it rests in thee." - St. Augustine

"Nature, red in tooth and claw." - Alfred Tennyson, 1850

The Future Starts Here
A.I relies on a human teacher to educate it about which patterns of numbers are desirable and which are not.

To a large extent, the assumption of octopus consciousness has a lot to do with how being watched by an octopus feels considerably creepier than being noticed by a fish.

Average IQ scores increased by 30 points over the past 100 years in a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. Intriguingly, a 2018 Danish study suggests that this went into reverse during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Potential explanations for this reversal have varied but some claim that the nature of intelligence itself has changed in a way that the standardised IQ tests fail to measure.

// The Magic of Reality // 06.07.22
The Earth spins too smoothly to feel the movement, and the air we breathe spins with us. If it didn't, we would feel it as a mighty rushing wind, because we spin at a thousand miles an hour. At least, that is the spin speed at the equator; obviously we spin more slowly as we approach the North or South Pole because the ground we're standing on has less far to go to complete a circuit round the axis.

Light Speed
If you'd looked at the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in 2012, you'd have seen what was happening in 2008.

The light we humans can actually see - the rainbow of visible colours between the slightly ‘higher-pitched' violet and the slightly ‘lower-pitched' red - is a very tiny band in the middle of a huge spectrum ranging from gamma rays at the high-pitched end to radio waves at the low-pitched end. Almost the whole of the spectrum is invisible to our eyes.

A few solid things reflect photons in a very special straight-line way, and we call them mirrors. But most solid things absorb many of the photons and scatter even the ones that they reflect (they don't behave like mirrors). We just see them as having a colour, which depends on which kinds of photons they absorb and which kinds they reflect.

Heavy Weight
Weight is the pull of gravity on your mass. On Earth we can use weight to measure mass because the pull is (more or less) the same everywhere. But because more massive planets have stronger gravity, your weight changes depending which planet you are on, whereas your mass stays the same wherever you are.

The mass of an object depends almost entirely on how many protons and neutrons it has in all its atoms added together. The number of protons in the nucleus of any atom of a particular element is always the same, and is equal to the number of electrons in orbit around the nucleus, although the electrons don't contribute noticeably to the mass because they are too small. A hydrogen atom has only one proton (and one electron). A uranium atom has 92 protons. Lead has 82. Carbon has 6. For every possible number from 1 to 100 (and a few more), there is one and only one element that has that number of protons (and the same number of electrons).

The number of neutrons in an atom's nucleus is less fixed than the number of protons: many elements have different versions, called isotopes, with different numbers of neutrons. For example, there are three isotopes of carbon, called Carbon-12, Carbon-13 and Carbon-14. The numbers refer to the mass of the atom, which is the sum of the protons and neutrons.

Genes are strung out in a definite order, along threads called chromosomes. We humans have forty-six chromosomes.

Thor's day
The Norse peoples of Scandinavia, famous as Viking seafarers, had lots of gods, as the Greeks and Romans did. The name of their chief god was Odin, sometimes called Wotan or Woden, from which we get our ‘Wednesday'. (‘Thursday' comes from another Norse god, Thor, the god of thunder, which he made with his mighty hammer.)

In Oscar Wilde's delightful play The Importance of Being Earnest, an elderly governess called Miss Prism explains how, long ago, she wrote a novel. When she is asked whether it ended happily, she replies: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.'

// The Last 100 Years // 25.06.22
The Italians, who may have had a fascist government but weren't stupid, changed sides in 1943 for one simple reason: they knew that by the middle of 1943 the war in Europe was lost. It was only a matter of time and an awful lot of bloodshed before the war ended, and they really couldn't carry on.

The Normandy landings - aka D-Day, 6th June 1944, delayed by a day because of bad weather - were the beginning of the invasion of Europe by the Allies.

Hitler's army was bound to him by an oath of loyalty, and he was set on going down in flames.

In 1899, when Britain took the 98-year lease on Hong Kong, it was a global superpower, ruthless in its use of force to get its way. China was a basket case. When the lease ran out in 1997, well..., you decide.

// The Wisdom of Carlin // 22.06.22
When the social order discounts the individual in favour of the corporate state, the individual values himself and his fellow humans less.

We have to declare a war on everything; we have a war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on litter, the war on cancer, the war on drugs, but did you ever notice we got no war on homelessness? Huh? No war on homelessness. You know why? There's no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporate swine and the politicians could steal a couple of million dollars each, you'll see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty goddamn quick, I'll guarantee you that!

I know where we can build housing for the homeless: GOLF COURSES!!! Perfect! Golf courses! Just what we need: plenty of good land in nice neighbourhoods, land that is currently being wasted on a meaningless, mindless activity, engaged in primarily by white, well-to-do, male businessmen who use the game to get together to make deals to carve this country up a little finer among themselves. I am getting tired, really getting tired of these golfing c*cksuckers in their green pants, and their yellow pants, and their orange pants, and their precious little hats, and their cute little golf carts! It is time to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless. Golf is an arrogant, elitist game and it takes up entirely too much room in this country.

// Nothing is Harder than Doing Nothing // 14.06.22
"I've always thought that when things are bad they will get better and when things are good they should be enjoyed while they last. Maybe that's where my trademark smile comes from." - Carl Cox

"He is living proof that having such a long and successful career is based on being a genuinely nice person, being filled with sheer talent and coupled with a passion for what he loves. One look at Carl and you can see that success can never be based on hype, ego and diva demands." - John Digweed on Carl Cox

Louis Theroux
Can you imagine anything more divisive, more diabolical, in a way? A virus that preys on the weak and the elderly. Shaving the margins - nudging the herd to turn upon those who are already slow and vulnerable. And the only measures that may help will constrain and sacrifice life in general - punish the young, the vigorous, anyone in the entire rest of the world who isn't old and infirm. As if to put people to the test and ask: you say you value life, but at what cost to the young?

‘Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair'. Milton's line about Satan in Paradise Lost also applies to a lot of rappers.

// 1215 and All That: Magna Carta and King John // 12.06.22
Magna Carta is cited as the cornerstone of the (unwritten) English constitution, and lead to the 1689 Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights confirmed English freedoms such as the right to have a reasonable bail when being tried, freedom from cruel and unusual punishments, and freedom of speech, as well as preventing royal interference with the law.

Today, the doors to the US Supreme Court feature eight panels showing important moments in legal history, one with an angry-looking King John facing a baron, between them being Magna Carta.

By Elizabeth I's time, Magna Carta was so little cared about that William Shakespeare's play King John didn't even mention it. The work mainly attacks John for not standing up to the Pope enough, which at this time of anti-Catholic paranoia was seen as a far bigger crime than a few murders and violations of the law.

John's rule had been a miserable failure. He had made the crucial mistake of alienating the powerful; he was fond of poking fun at any pomposity, which could make him almost seem like a decent man-of-the-people type, if you can overlook the numerous murders. And his personal habits, though strange to his fellows, would make him far more suited to the twenty-first century. He was the first king since classical times to sport a dressing gown, and he shocked court society by regularly taking baths, sometimes once a month, when many people took as many in a lifetime; although most historians are now doubtful of contemporary accounts of him spending the whole morning in bed reading. The one good thing he did do was found a city on the River Mersey in 1207 called Liverpool.

King John passed away at midnight during a whirlwind, finally killed by his gluttony, 'for he could never fill his belly full enough to satisfy him'.

Coeur de Leon
Reconstruction work at Glastonbury Abbey led to the discovery of two bodies, which just happened to be those of Arthur and Guinevere, the sixth-century, nonexistent king and queen of Britain - which was incredibly good luck. Glastonbury Abbey had burned down in 1184 and the monks there were in desperate need of money to finance a new building, so they might not have been entirely honest when they made this miraculous discovery, as there were clear financial incentives toward being associated with the mythical King Arthur. Alongside Arthur and Guinevere was a sword, which Richard I assumed to be Excalibur and took with him. He then swapped it with the dim-witted king of Sicily for four ships and fifteen galleys.

Although Henry II spent only a third of his reign in England, most of it in Normandy, Richard tried to avoid the place altogether if he could help it, complaining that ‘England is cold and always raining.' At one point, he even tried to sell the entire country to the Holy Roman Emperor. Richard also managed to make enemies with almost everyone he met en route to the Holy Land, and this would cost England a king's ransom. Literally. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the holy war, they were very expensive, and the monarch's escapades bankrupted the country and in particular cost the barons dearly. These were among the causes of the rebellion of 1215.

The Third Crusade came about after the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem had been reconquered by the Muslims in 1187.

In the end, Richard I's escapades achieved very little, with Jerusalem still in Muslim hands and the king having never gotten closer than twelve miles away from it, although for centuries mothers in Turkey would warn their children of 'Malik Rik' - a bogeyman figure.

Talk
Informal meetings begun to take a more formalized shape, and in 1236 they were first called ‘Parliament' (literally ‘a talk' in French). This Parliament met four times between 1248 and 1249.

The position of so many foreigners in the English court was exploited by the rebel leader, the not-very-English Simon De Montfort. De Montfort was the hero of the baron's revolt and of Parliamentary rule, but he was perhaps the least sympathetic character of the entire period. His father had led the exceptionally cruel and needlessly violent Albigensian crusade against Cathars in the south of France, and the younger Simon de Montfort had arrived in England at the age of twenty-two, having spent his teens persecuting religious minorities and without a word of English.

There were certainly movements suggesting discontent and figures during the twelfth century who did fight against the rich. At one point, London's poor and disillusioned, of which there were many, were moved to agitation by one ‘William long beard,' a charismatic speaker who 'plotted great wickedness in the name of justice', a conspiracy of the poor against the rich. With his fiery eloquence, he inflamed both the poor and the moderately well-off with a desire for limitless freedom and happiness and with a hatred for the arrogance of the rich and noble which he painted in the blackest colors. At public meetings, he proclaimed himself 'the king of the poor, and their savior', and also called himself the ‘advocate of the people'. At St. Paul's he argued that the rich should bear the burden of financing the Crusades. In those days, of course, the authorities rather looked down on this sort of agitation, and it ended badly for the humble soldier - who was, in reality, a university-educated Anglo-Norman with the embarrassingly aristocratic name William Fitz Osbert, but who chose to play down his origins and instead grew his hair and beard long in tribute to his Saxon ancestry.

The very first ‘Robert Hod' (as he was identified) is mentioned in June 1225 in York, and by the 1260s it had become a sort of nom de plume for rural ne'er-do-wells. The Robin Hood legend was first written down by William Langland in the 1370s, but it was certainly around in the thirteenth century. If there was anyone who it was even loosely based on, he would have probably been active toward the end of Henry III's reign in the 1260s; this was the period after the Second Barons' War when the country was in a state of lawlessness.

By the end of the twelfth century, England had become more prosperous than ever. There were now 150 fairs and 350 markets across the country, church spires were shooting up, wool and tin were big exports, and London was now home to 30,000 people and second city Norwich between 5,000 and 10,000. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw huge economic growth in western Europe, and in England the population tripled in two hundred years, reaching six million in 1300, a figure it wouldn't reach again until the eighteenth century after the devastation of the Black Death. London had also become the center of government by the time of Henry II, with the Treasury moving from Winchester to Westminster in the twelfth century, although there weren't really capital cities as such, as the royal court traveled around with the king and his entourage.

Inventions such as paper (first recorded around 1100), clocks, oil painting, compasses, buttons for clothes, and mirrors appeared. The centre of this burgeoning renaissance was Paris and its university, where between 1179 and 1215 one-third of all students were English.

// 1066 and Before All That: The Battle of Hastings, Anglo-Saxon and Norman England // 10.06.22
While England was being attacked by Vikings in the ninth century, the Danes were also launching raids on Francia - the former Roman province of Gaul, which had been overrun by the Franks when the empire collapsed. The Franks were the most powerful of the barbarian German tribes and their king, Charlemagne, had in AD800 been crowned 'Emperor of the West' by the pope; so started the complicated nonsensical entity called the 'Holy Roman Empire', which lasted until Napoleon's time.

Although the formation of Norway, Sweden and Denmark would ultimately lead to the pacification of Scandinavia, it also made these new Viking armies much larger and stronger than previous ones. And with Æthelred II (known as the Unready), a young and weak king on the throne of England, the Viking raids began again in the 980s, met by Ethelred with incompetence and cowardice.

Sweyn Forkbeard had become king of Denmark in 986 after overthrowing his own father, Harald Bluetooth. The country had only recently been united by Sweyn's grandfather Gorm the Old, described by a German chronicler as a 'savage worm' who tortured Christian missionaries to death. Gorm's son Harald Bluetooth, whose nickname probably reflects his terrible dentistry, made his father turn in his grave by becoming a Christian. Harald was so keen on the new religion he actually converted his father to Christianity, even though Old Gorm was technically dead, and had him reburied in a new church he had built.

The coming of the year 1000 was met with something approaching dread in some quarters, but Old English culture had a strong sense of doommongering at the best of times, which considering events was understandable. (Much of what we know of the Anglo-Saxons comes from their poetry, which would have been played around the fire of great halls accompanied by the six-stringed harp.)

Sweyn Forkbeard (father of king Cnut the Great) had raided England previously. Running out of ideas, in 1012 Ethelred the Unready officially launched the heregeld, or as it became popularly known, Danegeld, formalizing what had been practise since he'd paid off Olaf. The following year, in 1013, Sweyn launched a full-on invasion of England.

Harold Godwinson won an astonishing victory against the Norwegian forces of Harald Hardradahad ('hard ruler') at one of the most decisive battles of the medieval era (The Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire). Unfortunately, it wasn't to be even the most important battle that year. On September 28, the Normans landed in Sussex, and Harold would have heard the news four or five days later, most likely while already heading south with his exhausted army.

Although no one knew it, Stamford Bridge (25 September 1066) represented the end of the Viking age. The losses would have taken Norway a long time to recover from, and as Christianity became more firmly established and Scandinavian states more centralized, the likes of Harald Hardrada became a thing of the past.

So much of the Norman conquest was avoidable if Harold Godwinson had been a bit more cautious.

Normandy (‘land of the North-men')
It's common to refer to the Normans as 'French Vikings', but they weren't that Viking. In their culture and their military tactics the Normans by 1066 were rather like any other Franks; they hardly went near the sea, they fought on horses, spoke French, were deeply Christian and, like the Franks, were also moderate in their drinking compared to the English. Norman chroniclers were frequently disgusted by how much alcohol the English consumed, which is a criticism no Scandinavian would make.

The authorities called it the King's Roll, or the Winchester Book, but the natives, fighting conquest with irony (not very successfully), named it The Domesday Book, as if it was the very day of judgement from the Lord. The book recorded who owned what in 1086, when it was made, and who owned it on the ‘day King Edward lived and died'. The speed in which it was made is seen as proof of how efficient the Anglo-Saxon state was, and it was so extensive that it was last used to settle a land dispute in the early twentieth century.

La Lingua Franca
William I (1028 - 1087), usually known as William the Conqueror and sometimes William the Bastard, had initially tried to learn English and rule in a conciliatory way, but he gave up on the language and after 1070 English no longer appeared on official documents.

Most Anglo-Norman aristocrats grew up in England and were cared for by English nannies and servants, and by the third generation most were marrying English or part-English girls. The barons may have spoken French for official business, but many now conversed in English at home, and all were fluent by the 1170s. Meanwhile, their version of French had become detached from that which was spoken in Paris and had become a subject of mockery.

In 1362 Parliament made English its official language, while in 1399 Henry IV became the first king to have English as his native language since his ancestor Harold II (Harold Godwinson). He opened Parliament by shouting ‘Yes, yes, yes!'. His son, Henry V, would spend his short, spectacular career on a rampage through Normandy, as demented in his confidence in God's support as William I. Henry V, the prototype English soccer hooligan abroad, could barely understand French at all.

French-derived English words sound more flouncy, which is why George Orwell famously advised people to use Anglo-Saxon terms if possible.

Today almost all of the most common English words predate the conquest. The most popular French-derived word is just, ranked at 105.

As one historian said of Henry I (fourth son of William the Conqueror and King of England from 1100 to his death in 1135), "From the moral standpoint he was probably the worst king that has occupied the throne of England". Relentlessly greedy, cruel and sex mad, he was clever enough to keep the Church onside so he could concentrate on his main interests - sex and money. A thickset man with black hair, "a steady gaze and an unfortunate tendency to snore", during his long reign Henry managed to sire between 22 and 25 illegitimate children by up to eight different mistresses, which is to date the English royal record.

Slaves were often poor people who had gone down in the world, or they were native Britons (or as the Saxons called them, ‘Welsh', which means ‘slave' as well as ‘foreigner').

// The Art of Disappearing // 22.05.22
When they say, "Don't I know you?"
say "No".

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone is telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say, "We should get together"
say "Why"?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time. - Naomi Shihab Nye

// Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention // 19.05.22
Every new technology brings with it a panic where people say it'll trash the world, After all, Socrates said writing things down would ruin people's memories.

The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey - which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans - found that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40%, while for women it was down by 29%. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57% of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone. Complex literary fiction is particularly suffering. For the first time in modern history, less than half of Americans read literature for pleasure. It's been less well studied, but there seem to be similar trends in Britain and other countries: between 2008 and 2016 the market for novels fell by 40%. In one single year (2011) paperback fiction sales collapsed by 26%.

Tie yourself to the mast
The you that exists in the present wants to pursue your deeper goals and be a better person. But you know you're fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation. So you bind the future version of you. You narrow your choices. You tie yourself to the mast.

A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same.

I make you angry, you will pay less attention to the quality of the arguments around you, and you will show "decreased depth of processing" - that is, you will think in a shallower, less attentive way. No matter where you start, you end up more crazy.

// Ask A Historian // 15.05.22
The pioneer of History as an intellectual practice is usually said to be the ancient Greek writer Herodotus of Halicarnassus, whose magisterial study of the Greco-Persian Wars, The Histories (which he composed around the year 430 BCE) was the first major text in which a scholar travelled around, gathered a massive bunch of evidence, and then explained how he'd come to his judgements.

The oldest of the Abrahamic faiths (Abraham is the common Hebrew patriarch) is Judaism. Scholars disagree on how old these ideas actually are; the all-important Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Pentateuch) was probably only written down in the sixth century BCE, but there are definitely some elements dating back to the time of Kings David and Solomon, some 3,000 years ago.

Pythagoras was so renowned for his meat aversion that veggies were commonly referred to as ‘Pythagoreans' in Europe and North America until well into the early twentieth century.

Beer is basically liquid bread, and some archaeologists have argued beer was equally, if not more, important than bread as a calorific supply in these early societies.

Le Week-end
English and French differ a fair bit on naming traditions because the old Germanic gods dominate the Anglophonic days of the week - Tiw gets Tuesday, Woden gets Wednesday, Thor gets Thursday, Freya gets Friday - but the French stick with the Roman tradition of: Lundi (Lunar), Mardi (Mars), Mercredi (Mercury), Jeudi (Jupiter), Vendredi (Venus), and Samedi (Saturn). It's only Sunday (Dimanche) where they abandon the pagan polytheism and embrace a Christian idea – Dimanche comes from Dies Domenica, meaning the ‘Day of the Lord'.

The rise of nineteenth-century industrialisation and the changing rhythms of mass labour helped to bring about the creation of a new temporal concept – the weekend – in the early 1900s.

In the mid-1500s, during the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, newfangled coaches began to spread westwards through Europe from Hungary – ‘coach' derives from the Hungarian word kocsi, which itself comes from the Hungarian village of Kocs, where wheelwrights pioneered the sprung-suspension design. The coach made public transport more comfortable and more popular, and horses were the obvious animal to pull them, but it still remained unaffordable to the vast majority of people for a long while.

// Cannabis: Seeing Through the Smoke // 05.05.22
People usually think that the characteristic smell of cannabis is due to its THC content, when in fact it's due to its terpenes. Terpenes are the compounds responsible for the way most plants smell.

The UK is now one of the most backward countries in the world when it comes to medical cannabis. This is despite it being one of the last countries to ban cannabis as a medicine, in 1971.

// Crossroads // 15.04.22
She'd re-entered a mundane world in which it wouldn't be so easy to stay connected with God. For the first time, she understood how a person might actually look forward to Sunday worship in the sanctuary.

Remembering that when he was bathed in God's goodness, it was enough to simply remain in it, experience the joy of it, not think of anything, just be there.

// The Portrait of Mr. W. H. by Oscar Wilde // 30.03.22
"My dear fellow, let me advise you not to waste your time over the sonnets. I am quite serious. After all, what do they tell us about Shakespeare? Simply that he was the slave of beauty." "Well, that is the condition of being an artist", I replied.

// Harlem Shuffle // 19.03.22
No one really cares about other people when you get down to it. Their own struggles are too close up.

Apex Hides the Hurt
He was watching an old black and white movie on the television, the kind of flick where nothing happened unless it happens to strings. Every facial twitch had its own score. Every smile ate up two and a half pages of sheet music.

// The School of Life // 23.02.22
Without ill intention, most people are intermittently jealous, bored, vindictive, keen to prove a point, or distracted by their own lives.

Ideas, however noble, tend to acquire a little help from beauty.

The single greatest enemy of contemporary satisfaction may be the belief in human perfectibility.

// Old Wives' Tales // 01.02.22
An old folk tale tells of a long-married couple, who in their first year of relationship put a coin in a jar beside their bed every time they had sex. After the first year, they took a coin out of the jar every time they had sex. The jar was never empty.

// Four Thousand Weeks // 12.01.22
It's embarrassing to admit what an outsized negative effect minor frustrations have had on my happiness over the years.

Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life is just a process of engaging with problems, giving each one the time it requires. The presence of problems in your life isn't an impediment to a meaningful existence, but the very substance of one.

The human disease is often painful, but as Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it's only unbearable for as long as you're under the impression that there might be a cure. Accept the inevitability of affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.

Fear is part of the deal, and experiencing it won't destroy me.

“You see, I don't mind what happens”
Partway through a lecture delivered in California in the late 1970s, the modern-day spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward and said, almost conspiratorially, “Do you want to know what my secret is?” Almost as one body the audience sat up. People were leaning forward, ears straining to hear, mouths open in hushed anticipation. Krishnamurti said in a soft, almost shy voice, “You see, I don't mind what happens”.

Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed-up. But this is nobody's actual experience. Instead, life accerlates, and everybody grows more impatient. It's somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven - or ten seconds for a slow-loading web pages versus three days to receive the same information by mail.

"We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life, because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think." - Nietzsche

How can you be sure that people feel busy? It's like the line about a vegan: don't worry, they'll tell you.

Most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time - our culture's ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want - because it's scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing depends on cooperating with others.

The more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get.

Does this choice dimish me or enlarge me?
The original Latin word for decide, decider, means to cut off, as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like homicide and suicide. Any finite life - even the best one you could possibly imagine - is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

We tend to feel as though it's our right to have things move at the speed we desire, and the result is we make ourselves miserable - not just because we spend so much time feeling frustrated, but because chivvying the world to move faster is frequently counter-productive. For example, traffic research long ago established that impatient driving behaviour tends to slow you down. The practice of inching toward the car in front while waiting at a traffic light is wholly self-defeating, because once you start moving again you have to accelerate more slowly.

On December 15, 1933, Carl Jung wrote to a correspondent, responding to several questions on the proper conduct of life: “Your questions are unanswerable”, he wrote, “because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single definitive way. If that's what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they will tell you what's what.”

// The Universe in Bite-sized Chunks // 04.01.22
Right now you're breathing in an atmosphere that's 21% oxygen. Even sitting around doing nothing you consume 550 litres of the stuff every day. Over your lifetime that's more than 16 million litres (or 22 tonnes) of oxygen. The trouble is oxygen shouldn't be here. It is a very reactive gas and it quickly combines with other elements in the atmosphere to create new chemical compounds. And yet there's plenty for you - and everyone else - to breathe in. We have other life forms to thank for that. Plants, trees and microbes in the ocean produce oxygen via photosynthesis to replace what's being lost. That makes oxygen a biosignature gas - one that if seen in abundance may indicate the presence of life on a planet.

Today we go about our hectic, modern lives in the digital age largely unaware of the rhythm of the sky. But for ancient civilizations it was the only way of measuring time, and their extensive studies of the movements of the sun and the stars form the basis of how we organize our lives today.

In physics, a field is an area over which a force operates. The Earth has a gravitational field for example. Its strength varies over the Earth's surface - it is stronger over mountains and weaker above valleys.

We need dark matter to explain why we don't see enough gravity in galaxies to account for the speed of their stars. So we've invented invisible stuff to make up for the shortfall. But what if we don't really understand gravity properly?

How do you get from something as loosely bound as a molecular cloud to something compact enough to fuse hydrogen into helium (the hallmark of a star)? You tip the balance in favour of gravity.

The Big Bang vs. Steady State model
We know that the universe isn't expanding in the sense that galaxies are surging outwards through space into some previously unoccupied area. Instead, it's the space between galaxies that is stretching.

Hubble showed us that the universe is expanding. A universe expanding today was smaller yesterday, so it is natural to think that it must have been very small in the distant past. This tallied well with earlier work by Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaître in the 1920s. They'd used the equations of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity to argue that the universe has expanded over time from an initial compact state. We can use the rate at which the universe is getting bigger - Hubble's constant - to work backwards and calculate when the expansion started. The modern answer we get is 13.8 billion years ago. Watch the expansion in reverse and you would see everything getting closer and closer together. If you follow general relativity to the letter, all of space(time) ends up concentrated in a singularity - the same infinitely small, infinitely dense point it predicts sits at the centre of a black hole. The concepts of both space and time break down at a singularity. Together these clues suggest that time and space began around 13.8 billion years ago when an incredibly small, hot point exploded outwards. Astronomers call this event the Big Bang. The universe it created has been expanding and cooling ever since.

Our Solar System


All other planets (besides Earth) are named after Roman gods. Uranus is the only one with a Greek name.

To be classified as a planet you need to directly orbit the sun.

The sun will continue getting brighter and hotter, until in a billion years the temperature on Earth will rise well beyond 100 degrees Celsius. Our planet will become a scorched and sterilized rock, its oceans boiled away. The sun - the giver of life - will ultimately be its exterminator.

It takes Mercury - the smallest planet in the solar system - just 88 days to orbit the sun. One Mercurian day lasts nearly 59 Earth days.

Venus is the closest planet to us, and is often called ‘Earth's twin', but the only real similarity is size - Venus is 95% the diameter of the Earth. The planet's quirkiest feature is that its day is longer than its year. That may sound utterly perverse given that we live on a planet where days are significantly shorter than years. Yet Venus's slow rotation means it takes 243 Earth days to spin once on its axis. It only takes 225 days to orbit the sun. It is also the only planet to spin clockwise. It's very unlikely Venus started out like this. Perhaps a collision with a large object knocked it over to spin upside down with a much slower rotation rate.

There's no getting away from it: Venus is a horrid place. It's enshrouded in thick layers of carbon dioxide laced with sulphuric acid. This heaving atmosphere traps immense amounts of heat from the sun and presses down on the surface with an atmospheric pressure 93 times that of Earth's. Anyone foolish enough to venture down there would be simultaneously baked, crushed and dissolved. Despite not being the closest planet to the sun, these cloud decks make Venus the solar system's hottest planet. Thanks to an intense greenhouse effect, temperatures there can rise nearly 40 degrees higher than on Mercury.

Our moon is an oddball. When you compare all the moons in the solar system to their planets, the Earth-moon relationship is way out in front when it comes to size. The moon's diameter is nearly 28% that of Earth's. The next nearest is Neptune's largest moon, Triton, which is only 5% as wide as its host. We have the fifth-largest moon in the solar system, but we're only the fifth-largest planet.

We have a better map of the Martian surface than we do of the ocean floor here on Earth.

A Jovian day is less than 10 hours long. The swiftness of its spin also means Jupiter is noticeably fatter at the equator than the poles.

The nearest star to the Earth after the sun (Proxima Centauri) sits about 40 trillion kilometres away - or 4.2 light years. For closer objects you can use light hours, light minutes or even light seconds. Pluto, for example, is 5.3 light hours from the Earth. The sun is 8.3 light minutes away, and the moon just 1.3 light seconds.

Our Galaxy
The stars in the the Milky Way are rotating around the centre anticlockwise - that's in the same direction the planets orbit the sun (except Venus). It takes the sun approximately 220 million years to complete one lap of the Milky Way, a period astronomers call a cosmic year.

The Andromeda galaxy is the closest major galaxy to our own Milky Way. It contains a trillion stars, yet still looks like nothing more than a passing wisp of cloud. This is due to its incredible distance from us - a staggering 2.5 million light years. Even though light travels at 300,000 kilometres a second, it still takes light 2.5 million years to trek all the way here from Andromeda. It's no wonder we can barely see it. When you look at Andromeda, you are seeing light that is 2.5 million years old. Modern humans weren't even on this planet when the light arriving here today originally set off. Instead, our ancestors, primates known as Australopithecus, were just starting to fashion stones into the first primitive tools at the dawn of the Stone Age.

Light
The next time you feel sunlight on your face, take a moment as you bathe in light that is up to a million years old to think about the colossal journey that energy has been on from the core of the sun.

Every second, the sun fuses 620 million tonnes of hydrogen into 616 million tonnes of helium. The missing 4 million tonnes is converted into sunshine.

If you could follow the path of an individual light particle (photon), you would have to wait between 100,000 and a million years to see it emerge from the crazy, pinball machine environment of the radiative zone. You often hear people say that the light we see from the sun is eight minutes old because that's its journey time from the sun to the Earth. That's the travel time from the edge of the sun, but the light isn't created at the edge but in the core. By the time the light reaches our eyes it is already over 100,000 years old.

Your bathroom taps have been lying to you your entire life. Every day we wash our hands and brush our teeth confronted by a sink that insists red is hot and blue is cold. Really it is the other way around. And you don't need to look at the stars to see it. The hottest flames, such as those produced by a blowtorch, are blue. A normal, open flame is yellow. Only when a fire starts to cool down and die out does it then glow red. Stars are not on fire, but the principle is the same. By looking at a star's colour we can tell how hot it is. The coolest stars are red, with surface temperatures around 3,000K (Kelvin; to convert to degrees Celsius subtract 273). Yellow stars sit somewhere in the middle with surface temperatures of 6,000K. The hottest stars, which appear blue, can reach temperatures of 50,000K.

The Doppler effect with sound is something very familiar. As an ambulance speeds towards you its siren has one pitch, but as it hurtles past its sound very clearly changes. That's because the sound waves are being bunched up as the ambulance approaches, then stretched out as it moves away. Light also behaves as a wave, except it isn't the pitch that changes: it's the colour. Light sources moving away from us appear redder (redshift), approaching sources turn bluer (blueshift).

If a light source is moving away from you, its light waves will be stretched out and its spectral lines - that black barcode pattern - will shift towards the red end of the colour spectrum. The lines of an approaching object are shifted towards the blue end. The more they shift, the faster the object is moving.

Exoplanets
Finding planets around other stars - called exoplanets - is no easy task. Let's flip our perspective and imagine there's an alien civilization out there trying to see if the sun has any potentially habitable planets. For starters, the sun is a million times bigger than the Earth. It also shines with a fierce light, whereas the Earth creates no natural illumination of its own. The problem is compounded when you realize that the nearest they could be searching from is the closest star to us after the sun. That's Proxima Centauri some 40 trillion kilometres (4.2 light years) away. Searching for alien planets is akin to looking for a small, dark needle in a giant, blinding haystack placed so far away you can barely see the haystack let alone the needle.

Usually what goes up must come down. Unless, that is, you launch something upwards incredibly fast. If you could jump off the ground at eleven kilometres per second you would get away from Earth's gravity before it could pull you back down. This escape velocity is what rocket scientists must achieve if they want to get their payloads into orbit. The more massive and compact an object, the higher its escape velocity.

The Elbow Room, The Dive Inn
The iron in your blood and the oxygen it helps carry around your body were made inside massive stars by fusion and then blasted across the universe by a supernova.

We came from space: The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood were forged in the heart of dying stars and blasted across space by mighty supernova. By venturing into space we're only going back home.

// Time: 10 Things You Should Know // 15.12.21
The first minute hand didn't appear on a clock until 1680, with the second hand following a decade later. This system of time was based on the sky. The gap been sunrises became a day, which was divided into hours, minutes, and seconds (the last two were originally called first minutes and second minutes, which we now call seconds). Days were collected together into blocks of seven, called weeks - one for each of the seven celestial objects they could see moving in the sky. A month - or moonth - is how long it takes for the moon to wax and wane through its cycle of phases.

The first film was recorded in 1888, a 2.1 second-long-snippet of Roundhay Park in Leeds, England. A year later, Benjamin Harrison became the first US president to have his voice recorded in a 36 second clip. The first photograph takes us back to 1826, when Joseph Nicephore Niepce snapped the view out of an upstairs window at his home in Burgundy, France.

// Long Way Home: A Memoir of Fame, Family, and Redemption // 10.12.21
Shooting coke takes me to another planet. What's wrong with the one I'm on? At this point, I couldn't tell you. I'm not living an examined life. I don't know why I don't want to face reality. I'm not sure why I don't want to challenge myself. Am I afraid of success? Am I afraid of discovering my limitations?

I make new mental connections and have psychological epiphanies.

The true solitude of prison is less about the number of people around you than the knowledge that anyone could be an adversary and nobody's coming to save you.

Dr. Kaminski talks about planning for the past, instead of planning for the future. He means making decisions based on how you'll look back on them. I want to look back on this time and have good memories. I'm trying to enjoy the moment.

These are the ups and downs of life, which I insulated myself from during all those years of addiction.

// Brand Stamp // 29.10.21
Remembering that politicians work for us leaves us nonplussed! Rather, they act and we treat them like our masters. Instead of saying, "Hey! Sort these bins out", or "Fix these roads", we're more likely to think, "They're watching me". "They're going to lock me up", or even, "They're going to kill me". - Rusty Rockets

// Hangover Square // 20.10.21
By his excesses, he put his companions in countenance*, making their own excesses seem small in comparison. Your hangover was never so stupendous as Mickey's, nor your deeds the night before so preposterous. The follies of each individual were forgotten, submerged in his supreme Folly; by his own disgrace he brought Grace to others. For this reason, if he tried to live soberly, and in the desperation of his self-inflicted illness he was sometimes forced to do this, his friends at once revealed their cold dislike of his change of front, and by combined chafing and indirect bullying soon forced him to return to the character in which he was of such service to them.

* in an assured condition or aspect; free from shame or dismay.

// George Monbiot // 01.10.21
When politicians have achieved elected office by scaring the living daylights out of the electorate, they correctly perceive an outbreak of peace as a threat to their interests. Journalists support them partly because they celebrate power regardless of its complexion and partly because war makes better copy than peace.

Reproduction among prosperous people has a demonstrable impact on the welfare of others. Thanks to the depletion of resources and the effects of climate change, every child born to the rich deprives children elsewhere of the means of survival.

// Who Owns England? // 14.09.21
The UK as a whole is some 60 million acres, so if it were shared out equally among the current population, we'd have almost an acre each. To help visualise what that means, it's worth bearing in mind that Parliament Square covers roughly an acre.

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.

The Crown Estate gets more rental income from Apple's flagship store on Regent Street than it does from its entire agricultural estate.

Once, when asked to give advice to young entrepreneurs on how they could succeed in modern Britain, the now-deceased 6th Duke of Westminster had some sage words: "Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror".

The Dukes of Westminster family name, Grosvenor, derives from Hugh Le Grand Veneur, the ‘great huntsman' of King William's court. Disgruntled commoners took to calling the portly Hugh the ‘fat huntsman', or ‘gros veneur', and the nickname stuck.

LORD: How dare you come on my land, sir?
POACHER: Your land! How do you make that out?
L: Because I inherited it from my father.
P: And pray, how did he come by it?
L: It descended to him from his ancestors.
P: But tell me how they came by it?
L: Why, they fought for it and won it, of course.
P (taking off his coat): Then I'll fight you for it.

In his memoirs, Tony Blair castigates himself for being a ‘naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop' for introducing FOI, and considers it one of his greatest mistakes. He may have been forgetting about some things.

// The Book of Trespass // 13.09.21
You don't inherit the land from your ancestors, you borrow it from your children.

“Any friend of mine walks where he likes in this country, or I'll want to know the reason why.” - Mr Badger, The Wind in the Willows

Slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery.

When slavery was finally abolished in 1833, the slavers received a total of £20 million from the British taxpayer, estimated as anything between £87 billion and £500 billion in today's money. The slaves, of course, received nothing, and as part of the deal had to stay exactly where they were and work unpaid ‘apprenticeships' for four years after their supposed release.

The English were not always so bewitched by their 'betters'
The aristocracy seems to be a form of cosplay for hereditary landowners, a subculture of adults titillated by their own fancy dress.

Those who share the aristocratic empty workless day are labelled not aesthetes, but idle benefit scroungers, who bleed England of its wealth.

When Prince Edward married, he was honoured with an earl ship and decided to ‘style' himself Earl of Wessex, a region that no longer exists but that was inspired by his admiration for a character invented by Tom Stoppard for the film Shakespeare in Love.

It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title 'count' was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic 'earl' precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt.

The Peasants' Revolt Of 1381
At long last the aristocracy had what they had always feared: an organised network of sedition.

The relatively recent fad for human rights.

In February 2017, Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail for references on account of it being ‘generally unreliable'.

The historian Benedict Anderson suggests that the concept of nation took on a new strength with the proliferation of the printing press. The printed word led to a standardisation of language that grouped people together under the pretence that a shared language represented a shared ideology. National newspapers became the principal conveyors of this ideology, a daily affirmation of nationhood: 'The newspaper reader is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. Fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.'

‘It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition,' wrote Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany, ‘that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be moulded until they clothe ideas and disguise.'

VIPS, or VRichPs
If you haven't paid for it then you're almost certainly not allowed to do it.

It exemplifies the kind of sly rhetoric that turns waiting into loitering, and walking into trespassing, fusing a moral judgement of the act into the act itself.

// Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature // 26.08.21
The truth is always multiple! The greatest wisdom sees both sides!

Allegory is an old Greek synonym for 'speaking other', and it operates as a kind of literary code where one thing covertly represents another.

Master Kong
The Chinese novel was invented in the 1300s, many centuries before its European counterpart. Its reputed inventor was the playwright Luo Guanzhong, a semi-legendary character who styled himself 'the playboy of the seas'. In the last days of Kublai Khan's golden empire, or possibly in the first days of the million-man-army Ming dynasty, Luo paused his playboy ways to author Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a mythic-historical novel about the rise of the dynasties of Shu Han, Cao Wei, and Eastern Wu. And at roughly the same time that Luo was composing Romance, another author (possibly Luo's teacher or maybe even Luo himself) was crafting the second classic Chinese novel, Outlaws of the Marsh, which recounts how a gang of outlaws repent their crimes to join forces with the rightful emperor.

Hamlet was one of the first plays to be performed at the Globe, the sky-open theater constructed in 1599 from salvaged timbers by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, upon the bog-reed wilds of London's southern entertainment district.

Only a few months before Galileo built his star-seer, Johannes Kepler had finished writing New Astronomy, an enormous book that attempted to prove that the earth was orbiting at great speed round the sun. Kepler was very earnest about this proof and could show you intricate mathematics to back it. But, of course, that only proved how useless mathematics was.

The Italian Renaissance (or as it was then known, the Rinascita)
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Rinascita had burst forth with buoyant light, dispelling the 'dark ages' with the love songs of Petrarch, the metalworks of Donatello, and the vanishing-point portraits of Masaccio. And for the next century or so, the possibilities for Italy's future seemed limitless: Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa's infectious smile; Michelangelo frescoed the Sistine Chapel with a sky of bluest blue. But during Straparola's final years, that blue-sky hope evaporated. French cannonballs battered the five castles of Naples. Swiss mercenaries overran the walled groves of Milan. Spanish cavalry trampled the prized vineyards of Venice. Gallic archers used da Vinci's masterpieces for target practice. Rome was sacked. Turin was captured. Florence was besieged. By the winter of 1553, Italy was bleak with despair. The Rinascita was over.

1848 became the great change that wasn't: the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.

The prescription of bed rest for shell shock dated all the way back to Silas Weir Mitchell. Mitchell had served as a physician during the American Civil War, where he'd noticed soldiers become wildly agitated by combat. Such soldiers, Mitchell would later opine, had suffered 'nerve wounds' that made them 'hysterical'. Hysterical was a medical term derived from hystera, the ancient Greek for uterus, and, in the view of Silas Weir Mitchell, a man suffering from combat trauma might as well have had a uterus. Such a man was as fragile, nervous, and overemotional as the 'weaker sex', so there could only be one cure for him. Like a woman who'd read too many books, he needed a long stay in bed.

In the short term, laughing at ourselves releases feel-good neuro-opioids and drops our blood level of cortisol, diminishing stress. And in the long-term, laughing at ourselves reduces anxiety, nurtures emotional resilience, and helps us bond with other people.

// Mentors // 23.08.21
Who would I be if I lived by the Maharishi's blunt edict: 'Don't do what you know to be wrong, do what you know to be right'?

Those who quickly see that no material thing will ever make them feel whole, but that the invisible world is humming with love and they are able to connect to it.

She is still too young to conceive of ‘under the bed' but I bet that as soon as she conceptualizes it, there will be a monster there. Fear fills new territories of awareness. It is the same with me, I learn of new spaces and I fill them with fear.

Anyone who's been to school knows that mass education can be pretty inconsistent and the average harried educator has too many bureaucratic and financial burdens to mindfully endow more than a handful of pupils with the elixir of mentorship.

// The People of the Abyss // 16.08.21
The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer. They are made dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by right of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it. The public house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner and between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men. Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness and debauchery.

When I asked him what he lived for, he immediately answered, “Booze.” A voyage to sea (for a man must live and get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and the big drunk at the end. After that, haphazard little drunks, sponged in the pubs from mates with a few coppers left, like myself, and when sponging was played out another trip to sea and a repetition of the beastly cycle.

“The King! the King! God save the King!” Everybody has gone mad. The contagion is sweeping me off my feet - I, too, want to shout, “The King! God save the King!” Ragged men about me, tears in their eyes, are tossing up their hats and crying ecstatically, “Bless 'em! Bless 'em! Bless 'em!” See, there he is, in that wondrous golden coach, the great crown flashing on his head, the woman in white beside him likewise crowned. And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it is all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland. This I cannot succeed in doing, and it is better so. I much prefer to believe that all this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo foolery has come from fairyland, than to believe it the performance of sane and sensible people who have mastered matter and solved the secrets of the stars. - Jack London on the Coronation of Edward VII (aka Bertie)

"A soldier is ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, but is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing." - George Bernard Shaw

It is the way of the world that when one man feeds another, he is that man's master.

// Impulse Control // 13.08.21
I do wonder what greater achievements, what deeper relationships, could have been had without a lifelong relationship with drugs or alcohol. It's obvious to wonder at the what-ifs of the fatalities; I wonder at the what-ifs of those who still function year in and year out. That's why I am so thankful that my life had stopped functioning by 1990. What cruel descent awaited me for the rest of my days as a recreational abuser? It probably would have been worse than death, a kind of nonlife of unmet expectations, promises unfulfilled, in terms of both my own potential and being the man I wanted to be for those I love. It would have been a slow slide into a smothering malaise of mediocrity and diminishing returns. I'm not sure my addictions would have ever killed me; I wasn't that type. But it easily could have been even more tragic; I would have died on the inside - Rob Lowe.

// The Headless Way // 29.07.21
Light leaves the sun, and eight minutes later gets to your body, which absorbs a part of it. The rest bounces off in all directions, and some of it reaches my eye, passing through the lens and forming an inverted picture of you on the screen at the back of my eyeball. This picture sets up chemical changes in a light-sensitive substance there, and these changes disturb the cells (they are tiny living creatures) of which the screen is built. They pass on their agitation to other, very elongated cells; and these, in turn, to cells in a certain region of my brain. It is only when this terminus is reached, and the molecules and atoms and particles of these brain-cells are affected, that I see you or anything else. And the same is true of the other senses; I neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor feel anything at all until the converging stimuli actually arrive, after the most drastic changes and delays, at this centre. It is only at this terminus, this moment and place of all arrivals at the Grand Central Station of my Here-Now, that the whole traffic system - what I call my universe - springs into existence. For me, this is the time and place of all creation.

No wonder that seeing 'It' (which is not other than consciously being It) is such a bare and austere and even sombre experience. The fact that it comes across as “non-religious” and “devoid of emotion”, as “prosaic and non-glorious” is evidence of its authenticity. “Here is nothing painted in bright colours; all is grey and extremely unobtrusive and unattractive.”

// The Prince of Whales // 28.07.21
In 1707 (Queen Anne), the Acts of Union abolished the Kingdom of England (which included Wales) and the Kingdom of Scotland - and their respective parliaments - to create a unified Kingdom of Great Britain, with a single parliament.

The Battle of Culloden (1746, Scotland) was the last large-scale pitched (pre-arranged) battle fought on British soil. It was the final confrontation of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and was fought between 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' (Charles Stuart - the eldest son of James Stuart, the exiled Stuart claimant to the British throne) and Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, son of British monarch George II. The battle lasted only an hour, with the Jacobites suffering a bloody defeat.

In 1807, the United Kingdom government banned the slave trade.

// I've Got News For You // 24.07.21
It's a sledge, she's a guy, he's a ghost.

Can you keep a secret? So can I.

// Dead Famous // 22.07.21
Actors play roles. Stars play themselves.

'The public sphere' is an appetite for shared experiences and a sense of belonging to a community. Celebrities help us belong; they glue us together. They're the show ponies that we gather to judge en masse.

During the 1600s, pamphlets, posters and ballads spread both the news and rumours. The world's first weekly newspaper was published in Strasbourg, Germany in 1605. The first true newspaper published in Britain was the Oxford Gazette, which was published in 1665. The first daily newspaper - The Daily Courant - was first published in London in 1702. By the 1720, 24 newspapers were being published. Newspaper readership wasn't large at this stage, maybe a few thousand copies per title. Photographs didn't grace the pages of most newspapers until the end of the 1800s. (Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450.)

Cartes de Visite
Organised sport is very modern, and the sharing of its joyous highs and lows was so much harder until radio and television came along. Even sports journalism only got up-and-running in the early 1800s, mostly for horseracing and boxing, and only became widely read in the late 1800s.

The 1890s were a strange time of cultural crisis in the Western world. New technology - most notably the speed of the telegraph machine - had hugely increased the pace of modern life, and psychologists were busily diagnosing patients with a novel nervous disease called neurasthenia (nicknamed 'Americanitis') that supposedly made strong, virile men weak and depressed. There was apparently too much information, travelling too fast, and people's brains couldn't handle it.

Andy Warhol
‘Don't pay attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.'

'I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In 15 minutes, everybody will be famous.”'

"Music is the One True Rapture" - Ben Jonson(1572-1637)
Music stars existed initially in opera, and then later in variety, music hall, and jazz, but pop music is a mid-20th century innovation, built on the technological platforms of the phonograph, radio, and jukebox. Pop requires both recording and reproduction technology. Until music could be recorded, live performance was everything. Famous songs were much more available than famous singers. Between 1900 and 1910, at least 100 different songs sold a million copies in America, but as printed sheet music, not audio. Until the phonograph got a stranglehold on the market - just after the First World War - home entertainment involved bashing the tune out on your own piano.

// The Noble Eightfold Path // 16.07.21
Right Understanding
Right Thought
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

// To Be Continued... // 09.07.21
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
- George Gordon, Lord Byron

Pinegrove - Old Friends
But when I thought I was getting better,
I woke up on the ground,
An appointment, oh disappointment,
A set back, another comedown,
As if I needed a reminder.

How come every outcome is such a comedown?

// A Million Years in a Day // 04.07.21
Humans (is that the right categorisation?) have eaten meat for millions of years, and at some point between 400,000 and 1.9 million years ago (the debate hasn't quite settled on when exactly), our ancestors worked out how to control fire and thereby cook their dinners, which in turn better released calorific energy in their food, and prompted the development of bigger human brains.

Not only does fire warm the body, but cooking chemically unlocks the extra calories in meat to boost the body's resistance to the chill, and speeds-up digestion. What's more, cooking the food didn't just make it tastier and more nutritious, it also softened the tough fibres that were challenging to the jaw strength of gummy infants and the toothless elderly.

Focus is the Latin word for hearth, and the fireplace has been the pulsing organ of commonality for many millennia.

Pigs were first domesticated in the Middle East around 9,000 years ago. They were particularly easy to rear because they eat basically anything, don't require verdant pastures, produce big litters, and gain an extraordinary 2lb in weight each day until they reach adulthood. Other animals require greater effort, but also produce milk and fur/wool in recompense.

Food - One (Huge) Meal a Day
The customary service a la francaise created a majestic scene for the diners, in which the hor d'oeuvres - which weren't initially appetizers but side dishes (hor d'oeuvres meaning ‘outside the works') - flanked the perimeter edges, while the various main dishes were placed in the table's centre. The rubric varied, but really lavish feasts aimed to serve 12 times as many dishes as they were guests, meaning that larger tables could groan beneath the gargantuan array of hundreds of individual bowls, so not all were served at exactly the same time. The first course was usually soups into tureens; the second featured meats, fishes, vegetables and sweet desserts - essentially all the things we consider worthy of a complete meal today - and then the tablecloth was lifted off to reveal a fresh one underneath, before the third and final course of cheeses, fruits and yet more desserts were brought out. ('Dessert' derives from de-served, meaning the table was cleaned first.) To plough through this vast ocean of grub took literally hours, swelled the belly, wasted a bin-load of ingredients and inevitably lead the food to swiftly turn cold, but it was a theatrical style of banqueting that trumpeted the host's enormous generosity. Conversely, the more modern service a la russe - in which the cutlery was pre-laid and each course came out separately - caught on quickly in high society, and was accepted custom by the 1880s. How so? Well, the practicalities helped: food was now served hot rather than lukewarm, and the meal was done in a mere 90 minutes, rather than being a grueling 4-hour endurance event.

Drink - Alcohol
Alcohol is basically just fermented sugar. There are more calories in a gram of ethanol than in a gram of protein or carbohydrate.

Alcohol gets its name from 'al-kohl', Arabic for a black powder produced by the chemical sublimation of anatomy. That, on first glance, is a bit of a weird etymology, because booze isn't made of heavy metals and most Muslims don't drink alcohol anyway. What's more, the word ‘alcohol' didn't even refer to a recreational drink until the 1700s. So what's going on there, then? It all stems from the alluringly strange story of alchemy, a mediaeval intellectual movement that blended science, religion and philosophy in the pursuit of higher knowledge and vaguely magical powers. Most alchemists were hunting the elixir of eternal youth, or the Philosopher's Stone, and - despite their doubtless intellect - their experiments might seem ludicrous to modern eyes. Take for example the Italian aristocrat Bernado de Treviso who wasted his fortune and much of his life trying to transform lead into gold by smearing it in a disgusting mixture of vinegar, chicken eggs and horse dung. Yet despite such inevitable failures, alchemical research wasn't entirely pointless - it gave the world alcoholic spirits. It wasn't technically a mediaeval discovery. The ancient Greeks had already been distilling liquid 2,000 years beforehand, and more recently mediaeval Arab scholars have done it with wine, but when these European amateur wizard's first witness such experiments, they were immediately spellbound and dubbed it aqua ardens (burning water), because it would ignite under a naked flame. But that wasn't it's only baffling characteristic, as it also evaporated in sunlight, had a profoundly powerful effect on body and mind, and stopped food from rotting. Across Europe, rumours soon spread among learned chin-strokers of this newly found quintessence - the fifth element - to join water, air, fire and earth. If this miracle substance could preserve food, then perhaps it preserved life too? The 13th century Spanish alchemist and physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova was one of the first to distil wine into brandy and snappily named it ‘aqua vitae' - the water of life. With such a catchy hook, it's understandable how spirits was soon adopted by the medical community as a hard-hitting panacea. Alas, aqua vitae didn't prove to be very effective.

Philopotes
A philopotes was the Greek word for a ‘drink lover', yet it wasn't a euphemistic insult for a problem alcoholic, but a positive endorsement of a person's attitude to life. Male drinking parties, called symposia, were cheerfully boozy but they weren't raucous orgies - the focus was on philosophical discussion and, much like modern middle-class dinner parties, these wine-lubricated gatherings with fraught with perilous etiquette traps. Even the drinking vessel (kylix), a wide-brimmed bowl with two handles, was unnervingly tricky to bring to the lips without splashing wine down one's chin, forcing the holder to drink slowly. It could also be decorated with a glaring human eye, as a reminder that society was watching very closely.

The great mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan, said: 'A soldier must not get drunk more often than once a week. It would, of course, be better if he did not get drunk at all, but one should not expect the impossible.' Genghis achieved military feats so vast, and killed so many people, that the forests regrew on all the abandoned farmland and CO2 levels dropped by 700 million tonnes - yet even a man who could reverse global warming couldn't stop his soldiers getting tipsy.

As a man, Columbus himself is certainly not deserving of heroic status in the USA. He never set foot in North America and pretty much laid the groundwork for the incalculable horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, which just makes the existence of Columbus Day seem like a bad taste joke.

// Big Data // 25.06.21
Ever tried talking to a research psychologist about measuring happiness? The way you ask gets very different answers indeed. Asking about life satisfaction gives you the impression that having children is the best path to a happy life. Asking about moment-to-moment mood tells you the opposite.

Malthus assumed that human population would grow exponentially, while food production would grow in a linear fashion, adding the same quantity every year. But Malthus didn't factor in any of the improvements in food production that have allowed production to outstrip population growth while using less of the Earth's surface. In the last 50 years alone, the land area needed to grow a fixed amount of food has fallen by 2/3.

// Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality // 05.06.21
The modern approach to understanding the world emerged in Europe in the 1600s. There were partial anticipations earlier, and elsewhere, but the constellation of breakthroughs known as the Scientific Revolution provided inspiring examples of what could be achieved by human minds creatively engaged with the physical world. The methods and attitudes that led to those breakthroughs gave clear models for future exploration. With that impetus, science as we know it began.

Outer plenty is what we sense intuitively when, on a clear night, we look up at a starry sky. We feel, with no need for careful analysis, that the universe has distances vastly larger than our human bodies, and larger than any distance we are ever likely to travel.

What then is time?
Saint Augustine, a very powerful thinker, articulated a common feeling of puzzlement: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Time is what clocks measure, and everything that changes is a clock.

Two other manifestations of time are central to human experience. One is its role in music. In playing music together, or in dancing or singing, we rely on our expectation that everyone involved will stay in sync. While that experience is so familiar that we tend to take it for granted, it provides convincing evidence that we share, with high accuracy, a common notion of the passage of time. Another manifestation of time, perhaps the most important of all for humans, relates to life history. Almost all babies develop on roughly the same schedule, beginning to walk, talk, and achieve other milestones after a certain number of months (or days or weeks). People grow in height, reach puberty, thrive, and decline according to predictable patterns, closely connected to the number of years they've lived. Each of us is a clock, albeit one that's hard to read accurately.

Clocks run slower near Earth's surface, where its gravitational field is stronger.

The nearest star - Proxima Centauri - is a little over four light-years away.

Planets around stars other than our own Sun are called 'exoplanets'.

"In truth, there are only atoms and the void." - Democritus
Atoms can combine together into bigger units - molecules - following the rules of quantum theory and the laws of electrodynamics. We say that the atoms are joined by chemical bonds to make a molecule.

The most important and remarkable point about our trinity of properties - mass, charge, and spin - is simply that there are so few of them. For any elementary particle, once you've specified the magnitude of those three things, together with its position and velocity, you've described it completely. How different it is for the objects of everyday life! Objects we commonly encounter have all kinds of properties: sizes, shapes, colors, smells, tastes, and many others.

"I am large, I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely. - Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Many animals inhabit a distinct sensory universe from humans. We share the physical world with them, but we experience it quite differently, not only at the level of intellect, but even at the level of raw perception. Dogs and many other mammals live in a parallel universe dominated by smells. Dogs' noses are chemical laboratories, confronting incoming molecules with three hundred million receptors, compared to six million for humans. And a large portion - about 20% - of a dog's brain processes the result, compared with less than 1% for humans. Bats navigate in the absence of light by sending out extremely high-pitched sounds - ultrasound - and analyzing the (ultra)sounds that bounce back. Human ears are deaf to ultrasound. They cannot be used for fine navigation, because the wavelength of humanly audible sound is too large. People have a poor sense of where the sounds they hear originate, in general. Spiders construct sensory nets of another kind. Their webs are not only traps, but signaling devices, whose vibrations indicate the presence and position of prey. Vision is our main portal to the external world, considering both how much information it gathers and how much of our brain - anywhere from 20% to 50%, depending on how you count - is devoted to processing that information. Yet even here, our sampling of the external world is paltry relative to what's out there. Human vision samples the state of the electromagnetic field. But it samples only the radiation that happens to impinge on our pupils. Further, it is sensitive only to radiation within a narrow range of wavelengths, from about 350 to 700 nanometers (that is, around half a millionth of a meter, or a few hundred-thousandths of an inch). This defines 'visible light'.

"If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting." - Herbert George (H.G) Wells

// Drug Use for Grown-Ups // 20.04.21
"If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on." - Terence McKenna

Liberty - and by extension freedom - is virtually impossible without responsibility. I am a responsible person by most traditional measures. As a responsible person, I must be cognizant of the consequences of my actions on people and the environment. If my actions hinder others from exercising their freedoms, then it is incumbent upon me to alter my behavior. Responsible people make such adjustments. But being responsible isn't easy. Responsibility requires a considerable amount of self-inspection and a healthy sense of respect for fellow humans. It takes a tremendous amount of ongoing work. Grown-ups put in the work because it affords us liberty; it entitles me to live my life according to my own values.

Lipid Soluble (Able to enter the brain more rapidly)
The faster a drug gets into the brain, the more immediate and intense its effects will be.

Someone was so kind as to offer me a drink. “That's mighty American of you,” I said, “but I must decline because it's not my drug of choice.”

Neuropsychopharmacology
“To reduce demand would be to have God redesign the human brain to change the way cocaine reacts with certain neurons.” - Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Frank Gawin (June 16, 1986)

To be addicted, a person must be distressed by their drug use. In addition, the individual's drug use must interfere with important life functions, such as parenting, work, and intimate relationships. This use must take up a great deal of time and mental energy and must persist in the face of repeated attempts to stop or cut back. Other symptoms that the person may experience include needing more of the drug to get the same effect (tolerance) and suffering withdrawal symptoms if use suddenly ceases.

A Priori (Ahead of Time)
A correlation or link between factors does not necessarily mean that one factor is the cause of another. For example, there is a strong correlation between the number of umbrellas put up and the amount of precipitation, but it would be foolish to conclude that putting up umbrellas causes rainfall. One of the standard logical fallacies taught in logic classes is, After this, therefore because of this.

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” - Albert Einstein

21 Over 18
The Eighteenth Amendment took effect on January 17, 1920. It would take almost a decade and a half - and the belief that alcohol-tax revenue would lower income taxes - before reason prevailed. On December 5 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, making it the only one ever to be repealed.

// Paperwork // 10.04.21
In August, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, what remained of the war was paperwork.

Having spent all that time looking at Citizen Kane rushes in his editing days, Wise knew the dramatic effect of sets with ceilings. - Robert Mitcham

Treasure Island
I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze over-head, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night, and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.

Killing of the Unicorn
It's no coincidence that Beauty and the Beast was written by a woman. (Beauty and the Beast was written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740.)

Scarface
She was the sort of girl that immediately and unconsciously made a young man ambitious for more intimate acquaintance, and an old man regretful for his age.

// Your Symphony of Selves // 01.04.21
Unless people accept that they have multiple selves, they will experience anxiety over their inconsistencies. By becoming aware of our internal conflicts, we can release the mental energy we have been using for repression, work out some internal negotiations, and use the released energy in our lives.

Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, and you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness. And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There's nothing that corresponds to the sense that there's an unchanging self.

Far from making you crazy, talking to yourself in the third person actually makes you smarter, more imaginative, and more confident.

It is much better to work at keeping the wrong self off centre stage than it is to try to get it to not do what it always does or wants to do.

In any given interaction, we can never be sure of the part that we are actually playing - all we can do is show up and be fully who we are.

// Lonely Boy // 28.03.21
"The way I lived my life back then - and for a good few years afterwards - was that I was just in a place, and whatever happened was just another experience."

"I used to think that rock stars fell from the sky. In real life they probably came off stage at Top of the Pops, took their gear off and went home to watch TV like everyone else." - Steve Jones

// Look On My Works Ye Mighty & Despair! // 21.03.21
‘Men who've got their shit together' would be a great porn category. - Rose Matefeo

People from LA love David Lynch.

Last Go Round
The thrill doesn't come free, we all know that. Everybody has to pay the merry-go-round man with something; and the more you relish the ride, the more you have to pay.

// Ozymandias // 18.03.21
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

// This Be The Verse // 16.03.21
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself. - Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)

// How the Mind Works // 15.03.21
Epistemology is the analysis of how we know.

There is nothing common about common sense. This is a well-known fact among robot makers.

If the mind has a complex innate structure, that does not mean that learning is unimportant. Framing the issue in such a way that innate structure and learning are pitted against each other, either as alternatives or, almost as bad, as complementary ingredients or interacting forces, is a colossal mistake. It's not that the claim that there is an interaction between innate structure and learning (or between hereditary and environment, nature and nurture, biology and culture) is literally wrong. Rather, it falls into the category of ideas that are so bad they are not even wrong.

People don't selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favourable in the environment in which we evolved. Our goals are sub goals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends.

// Objection: Speculation // 01.03.21
"Once on a summer afternoon, as I watched the young men wandering among the ranges of slag heaps outside Airdrie, I was foolish enough to wonder how it was that no sage or Mahatma had ever risen among them, for they seemed to me to have nothing to do but think." - Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey, 1935

The Scarlet Pimpernel
As for breaking his word, the very thought is preposterous!

Odd's fish! (A favourite exclamation of Charles II. It was a corruption of "God's Flesh".)

Ireland: England's first colony.

Love can only be known by its absence.

Green Dolphin Street
The moment of balance he was looking for, the instant of perfect pitch, was becoming harder to find each day. Once there had been a time when two martinis at noon had made him feel like a king; not only that, but the feeling had lasted, with a glass of wine here or there, for two to 3 hours, even sometimes until the evening scotch. In that mood, he could see all his troubles for what they were - insolent, negligible - and he could live off the feeling of reassurance. Now it was almost impossible to prescribe the mixture, or the volume, that would liberate that powerful sensation; and on the rare occasion that he found it, it seemed to last only a few minutes.

// Chasing the Light // 22.02.21
Time will never go quite that patiently again, nor will people postpone their gratification to see a movie.

Every filmmaker knows, no matter how hard you've tried, it makes no difference whether someone likes it or doesn't like it, as long as they see it and are talking about it. This is the role of 'Did you see?'

I understood Norman Mailer's directive on writing: We are governed by a secret pact to do it each day, to store and carry the residue of the previous day into our unconscious, to sleep on it, and then continue that mindset through the next day. It's a rhythm you don't break, and if you do, you wasted your preparation, never to be regained the same way.

I always felt a certain kinship in his dancing eyes for the madness of this life.

I grew to know my father far more gradually than my mother, as fathers often wait to confide in their sons.

Many of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors waited like kings until they aged before they either married or bore children.

I cringe when I see a new 70inch giant smart screen (made more for news and sporting events), replaying a film at thirty frames per second instead of twenty-four frames, which is the speed at which we make the film, and which can be easily corrected, though it never is, through the controls on the TV.

// High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery // 01.02.21
We're too afraid of drugs and of what we think they do. Our current drug policies are based largely on fiction and misinformation. Pharmacology - or actual drug effects - plays little of a role when policies are devised. As such, we have been bamboozled to believe that cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, or some other drug du jour is so dangerous that any possession or use of it should not be tolerated and deserves to be severely punished.

One of the most fundamental lessons of science is that a correlation or link between factors does not necessarily mean that one factor is the cause of another. This important principle, sadly, has rarely informed drug policy.

The opposite of empirical evidence is anecdotal information, which cannot tell us whether the stories told are outliers or are ordinary cases. Many people rely on personal anecdotes about drug experiences to try to understand what drugs do or don't do, as if they are representative cases or scientific data. They are not.

Experienced users tend to take drugs in ways that get them to the brain quickly, that is, by smoking or intravenous injection. Because smoking and shooting drugs intravenously produce more potent effects, the likelihood of harmful consequences is increased with these methods. Alternatively, taking a drug by mouth is usually safer than other ways of consuming drugs for two reasons: (1) the stomach can be pumped in case of an overdose, which isn't possible with smoked or injection overdoses; and (2) some of the drug will be broken down before reaching the brain, resulting in fewer drug effects.

Growing up, the worst thing of all was to look foolish or uncool: it was best to stay quiet unless you were absolutely sure you were right. Being strong and silent meant that you never looked stupid. Even if I didn't care much then about being seen as smart by teachers, I certainly cared about not looking dumb, especially in front of friends. Always, I had to be cool.

// A Room With a View // 31.01.21
Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much.

“Come this way immediately,” commanded Cecil, who always felt that he must lead women, though knew not whither, and protect them, though he knew not against what.

Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

At the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better - a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have used them most.

Like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality.

“You will never go up,” said his father. “You and I, dear boy, will lie at peace in the earth that bore us, and our names will disappear as surely as our work survives.”

// I Used To // 22.01.21
Do you like Jack Kerouac's work? I used to. - Frank Skinner

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac's work: It's not writing but typing.

// The Making of a Philosopher // 17.01.21
Philosophy consists of a bunch of meaningless questions. Given that these questions make no sense, they obviously have no satisfactory answers. Philosophical questions are like the 'question' of why colorless green ideas sleep furiously, or how tall no one is, or what becomes of a number if you immerse it in cold water. These are just not proper, well-formed questions; they merely have the grammatical form of questions.

In philosophy it seems that every generation repudiates the supposed insights of the previous generation, so that there is no cumulative body of philosophical knowledge that everyone can agree on.

It is always a damning moment when one philosopher says to another, “Hang on, that doesn't really follow.” Since philosophy is largely about the construction of arguments, the philosopher needs to be finely tuned to what follows from what. “Non sequitur” is the ultimate put-down. P. F. Strawson once stingingly said of an argument of Kant's that it was, “a non sequitur of numbing grossness”.

There is always something more pressing to do
Just as a dog cannot be expected to solve the problems about space and time and the speed of light that it took a brain like Einstein's to solve, so maybe the human species cannot be expected to understand how the universe contains mind and matter in combination. Isn't it really a preposterous over-confidence on our part to think that our species - so recent, so contingent, so limited in many ways - can nevertheless unlock every secret of the natural world? As Socrates always maintained, it is the wise man who knows his own ignorance.

Mathematicians struggled for centuries to prove Fermat's last theorem, finding it peculiarly recalcitrant, knocking their heads against a brick wall. Then one of them, through hard work and ingenuity, actually came up with the required proof, and everyone agreed that it was right. Problem solved! It would be wonderful if something similar could be done with a longstanding philosophical problem - the mind-body problem or the problem of free will. Some ingenious individual finally figures out the correct solution, by hard work and ingenuity, and everyone else agrees that it is indeed correct. But if I am right, this isn't going to happen. That is rather depressing.

As Bertrand Russell pointed out in The Problems of Philosophy in 1914, the value of philosophy does not lie in the acquisition of what he called 'positive knowledge' - as the value of science does - but rather in enlarging the imaginative scope of our minds and in appreciating that ignorance is part of the human condition.

Naive Realism
We no more really perceive physical objects than the sun really rises or the earth is really flat - these are just naive illusions. What we perceive is inside us, not outside, as we naively think.

It is, as philosophers say, a disposition of objects to produce experiences in perceivers. But that is not to say that all properties of objects are similarly mind-dependent. The shapes and sizes of objects are not mind-dependent in the same way at all: If Martians see as small and square objects that we correctly see as big and round, then they see them wrongly; we can't both be right about the shape and size of something if we see it quite differently. Shape and size are objective features of things, while color has a subjective nature. Thus philosophers traditionally distinguish between the objective, mind-independent 'primary qualities' of things, and the subjective, mind-dependent 'secondary qualities' of things.

Determinism
If all human action is determined by the laws of nature, so that every decision has its antecedent cause, how is it possible for the human will to be free?

A cornerstone of Sartre's philosophy is that man is radically free, and I had only lately concluded that free will is an illusion.

// Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness // 10.01.21
It is good scientific practice to go with the theory that is simple and elegant rather than the theory that preserves common sense. Those who follow this dictum with rigorous objectivity and with a mind free from bias will be led, I believe, to panpsychism.

We treat other humans not as objects but as sentient centers of value and purpose. We feel their presence when in close proximity, and we instinctively interpret their actions as flowing from their individual agency. Imagine if children were raised to experience trees and plants in the same way, to see the movement of a plant toward the light as expressing its own desire and conscious drive for life, to accept the tree as an individual locus of sentience.

My individual conscious mind will unravel and cease to be at the moment of bodily death. But one essential component of my mind - formless consciousness which is the backdrop to all of my experiences - does not cease to be. Hindus place great emphasis on meditation and good conduct as the key to realizing one's identity with formless consciousness and thus avoiding an endless cycle of pointless rebirths. But if we assume that the doctrines of karma and rebirth are false, then at death each of us collapses eternally back into formless consciousness as a matter of course. Enlightenment is guaranteed!

Cosmic Alienation
In the early twentieth century, Max Weber wrote of the “disenchantment” of nature caused by modernity and the rise of capitalism. In a religious or traditional worldview, the universe is filled with meaning and purpose; as Weber put it, "The world remained a great magical garden". The modern scientific worldview, in contrast, seems to present us with an immense universe entirely devoid of meaning, in which human beings are a tiny and painfully temporary accident. This can lead to a sense of alienation. We seem to have nothing in common with the universe, no real home within it. The 'big picture' story of the universe is one of insentient and meaningless physical processes, from which we are a senseless aberration. In the absence of a place in the universe, we have only consumerism and the endless quest for economic growth to make sense of our lives. This problem of 'cosmic alienation' has grown worse as society has become more globalized.

When one is embedded in a traditional society, ignorant of the plurality of social forms across the globe, the conditioned meanings of one's society seem to define the cosmos. One lives not in a meaningless universe but in a world with sense and purpose. However, globalized markets have eroded many traditional forms of life; international chain stores have conquered the centers of communities; advertising now fills all corners of public space. Where local beauty is preserved, it is only as a quaint museum piece for globe-trotting tourists. Even the mere awareness of a plurality of cultural forms can lead to alienation, by making it plain that one's own social and moral norms are not timeless realities but contingent choices of history. Traditional ways of life come to be seen as empty of meaning, leading to relativism or even nihilism.

It is perhaps no surprise that nationalism is once again on the rise, as people grasp after something probably lost forever. Without the meaningful structures once given by traditional society, we are left with nothing but mechanistic nature and the meaningless abyss of empty space. Panpsychism offers a way of 're-enchanting' the universe. On the panpsychist view, the universe is like us; we belong in it. We need not live exclusively in the human realm, ever more diluted by globalization and consumerist capitalism. We can live in nature, in the universe.

Schrödinger's Cat
Schrödinger's cat is the thought experiment of the pioneer of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, who the Schrödinger equation is named after. The poor cat is trapped in a box with a vial of poison and a small amount of radioactive substance. If the radioactive substance decays, the vial of poison will smash and the cat will die. If the radioactive substance doesn't decay, the cat will be saved. While the box is closed and the system unobserved, Schrödinger's equation rules the roost, with the result that the radioactive substance exists in a superposition of both decaying and not decaying, from which it follows that the cat is in a superposition of being both alive and dead. But as soon as the box is opened, the collapse postulate kicks in, ensuring that the superposition transforms into a definite value leaving the radioactive substance either decayed or not decayed and the cat either definitely alive or definitely dead.

The basic idea of 'quantum dualism' as we might call it, is that it is the interaction of the nonphysical mind with the physical world that causes the change from the peculiar governance of the Schrödinger equation to the familiar governance of the collapse postulate. Schrödinger's cat exists in the indeterminate state of being both alive and dead only when there is no conscious mind interacting with the interior of the box via conscious observation. As soon as a human mind interacts with the relevant properties of the system, the superposition of being alive and dead is transformed into a definitely living or a definitely dead cat. If there are conscious minds interacting with the physical world, then ascribing a fundamental role to observation is perfectly intelligible.

In virtue of resolving the superposition
David Chalmers once remarked, “If you wanted a scientific theory that makes room for the conscious mind to play a fundamental role, you couldn't hope for something better than quantum mechanics.”

So long as science is equated with physical science it will be subject to the following limitations: It will be unable to account for consciousness, as the qualitative reality of consciousness cannot be captured in the quantitative language of physical science. It will be confined to telling us what matter does, remaining silent on its intrinsic nature.

The Problem of Intrinsic Natures
Physical science restricts itself to providing information about the behavior of the things it talks about - particles, fields, spacetime - and tells us nothing about their intrinsic natures. But imagine you have a chess piece on a board. You may know what the chess piece does, how it behaves; if it's a bishop, let's say, it moves diagonally. But there must be more to the nature of the chess piece than what it does. There must be some way the chess piece is in and of itself, independent of its behavior. It may, for example, be made of wood or plastic. When we ask how the chess piece is in and of itself, we are asking about its intrinsic nature. Similarly for the electron, independently of what it does in relation to other particles, there must be some way the electron is in and of itself. And yet physics leaves us completely in the dark about the intrinsic nature of the electron. This is referred to as 'the problem of intrinsic natures'.

Free-Falling Objects
Galileo asks us to assume that Aristotle is correct: heavier objects fall to the ground faster than lighter objects. Now imagine we drop two objects from a great height; for the sake of vividness let's use an elephant and a bowling ball. Galileo added another crucial detail to the thought experiment: before we drop the elephant and the bowling ball, we chain them together. Now ask the following question: Would the elephant fall faster in this situation than it would have done if it weren't chained to the bowling ball? In other words, does the fact that the elephant is chained to the bowling ball slow the elephant down or speed it up? The genius of Galileo was that he realized, through pure rational reflection, that assuming Aristotle's physics, this question has two contradictory answers.

Algorithms
Alan Turing laid the ground for modern computing by rigorously formulating the notion of 'computation', and testing through logical arguments its potential as well as its limits. Very roughly, a task is computable if it is possible to specify a sequence of instructions that will result in the completion of the task when carried out by some machine. We call the set of instructions an algorithm.

One of most famous concepts in artificial intelligence is what has become known as the Turing Test. Originally known as the Imitation Game, this was Turing's test for the capacity of a machine to demonstrate intelligent behavior. Turing imagined a person - the interrogator - addressing a series of questions to two collocutors hidden from sight in an adjacent room, one of whom is another person and one of whom is a machine. The aim of the game is to work out which is which. To pass the test, the machine would have to fool 70% of judges during a five-minute conversation. Turing predicted that by the end of the twentieth century there would be machines able to pass this test with ease. Turing's prediction was not borne out. Despite occasional media hype to the contrary, no computer has ever passed the Turing Test.

Proud to follow in the great tradition of Descartes, Keynes, and Churchill, of working in bed.

As the philosopher Wittgenstein said, explanations come to an end somewhere. Explanation has to come to an end somewhere.

// The Happiness Hypothesis // 02.01.21
"Set your heart on doing good. Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy. A fool is happy until his mischief turns against him. And a good man may suffer until his goodness flowers." - Buddha

"If passion drives, let reason hold the reins." - Benjamin Franklin

"It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one's own faults." - Buddha

"Why do you see the speck in your neighbour's eye, but do not see the log in your own? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour's eye." - New Testament

"It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly and justly, and it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly and justly without living pleasantly." - Epicurus

// House Don // 31.12.20
Get to the end of the year without regret; the end of the day, the hour.*

* A semicolon is used to link independent clauses in a single sentence that are closely related in thought.

Parents' job is to work themselves out of a job.

// Definitely needs his hard drive checking // 26.12.20
A lie is told for the benefit of the addresser. A white lie is told for the benefit of the addressee.

// History of the World // 18.12.20
Just as Siddhartha was provoked by the turbulence of northern India, and the Jewish prophets were stirred by the experience of war and exile, without the violence and the feuding, Kongzi (Confucius) would never have been driven to become a teacher.

Kongzi's version of 'the golden rule' sounds very much like Christ's: Deal with the common people as though you were officiating at an important sacrifice. // Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself.

As a religious figure, Jesus has claimed perhaps around a third of the world's believers, as against a fifth to a quarter who are Muslim.

In the year 800, the world was led by two great cultures, the Chinese and the Muslim. From then until the Renaissance, a span of some six centuries, Europe was a comparative backwater. There, tribal groups who had migrated from Asia, and scattered people once ruled by the Romans, slowly came together, first into feudal kingdoms ruled by families, then into nations with fixed territories and (usually) languages.

A Pyrrhic Victory (Pyrrhus famously declared, Another such victory, and we shall be lost)
The four main Crusades that aimed to recapture Jerusalem and the ‘Holy Land' of Palestine from the Muslim Arabs, began as an attempt by the papacy to rally Europeans and bolster the authority of Rome. Though some Middle Eastern land was captured and held for generations, and though the call to war against the Heathen inspired mass devotion, their brutality and the resulting death-toll rendered the Crusades a failure. They poisoned the atmosphere fatally and semi-permanently between the two biggest Abrahamic faiths, and conclusively demonstrated that Constantine's embracing of Jesus of Nazareth had corrupted his message: the Cross of suffering, pity and forgiveness emblazoned on the pennants of invading knights made no sense.

Queen Elizabeth turned a blind eye to piracy, and when the heroic Devon rascal Francis Drake made the journey around South America and into Peruvian waters to steal gold and silver from the Spanish (who had, after all, stolen it from the Incas), Elizabeth's own share was enough to pay off England's entire foreign debt.

The sweet taste of sugared tea in the mouth, the satisfying smack of rum on the lips, the soft feeling of a fresh cotton shirt, the calming exhalation of good tobacco smoke - these were the intense physical pleasures that allowed generations of Europeans to avert their eyes from the slave economy on which they depended. Even with television and the other modern communication media, it remains very easy to enjoy a slickly designed computer tablet, a line of cocaine or bright throwaway clothing without thinking too hard about how they come to be so cheaply available.

When we see recreations of the villages of Jane Austen's England, or Enlightenment Edinburgh, or the American towns of the Revolutionary era, the film-makers will generally have left out one thing that would have stood out a mile - the crowds of pustule and scar covered people, their eyes squeezed shut by the mutilations of smallpox, wretched beyond description.

The word vaccine comes from the Latin for ‘cow', and was first used to treat cowpox.

Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age ran from the 1550s through to the early nineteenth century, with particular freezes in the 1650s and late 1700s.

Venice started as a loose collection of muddy islands used as sanctuaries by refugees during the late Roman wars, then developed into a vigorous, aggressive republic whose galleys and sailboats were intimately connected with the Muslim-dominated trading world, taking spices, slaves, salt, fur, iron and timber between the Christian kingdoms and the caliphates.

When the Mongol khanates gave central Asia a century or so of peace, they opened up a window into a centuries-long wall of mutual ignorance between China and the Mediterranean.

Another of Genghis's grandchildren, the greatest of them all, Kublai Khan, had won a war of succession and was now ruler of what we might call the Chinese end of the family firm. From the 1250s he had been digging deeper into Chinese territory, building his first capital at Shangdu (Xanadu), and from 1266 creating a huge new court complex at Beijing.

Death or Glory
Had the imperialists lost much earlier, then perhaps Britain today would not be a post-manufacturing, post-industrial nation overdependent on the financial services that are the last vestige of imperial stretch. She would certainly have experienced far less mass immigration and would have a shorter record of involvement in overseas wars.

Gas-lighting, so important to making early-industrial city life safer and the days longer, got a major boost in Britain because of the massive accumulation of unwanted musket barrels after Napoleon's defeat in 1815, which were turned into gas pipes.

Stalin is the second most lethal mass killer of modern times. The first is Mao, the third, Hitler.

Four modern wars between Frenchmen and Germans: the Napoleonic, the Franco-Prussian, and the two world wars.

Quiet supporters of the Confederate cause included most of the Conservative and aristocratic right in Great Britain, Napoleon III in France, and the monarchical party in Spain. Lincoln's war changed America; and therefore changed the modern world.

// Homes & Experiences // 17.12.20
To be released from that inchoate, stupid compulsion to regard every to-even-the-mildest-degree-gregarious interaction with a remotely attractive person as a potential romantic opportunity and suffer consequent disappointment when it didn't transpire to be one, felt good.

A psychological reliance on alcohol to deal with stressful situations.

The lyrics evoked themes of generational anger at difficult to identify oppressors.

// Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging // 10.12.20
If you want to make a society work, don't keep underscoring the places where you're different, underscore your shared humanity.

Belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs.

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything: Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction. This fundamental lack of connectedness allows people to act in trivial but incredibly selfish ways. Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. “It's a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you're in it alone, that there isn't a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared. It's the embodiment of every man for himself.”

Jobs that are directly observable to the public, like construction, tend to be less respected and less well paid than jobs that happen behind closed doors, like real estate or finance. And yet it is exactly these jobs that provide society's immediate physical needs. Construction workers are more important to everyday life than stockbrokers and yet are far lower down the social and financial ladder.

There was a period during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 when a bumper sticker that read 'No blood for oil' started appearing on American cars. Implicit in the slogan was the assumption that the Iraq War was over oil, but the central irony of putting such a message on a machine that runs on oil seemed lost on most people. There is virtually no source of oil that does not incur enormous damage to either the local population or the environment, and driving a car means that you're unavoidably contributing to that damage.

Sick Leave - Siegfried Sassoon, who was wounded in World War I:
In bitter safety I awake,
unfriended,
And while the dawn begins with slashing rain,
I think of the Battalion in the mud.

// History of Britain // 20.11.20
The Kingdom of Great Britain came into being on 1 May 1707. The Treaty of Union, stating that England (including Wales) and Scotland were to be "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain", was a genuine attempt to bind two ancient kingdoms that had a long history of enmity, but which also had much in common.

Altough Anne did not give birth to a successor, her reign does mark the true birth of a modern nation. In 1707 she became the first monarch to rule over the constitutionally united realms of England, Wales and Scotland – or as it became known, Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament, after a ruinous attempt at creating an empire in central America, had bankrupted the country. It accepted London's bail-out terms and dissolved itself, thereby creating a single British Parliament.

George II himself led an army of British and Hanoverian troops at Dettingen in 1743, the last British monarch to command in battle.

Pax Romana
When the Spanish soldier Hadrian donned the imperial purple in AD 117, he inherited a vast Empire that sprawled from southern Scotland to Mesopotamia. An experienced military strategist, he believed that much of the Empire was indefensible and wanted borders that could be held. Hadrian visited Britain in AD 122 when, "He set many things right and drew a wall along a length of 130km to separate barbarians and Romans". Hadrian's Wall was to become the largest symbol of Roman power in Britain.

The Roman obsession with cleanliness had a significant impact on the urban landscape of Roman Britain. Bathing was an essential social and fitness activity for the members of the Roman establishmen.

The example of the Romano-British missionary Patrick in spreading the faith in Ireland in the later 5th century was crucial. Patrick created the template for later saints to follow by founding monasteries, as at Armagh, to act as centres of Christian example, and by facing down the magic of the Irish druids.

The year 410 is traditionally held to mark the end of Roman Britain. There was, however, no sudden withdrawal of legions on that date. Roman strength in Britain had been seeping away for years. Rather, 410 marks the year that barbarian invaders knew that they could assault southern Britain with total impunity.

Pax Britannica
Northumbria gave England its first historian in the shape of Bede, who finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People there in the 730s.

The Anglo Saxons kings worshipped the gods of Germanic and Scandinavian homelands. Only the days of the week, named after Saxon gods Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frige, serve as a reminder of this brief period of pagan belief in England.

Alfred of Wessex is rightly remembered as a champion of learning who established abbeys and schools, invited scholars from other lands to his court, and successfully put himself back through school as an adult. However, his motives were not merely altruistic. Thanks to the imported Welsh cleric and biographer Asser, Alfred's place in history was secured. We know far more about Alfred and his achievements than any other Dark Age prince. Alfred's Book of Dooms (or laws) not only made sense of the separate legal customs of his Mercian, Kentish and Wessex subjects, but reinforced his position as overlord of southern Britain.

Before his death in 899, Alfred, the only English monarch known as Great, had recaptured London and added the lands of West Mercia and Kent to his realm. Perhaps Alfred's greatest victory lay in aligning the cause of Wessex with a wider burgeoning sense of ‘Englishness'.

Danish warships were first mentioned in the AngloSaxon Chronicle in 787. Within a few years, the British and Irish Isles were bearing the brunt of ‘the fury of the Northmen' as the Vikings burst out of their Scandinavian homelands to plunder throughout Europe.

Henry I was the first Norman king born in England (in 1068) and the first to speak English. His father was William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, who had invaded England in 1066. During his long reign, the sharp differences between English and Norman society began to abate. By marrying Edith of Scotland, who carried the bloodline of the Saxon kings, Henry merged the old and new dynasties of England.

In 1603, the Earl of Monmouth carried the news of Elizabeth's death to James VI in Edinburgh in less than sixty hours, riding at breakneck speed, and his time was not improved upon until the early 19th century.

After 1603, English Catholics were especially fearful of their zealously Protestant monarch from Scotland. There were several Catholic plots to assassinate James before the famous Gunpwder Plot (1605) to blow up the Palace of Westminster while the king and the Protestant nobility attended the opening of Parliament. Catholics had been suspected of disloyalty since the Reformation, and after 1605, the celebration of the plot's failure indissolubly linked Catholicism with treason in the Protestant public's mind.

Many British radicals, bitterly disappointed by the Cromwellian junta and then the restoration of the Stuarts, emigrated to the American colonies.

Excesses of the capitalist system
Marx dreamt of "common ownership of the means or production and exchange".

The period between the Restoration (1660, when Charles II returned from exile in Europe) and the Napoleonic wars witnessed unprecedented change in the British landscape. The rising population and rising prices encouraged 17th century landowners to adopt new farming practices, often modelled on Dutch innovations.

The one incontestable fact about the demography of early modern Britain is that many more people were living on the island in 1700 compared to 1500. Most of these additional people were English. By 1650, the population in Wales had probably struggled back to its pre-plague levels of around 350,000. That of Scotland was less than one and a half million by the same period, but many inhabitants lived in the Gaelic hinterland beyond the reach of the Scottish state. The population of England at the Restoration was about five million. More than half a million of these people were squashed into the burgeoning capital, ten times more than had lived in London in the reign of the early Tudors. Not only had England's population increased, it had significantly outpaced that of the ‘Celtic' margins.

In 1700, coal was a domestic fuel in the houses of the rich. By 1850, it was the staple of British industrial might and annual extraction rates had tripled from four to twelve million tonnes.

Thanks to innovative technology, an abundant supply of coal, cheap pig iron (also known as crude iron - an intermediate product of the production of steel) and rising demand in its domestic and colonial markets, Britain raced ahead of its European competitors. In the 1820s, British coal extraction was nine times that of France, Germany, Russia and Belgium combined. In 1851, the urban population exceeded the rural for the first time in British history and many of those town dwellers lived in the shadow of a colliery winding-wheel or a mill chimney-stack. Industry was also helped by the prevailing ‘laissez-faire' attitude of Whig and Tory governments, who were loathe to interfere in industrial matters. As a result, British products dominated the world's markets.

Tory come from the Irish Gaelic word for an outlaw.

The Great Exhibition took place in Hyde Park and only lasted for six months (from 1 May to 15 October 1851) before the Crystal Palace was dismantled and re-erected at Sydenham Hill, but in that brief period it attracted over six million paying visitors. The profits provided the foundation for a series of public works such as the Albert Hall and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The exhibition also provided a focus for British pride and the term ‘Victorian' began to be used to express national confidence and contentment.

The Victorian Age was one of the most publicly devout in British history. In England, this was in large part due to the influence of Evangelical Anglicans who roused their Church from its 18th century torpor and encouraged it to take a more vigorous role in the life of the nation.

Canals: the great transport breakthrough of the pre-railway age
Railways were a powerful unifying force throughout Britain. They established one shared national time and provided reliable distribution for all kinds of commercial and industrial products, especially national newspapers and the penny post. Perishable foods such as vegetables and dairy produce were brought to market faster and fresher than in the days of turnpike and canal. Central government could supervise local affairs by sending out auditors and inspectors to check town councils and school boards. Wealthier residents could escape the towns and head for the leafier suburbs. In all parts of Britain, railways provided working class Britons with excursions to the mushrooming seaside towns.

British participation in the slave trade was prohibited in 1807, and in 1833 slavery was abolished in all British territories - at great cost to the British taxpayer as slave-owners received over twenty million pounds in compensation.

The new India and Pakistan came into being on 15 August 1947. However, millions were caught on the wrong side of the new borders drawn up by the Boundary Commission and had to cross hostile territory in search of safety. An estimated 200,000 - from all religions - were the victims of Britain's hasty flight from imperial responsibility.

// Howards End // 12.11.20
For a fraction of time she was happy. Then her brain recommenced.

"You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom."

Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d'Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.

// Possessed // 11.11.20
We come into this world with nothing and leave with nothing, but in between, in our brief moment on life's stage, we strut and fret over possessions as if our existence is defined by what we can own. For many of us, our lives are controlled by this relentless pursuit, even though we do so at the risk to ourselves, our children and, ultimately, the future of our planet.

In virtually all the key dimensions of human well-being, life is much better than it was only a few hundred years ago, and yet most of us think that the world is going to hell in a handcart in a phenomenon known as declinism - the belief that the past was much better than the present. Declinism is a distorted perspective that plays into the hands of right-wing politicians who stoke the fires of nationalism and protectionism. The reasons for declinism are many, from various biases in human cognition (including rose-tinted nostalgia and the tendency to pay greater attention to future dangers, especially if you are already wealthy) to the well-known adage that bad news is more newsworthy than optimism.

In ancient Rome, suicide was considered an acceptable, even noble act among its citizens, but it was illegal for slaves and soldiers because these individuals were considered property of the slaveowners and the state, and so suicide was considered theft. As theft was a capital crime, attempted suicide by these individuals was technically, but ironically, punishable by death.

// Difficult Women // 29.10.20
The plural of anecdote is not data.

What's a vagina for? The clue is in the Latin name, which means ‘sheath for a sword'.

Hearing dull people bore on about their kink is usually about as fun as watching a slideshow of someone else's holiday. The edginess of sex is overrated. Your parents did it. Your grandparents did it. Your grandparents might be doing it right now. Ultimately, two groups are invested in making women worry about being ‘frigid': people who want to sell them overpriced lingerie, and people who want to coerce them into sex they don't really want to have. Sex is great. But so is rock-climbing. Neither defines your worth as a person.

Philip Larkin's glum misanthropy that sex is like, "Asking someone else to blow your nose for you".

A woman's place is in the wrong
In the late nineteenth century, campaigners argued that women should be freed from their corsets and crinolines. In 1881, the Rational Dress Society was founded. One of its demands was that the weight of women's undergarments should be halved, from fourteen pounds to seven pounds – still the weight of a newborn baby. When you imagine early feminists doing anything - marching, leafleting, tying themselves to railings - remember that they were doing it in extremely heavy, uncomfortable clothes.

A common theme in the history of sexism: Insist that women are unable to accomplish something; when one of them nonetheless accomplishes it, change the rules.

It took until the 1970s for women to get an honorific - Ms - which didn't indicate their marital status.

Waves
The ‘wave' model of feminism depends on the idea that there were two great bursts of activity in the movement; the first in the 1910s, when women got the vote; the second in the 1970s, when equal pay legislation was passed. Alongside equal pay, the refuge movement is one of the greatest achievements of the Second Wave. If Walker was the Third Wave, we might call the flowering of feminist activism enabled by the Internet (and particularly social media) the Fourth Wave. Running from Everyday Sexism to #MeToo, it awakened a new generation to the idea that, no, sexism hadn't been solved by their mothers and grandmothers. They were moved to anger. They were not post-feminism. They were the Fourth Wave.

How many young feminists have ever seen a domestic-violence refuge, let alone volunteered in one?

The first women got the vote in 1918, and the first female MP was elected; a year later the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act allowed women to enter the civil service, become vets and accountants, and act as lawyers, jurors and magistrates. The 1970s brought equal pay, the first maternity leave legislation, the right not to be sacked for getting pregnant, and the Sex Discrimination Act. But those two decades were also moments when other factors collided with feminist campaigning. The entry of 1.5 million women into the workforce thanks to the First World War killed off the ‘ Downton Abbey Britain' of deference and domestic servitude, and gave women a taste of economic freedom. The Second Wave coincided with the creation of the pill, which became available to married women on the NHS from 1961, and to single women from 1974. Independence and control: these are the keystones of feminism. Your own money and your own body. The first can help you achieve Virginia Woolf's dream of ‘a room of one's own'. The second stops you being seen purely as a mother, or potential mother, to more interesting human beings: men.

Suffragettes and Suffragists
Thatcher appointed only one woman to her cabinet in her whole time as prime minister. In Britain, our main opposition party has never had a woman leader.

The vast warren of Westminster and its strange and pointless rituals.

A commission was set up - usually a good way to bury any potential radicalism under mounds of paper and months of deliberation.

One of the opponents of greater female education was Queen Victoria. According to the Scottish poet Sir Theodore Martin in 1901, "The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'woman's rights' with all its attendant hours, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety". At the time, this example of the poor, feeble sex had amassed an empire which covered a quarter of the earth's land mass. Like Elizabeth I, who told her troops she had "The body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king", or that strident female-hater Margaret Thatcher, Victoria was a powerful woman who saw herself as an exception. It made her less difficult - less threatening to the status quo.

Marxist criticisms of power structures have been completely absorbed by the feminist movement, while the word itself seems like a relic of an earlier age. Take the idea that women's sexual behaviour is obsessively monitored - through virginity tests, punishments for adultery, the idea that a wife should submit to her husband - to maintain a system where property is passed down from father to son. That comes from the work of Marx's co-author Friedrich Engels. The Marxist tradition championed Florynce Kennedy's phrase 'horizontal hostility', where infighting diminishes the ability of a group to challenge their shared oppression. And it gave us the concept of 'false consciousness', defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the notion that members of the proletariat unwittingly misperceive their real position in society and systematically misunderstand their genuine interests. There's definitely a feminist version of false consciousness. If you're trapped as a housewife, you begin to take pride in how shiny your taps are, castigate other women whose taps are not sufficiently shiny, and refuse to contemplate a world in which shiny taps are not the best measure of your worth as a human being. You do not question why, if shiny taps are so important, you're not being paid to clean them.

Two of the wokest media brands, Vice and BuzzFeed, have strongly resisted their employees forming unions.

// Practiced At Not Knowing // 28.10.20
Cromwell was "practiced at not knowing".

There's nothing civil about civil war.

// Just Like You // 25.10.20
His various addictions were sweating from the exertion of jumping up and down while trying to catch the attention of their owner.

The referendum was giving groups of people who didn't like each other, or at least failed to comprehend each other, an opportunity to fight. The government might just as well be asking a yes/no question about public nudity, or vegetarianism, or religion, or modern art, or some other question that divided people into two groups, each suspicious of the other.

// Children of Men // 24.10.20
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

Of the 4 billion life forms which have existed on this planet, 3 billion 9 hundred and 60 million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteoroids and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that homo sapiens should be exempt.

If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. For the rest of our lives we're going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. You might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed.

// You Left Early // 16.10.20
A drink or two starts to obscure and blur your private list of discomforts and horrors. After the third you can't really make the list out anymore. What a relief that can be.

Addicts are greedy, self-obsessed people, always wanting more of a good thing, always wanting the good thing to be better, always trying to mollify or nullify the bad things; always trying to change the overwhelming cocktail of fear and self-disgust, to become more ambitious and hence successful, to improve relationships. The opposite happened.

Fear or desire. It's always fear or Desire. Or both

Fear makes you gullible
Need / desperation makes you susceptible.

// The Romantic Movement // 15.10.20
Alice could make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain, rather than the presence of pleasure.

Alice was always apprehensive of occasions when happiness was a prerequisite, birthdays, feast days, reunions or weddings. She had difficulty enjoying things when under pressure to do so, there had to be a chance to declare something awful before she could begin to think it marvellous. Nothing made her sadder than someone who kept reminding her how happy she had to be.

Genius is for the intelligent what madness is for the dim-witted.

The Cretan Paradox
“All cretens are liars”, says the Cretan Paradox.

When things are bought out of more than sheer necessity, the unconscious goal may not simply be to acquire a product, but to be transformed by the acquisition.

The Greek meaning of the word utopia was ‘no such place exists'.

The man who gives up a wife to marry his mistress nevertheless has to find a new mistress - and the person who flies off to a Caribbean island still needs a paradise of the mind to appease the inevitable, sun-and-sea withstanding disappointments.

// Snowden // 26.09.20
"Double a penny once a day and you reach a million dollars in less than a month. That is what exponential growth looks like with a base of 2. Data scientists estimated decades ago that it would take no more than 6 steps to trace a path between any two people on earth. They're finding made its way into popular culture in six degrees of separation." - Barton Gellman

'Wow' is an all-purpose exclamation.

"He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half of the mind only." - Evelyn Waugh

George Carlin
Most awards are just an excise for a television show.

I believe I am bigger than the universe, smaller than the universe and equal to it. I'm bigger than the universe because I can picture it, define it in my mind and everything that's in it, and contain all that in my mind in a single thought. A thought that's not even the only one in there. I'm smaller than it because that's obvious. I'm equal to it because every atom in me is the same as every atom the universe is made of.

// Team Human // 10.09.20
Employment as we currently understand it, emerged only in the late middle ages, when the peer-to-peer economy was dismantled. Monarchs gave out exclusive monopolies to their favourite companies, forcing everyone else to become employees of the chosen few. Instead of selling the value they created, former craftspeople and business owners now sold their time. Humans became resources. The employment model has become so prevalent that our best organisers, representatives, and activists still tend to think of prosperity in terms of getting everyone jobs, as if what everyone really wants is the opportunity to comodify their living hours.

The Public Commons
The commons were originally a set of lands in England owned by the Catholic church and open to local farmers for grazing. There was a strict set of rules about how much land one could graze and how often, which kept the commons capable of the sustaining everyone's flock in a fair fashion. After King Henry VIII rejected the authority of the Pope, those common lands became privatised or enclosed.

The economy needn't be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate good will. The commons is a conscious implementation of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruists, whether human or ape, reward those who co-operate with others and punish those who defect. A commons works the same way. A resource such as a lake or a field, or a monetary system, is understood as a shared asset. The pastures of medieval England were treated as a commons. It wasn't a free-for-all, but a carefully negotiated and enforced system. People brought their flocks to graze in mutually agreed-upon schedules. Violation of the rules was punished, either with penalties or exclusion. The commons is not a winner-takes-all economy but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a longer-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some other player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

A belief in reincarnation or karma would make it hard to engage in such inhumanity without some fear of repercussion. Nothing can be externalized because everything comes back around.

Techo-Narcissism
According to the curated history of humanity, whenever things look irredeemably awful, people come up with a new technology, unimaginable until then. They like to tell the story of the great horse manure crisis of 1894, when people in England and the United States were being overwhelmed by the manure produced by the horses they used for transportation. Luckily, according to this narrative, the automobile provided a safe, relatively clean alternative, and the streets were spared hip-deep manure. The problem with this story is that it's not true. Horses were employed for commercial transport, but people rode in electric street cars and disliked sharing the road with the new, intrusive, privately owned vehicles. It took half a century of public relations, lobbying, and urban planning to get people to drive automobiles. Plus, we now understand that if cars did make the streets cleaner in some respects, it was only by externalizing the costs of environmental damage and the bloody struggle to secure oil reserves.

Each new choice our technologies opened up to us also risked alienating us from our primal connections with nature and one another. Fire let us living places otherwise too cold for human habitation. Electric lights let us stay up and do things late into the night. Airplanes let us travel across a dozen time zones in a single day. Sedatives let us sleep on the plane, stimulants wake us up when we arrive, and mood drugs help us cope with the stress of living that way. Sunrise and sunset are images for the computer desktop. As we drift away from the biological clocks through which we used to find coherence, we become more dependent on artificial cues. We begin living as if we are in a shopping mall or casino, where day and night are programmed by the environment.

Think of the way video game graphics advanced from crude vectors indicating spacecrafts or asteroids to high resolution, texture-mapped simulations of worlds. Playability is never dependent on realism, any more than an authentic reproduction of a gun makes for a better game of cops and robbers than a stick. The more realistically a play world is depicted, the less play is involved and the more easily the player is manipulated to spend more time, energy, or money in the alternate world. As gaming goes from toy to simulation, the player becomes the played. Similarly, as technology goes from tool to replacement, to humans using it devolve from users to the used.

Human beings rely on the organic world to maintain our prosocial attitudes and behaviours. Online relationships are to real ones like internet pornography is to making love. The artificial experience not only pales in comparison to the organic, but degrades our understanding of human connection.

While one can pluck a reassuring statistic to support the notion that the world is growing less violent - such as the decreasing probability of an American soldier dying on the battlefield - isn't starving a people and destroying their topsoil, or imprisoning a Nation's young black men a form of violence? Capitalism no more reduced violence than automobiles saved us from manure-filled cities. We may be less likely to be assaulted randomly in the street than we were in medieval times, but that doesn't mean humanity is less violent, or that the blind pursuit of continued economic growth and technological progress is consonant with the increase of human welfare.

Compulsions are futile efforts at gaining control of random systems. Once triggered, they are really hard to shake.

// Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus // 09.09.20
“The increase of wealth is not boundless.” - JS Mill. Instead, Mill saw the end of growth concluding in what he called the 'stationary state' - a sustainable equilibrium in which they would be “a well-paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body of persons than at present, not only exempt from the coarser toils, but with sufficient leisure, both physical and mental, from mechanical details, to cultivate freely the graces of life.

Fiat currencies: money declared legal by the government, but not backed by any physical commodity.

// Blockchain: The Next Everything // 31.08.20
The basic function of each blockchain is to group digital information into collections - called 'blocks' - that can't be altered. This information can include anything from a financial transfer to the census count of rubber trees in Amazonia - anything that someone wants to permanently record. When a block is full of data - after perhaps 2,000 entries - one of several complex processes is used to time-stamp it into a permanent record. Each block is linked to the next by a code that references the content of both blocks. That's why we call it a 'chain'.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Many people will be familiar with personal examples of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon even if they have not heard the term before. In short, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a frequency bias. You notice something new, at least it's new to you. It could be a word, a breed of dog, a particular style of house, or just about anything. Suddenly, you're aware of that thing all over the place.

The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire into the Middle Ages. The capital, Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), was dominated by Greek, rather than Roman, influences. The empire fell to the Ottoman Empire about forty years before Columbus discovered the New World.

// Decline & Fall: The End of Empire // 30.08.20
An empire is a wealth pump, a device to enrich one nation at the expense of others. The mechanism of the pump varies from empire to empire and from age to age; the straightforward exaction of tribute that did the job for ancient Egypt, and had another vogue in the time of imperial Spain, has been replaced in most of the more recent empires by somewhat less blatant though equally effective systems of unbalanced exchange. While the mechanism varies, though, the underlying principle does not.

In reality, the peoples of Europe and the European diaspora were by and large Johnny-come-latelies to the business of empire.

British Empire
Britain covered a quarter of the planet's land surface and had effective control over all its oceans.

Children who were just old enough to remember the celebration of Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897, when the empire was not far from its zenith, had not yet reached retirement age when the last tattered scraps of that empire went whistling down the wind.

Kipling's pompous blather about "The white man's burden".

The British Empire ended in the early 1940s when the United States conquered and occupied Britain. It was a bloodless conquest, like the German conquest of Luxembourg, and since the alternative was submitting to Nazi Germany, the British by and large made the best of it.

American Empire
The last three decades or so have seen America turn into something close to a Third World kleptocracy, the sort of failed state in which a handful of politically well-connected people plunder the economy for their own benefit. When bank executives vote themselves and their cronies million-dollar bonuses out of government funds while their banks are losing billions of dollars a year, just to name an obvious example, it's impossible to discuss the situation honestly without using words like looting.

The result can be seen on Capitol Hill day by day, as one fantastically expensive weapons system after another sails through Congress with few dissenting votes, while critically important domestic programs are gutted by bipartisan agreement, or bogged down in endless bickering.

The welfare states of the late twentieth century were the product of a vast but temporary abundance of energy and the products of energy; they did not exist before that glut of energy arrived, and it's thus a safe bet that they won't exist after the glut is gone. It's at least as safe a bet, mind you, that nobody in America will be willing to face that fact until long after the abundance of the recent past is a fading memory. The last decade or so of bickering in the nation's capital is more than adequate evidence of the way the winds are blowing. Republicans talk about jobs, Democrats talk about justice, but in both cases what's going on is best described as a bare-knuckle brawl over which party's voting blocs get to keep their accustomed access to the federal feeding trough. Choose any point on the convoluted political landscape of modern America, and the people at that position eagerly criticize those handouts that don't benefit them, but scream like irate wild-cats if anything threatens their own access to government largesse. That's the kind of thing a society can do when it can draw on half a billion years of stored sunlight to prop up its economy.

It used to be called the Washington Consensus, though nobody's using that term now for the austerity measures currently being imposed on most of Europe. Basically, it amounts to the theory that the best therapy for a nation over its head in debt consists of massive cuts to government spending and the privatization, at fire-sale prices, of government assets. In theory, debtor countries that embrace this set of prescriptions return promptly to prosperity. In practice - and it's been tried on well over two dozen countries over the last three decades or so, so there's an ample body of experience - debtor countries that embrace this set of prescriptions are stripped to the bare walls by their creditors and remain in an economic coma until populist politicians seize power, tell the IMF where it can put its economic ideology, and default on their unpayable debts. That's what Iceland did, as Russia, Argentina, and any number of other countries did before them, and it's the only way for a country drowning in debt to return to prosperity.

Arbitrage
Arbitrage is the fine art of profiting off the difference in price between the same good in two or more markets. The carry trade, one of the foundations of the global economic system that came apart at the seams in 2008, was a classic example of arbitrage. In the carry trade, financiers borrowed money in Japan, where they could get it at an interest rate of one or two per cent per year, and then lent it at some higher interest rate elsewhere in the world. The difference between interest paid and interest received was pure profit.

Very few people seem to have noticed that globalization involved a radical reversal of the movement toward greater automation - that is, the use of fossil fuel energy to replace human labor. When the cost of hiring a sweat-shop laborer became less than the cost of paying for an equivalent amount of productive capacity in mechanical form, the arbitrage shifted into reverse; only the steep differentials in wage costs between the Third World and the industrial nations, and a vast amount of very cheap transport fuel, made it possible for the arbitrage to continue.

Until the coming of the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the energy that went into human economic systems went from sunlight to crops to human and animal muscle, which produced and distributed goods and services. The industrial revolution transformed that equation, adding torrents of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy to the annual income from photosynthesis. Only a small fraction of the labor force and other resources had to be diverted from food production to bring this flood of energy into the economic equation, and only a small fraction of fossil fuels had to be cycled back into the fossil fuel extraction process; the rest of the labor force, other resources, and all that additional energy from fossil fuels could be poured into the rest of the economy, producing goods and services in unparalleled amounts.

Hitler may have been crazy, but he wasn't stupid
It's one of the mordant ironies of contemporary history that Europe fought two of the world's most savage wars in the first half of the twentieth century to deny Germany a European empire, then spent the second half of the same century allowing Germany to attain, without a shot being fired, nearly every one of its war aims short of overseas colonies and a victory parade down the Champs Élysées.

Ironies in the Fire
That the level of education that routinely came out of one-room school-houses was measurably better than that provided by today's multimillion-dollar school budgets is just one more irony in the fire.

There aren't that many business propositions in the industrial world just now that are in a position to earn enough money to pay back loans. Outside of manipulating money and gaming the system, there simply isn't much that makes a profit any more. It's the disintegration of an economy in which accounting fraud is nearly the only growth industry left.

Snarl words: they express the emotional state of the speaker rather than anything relevant about the object under discussion.

// The Long Descent // 29.08.20
Everything is connected to everything else. As Wordsworth put it, “Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.”

What political scientists call liberal democracy is really a system in which competing factions of the political class buy the loyalty of sectors of the electorate by handing out economic largesse.

To get energy out of any resource, you have to put energy in
A net energy of 1 is the breakeven point - the resource yields exactly as much energy as went into extracting it - and many of the proposed 'solutions' to the energy crisis have lower net energy than that. This makes them energy sinks, not energy sources. Making a solar cell, for instance, requires large infusions of diesel fuel, first to mine the raw materials and then to ship them to the factory. Even larger doses of natural gas or coal are needed to generate the electricity that powers the complex process of turning the raw materials into a cell that will make electricity out of sunlight. The complexity of the process makes net energy calculations challenging, but estimates range from a very optimistic 10:1 yield to more pessimistic, and arguably more realistic, 1:1 net energy yield.

Oil was the single largest component in the industrial world's energy mix, and the 'gate-way resource' that gave access to all other forms of energy: the machines that mine coal, drill for natural gas, build hydro-electric dams, and so on, are all powered by oil.

All the fossil fuels, in energy terms, are stored sunlight heaped up over geologic time long before our ancestors strayed out of the shrinking tropical forests of the late Pliocene and launched themselves on the trajectory that led to us.

Fossil fuel energy - and only fossil fuel energy - made it possible to break with the old agrarian pattern and construct the industrial world. Unless some new and equally abundant energy source comes on line fast enough to make up for fossil fuel depletion, we will find ourselves back in the same world our ancestors knew, with the additional burdens of a huge surplus population and an impoverished planetary biosphere to contend with.

So much time has been wasted, and so little has been done to prepare for the inevitable, that a great deal of human suffering and deprivation is inevitable at this point.

It's déjà vu all over again
Stories are probably the oldest and most important of all human tools. Human beings think with stories, fitting what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the universe around us into narrative patterns that make the world make sense. We use stories to tell us who we are, what the world is like, and what we can and can't do with our lives. Every culture has its stories, and if you pay careful attention to the stories a culture tells, you can grasp things about the culture that nothing else will teach you.

If you have a wealth of different stories to think with, odds are that whatever the world throws at you, you'll be able to find a narrative pattern that makes sense of it.

The great 20th century historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: "If one cannot think without mental patterns - and, in my belief, one cannot - it is better to know what they are; for a pattern of which one is unconscious is a pattern that holds one at its mercy".

American Empire
When the United States maintains military garrisons in more than a hundred nations, supporting a state of affairs that allows the 5% of humanity who are American citizens to monopolize a third of the world's natural resources and industrial production, it's difficult to discuss the international situation honestly without words like 'empire' creeping in. It requires a breathtaking suspension of disbelief to redefine American foreign policy as the disinterested pursuit of worldwide democracy for its own sake. Still, portraying today's American empire as the worst of all possible worlds (a popular sport on the left for the last fifty years or so) requires just as much of a leap of faith. If Nazi Germany, say, or the Soviet Union had come out on top in the scramble for global power that followed the implosion of the British Empire, the results would certainly have been a good deal worse: those who currently exercise their freedom to criticize the present empire would face gulags or gas chambers.

If the average American used only as much energy per year as the average European, America would be exporting oil, not importing it.

The difference between Europeans and Americans, some wag has suggested, is that Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance, and Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

Consider the suburbanite who mows his lawn with a gas-powered mower and then hops in a car to drive down to the gym to get the exercise he didn't get mowing his lawn.

Despite a flurry of media ceremonies parading new technological advances before the faithful like so many saints' relics, most people in the industrial world have begun to notice the steady erosion in standards of living, public health, and the quality of products for sale since the energy crises of the 1970s. Compare the lifestyle that was possible in the United States on a single working-class income in 1970, let's say, with the lifestyle possible in the same country on a single working-class income today, and it becomes very hard to cling to the assurance that the future will inevitably be better than the past.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything around you starts to look like a nail
The Deindustrial Revolution: a period of wrenching change in which the world's industrial societies give way to subsistence economies dominated by the agricultural sector and powered by sun, wind, water, and muscle.

Those people and industries that require more energy will do worse than those that can make do with less, and those professions that meet actual needs will do much better than those devoted to the mass production of the unnecessary.

The downslope of civilizations forms the great incubator of religious movements.

Even radical neoprimitivists who think we all ought to go back to hunting and gathering rely on websites and podcasts to get their message out.

Projecting the Shadow
In Jung's psychology, the shadow is the sum total of everything we don't accept about ourselves. We try any number of psychological tricks to keep from becoming aware of our shadows, but one of the standard methods is to project it onto someone else. Instead of owning up to the fact that we have characteristics we claim to despise, we see those characteristics in them, whether 'them' is an ethnic group, a religious community, a political party, or what have you.

If evil space lizards dominate our planet, it doesn't matter that your comfortable lifestyle depends on Third World sweatshops and environmental devastation, or that the choices you make are helping to guarantee your grandchildren a poorer life on a more barren world. Because the lizards run the world and you don't, they're to blame, not you.

// Brian Anger (B. Anger) // 20.08.20
“Most unhappiness is caused by people listening to themselves ... instead of talking to themselves.” - William James

"The fastest route to confidence is to stop being so attached to one's dignity and seriousness; and plainly admit that one is, of course, an idiot. We all are." - Alain de Botton

// Drinking Jokes // 06.08.20
My Dad told me, “Do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life", so I did heroin.

Getting a dog says, "I'm so lonely I could pick up shit." - Frankie Boyle

It's actually pretty easy to quit alcohol. I've done it 10 times already.

Sony's decision to ban porn from its Betamax format doomed it to oblivion.

// Hazardous Drinking // 17.07.20
Every night when he climbed between the sheets he savoured a feeling familiar to any alcoholic: I made it. I made it through another whole day. I am getting into bed completely sober. This feeling had its morning corollary: a minor flicker of panic, of terror, in that moment of waking, the moment between sleep and true wakefulness, when a hangover is automatically anticipated. Then the flooding joy of pure relief when he realised he didn't have one, that the routine experience of almost 30 years had not been repeated, that he had slept either 6 or 7 hours with no multiple trips to the bathroom, no night terrors, no constant waking, and that you will be getting out of bed and into the day clear, fresh and unimpeded. - John Niven

Drink?
If everyone drank within recommended limits, the industry will lose 13 billion pounds.

In terms of cost to the country, smokers are good value. They pay huge amounts of tax by duty and during their working lives, and many die before they can draw their pension.

The cheapest death for the NHS is a heart attack.

Almost half of all deaths in working age men in a typical Russian city may be accounted for by hazardous drinking.

// Blue // 16.07.20
"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable." - C.S Lewis

Life only has golden periods in the rear view mirror. Upfront, through the windshield, it's panic and chaos as it all comes at you much too fast.

// The Movie is Happening Behind the Camera // 04.07.20
The bad news is that you're falling at 1,000 miles per hour through space. The good news is... there's no ground.

Living bodies generate energy in that they convert energy from one source into another. This is what metabolism is. Energy is never lost. This is the first law of thermodynamics, discovered over the last three hundred years. Energy cannot be lost, but rather changes state.

"The more people there are, the lonelier it gets." - Fresh (1994)

"Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende" - A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness

// Super Sense // 19.06.20
Any concern about understimulation from the environment simply reflects how little we appreciate the complexity of the day-to-day existence that we take for granted.

There is more than one way to define any object, including a human. The same individual human can simultaneously be a male, an adolescent, a prince, a neurotic, an artist, an athlete, an atheist, and so on. An object can be a stone, a paperweight, an ashtray, a weapon, a counterweight, or even a sculpture. And if there is more than one way to define an individual, you can't have a unique essence of that individual. Aristotle was Plato's student, but he realized that his teacher had been mistaken as far as essences were concerned.

Like the pod-people in the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alien replicants might be identical to us in every physical way, but they would lack the essential quality that makes us human.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (After this, therefore because of this)
Described as the basis for superstitious reasoning - in other words, assuming a cause where there is none.

Without the perception of control, we are vulnerable to our supersense. 'Doing nothing' is not an option. Anything that we feel can affect outcome is better than nothing, because an inability to act is so psychologically distressing.

The number one reason people believe in the supernatural is because of their own personal experience. No amount of scientific explanation seems to shake the foundations of such belief.

There are few phobias of modern appliances because we simply have not had enough time to evolve wariness.

All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas - Immanuel Kant
Psychologists have come to the conclusion that there are at least two different systems operating when it comes to thinking and reasoning. One system is believed to be evolutionarily more ancient in terms of human development; it has been called intuitive, natural, automatic, heuristic, and implicit. It's the system that we think is operating in young children before they reach school age. The second system is one that is believed to be more recent in human evolution; it permits logical reasoning but is limited by executive functions. It requires working memory, planning, inhibition, and evaluation. This second reasoning system has been called conceptual, logical, analytical, rational, deliberative, effortful, intentional, systematic, and explicit. It emerges much later in development and underpins the capacity of the child to perform logical, rational problem-solving. When we reason about the world using these two systems, they may sometimes work in competition with each other. The rational system is slow and ponderous. It's not very good at coming up with snappy decisions. Also, if you preoccupy your rational system with problem-solving, that uses up your executive functions, then the intuitive mechanisms can run amok. That's why people under stress and time constraints often default to the intuitive system, which is more effortless.

Our complex modern brain has emerged by accumulating small, subtle changes in its structure, passed on from one generation to the next.

Our minds are naturally inclined to a creationist view. After all, creationism was created by the human mind, whereas evolution by natural selection is a fact that was discovered.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things (Corinthians)
Some rules for object knowledge must be built in from birth, in the same way the rules for learning language are.

Babies are naturally inclined to sort out the world. They are thinking about things and forming categories. They must be thinking, 'This is one type of thing, whereas that is another'.

Babies interact with people in a totally different way from their interactions with objects. By their first birthday, they have solid objects pretty much figured out, though they are still unsure about nonsolid objects like liquids, sand, and jelly.

The testes produce the steroid hormone testosterone, which is an essential mechanism for the masculinization of males. In the womb, testosterone turns girl babies into boy babies. Without it, all boys would turn out to be little girls. That's why we all have nipples. Over the course of the lifetime, testosterone plays a role in the so-called secondary sexual characteristics that appear around puberty with the change in the genitals, body mass, and hair. In old age, testosterone levels become depleted. Among other symptoms of old age, lowered testosterone can reduce the sexual libido.

Dualism
Van Gogh, Beethoven, Byron, Dickens, Coleridge, Hemingway, Keats, Twain, Woolf, and even Newton - all experienced episodes of mania. Creativity may be a benefit of the supersense, but the price we sometimes pay is potential mental illness.

It is often thought that Dracula was loosely based on the sixteenth-century Romanian prince Vlad Dracula, known more charmingly by his nickname ‘Vlad the Impaler'. Prince Vlad was particularly successful at defending Romania against the invading Turks and delighted at skewering his victims alive on sharpened wooden poles. However, it seems that Stoker took only the name for his character from the Romanian prince.

When a taxi driver asked the late Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, for his gut reaction to the question of whether UFOs are real, Sagan replied that he tried not to think with his stomach.

// Seventeenth Century Empire // 18.06.20
A band of shipwrecked English sailors washed up on the pleasant shores of Bermuda in 1609, and when their reports of the place reached England a decision to colonise the island was taken, and a group of settlers arrived in 1612. This was the first English post in the Caribbean, whose largest islands - Cuba, Hispaniola and San Salvador - had already been in Spanish hands for a century.

In 1655 England took Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1664 France wrested half of Hispaniola from them, the half now known as Haiti. The Spanish had sought to mine gold in their Caribbean possessions, but the islands yielded relatively little of the stuff in comparison to the immense wealth extractable from Mexico and Peru, so the islands became staging posts for their galleons rather than centres of economic activity themselves. In the English and French possessions matters were different; the settlers engaged in agriculture, starting with tobacco but soon diversifying into the highly lucrative sugar business.

The United Provinces (Dutch Republic), a new independent state, flourished throughout the seventeenth century mightily because of its maritime successes, overseas trade and Eastern empire. The resulting access of wealth prompted a flowering of culture. It was the superlative age of Dutch painting; as Europe's most liberal and tolerant country it attracted thinkers, scientists, writers and political exiles to settle there. This part of the Netherlands' history has aptly been called ‘the Dutch Golden Age', a phrase that applies both literally and metaphorically. By contrast, most of the remaining part of the Netherlands continued under Spanish dominion as a Catholic country - and eventually became Belgium. The Low Countries had long been one of the richest parts of Spain's Empire, and the loss of half of it hastened the demise of Spain as a world power.

The seventeenth century saw the decline of Spain and the rise of France as great powers. Spain had based its might in the previous century on the flood of bullion from its transatlantic possessions; by the end of the seventeenth century France was the new superpower, its language the international language and its culture dominant.

To see history in somewhat Hegelian terms as the unfolding of progress, an upward movement towards increasing enlightenment, prosperity, liberalism and superiority over former times. But it was hard to continue thinking in these terms in the aftermath of the First World War, in which the apparent upward trend of civilisation met with a horrifying smash, and lay in wreckage of its own making.

// Outer Space // 18.06.20
What a change took place in the period between Copernicus and Darwin, moving humankind both from the centre of the universe AND from the summit of creation to a little rock in the outer suburbs of an ordinary galaxy among billions of galaxies.

Transit of Venus: The visible passage of the planet Venus across the face of the sun.

Late Heavy Bombardment: Nearly 4 billion years ago the inner solar system was subjected to an immense hailstorm of meteors and asteroids. So many collided with the moon that they melted its surface. Mercury was especially badly hit; vast craters were ringed by volcanoes after the impact, and shock waves raised strangely shaped hills on the planet's far side. The fact that, according to the fossil record, life began soon after the Bombardment suggests either that an earlier emergence of life was obliterated by it and had to start over, or that life was brought to our planet by the huge rocks that collided with it.

Kepler 452b is a planet very like our own, orbiting a sun very like our own at about the same distance, with an orbital period of 385 days. This ‘Earth 2.0' is 1,400 light years distant, and joins other planets observed by NASA's Kepler space telescope to suggest that we can expect to detect many planets in ‘Goldilocks Zones' - circumstellar habitable zones: zones ‘just right' for life - around the statistically many other stars likely to have them.

// The History of Philosophy // 13.06.20
Epistemology - or ‘theory of knowledge' - is enquiry into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. It investigates the distinctions between knowledge, belief and opinion, seeks to ascertain the conditions under which a claim to know something is justified, and examines and offers responses to sceptical challenges to knowledge.

How can we overcome sceptical challenges to knowledge? Is there a world existing independently of our experience of it? How the world is in itself, independently of being experienced by us, is unknowable because it is inaccessible: we cannot circumvent our way of having experience so that we can (as it were) peer behind our experience to see what the unexperienced world is like.

"Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it." - Marx

Philosopher Kings
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - Hamlet

Chalmers distinguishes between the ‘hard problem of consciousness' - how to explain qualia - and the easy problems, such as explaining the brain's performance of various cognitive functions such as processing sensory inputs, integrating information and the like. The hard problem is to explain why the performance of these functions is accompanied by the phenomenon of ‘what it feels like' to perform them.

Is the mind merely a mirror that somehow reflects reality, or does it instead interact with reality for practical purposes? How we carve up reality, and what we believe about it, has a great deal to do with our needs and interests, and of course with the perceptual and cognitive faculties that have evolved in their service. (There is a distinct Kantian flavour to this view.)

If someone is not looking, the rose has no colour - not because looking at it causes it to have colour, but because colour is something perceived in the mind as a result of the way that light reflected from the rose interacts with our eyes, stimulating messages to pass via the optic nerves to the brain.

The dispute may seem a semantic one
Most of our words are general terms, and knowledge is conversance with the general ideas they denote. This has to be so because we cannot have a different individual name for every single thing in the world; knowledge would be impossible if so.

The meaning of a word is an idea in the mind of the person who uses it. That seems superficially plausible; but a very little thought shows that it cannot be right. Ideas are private, words public; words have to have the same meaning for most users of them, but how can anyone be sure that the idea in one person's mind matches the idea in someone else's mind when both use the same word? Locke's theory implies that in communication what happens is that an idea is encoded into speech or writing, transmitted by sound waves or marks on paper, then decoded by a hearer or reader. What are these coding and decoding relationships? The same problem arises as before: what guarantee is there that the coding manuals of transmitter and receiver match? What guarantees that what is intended by the transmitter is understood by the receiver in the same way? And again: what kind of thing is the idea ‘meant' by a general term like, say, 'dog' - is it a mental image of a particular dog of a particular breed with a definite size and colour, or is it an image of a mixture of all breeds, sizes and colours? If the former, how does it represent all dogs? If the latter - how could there be such an image at all?

Ataraxia: peace of mind
We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure.

"They most enjoy luxury who have no need of it, and we know that what is natural is easily procured, while only vain and worthless things are hard to get. Plain food gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, bread and water confer the highest pleasure when conveyed to hungry lips." - Epicurus

"More things make us afraid than do us harm." - Seneca

Pythagoras is credited with thinking that the earth is a sphere, and later writers also claimed that he thought the cosmos is heliocentric, which is why the Copernican heliocentric model of the universe was described as ‘Pythagorean'.

The School of Athens
A famous story has it that when a man called Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi who was the wisest man living, the oracle said ‘Socrates'; and that Socrates was astonished to learn of this, until he realized that it was doubtless because he knew that he knew nothing.

The Athens of Socrates' lifetime was the Athens which had been triumphant as a leader of the Greek world in the war against Persia, and had become wealthy and powerful as a result. It was the Athens of Pericles, who had used the tribute from the states in Athens' new empire to adorn the city with beautiful temples and statuary and to sponsor the arts. In this high point of classical antiquity the great ideal was beauty, not least of the male form and face, and the social and political skills acquired by an education at the hands of leading sophists, skills that would lead to fame, honour, riches, influence and a high position in public service. Socrates was, in his person and manner of life, in effect a rejection of all this. He was famously ugly, with bulging eyes, a big snub nose and thick lips, a burly frame, an indifference to dress and personal cleanliness; and he had strange habits such as standing in a trance for entire days, lost in thought. He did not seek public honours or position, though he fought with notable courage alongside his fellows in the wars. He therefore stood out, an anomaly, an eccentric, all the more so for incessantly asking questions and confusing his interlocutors when they tried to answer them.

Plato, from platon: broad, was a nickname bestowed either by his wrestling-master because of his sturdy frame or by admirers for the breadth of his teaching.

In the Allegory of the Cave, most people, says Plato, are like the prisoners in the cave watching shadows. Some attain to the level of understanding possible for a prisoner free enough to move about the cave. But the goal is to step into the sunlight, and to see the truth in its full glory.

Socrates and Plato disliked the sophists on the grounds that they offered to teach, in exchange for money, the ability to persuade others to any point of view, which meant that they taught people how to win arguments, not how to discover truth. In the Euthydemus Plato gives examples of the tricks that sophists offered to teach anyone wishing to beat opponents in debate. No doubt this was indeed what many sophists did, and because Socrates and Plato were critical of them the word ‘sophist' now has a pejorative connotation. We talk of a tricksy argument as ‘sophistical', the act of bamboozling others is called ‘sophistry', and the word ‘sophisticated' - though now used to describe a refined taste, superlative elegance, and the like - in its original meaning implies anything deliberately made complicated and bewildering in order to mislead others.

In Plato, dialectic was the process by which, in a question-and-answer discussion, an approach is made towards truth, the opposing arguments helping each other – pushing each other – to evolve in the direction of that goal. In Hegel, dialectic is the process in which any oppositions can, through the clash between them, produce something new, which in its turn could be opposed by something in another clash, producing yet a further new outcome. Hegel saw his use of the method as going far beyond Plato's, which was confined to particular problems or concepts.

Aristotle said that Zeno invented ‘dialectic' - the form of philosophical argument aimed at arriving at truth (as opposed to eristic, argument conducted merely for the sake of argument or for point-scoring).

The briefest reflection shows that Aristotle could not have had very much influence on prince Alexander. Aristotle liked the idea of small republican polities; Alexander created a vast empire, all the way to the banks of the Jumna in India. Aristotle's ethics taught moderation in all things; Alexander drank himself to death at an early age. If indeed there was any influence it seems therefore to have been an entirely negative one. But legend was too tempted by the juxtaposition of these mighty names not to wrap itself around them.

After the abolition of the School of Athens - the Platonic Academy - by the Emperor Justinian in 529CE, and his proscription of the teaching of ‘pagan' philosophy, intellectual activity fell under the authority of the Church, and as time went by it became increasingly risky to diverge from doctrinal orthodoxy.

BCE: Before the Commn Era / CE: Common Era
From the fourth to the fourteenth century CE the increasing dominance of religion over the mind of Europe meant that philosophy was largely the handmaiden of theology. It became increasingly dangerous for philosophical speculation to stray from the neighbourhood of doctrinal orthodoxies imposed by the Church. This grip was broken by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was broken not because the Reformation introduced a new intellectual liberalism - rather the opposite, when you consider the inflexibilities of Calvinism, for example - but because religious authorities in most parts of Europe that became Protestant did not have the power to enforce theological orthodoxy or to control speculation and enquiry. One immediate result was an outburst of interest in the occult: magic, astrology, the Cabala, Hermeticism, alchemy and mysticism - but in the midst of this, and arising partly out of it, there was also a liberation of philosophical and scientific enquiry. The Reformation was, famously, triggered by Martin Luther when he posted his ninety-seven theses on the church door of Wittenberg in 1517. He was not the first to object to malpractices by the Church, but he lived in the dawn of a new and powerful technology: printing. In the half-century before Luther made his protest, Gutenberg's printing press had been copied in hundreds of towns and cities across Europe, and millions of printed books had already poured from them.

What the Christians kept was technical literature - mathematics, medicine, logical treatises, astronomy. There were works by Plato and Aristotle, Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy; but there were none of the poets, none of the plays, no letters and speeches.

John Stuart Mill was unable to attend either Oxford or Cambridge because he would not subscribe to the articles of the Church of England.

It is easy to see why Spinoza's extraordinary achievement would be such a beacon to the Enlightenment. It says: what exists is the universe, and humanity is a part of the universe, subject to the same laws. The life of reason is a life free from the trammels of fear, superstition and unreasonable hopes and desires; it is a life based instead on knowledge, on science and rational enquiry, on what really matters in practice to humankind. Freedom of thought is essential for progress, and for the flourishing of individuals and society. Spinoza's view breathes the clear air of intellectual freedom, and directs the attention to what matters: life itself, here and now, in society, with others, requiring thought and understanding.

The cogito argument was not invented by Descartes. St Augustine in the early fifth century CE wrote that we can doubt everything except that we doubt, and even he probably did not think he was saying anything novel. Neither presumably did Jean de Silhon, whose book The Two Truths was published in 1626 and contained the sentence, ‘It is not possible for a man who has the ability, which many share, to look within himself and judge that he exists , to be deceived in this judgment, and not exist .' Descartes knew Silhon's work, which predates his own version of the cogito by at least five years (he drafted his Discourse on Method in about 1630, though it was not published until 1637), for he writes approvingly of Silhon's book though he does not quote it.

A Critique of Pure Reason
Recall the conflict of opinion between empiricists and rationalists in epistemology, the former arguing that the origin of knowledge lies in sensory experience, the latter arguing that reason is the only sure path to knowledge. In the technical terminology of philosophy, knowledge derived from experience is called a posteriori knowledge, (implying ‘after experience'), while knowledge derived from reason is called a priori knowledge, (literally meaning ‘before experience' but understood as meaning ‘independently of experience'). From Plato onwards the rationalist ambition to arrive at certain knowledge by a priori methods of reasoning, that is, by excogitation and inference, had been opposed by the empiricist claim that genuine knowledge of the world can be secured only by a posteriori methods of observation and experiment. Mathematics was cited by rationalists as a paradigm of a priori knowledge, while empiricists in the two centuries before Kant could point to the scientific advances made possible by a posteriori investigation.

In Groundwork, Kant summarizes thus: "Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his idea of laws - that is, in accordance with principles - and only so has he a will". Human beings are, figuratively speaking, halfway between the animals and the angels, in the sense that they have both reason and the full complement of animal appetites and instincts. They are therefore in the unique position of being able to act in conformity with objective principles identified by reason, but they do not always do so.

Kant remarked that what ‘first interrupted my dogmatic slumber' was reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Transcendental enquiry
Sartre refused the Légion d'Honneur in 1945, refused election to the Académie Française in 1949, and refused the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, saying that he did not want recognition by institutions associated with political dispensations he opposed. In 1976, however, he accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Jerusalem.

Sartre uses an example of being discovered in an embarrassing situation: the shame one feels is a ‘phenomenological reduction' of being aware that there is 'the Other' - another subject of experience. The Other thus objectifies us - we are an object for it: we exist in the Other's consciousness - which is how we come to know ourselves in the first place; but because the primary way in which individuals relate is, in Sartre's view, through conflict, it is also the case that ‘hell is other people' (this is the culminating line of his play No Exit ). The reason is that before encountering the Other we are free and self-constituting, looking outwards from the pre-reflective self at the world. When Others enter the picture they become a suction-pipe draining one into it; for we are made to see ourselves as the Other sees us, objectifyingly, an alienating situation because it renders us into an in-itself for the Other. We see this when we realize that such emotions as shame and pride arise only in response to ‘the look' (‘the gaze', le regard ) of an Other. The look does not require the actual presence of an Other; its notional presence is enough.

Wandering along the Way: that is the ideal
The Zhuangzi teaches that one should distance oneself from politics and practical life, and instead should align oneself with the Way and follow its lead spontaneously, without striving and desiring. Thinking about things analytically or overmuch is the wrong thing to do. Wandering along the Way: that is the ideal.

What remains basic to the various Buddhist schools is the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path to liberation from existence by attainment of nirvana (extinction). The Four Noble Truths are that life is suffering, that suffering arises from desire and ignorance, that suffering can be escaped, and that one can achieve liberation by living an ethical life and by meditation. The Eightfold Path is Right Vision (understanding), Right Emotion, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood (work that does not harm others), Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Meditation.

The idea of reciprocity - shu - underlies the Confucian Golden Rule: ‘Do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you.' It is a familiar point that this is the negative version of the rule that says, ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.' George Bernard Shaw's comment regarding this latter - ‘don't do to others what you would like them to do to you, because they may not like it' - shows why the negative formulation is better. It requires the exercise of moral imagination, putting oneself in another's place and seeing things from that perspective. Zeng said, "The way of the Master is to do one's utmost and to put oneself in the other's place".

Cosmopolitan: a citizen of the world
We use numerals ultimately derived from India, though called ‘arabic numerals' because the Arabs transmitted them to the world at large.

How can anyone take laws seriously, given that it often happens that the same people who make them later repeal them and put others in their place?

If you descend to the bottom of a well you can see the stars even in daylight.

"Most people would rather die than think, and most people do." - Bertrand Russell

// Rich, Free and Miserable // 21.05.20
“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” - Blaise Pascal

"I drink not from mere joy in wine, nor to scoff at faith. No, only to forget myself for a moment. That only do I want of intoxication, that alone." - Omar Khayyam (a Persian mathematician, born: 1048)

Early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value.The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.

Golden Rules
Don't always prioritise your experiencing-self over your remembering-self.

Peter Singer's inexorable logic: The more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over those of other sentient beings.

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

// Living In The Long Emergency // 20.05.20
Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it.

Draw your own conclusions
Fiat currencies such as the US dollar, the euro, and the renminbi (abbreviated to RMB; China's 'people's currency'), are faith-based monies backed by the presumed productive capability of each nation.

Credit is 'money' created out of nothing more than expectation.

Remember, having plenty of money that has no value is just another way of being broke.

I doubt the utility of digital currencies. They are created from nothing (besides a great deal of energy-wasting computer calculations in server farms), and they are backed by nothing. The Bitcoin experiment looked like a popped bubble in early 2019, having fallen from its 2017 high of nearly $20,000 to about $3,500. It clawed back above $12,000 in late June of 2019 and then oscillated wildly across the summer. Gross instability is the last thing you want in something vying to be a currency. Blockchain currencies are yet another exercise in techno-narcissism. They are also another manifestation of overinvestment in complexity (and abstraction) in a system that already suffers from too much of that. Blockchain currencies claim to be safe from hacking, but that doesn't jibe with reality. Many hacks of cryptocurrency exchanges and thefts of individual crypto “wallets” (records of ownership) have already occurred. The fact that they rely on highly synchronized computer networks ought to be of concern to people, if only for the implied fragility. Don't forget that the internet is at the mercy of the electric grid, the world's largest machine, as it is sometimes called. The American electric grid is in notoriously shabby condition. Draw your own conclusions.

Cost externalities
Nothing lasts forever, of course, and wonderful as it was, the industrial economy couldn't last forever. It produced too many destructive externalities, including global population overshoot, resource depletion, and planetary ecological impoverishment.

The biggest mental block among the people running things was the fatuous belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it should have obviated their standing as technocrats.

Team Human
We humans may underestimate our own cosmic worth.

Humans are deeply social, and sharing hard work with others makes it bearable at worst, and fun at best.

Can we not marshal science and technology to take positive action? I've already described my objections to techno-narcissism and organizational grandiosity. We think too highly of our magical abilities to control the things we are so busy measuring. What will finally change the picture is the economic collapse of techno-industrial society. It will compel the cessation of many destructive activities and the slowing and diminishment of many more.

There is a reason that farming is called 'agriculture'. The culture part stands for the body of knowledge, skill, principles, and methodology acquired over thousands of years. Most of that knowledge has been jettisoned in the rush to turn farms into something like automated factories.

Einstein put the knock-on effect succinctly: World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones.

Alternative Fuels
The wind power of the future may be more like seventeenth-century Dutch windmills. The solar power of the future may take the form of hay grown to feed horses, oxen, and mules.

Thirty years ago, 89% of the world's energy came from fossil fuels. Now, it's around 85%. A lot of the remaining 15% comes from nuke plants. Hydro is about 7%. About 2% is solar and wind.

It begs the question: What produces the electricity to run the fans? Solar panels? What about the sunk costs involved in fabricating the fans, the panels, and all the electrical management equipment, including hydrocarbons burned in the manufacturing process?

In the shale formations, oil couldn't flow through the rock. It was trapped; you had to blast it out. That's where hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') came in. If you could get a pipe into the shale strata, you could blast it with water under high pressure, and then inject sand along with the water to hold open the tiny fractures.

“Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry.”

Essential supply chains depend on trucks nearly completely
Long-distance freight trucks can't run on electric engines, and there really is no substitute for diesel fuel in that industry. The batteries would have to take up most of the cargo space and weight. Light-duty short-haul trucks performed poorly on lithium-ion batteries when road tested by two national companies, and cost about three times as much as the internal combustion versions. There is probably not enough lithium available to outfit the world trucking fleet in any case. No batteries are compact and powerful enough for farming vehicles (tractors, harvesters) scaled to the current practices of agri-biz, or the giant earthmoving machines used in mining.

Electric motors are far simpler than gasoline or diesel engines. Electric motors plus their gearing and differentials can be assembled with fewer than a hundred moving parts; internal combustion cars require more than a thousand. The good news would be that electric cars have the potential to last much longer than gasoline or diesel cars. That's good news for the car buyer, at least. The bad news is that, unless cars are engineered for timely failure (planned obsolescence), the car manufacturers cannot depend on the same routine replacement formula that has ruled their economic model for decades and accounts for most car sales.

// The Long Emergency // 20.05.20
"The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose." - William James

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be either destroyed or created, only changed. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, says that the change of state in any given amount of energy flows in one direction, from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out; from being ordered to being disordered.

The Earth is a closed system. The laws of thermodynamics state that energy can't be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy. We have already changed half of our oil endowment (that was the easiest to get) into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change.

A mere 66 years after the Wright brothers got airborne in their clunky, kite-like rig, the U.S. government flew men to the moon and back. (They played golf there.) Who even thinks about them anymore? (Lesson: Even 'magic' has diminishing returns.)

The Wright brothers managed the first sustained flight not because their vehicle design was so brilliant - lots of people understood Bernoulli's principle - but because they applied a suitably powerful gasoline engine to the problem. Jetliners manage pretty much the same thing on the grand scale but with turbines powered by aviation fuel, which is essentially kerosene. Kerosene has been fairly cheap in recent decades. It is just another product of petroleum distillation like gasoline and diesel.

Oil
Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular air temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. It is flammable, but has proven to be safe to handle with a modest amount of care by people with double-digit IQs. It can be refined by straightforward distillation into many grades of fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, aviation fuel, heating oil) and into innumerable useful products (plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fabrics, lubricants).

Nothing really matches oil for power, versatility, transportability, or ease of storage. It is all these things, plus it has been cheap and plentiful. The lack of these qualities is among the problems with the putative alternative fuels proposed for the post-cheap-energy era.

To some degree, all of the non-fossil fuel energy sources actually depend on an underlying fossil fuel economy. You can't manufacture metal wind turbines using wind energy technology. You can't make lead-acid storage batteries for solar electric systems using any known solar energy systems.

Hitler did not like being fuel-dependent on the Bolsheviks he so despised. Eventually, he turned his sights on capturing the Soviet oil fields around Baku, and indeed that is why in 1941 he broke the 1939 antiaggression pact with Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia that would begin his undoing.

Petroleum starvation, along with the 1918 flu epidemic, eventually put the German war machine out of business, while the British innovation of the tank also helped break the stalemate of the trenches. World War I also saw the first use of airplanes in combat, though their use was a limited and romantic sideshow to the action on the ground.

An Arabian proverb of our time goes something like this: "My father rode a camel, I drive a Rolls-Royce, my son flies a jet airplane, and his son will ride a camel".

The establishment of Israel as a sovereign nation in 1948 was an ethnic anomaly along a Muslim strip 9,000 miles long, reaching from Morocco to Java.

Nuclear
One single atom of fissionable uranium will produce 10 million times as much energy as the burning of a single carbon atom. Uranium will produce 2 million times as much energy per unit mass as oil.

The amount of uranium needed to supply electricity for a family of four for a lifetime would fit in a beer can.

There is enough naturally occurring conventional uranium around to generate electricity based on current technology for perhaps a hundred years.

France was prescient enough over the past three decades to construct a network of nuclear generating plants that supply roughly 80% of the country's electric power - far more than any other nation.

Atomic fission is useful for producing electricity, but most of America's energy needs are for things that electricity can't do very well, if at all. For instance, you can't fly airplanes on electric power from nuclear reactors. The U.S. trucking transport system as currently operated won't run on electricity alone. In the current American mode of living, only about 36% of the energy consumed is in the form of electric power generated by one means or another: coal, natural gas, hydro, nuclear. This fraction has remained fairly constant for decades. The rest of our energy comes in the form of burning hydrocarbons.

Suburbia
The amount of asphalt paving alone in the United States represents an ecological insult beyond calculation. The stupendous amount of paving laid down in the United States during the past hundred years prevents rain from being absorbed as groundwater and sends it instead into rivers, and ultimately into the ocean. The effect of this is the inability of water tables and wetlands to recharge and the diminishing ability of the terrain to support life.

The U.S. average of 1,300 gallons of water per day, per citizen, is the highest use rate in the world, and some sixty times the average for many third world nations.

By the 1990s, American households were making a record 11 separate car trips a day running errands and chauffeuring children around. Automobiles were getting larger as the station wagon and van yielded to the supremacy of the sport-utility vehicle (SUV), an expeditionary car based on a light truck chassis and therefore exempt from legislated fuel efficiency standards.

Population growth rates may be mitigated somewhat from culture to culture by economic advance (which tends to lower reproductive rates by channeling women into the workplace), but economic development produces other not-so-benign consequences. Developing nations invariably increase their energy use. More cars are used, more electricity generated, more greenhouse emissions sent into the atmosphere.

Children
High school in our time amounts to little more than day care for virtual adults in which some learning might incidentally take place, much of it of dubious value.

The romanticization of childhood may prove to have been one of the luxuries of the cheap-oil age.

The idea of beauty will surely return from its modernist exile, as one of the few consolations in the years ahead will be our ability to consciously craft things for reasons other than to merely shock and astonish.

If the current mild climatic interval between ice ages, which we call the Holocene, had not been so extraordinary it would be hard to account for why civilization hadn't burgeoned many millennia earlier. Homo sapiens had evolved to pretty much our current level of brainpower fifty thousand years earlier.

Rich, Free and Miserable
Cargo cult: A belief system cinfined to undeveloped-societies, in which adherents practice superstitious rituals hoping to bring modern goods supplied by a more technologically advanced society.

Potemkin economy: Named after Grigory Potemkin, minister under Catherine the Great of Russia, who, in 1787, set up false-front villages along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the empress and foreign dignitaries as they toured past on a barge.

Greenland is a protectorate of Denmark.

Methane is also known as 'swamp gas'.

// Dawkins & Greene // 16.05.20
Temperature: A testament to the power of emergence.

Quantum entanglement as an explanation for the Field of Consciousness?
Just because you are conscious, it does not mean that consciousness is integral in everything, it just means that everything you are looking at is coming through the prism of consciousness.

It does not have to be the introduction of consciousness that collapses the quantum mechanic equation into a definite result. It could be an electron discharged from the microscope that forces it into position. Alternatively, it could be microtubules in the brain that can collapse the equation, and are therefore the seat of consciousness.

Astrobiology: The end game of intelligent life is annihilation
Fermi's Paradox requires not just any life (for example life at a bacteria level) but intelligent life, capable of transmitting radio waves we can receive. (Unless of course it's very close, then we wouldn't need to use radio waves which can travel long distances.)

We humans may underestimate our own cosmic worth.

Why is there something rather than nothing? This is the key question. Take it back as far as the big bang and it pertains.

Dawkins
Darwin was working 100 years ahead of his time.

We are a dustbin of late-acting lethal genes.

"The most frightening thing about death is eternity, and I'd rather spend eternity under general anaesthetic than in my mind."

// In Defense of Elitism // 15.05.20
Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

Boat Elite need to win every dispute because they don't understand that cooperation is how our species succeeded. It's a key reason humans and ants have spread out to cover the planet, while there are fewer than 5000 tigers and rhinos left.

He knows who he is and that doesn't change depending on location or company. I, meanwhile, am a new person in every situation, shape-shifting into my best guess of what people will like.

When he's at a restaurant, he orders aged steaks well-done, and then pours ketchup on them. If he had listened to the expertise offered by chefs, cookbook authors, and food critics instead of relying on his first reaction like a toddler, he would have gotten acclimated to the texture of a medium-rare steak. Then he would't need vinegar sugar to compensate for the moisture and flavor he removed by overcooking it.

// The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity // 13.05.20
John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time - if unchallenged - itself become lost.

There is a difference between debate and dialectic. Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true.

The person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. In an age of shouting for attention on social media, the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.

The metaphysics that a new generation is imbibing and everyone else is being force-fed has many points of instability, is grounded in a desire to express certainty about things we do not know, and to be wildly dismissive and relativistic about things that we actually do know.

You cannot tell people simultaneously, “You must understand me” and, “You cannot understand me”.

Claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there
There are places where gay men can hook up and places where gay women can hook up, but there have hardly been any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and women organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis. It is worth bearing these internal frictions and contradictions in mind when people talk about the LGBT community, or try to co-opt it for any political purpose. It barely exists even within each letter of its constituent parts.

Gay men tend to believe that men who claim to be ‘Bi' are in fact gays in some form of denial (‘Bi now, gay later').

After becoming a woman Jan writes, "My scale of vision seemed to contract, and I looked less for the grand sweep than for the telling detail".

Gay people are gay when they say they are and when they do the things that show them to be gay. Likewise, perhaps, people are trans when they say they are, and no outward sign - or any biological signifier - need be there in the trans case any more than it is expected (or demanded) in the case of being gay.

// Irony // 05.05.20
A situation is ironic if the result is the opposite of what was intended. It isn't merely coincidental or surprising, as when the newscaster thoughtlessly reports, “Ironically, the jewellery store was robbed on the same day last year.” If the robbers steal a homing device that leads the police to them, that is ironic.

"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." - Mark Twain

// End Times // 02.05.20
It won't matter if the end of the world is intentional or accidental, the product of terror or error. The end is the end.

Human beings are terrible at evaluating risk - especially existential risk. We rely on feeling rather than fact, and privilege emotional memories over hard numbers. “We treat something as impossible unless there is an experiential aspect to it, and no one has experienced an asteroid strike."

We make the mistake of assuming the future will be like the present. Psychologists have a name for this trait: the availability heuristic; the human tendency to be overly influenced by what feels most visible and salient in our experience. The availability heuristic can cause us to overreact, as when we hear about reports of a suicide bombing and become fixated on the danger from terrorists, ignoring the longer-term data that shows such incidents are on the decline. Risks that are most available to the mind are the ones that we care about, which is why so much of our regulation is driven by crisis, rather than by reason.

Homo sapiens (wise man) evolved to live in small groups, and so we feel acutely the grief of small-scale loss, that of a friend or a relative or even a stranger. But there is no individualizing the deaths of billions of people, perhaps even our entire species. And so we choose to deny it.

If Christopher Columbus were to arrive in the Americas today, he would find 30% less biodiversity than in 1492. The global population of vertebrates declined by an estimated 52% between 1970 and 2010. The current extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times higher than it has been during normal (meaning non-mass extinction) periods in biological history, with amphibians going extinct 45,000 times faster than the norm.

One point eight trillion pieces of plastic trash, weighing 79,000 tons, now occupies an area three times the size of France in the Pacific Ocean - and this Great Pacific Garbage Patch is expected to grow 22% by 2025.

Volcanoes
What really sets a supervolcano apart from anything else the Earth can throw at us - tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes - is that they are the only natural disaster that can truly go global. What happened after Toba could happen again - ash and sulfur from a supereruption would reach the stratosphere, and depending on the location of the volcano and its eruptive strength, it could spread around the globe, blocking incoming sunlight and casting the world into winter.

Over the course of human history, volcanoes have been the cause of far more extinctions than anything from outer space.

Asteroids
Asteroids - like planets, moons, and virtually every other object in the heavens that isn't a star - are visible only because they reflect the light of the sun.

Asteroids travel through the frictionless vacuum of space at speeds that reach tens of thousands of miles per hour. But when a meteor - which is what an asteroid is called once it reaches Earth - breaches the atmosphere, it hits air, which quickly piles up. Friction from air resistance causes the meteor to glow brightly and heat up to temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees. Up to 95% of the meteors that enter the Earth's atmosphere burn up completely, and most of the rest rarely leave behind more than tiny fistfuls of rock or metal known as meteorites.

Saturn's moon Titan has a chemically active and carbon-rich atmosphere, and may even host liquid water beneath its frozen surface.

Nuclear
From our time as hunter-gatherers to our current lives as office workers, humans have repeatedly transitioned from one source of energy to another. Every time that transition took place, we shifted to an energy source that has greater density, meaning it can release more power per unit of fuel. From human muscle power to harnessing animals, from burning wood to burning coal, from refining oil to splitting the atom through nuclear fission - with each transition we earned more bang for our energy buck.

Instead of shifting to a fuel source that has greater energy density than the current incumbent, the renewable revolution demands that we move to a less dense energy source. Wind and solar and biofuels require more land and produce less energy per unit than fossil fuels like oil and coal, which is a problem, since land is one of the few resources on this planet that are truly scarce. Renewables are also intermittent - wind turbines only produce power in the breeze, and solar panels only produce electricity when the sun shines - while fossil fuels can be stored and burned anytime and anywhere.

Once the destructive power of the nuclear bomb had been demonstrated at Hiroshima, and three days later at Nagasaki, other nations rushed to arm themselves with this terrible new weapon. The Soviet Union tested its first bomb in 1949, Great Britain in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964.

One of the reasons the U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration gave for not dismantling America's largest atomic warheads after the Cold War was the possibility that they might be required for planetary defense.

Pandemic
Diseases are defined by their basic reproductive number, or R0 - the number of people one sick person will infect on average. Measles, one of the most contagious diseases on Earth, has an R0 of 12 to 18. SARS, after infection control methods were put in place, had an R0 of 0.4, which is why the outbreaks were stopped so swiftly. SARS was a twenty-first-century plague. It was a zoonotic disease, meaning it jumped from animals to humans - a pathway it has in common with most emerging diseases, including HIV.

Influenza pandemics remain the great fear of infectious disease experts, but the most recent one in 2009 killed only about 284,000 people worldwide. That was fewer than the number of people who die from seasonal flu in an ordinary year.

Unless it happens to emerge in an environment as extreme and rare as a World War I trench, a flu virus that kills in a day is limited in its ability to spread, and so loses out to the milder version that only makes you wish you were dead. “That's why we've never seen that level of virulence again in flu,” said Ewald. “If a new virus were somehow both highly lethal and transmissible, the only way it could maintain both of those qualities is if transmission could somehow be easily feasible from sick people. That would rarely happen in nature.”

Antibiotics have saved hundreds of millions of lives since the serendipitous discovery of penicillin in 1928, but bacterial resistance to these drugs is growing by the year, a development doctors believe is one of the greatest threats to global public health. Thirty-three thousand people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections in Europe alone, according to a 2018 study.

The middle of the twentieth century was a golden age for vaccines, as scientific heroes such as Jonas Salk developed protections against life-threatening diseases like polio and measles. Yet while the worldwide pharmaceutical market is worth more than $1 trillion today, the market for vaccines makes up only 2 to 3% of it. Given that it can take ten years of testing and billions of dollars to develop a vaccine - and given that attempts have an estimated 94% chance of failure - drug companies have shied away from the business.

While seasonal flu vaccines focus on genetic parts of the influenza virus that are easy to target but which mutate constantly - which is why the vaccines quickly fall out of date - would-be universal vaccines aim for sections of the virus that remain stable from strain to strain. If successful, they could provide years or even a lifetime of protection in a single shot - including from future pandemic strains. The work is a scientific challenge. At a meeting on universal flu vaccines in 2018, one expert said that the field was essentially in the same place now as it had been in the 1960s. But we're spending only $160 million a year on universal flu vaccine research, compared to the more than $1 billion annually that goes to HIV vaccine work. I would never argue that we need to spend less money developing a vaccine for a disease like AIDS that has already killed tens of millions of people, but the damage a severe influenza pandemic could do to this planet is far worse. Yet we don't take it seriously enough to properly fund research into the one tool that could retire the risk of a flu pandemic altogether.

A.I
The cloud: the off-loading of processing and storage to remote server farms accessed via the internet.

A machine-learning algorithm depends on data to become smarter - lots and lots and lots of data, terabytes and petabytes of data. Until recently, data was scarce. It was either locked away in media like books that couldn't easily be scanned by a computer, or it simply went unrecorded. But the internet - and especially the mobile internet created by smartphones - has changed all that. As we now know, sometimes to our chagrin, very little that we do as individuals, as companies, and as countries goes unrecorded by the internet. As of 2018, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were being produced every day, as much data as you could store on 3.6 billion old CD-ROM disks. And the amount of data being produced is constantly increasing - by some counts we generate more data in a single year now than we did over the cumulative history of human civilization.

What oil was to the twentieth century, data is to the twenty-first century, the one resource that makes the world go - which is why tech companies like Facebook and Google are willing to go to any lengths to get their hands on it. Raw machine learning has its limits, however. For one thing, the data an algorithm takes in often needs to be labeled by human beings. The Netflix algorithm isn't able to micro-categorize all the movies and TV shows in the service's catalog on its own - that required the labor of human beings Netflix paid to watch each and every one of their offerings. If a machine-learning AI makes a mistake, it usually needs to be corrected by a human engineer. Machine learning can produce remarkable results, especially if the algorithm can draw from a well-stocked pool of properly labeled data. But it can't be said to produce true intelligence.

Deep learning - a subset of machine learning - is something else. It involves filtering data through webs of mathematics called artificial neural networks that progressively detect features, and eventually produces an output - the identification of an image, perhaps, or a chess move in a game-playing program. Over time - and with a wealth of data - the AI is able to learn and improve. The difference is that a deep-learning neural network is not shaped by human programmers so much as by the data itself. That autodidactic quality allows an AI to improve largely on its own, incredibly fast and in ways that can be startlingly unpredictable.

Stamford Raffles (5 July 1781 – 5 July 1826), the British imperialist and the founder of modern Singapore.

“Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” - Ben Franklin

// Until the End of Time // 10.04.20
Schrödinger raised some eyebrows (and lost his first publisher) when he invoked the Hindu Upanishads (ancient Sanskrit texts of spiritual teaching) to suggest that we are all part of an “omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self,” and the freedom of will we each exert reflects our divine powers.

The evolutionary advantage of storytelling
Immersion in fictional tales grappling with a wide assortment of challenges would have had the capacity to refine our forebears' strategies and responses. Coding the brain to engage with fiction would thus be a clever way to cheaply, safely, and efficiently give the mind a broader base of experience from which to operate. Storytelling may be the mind's way of rehearsing for the real world, a cerebral version of the playful activities documented across numerous species which provide a safe means for practicing and refining critical skills.

By telling stories and hearing stories and embellishing stories and repeating stories, we played with possibility without suffering consequences. We followed trail upon trail that began with “What if?” and, through reason and fantasy, explored a wealth of possible outcomes.

Through borrowed eyes protected by the tempered glass of story, we intimately observe an abundance of exotic worlds. And it is through these simulated episodes that our intuition expands and refines, rendering it sharper and more flexible. Through story we internalize a more nuanced sense of how to respond and why, and that intrinsic knowledge guides our future behavior. Through story we break free from our usual singular perspective, and for a brief moment inhabit the world in a different way. We experience it through the eyes and imagination of the storyteller. In the words of Joyce Carol Oates, reading “is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin; another's voice; another's soul ... to enter a consciousness not known to us.”

Steven Pinker describes a particularly lean version of the idea: "Life is like chess, and plots are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits".

Second Law of Thermodynamics
You should expect to encounter high-entropy states, because such states can be realized by a great many different arrangements of the constituent particles. By contrast, if you encounter a low-entropy state it should command your attention. Low entropy means there are far fewer ways the given macrostate can be realized by its microscopic ingredients. Step out of a long hot shower and find the steam uniformly spread throughout your bathroom: high entropy and totally unsurprising. Step out of a long hot shower and find the steam all clustered in a perfect little cube hovering in front of the mirror: low entropy and extraordinarily unusual.

When atomic nuclei fuse - as in the sun, where hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium billions and billions of times each second - the result is a more complex, more intricately organized, lower-entropy atomic cluster. In the process, some of the mass of the original nuclei is converted into energy (as prescribed by E = mc2), mostly in the form of a burst of photons that heats the star's interior and powers the release of light from the star's surface. And it is through such fiery starlight, which is itself a torrent of outward streaming photons, that the star transfers copious quantities of entropy to the environment. The increase in environmental entropy more than compensates for the decrease in entropy from fusing nuclei, ensuring that the net entropy goes up and the integrity of the second law is once again secured.

We lack a bridge from mindless particles to mindful experience
The hard problem seems hard - consciousness seems to transcend the physical - only because our schematic mental models suppress cognizance of the very brain mechanics that connect our thoughts and sensations to their physical underpinnings.

Theory of mind: by which we impute the kind of agency we each experience internally to entities we encounter in the external world.

For most of us, quantum mechanics remains utterly foreign because its hallmark features emerge over distances so tiny that we just don't experience them in everyday life. If we did, common intuition would be shaped directly by quantum processes and quantum physics would be second nature. Much as you know the implications of Newtonian physics in your bones - you can quickly grab a falling glass, instantly intuiting its Newtonian trajectory - you'd know quantum physics in your bones too. But lacking such quantum intuition, we rely on experiment and mathematics to mold our understanding by portraying aspects of reality we can't directly experience.

Feel a thought
The lyricist Yip Harburg, author of many classics including Over the Rainbow, said it simply: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.” For me, that captures the essence of artistic truth.

Darwin speculated that language emerged from song and imagined that those endowed with Elvis-like talents would more readily attract mates and thus more abundantly seed subsequent generations of gifted crooners. Given enough time, their melodious sounds would gradually transform into words.

Life is physics orchestrated
Some 13.8 billion years ago, within ferociously swelling space, the energy contained in a tiny but ordered cloud of inflaton field disintegrated, filling space with a bath of particles, and seeding the synthesis of the simplest atomic nuclei. Fusion within stars, as well as rare but powerful stellar collisions, melded simple nuclei into more complex atomic species, which, upon raining down on at least one planet in the making, were coaxed by molecular Darwinism to assemble into arrangements capable of self-replication. Random variations of the arrangements that happened to abet molecular fecundity spread widely. Through the long haul of Darwinian evolution, complex, self-directed, living beings emerged.

Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, Earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the Earth's crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form The Moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system, and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because Earth's tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of Earth's cant.

The recipe for building any atom, however complex, is direct. Join the right number of protons with the right number of neutrons, jam them together in a tight ball (the nucleus), surround them with electrons equal in number to that of the protons, and set the electrons in particular orbits dictated by quantum physics. That's it. The challenge is that, unlike Lego pieces, the atomic constituents don't just snap together. They strongly push and pull one another, making the assembly of nuclei a difficult task. Protons, in particular, all have the same positive electric charge, and so it takes enormous pressure and temperature for them to ram through their mutual electromagnetic repulsion and get close enough for the strong nuclear force to dominate, locking them in a powerful subatomic embrace.

To build a black hole like the one in the center of the Milky Way, whose mass is about four million times that of the Sun, you need matter whose density is about one hundred times that of lead.

Large groups often display statistical regularities absent at the level of the individual.

Particles and fields
Modern physics has grown accustomed to the idea of invisible substances suffusing space, latter-day versions of the ancient ether. From the inflaton field that may have driven the big bang, to the dark energy that may be responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe now measured, physicists of the past few decades have not been shy about proposing that space is filled with invisible stuff.

If we imagine that all of space is uniformly filled with another energy field - we call it dark energy because it doesn't generate light, but invisible energy would be just as apt - we can give an account of why the galaxies are all hurriedly departing. The case for dark energy is compelling but circumstantial. No one has found a way to clutch hold of dark energy, establish its existence, and directly examine its properties. Nevertheless, because it so adeptly accounts for the observations, dark energy has become the de facto explanation for the accelerated expansion of space.

Higgs suggested that if space were truly empty in the conventional and intuitive sense, particles would have no mass at all. He thus concluded that space must not be empty, and the peculiar substance it harbors must be just right for imbuing particles with their evident mass.

// What's It All About? (old ones) // 31.03.20
At the very least, we should follow the Greek physician Galen's Maxim, "Primum non nocere" : First do no harm.

Each is to count for one, and no-one more than one. - Jeremy Bentham

Be a Philosopher, but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man. - David Hume

Some seek sexual pleasures, others those of good food, yet others the experiences offered by drugs. Some seek pleasure in less physically sensuous forms, such as music, travel or art. It is just too crude to assume the hedonists always seek the most immediate and physical pleasure available. Some like to live the life of the mind, some to feel the pulsating beats of dance music, while others feel both needs strongly. - Julian Baggini

Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living creature that moves on the ground. - Genesis 1:28

The order of the world is shaped by death. - Albert Camus in The Plague

// The Pleasure Principle // 30.03.20
Epicurus saw that almost everything that necessity demands for substinance had already been provided for mortals, and yet he found that notwithstanding this prosperity, all of them privately had hearts ranked with anxiety.

"The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.” - Wittgenstein

Epicurious
"The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. For if someone has these things and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend even with Zeus for happiness."

"A free life cannot acquire great wealth, because the task is not easy without slavery to the mob or those in power."

"He who has learned the limits of life knows that it is easy to provide that which removes the feeling of pain owing to want, so there is no need for things which involve struggle." - Epicurus

Suffering in the midst of affluence
"Human beings never cease to labour vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares, evidently because they have not learnt the proper limit to possession, and the extent to which real pleasure can increase."

"If I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in a vision by a sensible form, I do not even know what I should conceive the good to be." - Lucretius

Admit you're hurt, confess your love, see what happens
Suppose you could take a pill that will have the effect of your never feeling anxious, fearful, outraged, hurt, offended, jealous, ashamed and regretful, scornful or, for that matter, excited, passionate, hopeful, triumphant, compassionate or ambivalent? Would you be motivated to take such a pill in order to obtain tranquility? Feeling is a kind of knowledge; it is only through our feelings that we know that we have been insulted, that we love someone, that danger lies ahead, or that it is uncertain what next step we ought to take. To stifle emotions is to lose awareness of the world and engagement with it. Moreover, while some things might just be endured because there is nothing we can do about it, human agency in response to emotional upsets can have a powerful remedial effect. Admit you're hurt, confess your love, and see what happens.

Friendship offers opportunities for shared attention - a distinctive aspect of human behaviour that other animals display only fleetingly - and for the full use of our powers of humour, aesthetic appreciation and speculation.

Set point theory
Set point theory tells us that people's subjective happiness level is basically set for life, and the needle budges only temporarily in response to gratifying events, such as winning a prize or getting a raise, before falling back to wherever it was.

In former centuries, some of the most admired persons were warmongers whose achievement was the massacre of thousands of people and the redrawing of national boundaries. This influence can be read from the statuary of most major European cities celebrating the achievements of people who ruined towns and villages and ordered hundreds or thousands of young men to their deaths. In our century, some of the most admired persons are entrepreneurs who discovered how to profit from the monotonous labour of others and how to tempt consumers into buying unnecessary objects.

For the religiously orthodox person, if God didn't want some particular person to be president of the United States, that person would not be president, so whatever that person does must be consistent with God's will.

Human beings are similar enough in our constitutions that we can all perceive tables and chairs, plants and animals, airplanes overhead, sails in the distance, red and green traffic lights, when they are a suitable distance away and our eyes are working normally. And human bodies are different enough from one another that we disagree about what dishes, colour combinations, and perfumes are appealing. But the visual world of an eagle or a panther, the odiferous world of a dog, or that of a lizard that can smell carrion (the decaying flesh of dead animals, from the Latin caro meaning 'meat') several miles away, must be different from ours, insofar as their bodies and sensory organs are composed of differently put together particles. We should beware of supposing that human perception sets any kind of standard, as though other animals enjoy enhanced or suffer from defective versions of our perceptual abilities.

Lucretius on death
"Death is nothing to us and does not affect us in the least, now that the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal. When body and soul, upon whose union our being depends, are divorced, you may be sure that nothing at all will have the power to affect us or awaken sensation in us, who shall not then exist."

"Why do you bemoan and beweep death? If your past life has been a boon, and if not all your blessings have flowed straight through you and run to waste like water poured into a riddled vessel ... why, you fool, do you not retire from the feast of life like a satisfied guest?"

The door is open
If things get too bad, killing yourself is the noble option. "The door is open", as the Stoics used to say.

// A.I vs. GM // 28.03.20
How fast a computer do you need to beat a chess grandmaster (GM)?

Any home PC made in the last 5-10 years would be more than capable of giving any GM a serious game, and would likely win. A smartphone is also fast enough.

In 1996 the supercomputer Deep Blue beat not just a GM, but World Champion Garry Kasparov. Its processing power was 11 GFLOPS (Giga-FLoating-point Operations Per Second). Let's compare Deep Blue to an iPhone 5s. The 5s' processing power is 10 GFLOPS, just 10% less powerful than Deep Blue! Considering that chess computer algorithms have improved vastly since '96, some GMs aren't as strong as Kasparov, and the iPhone's GPU (graphics processing unit) is more powerful than its CPU (central processing unit), I'd bet on the smartphone.

// Civilised to Death // 22.02.20
Homo sapiens: the hominid that knows it knows.

A meal is as good as a feast. More is no better than enough. 'Never satisfied' are not words to live by, but a colossal missing of the point that the game of life is not to be won. The point of life is the living of it, to keep playing, enjoy and prolong the experience.

“Show me where you're from and I'll tell you who you are”, they say. Well, I'm from Africa at least 300,000 years ago, and so are you.

Meet you in the middle baby
In his classic book Walden, Henry David Thoreau rebelled against the worship of superior men. Concerning the ancient Egyptian pharaohs he wrote, "As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs".

You and I live in a human world no other generation has ever known. No wonder so few of us are truly comfortable in the here and now; we've never had a chance to get to know the place.

When you're going in the wrong direction, progress is the last thing you need.

Nobody wants to believe we've invited our children to a party that's already well into the overflowing-ashtrays-and-spilled-drinks phase.

When you wake up smelling smoke, “Don't worry, go back to sleep” may be precisely what you want to hear, but that doesn't make it good advice.

The only proven technique for extending life span is caloric restriction.

Man is wolf to man
Non-reproductive sex can practically be considered a defining human characteristic. We are one of a very few species that enthusiastically engage in sex in myriad ways that can't possibly lead to pregnancy, but many religions impose draconian punishments for masturbation, sodomy, same-sex dalliances, or even enjoying sex with one's marital partner a little too much or too often. The insatiable hunger for human labour helps explain why most major religions so insistently and violently oppose non-reproductive sexual behaviour. Seen as a way of compelling rapid population growth in order to fuel the growth of civilized populations, this otherwise bizarre prohibition of non-reproductive sex begins to make sense. Humans are in effect being bred as a source of cheap, disposable labour, like horses, oxen, or camels.

// The Institute // 25.01.20
Booze and drugs dampen the torrent of input for high-functioning telepaths.

Around and around it went, and what was round had no point.

As funny as a rubber crutch.

Debt is a commodity.

// Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince // 22.01.20
In the early days of sound, photographic fluidity was surrendered to mechanical rigidity. The microphone, not yet movable from a boom, had to be hidden in a flowered plant or a centerpiece on a table. The actors had to play to it. And the camera, imprisoned in an enormous soundproof box, had lost its mobility. In those early years of primitive sound, the performers were far more circumscribed in movement than they would have been on a proscenium stage (the part of a stage in front of the curtain).

A lot of boiler-plate comedies (a boilerplate is a unit of writing that can be reused over and over without change) had to be ground out by the majors to fill the public hunger for at least one new movie a day. Television was still almost twenty years away and America went to the movies virtually en masse.

In England the common people felt a need for a royal family with whom to identify. It seemed no accident that we called our stars of the silent screen queens and kings.

It was fun to drink because you weren't't supposed to, to fornicate because Dr. Freud had now informed you that it was time to let your id take over from that puritanical superego.

// On Film // 14.01.20
"I was kept curious by the movie for most of its runtime."

"An indifference to the psychological motivations of the characters." - Bret Easton Ellis

"He was always more interested in his photographic effects than in the story he had to tell, or the characters his films could explore." - Budd Schulberg

Ayoade on Top
The trick of fiction is to convince us that life spills out beyond the narrative's frame.

The result is that I'm briefly bounced out of the film, and a strange sadness drifts through my body.

The Depressed Protagonist at Rock Bottom in a Bar is a potentially overused motif, but it's familiar for a reason. It's a cave-like setting, in which the wounded animal that is (Wo)Man retreats, regroups and reassesses, often in the company of a sympathetic supporting character who likes to obsessively dry-wipe glassware.

The medium of cinema finds it almost impossible to convey the labour required to achieve excellence in a given discipline. How can a film show a lawyer mastering her craft? She carries stacks of books, she drinks coffee, she stares at books while rubbing her eyes, she eats Chinese takeaway from the carton, she lays her head on the desk in tiredness, she wakes up with an egg roll affixed to her cheek, she puts her hair up in a bun, she acquires horn-rimmed glasses, she starts wearing less revealing cardigans, she wins the case, she is rewarded by a romance with the less flashy of the two men who are sexually interested in her. Cinema is much better at showing us the rules of a game, and then allowing us to watch people play by those rules.

People who make films that tell us to prioritise family over work still expect us to pay to see their films. If I were to try to see one of their exhortations at the cinema, but found myself impecunious, could I, as a lover of romantic comedies, appeal to the good heart of the usher?

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Her hair is the colour of a radioactive energy drink.

Few things are guaranteed to make people feel worse than air travel. You are one hundred times more likely to catch a cold on a plane; you're exposed to more radiation than you would be if you stood next to a nuclear reactor; and perhaps most pressingly, it makes a man mighty windy.

The kind of boxy white trainers that say, 'If you see me close to the swings, report me'.

I'm not saying we don't need lawyers. But that's only because I've been legally advised not to make that statement.

Here's a Times obituary you'll never read: ‘As great a rock star as he was, he was perhaps an even greater husband.' No one who achieved anything was ‘there' for someone else. They were elsewhere. Achieving.

// Capitalist Realism // 29.12.19
The public has been displaced by the consumer.

Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces - both physical and cultural - are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor.

To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is a twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger. They fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty, is Nietzsche.

With families buckling under the pressure of a capitalism which requires both parents to work, teachers are now increasingly required to act as surrogate parents, instilling the most basic behavioral protocols in students and providing pastoral and emotional support for teenagers who are in some cases only minimally socialized.

The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends less on what a company ‘really does', and more on perceptions and beliefs about its (future) performance. In capitalism, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

It quickly became clear that, far from constituting the end of capitalism, the bank bail-outs were a massive re-assertion of the capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative. Allowing the banking system to disintegrate was held to be unthinkable, and what ensued was a vast hemorrhaging of public money into private hands.

Anti-capitalism must oppose Capital's globalism with its own authentic universality.

// The Brain with David Eagleman // 27.12.19
Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world.

No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. But presumably, every creature assumes its slice of reality to be the entire objective world.

We think of color as a fundamental quality of the world around us. But in the outside world, color doesn't actually exist. When electromagnetic radiation hits an object, some of it bounces off and is captured by our eyes. We can distinguish between millions of combinations of wavelengths - but it is only inside our heads that any of this becomes color. Color is an interpretation of wavelengths, one that only exists internally. And it gets stranger, because the wavelengths we're talking about involve only what we call “visible light”, a spectrum of wavelengths that runs from red to violet. But visible light constitutes only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum - less than one ten-trillionth of it. All the rest of the spectrum - including radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, cell phone conversations, wi-fi, and so on - all of this is flowing through us right now, and we're completely unaware of it. This is because we don't have any specialized biological receptors to pick up on these signals from other parts of the spectrum. The slice of reality that we can see is limited by our biology.

So what does the world outside your head really 'look' like? Not only is there no color, there's also no sound: the compression and expansion of air is picked up by the ears, and turned into electrical signals. The brain then presents these signals to us as mellifluous tones and swishes and clatters and jangles. Reality is also odorless: there's no such thing as smell outside our brains. Molecules floating through the air bind to receptors in our nose and are interpreted as different smells by our brain. The real world is not full of rich sensory events; instead, our brains light up the world with their own sensuality.

I think of consciousness as the CEO of a large sprawling corporation, with many thousands of subdivisions and departments all collaborating and interacting and competing in different ways. Small companies don't need a CEO - but when an organization reaches sufficient size and complexity, it needs a CEO to stay above the daily details and to craft the long-view of the company. Although the CEO has access to very few details of the day-to-day running of the company, he or she always has the long-view of the company in mind. A CEO is a company's most abstract view of itself. In terms of the brain, consciousness is a way for billions of cells to see themselves as a unified whole, a way for a complex system to hold up a mirror to itself.

Priming
Priming is an effect in which one thing influences the perception of something else. For example, if you're holding a warm drink you'll describe your relationship with a family member more favorably; when you're holding a cold drink, you'll express a slightly poorer opinion of the relationship. Why does this happen? Because the brain mechanisms for judging intrapersonal warmth overlap with the mechanisms for judging physical warmth, and so one influences the other. The upshot is that your opinion about something as fundamental as your relationship with your mother can be manipulated by whether you take your tea hot or iced. Similarly, when you are in a foul-smelling environment, you'll make harsher moral decisions - for example, you're more likely to judge that someone else's uncommon actions are immoral. In another study, it was shown that if you sit in a hard chair you'll be a more hard-line negotiator in a business transaction; in a soft chair you'll yield more.

Every four months your red blood cells are entirely replaced and your skin cells are replaced every few weeks. Within about seven years every atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms. Physically, you are constantly a new you. Fortunately, there may be one constant that links all these different versions of your self together: memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that makes you who you are. It sits at the core of your identity, providing a single, continuous sense of self.

When we review our life memories, we should do so with the awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some came from stories that people told us about ourselves; others were filled in with what we thought must have happened. So if your answer to who you are is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative.

When we're in the middle of a dream, it seems real. When we've misinterpreted a quick glance of something we've seen, it's hard to shake the feeling that we know the reality of what we saw. When we're recalling a memory that is, in fact, false, it's difficult to accept claims that it didn't really happen. Although it's impossible to quantify, accumulations of such false realities color our beliefs and actions in ways of which we can never be cognizant.

// Can of Neck Oil // 21.12.19
"Refrain tonight, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence, the next more easy, for use [almost] can change the stamp of nature." - Hamlet

“He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.” - Dr. Johnson

"Maintenance drinking." - Stephen King

"Fulfilment of desire doesn't quell the desire." - Lionel Shriver

Plate face: a person of Asian decent. - Lionel Shriver

"Children and their instinctive talent for sensing those talentless with children." - John Niven

"We are all prisoners of our own place and time: Slaveholders and pederasts in Ancient Greece, God-botherers in the Dark Ages, torturers and witch-hunters in early modern England." - Louis Theroux

// (Why) Did You Do It? // 09.11.19
People say that if you give money to the homeless, they'll only spend it on drink and drugs. Well that's what I was going to spend it on!

The wild ways were beginning to outgrow their joyfulness and wilt into despair.

Googolplex
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like a hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." - Einstein

"Offence is important; that's how you know you care about things." - Marcus Brigstocke

There Never Were Any Rules
Make the hardest call of the day first.

It's easy to think that movies and TV are a miniature version of the world. That's not just wrong, it's a perspective that leads to mediocre movies, and to being boring.

Connection gives meaning to our lives. Connection is why we are here.

Doing nothing can be a very powerful action unto itself.

// Bien Dicho // 14.10.19
Las fiestas en los pueblos no están hechas para disfrutar, están hechas para sobrevivir.

// Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come // 12.10.19
Typically, introverts weigh decisions more carefully than extroverts. We're better at one-on-one situations because it's easier to judge how people are disposed towards us and what they might do next if there is only one person to process. When we start interacting with ten people or more, it becomes nerve-wracking because there are too many things to monitor.

What scares you, owns you.

The UK is the ‘cancellation nation'. A survey of 2000 British people found that on average we make 104 social arrangements a year, but bail on half of them.

// Nobody Waves, Everybody Waves Back // 07.10.19
What are you thoughts on euthanasia? Same as the youth in England.

When will people realise, "Do you want anything from the shop?” is a rhetorical question?

// Dreamseller // 24.09.19
There is much more to life than this place, my addiction, or this day.

There is never a moment in an addict's life when he can honestly say that the flames of his addiction have been completely extinguished. Addiction is a smouldering fire, subtle yet fierce.

His skin was picked to pieces. Bleeding scabs speckled him. These sores were the product of a twitching nervous system searching desperately for a compulsive activity to occupy its fitful surges of energy.

// Dirty White Boys // 22.09.19
The hard cons, the real pros, always had a glimmer of talent. They could have been something else, something better.

It amazed him: Somehow he always did the exact opposite of what he set out to do.

He had a gift but not a great one, that was clear, and he was so much less interesting than Mother, he was a wretched conversationalist, he didn't have her buoyant charm, her vividness, her confidence. And she told him that, not in subtle ways, but baldly and to his face. "Richard, you could do so much better if you weren't so meek. You will not inherit the earth that way, I promise you. You have to learnt to project. People don't find your self-doubts attractive at all. Reach out, open up." But the more she pushed him, the more he sealed up. It was as if he were blossoming inward, becoming more retarded and pitiful and self-conscious and crippled with terror. He was afraid of everything!

He slipped the brown paper bag from his left inside pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a fast swig. I.W Harper, seven years old, like the smoke off a prairie fire. He went into wooziness, then came back out, feeling calmer and more in charge. He screwed the lid back on, lightly, and slipped the pint into his pocket.

If fit his hand like a handshake from a brother.

He simply lived each moment, then forgot it forever.

// Conan Doyle for the Defence // 13.09.19
"Sir, I was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval which could in any way annoy me." - A.C.D to Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's former lover and later convert to the Roman Catholic Church.

"An exceptionally clear thinker, impatient of slower minds, overfond of whisky." (This does not refer to A.C.D)

// I, Fatty // 10.09.19
I spent the intervening weeks with my friends Mr. Morphine and Monsieur Brandy, and didn't care to leave their company no matter how much Minta implored me. Whatever faith I had, not just in humanity, but in right and wrong, loyalty and trust, truth and fibbery, went up in flames with the empty liquor crates and unread newspapers we burned in the backyard.

In my experience, morphine and whiskey will certainly introduce a man to his carpet.

It was the studio where you began working for the sole purpose of making enough money to stop working there. (Mack Sennett)

// Permanent Midnight // 09.09.19
Drug addiction is no different from any other religion. Sometimes all you need is the ritual.

Because as much as you want to stop, you also want to do more.

// Sated / Satiated // 06.09.19
"We are all idiots. Make peace with your inner idiot." - Alain de Botton

Pop songs have been getting shorter, in part because online streaming services pay artists for the number of times a song is listened to. The shorter the song, the more likely people are to listen to it often.

// Machines Like Me // 17.08.19
Paradise on earth was to work all day alone, in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.

We are disposed to make patterns and narratives when we should be thinking probabilistically if we want to make good choices.

I paused to look back and experienced one of those moments that can derange the emotional life: a startling realisation of the obvious, an absurd leap of understanding into what one already knows.

// The Lost Weekend // 06.07.19
It wasn't because he was thirsty that he drank, and he didn't drink because he liked the taste (actually whiskey was dreadful to the palate; he swallowed at once to get it down as quickly as possible): he drank for what it did to him. As for quenching his thirst, liquor did exactly the opposite. To quench is to slake or to satisfy, to give you enough. Liquor couldn't do that.

The poor devil, demoralized and thrown off balance by the very stuff intended to restore his frightened and baffled ego.

He had no way of knowing how long his little excursion into the past, his deliberate reverie, had lasted. It had not been refreshing or helpful; or if it had, the ringing of the phone wiped it at once all away, woke his aching nerves, his rioting heart, his fears of what was going to happen to him now.

// Rhotacism // 16.06.19
I'm so pale, it takes me a week to go white! - Billy Connolly

He lived so intensely within himself that he was barley aware of how his actions appeared to others.

I'm hooked on story.

"And what should they know of England, who only England know?" - Kipling

Love over money, art over everything.

// Litter: The Remains of Our Culture // 06.06.19
There is nothing more to the social contract these days than an agreement to leave each other alone, whatever the other may be doing.

I can think only of Burke's words in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: "What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." But disgust is in the mind of the repelled, and John Stuart Mill told us not to forbid anything merely because we find it distasteful.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. The unwillingness of people in Britain to place moral chains upon their appetites, and therefore upon their conduct, has led, naturally enough (and precisely as Burke would have expected) to an increase in the controlling power from without.

The aesthetes of nihilism believe that civilized life can only be lived without taboos. That some taboos may be justified, and therefore not in themselves an evil to be vanquished - is a thought too subtle for them.

I am not an egalitarian, and believe that no real equality can exist other than equality before the law.

Public Service
The principal purpose of the public service is to serve the private ends of those who work in it, to secure their well-being and generous pension arrangements. In the circumstances, declining services and increasing taxes are not only compatible, but to be expected.

Clearly it would not be right that the people engaged upon such important and hazardous work as politics should themselves have to fret over such trivia as the standard of their own living. They should not be distracted by discomfort.

A government that takes between 4/10 and 1/2 of people's income is making a very large claim about its responsibilities.

Mrs. Thatcher believed that there was a lot of waste and inefficiency in the public services and that, on the whole, private businesses were run more efficiently. She concluded that introducing the methods of private business into the public sector would increase its efficiency. Unfortunately, she failed to understand that an indisputable measure of the success or failure that was available to private businesses - namely the balance sheet - was not available to publicly-run services. And this was an absolutely crucial difference. In the public service, no measure of success or failure was readily available. This was not because no such measures were intellectually conceivable, but because the people doing the measuring were either the same people, or closely allied to the people, whose success or failure was being measured. Man being a fallen creature, truth in the abstract is not always his overriding goal.

de Tocqueville's 'Soft Tyranny' is so difficult to oppose because its ultimate source is so difficult to identify. It creeps up on you unannounced, so that no individual instance of it is worth opposing by personal sacrifice.

Tabula Rasa / Blank Slate
In Locke's philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that at birth the (human) mind is a 'blank slate' without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences.

Aesthetic judgment is fragile and changeable, susceptible to influences that are not primarily aesthetic in nature.

It is easier to see beauty in something when it is pointed out to you.

A single bad experience of a member of a human group is often enough to predispose someone against it as a whole; the reverse is also true.

They go abroad to do exactly what they would do at home if they could, seven days a week instead of two (the weekend), in greater warmth and sunshine. They have no interest in the local customs or history. They take their own way of life with them, as if there were no other possible, and exaggerate its most unattractive aspects.

Consign it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion
If, like Nero, you spill human blood on grass just because you like the juxtaposition of red and green, morality enters the question. But however much one might be repelled by a man who wore a grass-green shirt with blood-red trousers, one could not deduce moral failing from it.

// Stoic: A Guide to the Good Life // 03.06.19
"If God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts." - Seneca

Hedonic Adaption Process
We tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without, including antibiotics, air conditioning, toilet paper, windows, eyeglasses, and fresh fruit in January. Upon coming to this realization, we can breathe a sigh of relief that we aren't our ancestors, the way our descendants will presumably someday breathe a sigh of relief that they aren't us!

The gods had given to them the means of living easily, but this had been put out of sight because they required honeyed cakes, unguents, and the like.

Negative Visualization Technique
Contemplate the impermanence of the world.

Before eating a meal, those saying grace pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that this food might not have been available to them, in which case they would have gone hungry. And even if the food were available, they might not have been able to share it with the people now at their dinner table. Said with these thoughts in mind, grace has the ability to transform an ordinary meal into a cause for celebration.

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

Sextius would ask himself at bedtime, “What ailment of yours have you cured today? What failing have you resisted? Where can you show improvement?"

Eschewing Comfort
Someone who tries to avoid all discomfort is less likely to be comfortable than someone who periodically embraces discomfort. The latter individual is likely to have a much wider comfort zone than the former and will therefore feel comfortable under circumstances that would cause the former individual considerable distress.

The reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard, but because we are soft.

Stoics are careful to avoid becoming 'connoisseurs' in the worst sense of the word - becoming, that is, individuals who are incapable of taking delight in anything but 'the best'. Stoic enjoyment, unlike that of a connoisseur, is eminently transferable.

Epictetus presents us with the image of Zeus as an athletic coach: "It is difficulties that show what men are. Consequently, when a difficulty befalls, remember that God, like a physical trainer, has matched you with a rugged young man." Why do this? To toughen and strengthen you, so you can become "an Olympic victor". Seneca, by the way, argued along similar lines: God, he said, “does not make a spoiled pet of a good man; he tests him, hardens him, and fits him for his own service.” The adversities we experience count as “mere training,” and “those things which we all shudder and tremble at are for the good of the persons themselves to whom they come.”

Tranquillity
Those who think fame and fortune are more valuable than tranquility vastly outnumber those who think tranquility is more valuable.

Relax our face, soften our voice, and slow our pace of walking. If we do this, our internal state will soon come to resemble our external state.

If our goal is not merely to survive and reproduce but to enjoy a tranquil existence, the pain associated with a loss of social status isn't just useless, it is counterproductive. As we go about our daily affairs, other people, because of their evolutionary programming, will work, often unconsciously, to gain social status. As a result, they will be inclined to snub us, insult us, or, more generally, do things to put us in our place, socially speaking. Their actions can have the effect of disrupting our tranquility - if we let them. What we must do, in these cases, is use - or more precisely misuse - our intellect to override the evolutionary programming that makes insults painful to us.

Make it clear to the insulter that I have enough confidence in who I am to be impervious to his insults; for me, they are a laughing matter.

Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them.

"Chastity comes with time to spare, lechery has never a moment." - Seneca

Be ashamed only of what is really shameful
What point is there in being unhappy just because once you were unhappy?

Another way to overcome our obsession with winning the admiration of other people is to go out of our way to do things likely to trigger their disdain. Along these lines, Cato made a point of ignoring the dictates of fashion: When everyone was wearing light purple, he wore dark, and although ancient Romans normally went out in public wearing shoes and a tunic, Cato wore neither. According to Plutarch, Cato did this not because he “sought vainglory”; to the contrary, he dressed differently in order to accustom himself “to be ashamed only of what was really shameful, and to ignore men's low opinion of other things.”

Since nature intended us to be social creatures, we have duties to our fellow men. We should, for example, honor our parents, be agreeable to our friends, and be concerned with the interests of our countrymen.

We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us - we must agree to go easy on one another.

// Shorts in the Long Grass // 03.06.19
"We are but points in universal consciousness." - Russell Brand

Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

// Will Storr vs the Supernatural // 15.05.19
Emotions and free will are just an illusion that we have to stop us blowing our brains out.

The man who expends the most effort on the presentation of his personality is the man who's got the most to hide.

I'm rarely happier than at the outset of a long, quiet train journey, when I've found a forward-facing place to sit where nobody can see me.

Hypnogogic (half asleep) state
At the moment, I really want to be by myself. I find it difficult spending this much time with strangers. I feel like a bride who has to keep a piano-grin hoisted for the whole day.

By now I've almost completely lost control over which thoughts are staying in my mind and which ones are coming out of my mouth.

Ouija comes for the French and German words for ‘Yes'.

As I got older I started to learn more about the contradictions, the baffling rules and the surreal illogicality of the Church. And as I became more questioning of the low-level doom, the funny costumes, the weird tales and the rank hypocrisy, increasingly I'd just think... naaaah.

To take the sceptical stance, you need to just know somewhere deep in your soul that you're right. In other words, to be a true fundamentalist hardcore disbeliever, you have to have faith. The hard sceptics are just the same as priests because they offer absolutes, they give answers, and you only get answers from charlatans.

// Sunglasses at Night // 12.05.19
I'm neither happy nor unhappy. I'm confused and frightened, but not overwhelmingly so. I get by.

Men have to learn this golden rule over and over: Women want to be wanted and they love sex.

We are desperate for any sign of approval from women, and will misread the slightest friendly gesture as an entreaty to copulation.

Being with a prostitute is a sad mimicry of sex with a woman who actually wants you. Afterward you're disgusted with yourself and half-dead and not only have you killed yourself a little, but you've contributed to the ongoing destruction of another person - the woman who sold you her mouth and breasts and vagina.

Any man who thinks a prostitute wants him for anything other than money is a fool. Of course, there are many such fools. They are the bread and butter of the business.

Asians make the best and easiest transition to womanhood, followed by Latinos, then blacks, and lastly whites. - Jonathan Ames

// Desperate Characters // 10.05.19
“I'm tired of parties”, Otto said in the taxi. “I get so bored. Movie talk bores me. I don't care about Fred Astaire, and he doesn't care about me. I care even less about Fellini. Flo is so self-important because she knows actors.”

Sophie, suddenly animated by a murky yet powerful conviction that she knew what was wrong with everything, ran up the steps. But she had to wait for Otto; she didn't have the keys. He climbed the steps slowly, looking at the change in his hand. Sophie's access of energy, so startling as to verge on pain, died at once.

Floored again! What style!

Although she was a heavy woman, she did not look plump - sturdy rather.

Look at those shoes! Made by some European slave for a lira, right? What multitudes we all recline upon! I thought my vanity would subside by the time I was fifty, but it's gotten worse. That's why I dress this way. I'd rather look like an aged go-go girl than a middle class frump. There used to be a tribe in Africa that flung women who were fifty over a cliff. But I suppose they've become enlightened by now. How's Otto?

He doesn't think about people more than two minutes at a time, then by some supernatural agency presumes to arrive at total insight.

People don't think about other people that much.

He was like everyone else, witlessly inflexible, treating his own actions as if they stemmed from inexorable natural laws.

// The English Dane // 09.05.19
The English - at the time of Empire - were known for their gloominess and suicidal tendencies. Depressive disorders had long been known as ‘the English malady'. This image, which seems to be associated with national prosperity, transferred itself to the Scandinavians only in the following century.

Bede compares a human life to a sparrow that flies accidentally into a banqueting hall full of feasting guests and great blazing fires, but a moment later flies out through another doorway into the cold emptiness of winter again.

"The great mass of the human race has been considered as being born for no other reason than administering and pampering to the arrogant pretensions, luxury, vice, and debauchery of a very limited number, who, to the eternal degradation of man's character, assume titles and lordly honours and names, which alone ought to be bestowed on the Holiest Holy." - Jorgenson

Jorgenson came to the conclusion that his loss of faith had made him too confident; he had assumed ‘that reason was a match for impetuous passion and a warm temper'. This was a great error. He now began to see that only faith could hold back the ‘torrent of overruling inclinations' in his character; without it, all was ‘emptiness and confusion within'.

// The Science of Storytelling // 24.04.19
How we behave in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation. This is how it works: You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should sound and look and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on those predications. It's this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It's this hallucination that you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You'll never experience any actual reality because you have no direct access to it. This hallucinated reconstruction of reality is sometimes referred to as the brain's ‘model of the world'.

As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. Beneath the level of consciousness we're a riotous democracy of mini-selves which are locked in a chronic battle for dominion. Our behaviour is simply the end result of the battles. All the while our confabulating narrator works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?

Saccades
Our biological technology simply can't process most of what's actually going on in the great oceans of electromagnetic radiation that surround us. Human eyes are able to read less than on ten-trillionth of the light spectrum.

The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we're surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we're subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Our is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It's only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it's not only us who are broken, conflicted, confused, and who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets. It's not only us who feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves, who are scared. The magic of story is its ability to connect mind with mind in a manner that's unrivalled even by love. Story's gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone in that dark bone vault after all.

Myoclonic jerk (that sudden jarring contraction of the muscle when we're asleep)
Dreams feel real because they are made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake. The sights are the same, the smells are the same, objects feel the same to the touch.

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the audience." - Tolstoy

"Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves." - Russell T Davies

Eudaemonia (you-de-monia)
Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, “The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals”. For Aristotle, happiness was not a feeling but a practice. He was saying, stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.

When we push ourselves towards a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we're after, but when we're in pursuit of it. It's the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense that we're getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair.

Humans are built for story
When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical theory and explanation about what's happening in the world and why?

Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we've lost control without actually placing us in danger. It's a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, unexpected change and moral outrage.

All of us are in search of writers who somehow capture the distinct music made by the agonies in our heads. If we prefer storytellers with similar backgrounds and lived experiences to our own, it's because we often crave in art the same connection with others that we seek in friendship and love. Storytelling will always be full of associations that speak directly to our particular perspectives.

Animism
We willing allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain. We can tell when we're under its power: when all the good is on our side and all the bad is on theirs, our storytelling brain is working is grim magic in full. We're being sold a story. Reality is rarely so simple.

Each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neutral realms, ‘seeing' things differently, feeling different passions and hatreds and associations of memory as our attention grazes over them. We laugh at different things, are moved by different pieces of music and transported by different kinds of stories.

// Mark Sugarmountain // 21.04.19
You ever been inside?
Inside what?

"See ya. Don't think too much." - Liam G

Grown men cry over football, but won't hug their own son cos it might make them soft. - Asim Chaudhry

// The War on Drugs // 20.04.19
Legalise and regulate the supply of narcotics and at a stroke you deprive the most vicious gangsters in the world of the £375 billion annual income that enables all of their operations. At a stroke you allow some of the most vulnerable people in society to seek help for their addictions, instead of being shoved into prison cells. At a stroke you allow the police to get back to doing the vitally important work they are actually trained for, and can take real pride in.

Drug addiction is not a moral category but a medical issue that should be treated by doctors, not law enforcers. This springs from the age-old liberal traditions in British political life; traditions that favour custom over writ, personal liberty over state power, and pragmatism over blind obedience to the rules.

For the vast majority, the most revolutionary drug of the 1960s was the contraceptive pill
When the Misuse of Drugs act was passed in 1971, there were just over 1000 addicts in Britain and almost zero crime related to drug supply. Decades later there are 350,000 addicts, over half the prison population are inside for drug-related offences, and the criminal justice system has never been as corrupt.

Prior to the nineteenth century, drugs now illegal were widely used across Britain. In a country without universal health care, poppyhead tea was commonly brewed as a painkiller and folk remedy. Later, opium was imported and sold everywhere from high-street pharmacies to rural grocery stores. Most people used opium or laudanum (a tincture* of morphine and codeine) purely as a medicine. A few, such as the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey, took opiates seeking pleasure and mind expansion. Queen Victoria herself was fond of both opium and cannabis, before being introduced to cocaine later in life.
* tincture: an extract of plant or animal material dissolved in ethyl alcohol (ethanol)

The police are the public and the public are the police
The world's first modern, professional police force was established in Britain by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. Through many changes and evolutions, this is the essential model on which almost every advanced nation has founded and developed their own law enforcement services to this day.

In the British legal tradition, crimes are separated into two categories: crimes that are mala in se - wrong in themselves - and those that are mala in prohibita - wrong only because they are prohibited. Drug laws fit entirely into the second category. When writing up any crime, there is a space on the form where the arresting officer is required to record a victim. For crimes like murder and robbery this is obvious enough, but when drug arrests are made in the UK, the victim is, absurdly, recorded as ‘the Crown'.

The Press(ure)
If the American war on drugs was at last in part manufactured to satisfy racial prejudice, then its British franchise was at least in part manufactured to sell newspapers. The role of the press in creating hysteria around drugs cannot be overestimated.

The exploitative mix of prurient voyeurism, self-righteous condemnation, and blatant disregard for the truth, that is emblematic of so much of the tabloid press.

"We do not seem to have learn anything from the experience of our American brethren ... Cannot our legislators understand that our only hope of stamping out the drug addict is through the doctors? Legislation above the doctors' heads is likely to prove our undoing. We can no more stamp out addiction by prohibition than insanity." - W.E Dixon, 1923

// Watching the English // 28.03.19
The English seem to have a greater potential for embarrassment than other cultures, to experience it more often, and to be more constantly anxious and worried about it. We humans tend to make jokes about things that frighten us, and the English have an unusually acute fear of embarrassment, so it is not terribly surprising that much of our comedy should deal with this theme. To the socially challenged English, almost any social situation is potentially highly embarrassing, so we have a particularly rich source of comic material to play with.

Ridicule is often the quickest and most efficient way of teaching the unwritten rules; letting some know exactly where the invisible lines are drawn and conveying disapproval when they are over-stepped.

The Importance of Not Being Earnest
The English are more acutely sensitive to the distinction between serious and solemn, between sincerity and earnestness. Serious matters can be spoken of seriously, but one must never take oneself too seriously.

"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us." - Oscar Wilde

Body English: body language with an English accent
The English Male has bonding arguments. He is allowed three emotions: surprise, anger, and celebration. All manifest in loud swearing, and it is sometimes difficult to know which emotion is being expressed.

Sorry, but I'm not going to apologise for that
The generic rule is that every request must end with a please and every fulfilment of a request requires a thank-you.

Young people are increasingly affected by the culture of fear, and the risk-aversion and obsession with safety that have become defining features of contemporary society. This trend, described as a 'climate of pervasive anxiety' (which has no doubt been further exacerbated by economic recession) is associated with the stunted aspirations, cautiousness, conformism, and lack of adventurous spirit among many young people.

// Porcelain // 16.03.19
I liked working. When I sat on the futon and played too much Nintendo I ended up feeling like a greasy, vegan slug. Work was fun, and made me feel sharp and virtuous.

Hip-hop was transforming from a voice of protest to a celebration of bottle service and expensive watches.

Alcohol didn't numb the pain, but it did turn it into an interesting place full of distorted mirrors.

// Poverty Safari // 15.03.19
It's not useful to make too many assumptions about individuals or groups. Obviously I can't clear my head of all presumption, but what I can choose to observe are those assumptions as they emerge in my mind without acting on them. These assumptions say as much about me as they do about the subject of my judgment.

A belief that the system is rigged against you and that all attempts to resist or challenge it are futile. That the decisions that affect your life are being taken by a bunch of other people somewhere else, who are deliberately trying to conceal things from you. A belief that you are excluded from taking part in the conversation about your own life.

It's a world of such unending complexity that our leaders often choose to oversimplify every aspect of our lives into soundbites that make it harder to consider the issue in anything but tribal and adversarial terms.

// No Good Deed // 09.03.19
What was it Amis said? Eventually most marriages become sibling relationships, broken by the odd, embarrassing bout of incest.

A definition of Hell: a place where you spend your time with the people whom you committed your worst sins, forever staring guilty into their burning eyes.

// You // 17.02.19
You are, to be sure, a living organism, but it is probably more accurate to describe you as a current manifestation of the life force.

The zygote (the union of the sperm cell and the egg cell, also known as a fertilized ovum) that used to be you was a stem cell. As such, it didn't have a job to do, other than reproduce by means of cellular fission. Its daughter cells were likewise stem cells. But after about a week of dividing, your cells started to specialize. They didn't do so by choice; instead, they were told, by a chemical signal, what job they would do. A cell specializes by selectively expressing its genes. Activate some genes, and a cell will play the role of a skin cell; activate other genes, and it will instead become a liver cell. We humans have about 20,000 different protein-coding genes.

The Gut
The bodies of most animals are built around a tube known as a gut. At one end of this tube is the mouth, where food and water enter, and at the other end is the anus, where waste is excreted. It is a brilliant design.

Worms gained the ability to sense their environment and in particular to sense the presence of certain chemicals in the water. With this information, their motion could be directed toward where food was likely to be. Since the goal of this directed motion was to bring the food to the worm's mouth, the logical location for its sensory organs was near that mouth. Later, when worms developed primitive brains, the logical place for them was near the source of sensory input that they would analyse and was therefore near the mouth too. This is the evolutionary reason why what we call our head is home not just to our mouth, but to out taste buds, nose, ears and brain. It is the design favoured by most animals.

In evolutionary terms, we humans represent an advanced stage of the tubular body design: we are, at our core, a tube with a mouth, a digestive tract, and an anus. We inherited this design from a distant worm ancestor. Over millions of generations, we have evolved in a manner that allowed this “inner worm” to best conduct its business. This includes the addition of arms, legs, and a head with a brain. It is therefore not too much of a stretch to describe ourselves as radically accessorized worms.

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
For tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, the universe experienced a protracted dark age during which there was plenty of gas but no stars. If you could travel back to this time though, you would not have witnessed complete darkness, since the gas around you would have been quite hot. You would instead have seen a reddish glow in any direction that you looked. This glow is still there, but because the universe has cooled substantially since the Big Bang, it is no longer a reddish glow or even an invisible-to-the-naked-eye infrared glow. Its wavelength has gotten so long that it is in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This 'glow' goes by the name of cosmic microwave background radiation.

// Infinite Wishes // 21.01.19
"The absence of fear is trust." - Tolle

"The world is full of lonely people afraid to make the first move." - Green Book movie

"Like the best of rows, it moved rapidly from the particular to the general." - Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

// A Short History of Drunkenness // 17.01.19
“I drink to make other people more interesting.” - Ernest Hemingway

“I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me.” - Jim Morrison

"Even when I'm deep in foggy, clouded behaviour, numbing myself with whatever I can, some part of me remains self-aware. I'm hyper, hyper self-aware." - Lily Allen

What news?
Is this all there is? Perhaps. Probably. But if we were given vastly more we would still be asking the same question. Humans are not satisfied, and that too is our glory. We're always looking for new oceans to cross, not because we need to, but because we're bored. We like to talk of the Ultimate Truth, but we would be so disappointed if we found it, because there would be no more. We long for a God we can't describe, because the only description we, as humans, can give is of a particularly crafty magician, and we know that God is more than that. God can never be boring. Humans are never bored when they're drunk.

The story of most spirits: a medicine that was taken so enthusiastically that it became a pleasure.

Drinking Drys
The 18th Amendment - the one identified with prohibition, the only amendment to curtail liberty, the only amendment to be repealed - never really says what its banning. It just outlaws intoxicating drinks, without saying which ones they are. It was the Volstead Act that defined intoxicating as over 0.5% ABV.

Beer brewers were reasonably relaxed about the passing of the amendment. So were vintners. So were Drinking Drys. Everybody knew that Prohibition was not about alcohol, but about drunkenness, saloons and violence.

Whenever you see an American alcoholic drinks company that claims they've been making their product the same way for 150 years; that's a lie. In every case, there was a 13-year gap from 1920 to 1933.

Coca-Cola had a massive sales boom, not as an alternative to alcohol, but as an accompaniment.

Ale is liquid bread
Mead is fermented honey and water.

“We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!” - Benjamin Franklin

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes! It is in fact the great exciter of the yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chilled periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with the truth.

Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature. It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Wine doesn't like a leader and drunkenness tends towards democracy.

At some point the alcohol would have triumphed over the discipline.

The nightclubs have done more to improve race relations in ten years than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades.

Ster is a female suffix. The male suffix is er.

// Mandala: the Buddhist Wheel of Life // 03.01.19
The Mandala revolves through six realms. Each realm is populated by characters representing aspects of human existence - our various ways of being.

In the Beast Realm we are driven by basic survival instincts and appetites, such as physical hunger and sexuality, what Freud called the id.

The denizens of the Hell Realm are trapped in states of unbearable rage and anxiety.

In the God Realm we transcend our troubles and our egos through sensual, aesthetic or religious experience, but only temporarily and in ignorance of spiritual truth. Even this enviable state is tinged with loss and suffering.

The inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost Realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction, where we constantly seek something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need.

// Apanthropy * // 23.12.18
Last words: “See you around.”

* a love of solitude and a desire to be away from other people

// The Challenge of Things // 19.12.18
It is wrong to offend those who cannot choose their sex, sexuality, age, disability, or ethnicity, but as regards matters of choice - politics, religion, fashion sense - it is open season. You have no right to be protected from the criticism or disagreement of others, and must rely on having a good case to make in response. If you do not have a good case, that is your own problem.

As Colonial Secretary in the years after the First War World War, Churchill presided over the division of the Ottoman empire, creating Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria out of nothing, and giving the latter to France. Before the 1921 Cairo Conference at which this happened, John Maynard Keynes said to Churchill, “If you cut up the map of the Middle East with a pair of scissors, you will still be fighting wars there in a hundred years' time”.

A crazy person can buy a gun in an American or Norwegian shop, yet ‘drugs' are prohibited and policed at vast expense to society. Language matters: let us no longer use the word ‘gun' but the phrase highly dangerous killing instrument, and perhaps perceptions will change.

// 21 Lessons for the 21st Century // 14.12.18
Modernity doesn't reject the plethora of stories it inherited from the past. Instead, it opened a supermarket for them. The modern human is free to sample them all, choosing and combining whatever fits his or her taste.

Cooperation
We think we know a lot - even though individually we know very little - because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all of our needs, more and more so as history progresses. The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.

Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don't like too many facts, and they certainly don't like to feel stupid.

Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions. Poets, painters and playwrights are therefore at least as important as soldiers and engineers. People go to war and build cathedrals because they believe in God, and they believe in God because they have read poems about God, because they have seen pictures of God, and because they have been mesmerised by plays about God. Similarly, our belief in the modern mythology of capitalism is underpinned by the artistic creations of Hollywood and the pop industry. We believe that buying more stuff will make us happy, because we see the capitalist paradise with our own eyes on television.

Sufferation
When you are confronted by some great story and you wish to know whether it is real or imaginary, one of the key questions to ask is whether the central hero of the story can suffer.

Of all rituals, sacrifice is most potent, because of all things in the world, suffering is the most real. You can never ignore it or doubt it. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you that the story is real.

Even in romance, any aspiring Romeo or Werther knows that without sacrifice, there is no true love. The sacrifice is not just a way to convince your lover that you are serious - it is also a way to convince yourself that you are really in love. Why do you think women ask their lovers to buy bring them diamond rings? Once the lover makes such a huge financial sacrifice, he must convince himself that it was for a worthy cause.

As countless love poems testify, when you are in love, the entire universe is reduced to the earlobe, the eyelash, the nipple of your beloved. When gazing at Juliet leaning her cheek upon her hand, Romeo exclaims, “O that I were a glove upon that hand, That I may touch that cheek”.

The universe has no plot
The universe has no plot, so it is up to us humans to create a plot, and this is our vocation and the meaning of life. The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe.

Most people who go on identify quests are like children going treasure hunting. They find only what their parents have hidden for them in advance.

Our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal
Observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and messes up your hair. Just as you are not the winds, you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them in hindsight. You experience all of them, but you don't control them, you don't own them, and you are not them.

We cannot see the mind through a brain scanner. These devices enable us to detect biochemical and electrical activities in the brain, but do not give us any access to the subjective experiences associated with these activities. As of 2018, the only mind I can access directly is my own. If I want to know what other sentient beings are experiencing, I can only so do on the basis of second-hand reports, which naturally suffer from numerous distortions and limitations.

Perhaps we are all living in a giant computer simulation. That would contradict all our national, religious and ideological stories, but our mental experiences would still be real. Pain is pain, fear is fear, love is love, even in the matrix. It doesn't matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world, or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real. So if you want to explore the reality of your mind, you can do that inside the matrix as well as outside it.

// 0 in Roman numerals // 09.12.18
"I can't imagine anyone (aside from the narcissistic or painfully self-deluded) has ‘high self-esteem'. Life is largely a catalogue of embarrassment & failures to do oneself justice. What a task to still pursue something worthwhile and try to take responsibility amidst one's mess." - Derren Brown

// Kingdom of Fear // 08.11.18
Life is a gradual release from ignorance.

I always figured I would live on the margins of society, part of a very small Outlaw segment. I have never been approved by any majority. Most people assume it's difficult to live this way, and they are right - they're still trying to lock me up all the time. I've been very careful about urging people who cannot live outside the law to throw off the traces and run amok. Some are not made for the Outlaw life.

We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

// The Blade Artist // 31.10.18
The wisest of human beings are students, forever learning how to deal with life, continuously readjusting in the face of the shifting opportunities and threats it presents.

Franco had realised early into the conversation that external kindness or scorn made zero difference to Joe's mood. It was purely determined by the units of alcohol flowing through his system, and the fractured, internal narrative his fuddled brain was jumping through.

A prime minister could quietly protect rich paedophiles using the Official Secrets Act provided he publicly proclaimed that he would leave no stone unturned to bring such people to justice. It was the expression of the contrary action that gave you the license.

The TV shows the bland, posh, public-relations man, who has been re-elected. He talks in a conciliatory manner, of one nation, while planning massive cuts in public services for the poor, repealing the Human Rights Act, and bringing back fox hunting for the rich. People were deferential to power, you just had to make the right noises.

Every article seems either half-hearted and ill-considered or desperately overreaching, as if the publication is drowning in its own pointlessness.

// Lost Connections // 31.10.18
Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most.

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

DSM: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
Materialism correlates strongly with increased depression and anxiety. Something about a strong desire for materialistic pursuits actually affects the participants day-to-day lives and decreases the quality of their daily experience. They experience less joy and more despair.

When scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with anti-depressants. Because so many of us are taking and excreting them, they simply can't be filtered out of the water we drink.

Advertising is a form of mental pollution.

The concept of work hours is vanishing
Today, the average worker checks their work email at 7.42am, gets to the office at 8.18am and leaves at 7.19pm. A recent survey found that one in three British workers check their email before 6.30am, while 80% of British employers consider it acceptable to phone employees outside of work hours.

A typical westerner in the 21st century checks their phone every six and a half minutes.

// Adults in the Room // 28.10.18
Whenever a politician in the know gives a journalist an exclusive for a particular spin that is in the politician's interest, the journalist is appended (added), however unconsciously, to a network of insiders. Whenever a journalist refuses to slant their story in the politician's favour, they risk losing a valuable source and being excluded from that network. This is how networks of power control the flow of information: through co-opting insiders and excluding those who refuse to play ball.

If you have ever wondered why Europe's establishment is so much keener on austerity than America's or Japan's, it's because the European Central Bank is not allowed to bury the private banks' sins in its own books, meaning European governments have no choice but to fund bank bailouts through benefits cuts and tax hikes.

// Recovery // 26.10.18
Emotion: energy in motion.

The reality that I hold within is not an absolute, it is a construct. If it does not serve me, if it is not objectively authentic, then why not change it? The light of this new dawn thaws the cold intransigent past.

This place of consciousness in which we sit - that which we call ‘I' - is the place from which we will experience death.

The churning blank march of metropolitan life feels like the droning confirmation that joy is not an option.

My feelings of despair are not unique to me, and they are only temporary.

I now hear another rhythm behind the beat, behind the scratching discordant sounds of my own thinking. A true pulse behind the bombastic thud of the ego drum. There, in the silence, is the offbeat presence of another thing.

Is the river the water or its cradle?

"The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, and man sees it not." - Gospel of Thomas

// Waking Up // 06.10.18
Most of us are far wiser than we appear to be. We know how to keep our relationships in order, to use our time well, to improve our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve many other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask you how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say, and yet might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice.

We are such stuff as yeasts are made of
Arranging atoms in a certain way appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms.

How to use one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds are largely shaped by how we use them. There is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness.

The wandering mind has been correlated with activity in the brain's midline regions, especially the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial parietal cortex. These areas are often called the "default mode" or "resting state" network because they are most active when we are just biding our time, waiting for something to happen. Activity in the default mode network (DMN) decreases when subjects concentrate on tasks. Generally speaking, to pay attention outwardly reduces activity in the brain's midline, while thinking about oneself increases it. Mindfulness and meditation decrease activity in the DMN.

I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in mediation however, suggest that an alternative exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.

Solitary confinement is considered a punishment inside a maximum security prison. Even when forced to live amoung murders and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a room.

Optic blind spot
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that our encounters with other people constitute the primal circumstance of self-formation. On his account, each of us is perpetually in the position of a voyeur who, while gazing upon the object of his lust, suddenly hears the sound of someone stepping up directly behind him. Again and again we are thrust out of the safety and seclusion of pure subjectivity by the knowledge that we have become objects in the world of others.

I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one's own consciousness.

I perceive scarcely a scintilla of all that exists to be known.

// Laughter in the Dark // 28.09.18
“Uncle alone in the house with the children said he'd dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting the table silver into a bag. 'Oh, Uncle,' they cried in delight. 'Yes, isn't my make-up good?' said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humour. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children); antithesis: it WAS a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was Uncle (fooling the reader).” - Vladimir Nabokov

// The Myth Gap // 21.09.18
Marketing attempts to transfer meaning to a product or service.

Consumerism seems to be a product of consumers trying to outdo one another. If consumers were just conformists, then everyone would go out and buy exactly the same stuff; there would be no reason to buy anything new. Conformism, then, fails to explain the compulsive nature of consumer behaviour - why people keep spending more and more, even though they are over-extended, and even though it brings them no more happiness in the long run. Instead, consumerism is really all about all of us wanting to be different. It's about status, and the problem with status is that it's an intrinsically zero sum game. In order for one person to win, someone else must lose. Moving up necessarily involves bumping someone else - or everyone else - down. Thus, as society as a whole grows wealthier, consumer behaviour increasingly acquires the structure of an arms race. It's like turning up your stereo in order to drown out your neighbour's music.

Jung's Shadow: the greedy internal child whom we do not wish to acknowledge or recognize and who compels us to project our own unacceptable attributes on to others.

// Selfie // 15.09.18
We're not one person, and the people we are can be strangers to each other. Different version of us emerge depending on where we are, what we're doing, who we're with and how aroused we happen to be.

Our minds are just one perception or thought piled on top of another. You - the person - is not separate from these thoughts.

When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post-hoc explanations using post-hoc observations with no access to non-conscious processing. The 'you' that you're so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter model to account for as much of your behaviour as it can incorporate, and it denies and rationalises the rest.

Neural Pruning
Despite the fact that we are born with almost as many neurons as we'll ever need, the weight of a child's brain increases by more than 30% during its first 15 months. Most of this is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between cells. But then the cull begins: Connections start dying off at a rate of up to 100,000 per second. It is believed that this is one of the ways the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it's prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibilities. Then, when connections between neurons are not activated, they're killed. This is called 'neural pruning' and it works a little like a sculptor carving a face into a block of marble; it's what's taken away, not what's added, that really makes us who we are.

The core of who we are is set at the early stages of life, during which we're effectively helpless. We're part nature, part nurture, formed by biology, culture and experience. That non-biological part might make it sound as if we're free but - even putting biology aside - the type of person we become is principally defined by childhood events we have no control over and have very little capacity to reverse. By the time we're old enough to really understand what our personality is, and begin wondering if there is anything we can do to change it, most of the work has been done.

The Looking-Glass Self
It's the self that wants to be perfect, and the culture that tells it what perfect is.

To participate usefully in a social arrangement, you have to have a sense of who you are, you have to have a sense of identity. That sense of identity is a self which must be constructed by answering contextual questions - Who am I? Which groups do I belong to? - as well as the biological ones - Am I a boy or a girl? Am I black or white? You merge these answers and form in-groups. You start to develop prejudices and bias. You become preoccupied with what others think about you. Your sense of self-worth is a reflection of what other people think about you. With these hierarchies comes our obsessional concern with status. We're motivated to pursue validation from other people because of this need to keep our belief in our self-worth.

We're connected. We're a highly social species. Almost everting we do impacts on someone else, in one way or another. Changes we make to our environment form ripples that spread out, far into the human universe. The ripples are easy to ignore, especially for us Westerners. Many are invisible. But they're there, no matter how convenient or seductive it might be to pretend otherwise, and deny responsibility for anyone but our own sacred selves.

We're tribal and we're wired to want to punish, sometimes savagely, those who transgress the codes of our in-group. These are powerful and dangerous instincts that can easily overwhelm us.

Ostracized, rejected, devalued
The more you chose to be alone, the more everyone else wants to leave you alone. Isolation makes you paranoid. Your worst fears about yourself and everyone else fill all that silence you've created, making you feel more and more adverse to human company. Solitude can be an engine that produces its own fuel, sending you faster and faster into the quiet.

Imagine how many interactions you have every week in which it could possibly be imagined that you've been rejected in some way. These 'rejections' could range from overt acts of aggression to the subtlest interpretations of tone or body language. Your traits setting will not only guide you how many of these incidents you are actually aware of, but how you react to them. Some people will tend to shrug and think the best, while others will become angry, paranoid and vengeful. Others still won't even notice all but the most obvious confrontations. It's another alarm stem. We all have slightly different levels at which our bells start ringing, just as we have different responses to their sounds.

Capitalism has a way of absorbing dissent that communism doesn't
Part of neoliberalism's genius is that is has, as its electricity, our natural desire for status - it rewards the impulse for getting ahead of the rest of the tribe that's inherent in the human animal. Just as its founding father Friedrich Hayek had planned, this means it doesn't have to be imposed by force, as failed ideologies such as communism and fascism did. The market manages to regulate the people by having them regulate themselves, so the state can just sit back and watch.

He got a million dollars with of advice from some of the best psychologists in the country. None of it helped. It seems an archetype: the guru who claims to have discovered the answer, yet manifestly fails to change themself. (Editor's note: Themself as opposed to themselves - used in a singular context to refer to a person whose gender is unspecified.)

// No Matter Where You Are // 31.08.18
"6:30 is the best time on a clock, hands down." - Tommy Cooper

"They had unmanaged faces, unmanicured expressions." - Brando

// The Heretics // 09.08.18
The world as we know it began in the 18th century. It was during the Enlightenment that radical thinkers began to use reason and evidence to take on the supernatural forces of religion. Since then, the sciences have been predicated on a truth that is still held in a kind of reverence: Everything is made from stuff. There is nothing else - no magic, no soul, no God, no afterlife. Human beings are just machines, built by physics and chemistry. Reality itself is merely matter, held together by fields. This understanding - known as materialism - has built our civilisation.

We look in the brain and see the hemispheres, the regions, the neurons, the glia (non-neuronal cells), the synapses and all the highly complex feedback loops. We know that certain neural activity correlates with certain experiences. We have a good idea how we make decisions. We know that visual information is processed in around 30 different areas of the brain. But we don't even begin to see how all of that might come together, to coalesce into that incredible sensation of singularity, that feeling of I, of agency that sits on top of the stew of emotions and urges and sensations and memories that we feel at any one moment. How do all these cells create private, subjective experience?

The mind remains, to tantalising degree, a realm of secrets and wonder.

Confabulation
To ever really know ourselves is simply not possible. We tend to generate stories to explain the mysteries of what we do and believe. When called upon to justify our beliefs we automatically become confabulators - innocent liars defending unconscious decisions that we are not aware of making.

We are betrayed by our maps of salience (importance). They plot our narratives, identify our enemies, and then coat them in a distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch (e.g withdraw) and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it.

All of it begins in the unconscious. We experience hunches about moral rights and wrongs; wordless desires and repulsions; powerful instincts that seem to come from nowhere. This constant throbbing of emotions can be unsettling. We sometimes feel things that we don't understand, or even want to feel. When we come across an explanation of the world that fits perfectly over the shape of our feelings - a tale that magically explains all our hunches and tells us that it is all okay - it can seem of divine origin, as if we had experience revealed truth.

Religions and ideologies can match up so well with an individual's unconscious moral hunches that they can appear to be more than true. They seem miraculous and even worth dying for. They can make people happy because they validate their emotional instincts and then give them purpose - enemies to fight and the promise of a blissful denouement if their quest is successful. It is an illusion. A profoundly dangerous one, but also profoundly useful.

Our lives are lived in two realms - the psychical and the narrative. The model that our brain makes of the world of objects has to be accurate. If it wasn't, we would be bumping into walls and trying to eat chairs. But not so the invisible kingdom of feelings. That soft matrix of beliefs that we exist within - that ever flowing narrative of loves and feuds and hopes and hatreds - can be a place of tremendous distortion. The story that is woven for us is concerned, primarily, with our hero status and not objective truth. It is often wrong. The 'true' nature of reality can appear so clear and obvious that we frequently underestimate just how wrong it is possible to be.

Our prejudices and misbeliefs are invisible to us. We feel them only as a wordless urge, an emotion, something inside that fountains upwards. We can't see these sensations or analyse them forensically. We can't locate their sources. We can't alter them.

In that strange chemical and alchemical moment when an unconscious decision is made about what to believe, how much is genetic, how much is rational, how much is concerned solely with reinforcing our dearly held modes of their world? And how does personality collide with all this? How does the character of the decider - all that complex emotionality, the calculation of possible outcomes, the current state of mind, the kaleidoscope of motives, the autobiographical hero-mission - pollute the process?

When confronted by a new fact, we feel an instantaneous, emotional hunch that pulls us in the direction of an opinion. We then look for evidence that supports our hunch. Our mind completes the process by fooling us into believing that we have made an objective survey of the arguments, then gives us a pleasurable neurochemical hit of feeling as a reward. But all we have really done is confirm the hunch, silence the dissonance, reinforce the model.

Haven't we all hardened a position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger?

Facts do not exist in isolation. They are single pixels in a person's generated reality. Each fact is connected to other facts, and those facts to networks of other facts still. When they are all knitted together, they take the form of an emotional and dramatic plot, at the centre of which lives the individual.

Spotlight Effect
A cognitive error we all share, known as the Spotlight Effect, means that we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us, even though in reality they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.

We don't have any kind of biological reference for psychiatric disorders in the same way that we do for say, appendicitis. Even if we did, there would be an issue of where we draw the line between a psychiatric disorder and not. Virtually all of them lie on a continuum with normal function. It's not that you're schizophrenic or you're not, it's that you're more or less schizophrenic.

The effects of alcohol on normal behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical effects of ethanol. When people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.

Cuentos (Tales)
We experience the tales we immerse ourselves in as if they are happening to us. The tale's narrator - the film's camera eye - is the singularity in which sound, sight, emotion, motive and mission are combined.

At its most basic level, a story is a description of something happening that contains some form of sensation or drama. It is an explanation of cause and effect that is soaked in emotion. Human thinking must take this form because we are biologically incapable of removing the feeling from it. That is how our thoughts are delivered.

A capacity for surprise is an essential part of our metal life and when we experience it, we feel a surge of conscious attention as our minds seek new information to feed into their re-creation of the world. And so it is with narrative. A story requires surprise.

Stories work against truth. The operate with the machine of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. The scientific method is the tool that humans have developed to break the dominion of the narrative. It has been designed specially to dissolve anecdote, to strip out emotion and leave only unpolluted data. It is a new kind of language, a modern sorcery, and it has gifted our species incredible powers. We can eradicate plagues, extend our lives by decades, build rockers and fly through space. But we can hardly be surprised if some feel an instinctive hostility towards it (science), for it is fundamentally inhuman.

If our sole living purpose is the propagation of our selfish genes, then why shouldn't we just be zombies - unconscious decision-engines, roaming the earth, maximising our chances of survival by making simple decisions, beating each other up and procreating as much as possible?

Psi - Parapsychology
The idea that the mind could function outside of the brain had been dispensed with hundreds of years ago, a cornerstone victory in the battle between reason and religion. The mind is of the brain and it is in the brain. If you accept that it might be able to function outside of it - that personalities might be able to exist beyond the boundaries of their psychical selves - then what next?

Consciousness exists on an external field and our brains interact with it, a little like how the eye and our various visual processing areas interact with electrical impulses that are 'out there' to create vision.

Skeptics can be reminiscent of creationists, who think I will go to hell because I am not a Christian. They treat belief as a moral choice. If you do not choose as they do, you are condemned. And while beliefs can have moral consequences, which the law must appropriately punish, we should not judge ourselves for thinking those thoughts, nor be censured for the form of our hearts.

It is common for Skeptics to claim that they are truly open-minded, even when their behaviour suggests anything but.

Just ordinary madness
Christians or no, there will be tribalism. Televangelists or no, there will be scoundrels. It is not religion or fake mystics that create these problems, it is being human. Where there is psychosis, call a doctor. Where there is misinformation, bring learning. But where there is just ordinary madness, we should celebrate. Eccentricity is our gift to one another. It is the riches of our species. To be mistaken is not a sin. Wrongness is a human right.

// The Knife Went In // 06.08.18
Psychiatric conditions are mainly unconnected with any discernible physical pathology (laboratory analysis), nor are any of their causes known. Really, they are just patterns of behaviour, often disagreeable, but not diseases. Undesirable behaviour or emotion has been incontinently categorised as disease.

The solution is to exercise judgment, not to deny reality.

All of us have prejudices when we go out into the world. Anyone who thinks he is without prejudice is fooling himself.

The state is the means by which everyone tries to live at everyone else's expense.

Humanity is sufficiently diverse for that to have been possible!

// The Autobiography of a Female Body // 01.08.18
Your brain interprets and encodes everything that happens outside and inside of you into what we call meaning. It translates vibrations into music, reflected light into scenery, the movements and vocalisations of other homo sapiens into friends and enemies. It literally creates your world, and you alone live there.

Human babies need more parental investment than any other animal on the planet. If human babies developed to the same point as newborn chimps, they'd need to gestate for two and a half years, and all women would die giving birth. That means no children would have mothers and would be much less likely to survive into adulthood. Women who gave birth to smaller, less developed babies, were more likely to survive and although their newborns needed more attention and nurturing, their children had better odds of becoming adults. Thus it was 'premature birth' genes that were carried into future generations.

Men are this..., women are that (hack)
Broadly speaking there are many differences between men and woman, but there will always be a larger variance within a gender than between genders. Here is the broad stoke: men are taller than women, but this is not universal because loads of women are taller than loads of men. The height difference between the world's tallest and shortest man is much more than the difference between the average height of men and women. As well as being shorter than men, woman are fatter. On average, women are composed of 27% fat while the typical man is only 14%.

Both men and women have their attention caught by attractive women. In advertising, that attention means money, with the added bonus that making women insecure makes them spend ever more money. Looking at pictures of semi-clad models makes all women's self-esteem plummet. So much cash is leeched via our self-hatred, especially on the crap that is supposed to make them look better or hide imperfections.

We are built to like looking at women more than anything else.

Mirrors
Metal backed glass was invented 2000 years ago, but silver backed mirrors have only been around for 200 years. - Sara Pascoe

// Clown Shit // 27.07.18
"I've noticed black people feeling superior to other black folk based upon which set of Europeans colonised/enslaved their ancestors. Clown shit." - Akala

// Property by Lionel Shriver // 24.07.18
An intrinsic facet of being disliked was racking your brain for whatever it was that rubbed other people so radically the wrong way. They rarely told you to your face, so you were left with a burgeoning list of obnoxious characteristics which you complied for them.

Jillian had the kind of charm that wore off.

Jillian pursued purposelessness as a purpose in itself. It had taken her some years to understand that she had such troubles settling on a career because she didn't want one. She was surrounded by go-getters, and they could have their goals, their trajectories, their aspirations - their feverish toiling toward some distant destination that was bound to disappoint in the unlikely instance they ever got there. Some folks had to savour the world where they were, as opposed to glancing out the driver's window while tearing off somewhere else.

She wasn't so much out to convert anyone else as to simply stop apologizing.

How careless people were with their antipathy, how they threw it around for fun; how these days people indiscriminately sprayed vituperation every which way as if launching a mass acid attack in a crowded public square. Sheer meanness had been a customary form of entertainment.

After three or four of his backhands in a row smacked the tape, he did all the hard work for her: he would defeat himself.

He could see how attractive it was when you didn't like artifice and would rather be genuinely uncomfortable than insincerely at ease.

Note to self: she was as big a pushover for flattery as every other bozo.

Its limp elucidation taking so much less time than the rambling rationalisations of his rehearsals.

All grasping after satisfaction is fated to end only in more fruitless, gnawing desire.

The crime of knowing absolutely nothing yet having unrealistically high expectations of everything and everybody else.

Harriet wondered whether recipients of charity were naturally suspicious of other recipients of charity.

The elderly are prone to becoming bizarrely obsessed with food.

Teaching conferred the arbitrary yet absolute authority of a tin pot dictator and was bound to go to anyone's head eventually.

For all its post-class pretentions, modern Britain was just as feudally cleaved into serfs and landowning gentry as it had been in the Middle Ages, and entering his own middle age, Elliot was still a serf.

Britain considered the post office as outlandish a luxury as a place to live.

This whole emotional package was one of her first true tastes of adulthood: what happens when you realise that a great deal, or even everything is at stake, and that no one is going to help you. It was a feeling that some children probably did experience but shouldn't.

Most high archivers she'd encounters by then were powered primarily by narcissism, varying only in their capacity to conceal it.

Compliance is a creepy work, beloved of authorities everywhere, who treasured its ambience of simpering eagerness to please, spineless grovelling, wormlike subservience, and pants-wetting terror.

Wherever we stood was mere backdrop.

They simply did not gravitate towards ledger keepers and lunch-bill talliers.

Piercing American voices carry uncannily in small spaces.

A distinction between having a problem with pettiness and being an outright petty person.

Most of her unkindness had taken place in the confines of her own mind, but there might indeed be such a thing as thought crime.

// Cringeworthy: How to Make the Most of Uncomfortable Situations // 15.07.18
It can be miserable to feel hypersensitive to the awkwardness of everyday life, but I'd rather be the sort of person who is aware of it than the sort of person who isn't.

Do you just see yourself, or do you place yourself within the wider context of others' experience?

If you don't see me the way I see me, does it even matter? All this work I'm doing to convince you of who I am. And for that matter - who am I?

A Sense of Occasion
Awkwardness is the feeling we get when someone's presentation of themselves - either our own or someone else's - is shown to be incompatible with reality.

The distinction between the lived and the corporeal self is that the former is in your head, whereas the latter is out there in the real world. You can pretend that these two selves are one and the same, until some kind of awkward mishaps occurs and yanks you out of that fantasy. You trip over your own feet and suddenly you're aware of how ridiculous you must look, and that the you walking around out there does not always do such a good job of living up to the standards of the you that exists in your imagination.

Not only are we trying to present ourselves in a certain way, but we're also simultaneously trying to interpret the impression others are trying to make on us. We obsess over these little cues in part because we're trying to figure out what they say about us, and in part to monitor whether this person is buying the image we are trying to protect.

Isolation is damaging today too, even without the threat of sabre-toothed tigers.

With all jokes, and any sort of comedic setup, you think it's going one way, but it goes another way. And usually the other way reveals some level of truth that maybe you hadn't thought about.

// Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment // 30.06.18
From natural selection's point of view, it's good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor, so your fellow tribe members have confidence in you. It is possible that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management, rather than, as folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker.

In human life as it's ordinarily lived, there is no conscious CEO that runs the show. Rather, there seems to be a series of selves that take turns running the show (in a sense, seizing the show). The way they seize control is through feelings. Of all the thoughts engaged in subterranean competition at any given moment, maybe the thought that has the strongest level of feeling associated with it is the one that gains entry into consciousness.

The less you judge things - including the contents of you mind - the more clearly you'll see them. Getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them.

I've seen people argue about what constitutes great wine, or great art, as if convinced they were really right and the other person was wrong. That's the thing about feelings, they can render judgement so subtly that we don't realise that it's the feelings that are rendering the judgement; we think judgment is objective.

You think you're directing the movie, but you're actually just watching it
We go to the movies and there's a very absorbing story and we're pulled into the story and we feel so many emotions. Then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected onto a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It's the same with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essential insubstantial nature.

When we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. If we reshape the story a bit each time - omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones - we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

"I consider myself an average man, except for the fact that I consider myself and average man." - Montaigne

The View From Nowhere
For practical purposes, what matters is how fast things are moving in relation to us. But if you want a deeper understanding of physics you need to detach yourself for a particular perspective and ask: Suppose I occupied no vantage point? Since I wouldn't be able to ask how fast things are moving relative to me, what exactly would it mean to ask how fast things are moving?

By replacing the gut bacteria in shy, anxious mice with bacteria from gregarious mice, they can make the shy mice gregarious.

// Kitchen Confidential // 20.06.18
By Monday, most seafood is four to five days old.

Don't eat mussels in a restaurant unless you know the chef personally.

Bacteria love hollandaise. That delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm temperature is also the favourite environment for bacteria to reproduce in.

Brunch menu. Translation: old, nasty odds and ends.

The reuse of bread is an industry-wide practice.

Don't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to keep the toilets clean, just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.

Ordering chicken
1, Chickens are dirty. They eat their own faeces, are kept packed close together like a rush-hour subway and when handled in a restaurant are most likely to cross-contaminate other foods.
2, Chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don't know what they want to eat.

// Greed & Fear in the Markets // 19.06.18
“What's your favourite film?”
“Don't know... probably clingfilm.” - Rob Auton

"Sensuality is often at odds with the practicalities of life." - Alain de Botton

The Inevitable switch from ownership that you purchase to access that you subscribe to
Uber owns no vehicles. Facebook creates no content. Alibaba has no inventory. Air BnB owns no real estate. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

Everything requires additional energy to maintain itself. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. - Kevin Kelly

// F*** You Very Much // 15.06.18
Like a lot of rude people, he saw abundant rudeness in others.

Diplomacy is "the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions". - Churchill

In 1902 Charles Horton Cooley came up with The Looking Glass Self - the notion that we use other people's expressions, behaviours and reactions to define ourselves.

Queueing is just waiting your turn, but it is a mental battle fraught with resentment, bitterness, judgement, silent fury and unspoken rules.

Public vs Private Space
Even in what we know is a public space, we consider it somehow private. But as we leave our private space for public, we must understand that we're expected to behave in a different way.

The problem is territory. We love it. Our ancestors fought for it, our contemporaries still do, and they'll still be at it next century. The need for our own territory is in our biology.

Where the two spaces begin dangerously to cross over is when we start to think of our cars as private territory. But the person sitting in the passenger seat doesn't get as offended or angered by 'rudeness' as the driver. Think of the passenger!

Power Without Status
A small amount of power and very little status can have devastating effects.

We're very status driven as human beings. We struggle to back down or disarm each other with a compliment or a smile because of our egos.

Listening to opinions someone has copied off the TV
Journalists and professional commentaters have been forced to face an unpleasant truth: they're only worth the clicks they muster. Attract an audience, attract the advertisers, keep your job.

Once commenters sought to provoke thought; now they're forced to troll for reactions.

// Life 3.0 // 13.06.18
Today's artificial intelligence tends to be narrow, with each system able to accomplish only very specific goals. In contrast, human intelligence is remarkably broad: a healthy child can learn to get better at almost anything. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.

It feels much harder to multiply 231,457 by 271,528 than to recognise a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long ago, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible. This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources in known as Moravec's Paradox and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customised hardware to them - more than a quarter of our brains in fact.

Digital brains are more difficult to build than clean-slate superhuman AGIs, just as mechanical birds turned out to be harder to build than airplanes.

"Computers are universal machines, their potential extends uniformly over a boundless expanse of tasks. Human potentials, on the other hand, are strong in areas long important for survival, but weak in things far removed." - Moravec

Substrate
Solids have many long-lived states whereas liquids and gases don't. If you engrave someone's name on a gold ring, the information will still be there years later, because reshaping the gold required energy, but if you engrave it in the surface of a pond, it will be lost within a second as the water surface effortlessly changes its shape.

If you email a friend a document to print, the information may get copied in rapid succession from magnetizations on your hard drive to electric charges in your computer's working memory, radio waves in your wireless network, voltages in your router, laser pulses in your optical fibre and, finally, molecules on a piece of paper. In other words, information can take on a life of its own, independent of its psychical substrate.

From a physics perspective, everything that future life may want to create is simply elementary particles arranged in some particular way. Just as a blue whale is rearranged krill and krill is rearranged plankton, our entire solar system is simply hydrogen rearranged during 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution: gravity rearranged hydrogen into stars which rearranged the hydrogen into heavier atoms after which gravity rearranged such atoms into our planet where chemical and biological processes rearranged them into life.

Singularity
Intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals. Consciousness is subjective experience; the way information feels when being processed in certain ways.

A drop of water is wet, but an ice crystal and a cloud of steam aren't, even though they are made of identical water molecules. Why? Because the property of wetness depends only on the arrangement of the molecules. It makes absolutely no sense to say that a single water molecule is wet, because the phenomenon of wetness emerges only when there are many molecules, arranged in the pattern we call liquid. So solids, liquids and gases are all emergent phenomena: they're more than the sum of their parts, because they have properties above and beyond the properties of their particles. They have properties that their particles lack. Just like solids, liquids and gases, I think consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, with properties above and beyond those of its particles.

Your consciousness lives in the past. Estimates suggest that it lags behind the outside world by about a quarter of a second. Intriguingly, you can often react to things faster than you can become conscious of them, which proves that the information processing in charge of your most rapid reactions must be unconscious.

The round-trip travel time for a message crossing Earth is about 0.1 second, roughly the timescale on which we humans think.

A Human in the Loop / Autonomous Weapons
Unlike nuclear weapons, A.I weapons require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials.

Chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most psychists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

The Theodicy Problem
Why would a good god allow suffering? In an AI-protector-god scenario, the solution to the theodicy problem is that the perceived freedom makes humans happier overall.

"For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." - Aristotle in Politics. Even after human enslavement became socially unacceptable in most of the world, enslavement of animals has continued unabated. Like human slave, non-human animals are subjected to branding, restraints, beatings, auctions, the separation of offspring from their parents, and forced voyages. Moreover, we are treating our ever-smarter machines as slaves without a second thought.

Since ancient times, philosophers have dreamt of deriving ethics (principles that govern how we should behave) from scratch, using only incontrovertible principles and logic. Alas, thousands of years later, the only consensus is that there is no consensus. While Aristotle emphasized virtues, Immanuel Kant emphasized duties and Utilitarians emphasized the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Kant argued that he could derive from first principles (which he called 'categorical imperatives') conclusions that many contemporary philosophers disagree with; that masturbation is worse than suicide, that homosexuality is abhorrent, that it's OK to kill bastards and that wives, servants and children are owned in a similar way to objects.

We humans are social animals who subdued all other species and conquered Earth thanks to our ability to cooperate. Some people have found it advantageous to collaborate in groups such as tribes, companies or nations where they in turn relinquish some power to a chief, boss or government. Some groups may in turn choose to relinquish some power to a governing body to improve coordination, with examples ranging from airline alliances, to the European Union.

What about spooky quantum speeds?
Have you ever tried and failed to swat a fly with your hand? The reason that it can react faster than you is that it's smaller, so it takes less time for information to travel between its eyes, brain and muscles. This 'bigger = slower' principle applies not only to biology, where the speed limit is set by how fast electrical signals can travel through neurons, but also to future cosmic life if no information can travel faster than light. So for an intelligent information-processing system, going big is a mixed blessing involving an interesting trade-off. On one hand, going bigger lets it contain more particles, which enable more complex thoughts. On the other hand, this slows down the rate at which it can have truly global thoughts, since it now takes longer for the relevant information to propagate to all its parts.

Special Relatively is superseded by General Relativity, where the speed limit is more liberal: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space, but space is free to expand as fast as it wants.

Thought Hierarchies
A living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn't pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to peruse and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware if it) guide our decision-making towards the ultimate goal of replication. Feelings of hunger and thirst protect us from starvation and dehydration, feelings of pain protect us from damaging our bodies, feelings of lust make us procreate, feelings of love and compassion make us help other carriers of our genes and those who help them and so on. Guided by these feelings, our brains can quickly and efficiently decide what to do without having to subject every choice to a tedious analysis of its ultimate implications for how many descendants we'll produce.

Schrödinger pointed out that a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it's allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.

The laws of physics appear to endow particles with the goal of arranging themselves so as to extract energy from their environment as efficiently as possible.

Bare Metal
Verification asks if a system meets its specifications, whereas validation asks if the correct specifications were chosen.

FLOPS are floating-point operations per second, say, how many 19-digit numbers can be multiplied each second.

Acrostic: where the first letter in each sentence forms a hidden message.

Auto-associative is memory by association rather than by address.

Even the vast dark expanses of space between galaxies tend to contain a significant number of intergalactic stars (rejects once ejected from their home galaxies).

There is a monster black hole in the middle of our Galaxy, which weighs about 4 million times as much as our Sun.

Some people with depression or schizophrenia have 'flat affect'.

The best-selling copyrighted book of all-time is The Guinness Book of Records.

// Atman: the self (or soul) \ Brahman: the universal soul // 08.06.18
"What it is to be an ape confronted by the cosmos." - Sam Harris

"Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need." - Voltaire, 1759

// Mind Hacking // 23.05.18
The Roman philosopher Seneca said, "While we teach, we learn" and educators have long-known the best way to lock in your own understanding of a topic is to teach it to someone else.

What did I want? I wanted to feel confident around people. One of my mind hacks was to keep telling myself, I'm good with people. Through hundreds and thousands of repetitions of that simple idea, I was slowly able to turn things around, so that now I really am pretty good with people. It happens slowly, a gradual metamorphosis.

The satisfaction of mastery is greater than any monetary reward.

Women can detect confidence (or lack thereof) immediately.

Root access, or rooting
It's as if the mind, like an insecure IT overload, wants to keep us locked in user mode. Even when we manage to get into superuser mode temporarily, before we know it we're locked out again, caught up in the content of the mind. We've slipped back into the movie.

Bare metal is a term for a new piece of computer hardware with no operating system.

High smartphone use is correlated with higher anxiety.

Our modern word meta comes from the Greek preposition meaning after. (Aristotle's Metaphysics was the book that came after Physics.) In the 20th century, the prefix evolved into meaning 'about its own category'.

A meta joke: A priest, a rabbi and a minister (an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman) walk into a bar. The bartender says, what is this? Some kind of joke?

I liked The Matrix better the first time, when it was called The Allegory of the Cave
M: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
N: What truth?
M: That you are a slave. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Born into a prison you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison, for your mind.
M: You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe what you want to. You take the red pull, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Gratitude
The mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience.

Imagination is not just a toy for children: it's the blueprint for reality.

Magical negative thinking is the belief that if we think or say something terrible it will come to pass. But we are constantly imagining things that do not come to pass. We do not need to be afraid of our own dark thoughts.

"If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration." - Nikola Tesla

// The Joy of Drinking // 17.05.18
Alcohol is an Arabic word: al-kuhul.

Apparently most of our ancestors greeted the dawn with tankard of beer or a jolt of brandy, or both. What was once called 'The hair of the dog that bite you' restored the blood sugar and slowed the sickening drop of the blood-alcohol level. Our ancestors in the mead-hall felt pretty guiltless about their consumption. Indeed they were proud of it.

The word honeymoon comes, they say, from the custom of the bride's father giving the happy couple a month's supply of mead with which to celebrate their union.

A red nose never lost a friend worth holding
During the seven years the Gin Act was enforced, the production of 'spirituous liquors' increased by over a third, enough for every man, woman and small child in London to put away a quart a week, on top of their beer.

An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of the Most Excellent, the Most Truly-Beloved, and Universally-Admired Lady, Madame Gineva. Unhappy Briton! More enslaved than Turk, forc'd to be sober and compelled to work!

Delirium tremens
Cocaine mixed with alcohol makes a psychoactive metabolite - cocaethylene - that blocks the dopamine transporter and produces a perfectly delirious state of euphoria.

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host. - Dorothy Parker

Dylan Thomas described an alcoholic as, "Someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do".

"No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by water-drinkers." - Horace

He blended into scenery where the sober stood out as downright peculiar
Most forced intimate gatherings of strangers are awkward because you have so little in common, but in AA everyone has the one big thing in common, the single interest, and it serves as a limitless topic.

"Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine." - Women's Christian Temperance Union

Self-denial is the new self-indulgence
Drinking anything but water, coffee or Gatorade is called 'abusing alcohol', as if the drink is the victim, though alcohol seems to have survived millennia of abuse and keeps coming back for more.

"Not drinking cost me nothing less than the best minutes of the day and the best years of my life. Or so it seemed at the time. Giving up the booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls." - Wilfrid Sheed

Bare walls and the morose satisfaction of having conquered your demons. You the designated drive, victorious, morally superior to those less resolute. Then you looked around and lo, all your friends had quit too, and didn't need you to drive them home from the gym.

Caffeine is less soothing than alcohol. After coffee came to Europe in the 16 century, anxious rulers sent spies to eavesdrop in coffeehouses on the mutterings of the discontented, not to listen in taverns to the toasts and songs of the happy. Caffeine does not encourage relations with strangers; it inspires the alert suspicions essential to self-preservation. Far from softening the harsh edges of reality, caffeine sharpens them, and rouses the exhausted to fresh efforts and longer hours of toil.

// Brick Lane // 15.05.18
The avenue that swept down to Buckingham Palace was as wide as 40 bullock carts and it was the grandest of roads. It was not black or gray. Nor was it brown or dusty yellow. It was red. It was fit for a queen. The tall black railings that guarded the palace were crowned with spikes of gold. The pavement was rife with tourists. Young couples, joined at the hip; families, each with a disconsolate member of its own; tour groups, homogenised by race and tourist equipment; small bands of teenagers, who smoked or chewed gum or otherwise engaged their mouths in ferocious displays of kissing. Many people looked at the palace as if they were waiting for it to do something. (Buckingham Palace has been the official residency of British sovereigns since 1837. The palace evolved from a town house owned from the beginning of the 18th century by dukes of Buckingham.)

When I say the bed is too soft and toss and turn all night because of it, and Chanu says it's not too soft and falls asleep immediately, both of us can be right in our own way. But not about the sun.

She told her mind to be still. She told her heart, do not beat with fear, do not beat with desire. Sometimes she managed it.

He whistled loudly, but not loudly enough to cover his dejection.

Work in and of itself, performed with a desire for perfection, is capable of giving satisfaction.

How much time she had wasted over the years, eating up her mind with a thousand petty worries and details that added up to nothing.

What she lacked in material she made up for in her willingness to repeat herself.

The boys wore jeans, or tracksuits with big check marks on them, as if their clothing had been marked by a teacher who valued, above all else, conformity.

// 0 - 9 // 10.05.18
All reptiles (like birds) have a single opening called the cloaca through which urine, feces, and the reproductive tract passes. The males of most bird species do not have a penis, both sexes have this multi-tasking orifice - the cloaca. Copulation generally involves a few seconds and a mere touching of these organs in order to deposit sperm.

// Everyday Drinking // 01.05.18
Churchill once boasted that he himself had got more out of drink than it had taken out of him.

"Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy. Brandy will do soonest for a man what drinking can do for him." - Samuel Johnson

"Wine cheers the sad, revives the old, inspires the young, makes the weary forget his toil and fear her danger, opens a new world when this, the present, palls." - Byron

"Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance." - Benjamin Franklin

// Super-Id (According to Freud...) // 24.04.18
We are born with our Id. The id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind; an important part of our personality because as newborns it allows us to get our basic needs met. When a child is hungry, the id wants food, and the child cries. When the child needs to be changed, is uncomfortable, in pain, too hot, too cold, or just wants attention, the id speaks up until his or her needs are met. The id doesn't care about reality, about the needs of anyone else, only its own satisfaction. Babies are not very considerate of their parents' wishes. They have no care for whether their parents are sleeping, relaxing, eating, or bathing. When the id wants something, nothing else is important. Freud believed that the id is based on our pleasure principle. In other words, the id wants whatever feels good at the time, with no consideration for the reality of the situation. The id contains sexual and aggressive drives, and hidden memories.

Within the first three years, as the child interacts more and more with the world, the second part of the personality begins to develop. Freud called this part the Ego. The ego is based on the reality principle. It understands that other people have needs and desires and that sometimes being impulsive or selfish can hurt us in the long run. It's the ego's job to meet the needs of the id, while taking into consideration the reality of the situation.

By the age of five (or the end of the phallic stage) the Superego develops. The superego operates as a moral conscience and develops due to the moral and ethical restraints placed on us. It dictates our belief of right and wrong.

In a healthy person, the ego is the strongest so that it can satisfy the needs of the id while not upsetting the superego. If the id gets too strong, impulse and self-gratification take over a person's life. If the superego becomes too strong, a person would be driven by rigid morals, be judgmental, and unbending in his or her interactions with the world.

// Derrame de Talento // 21.04.18
"Capitalism has a way of absorbing dissent that communism doesn't." - Niall Ferguson

// The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck // 20.04.18
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle.

I say don't find yourself. I say, never know who you are
I had all sorts of screwed-up beliefs, like you weren't allowed to speak to someone unless you had some practical reason to, or that women would think I was a creepy rapist if I so much as said "Hello". The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn't want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn't want to talk to me. I failed to sperate what I felt from what was.

Decision-making based on emotional intuition without the aid of reason pretty much always sucks. An overinvestment in emotion fails us for the reason that emotions never last.

If I measure myself by the standard - Make everyone I meet like me - I will be anxious because failure is 100% defined by the actions of others. I am not in control, thus my self-worth is at the mercy of the judgement of others. Whereas if my standard is - Improve my social life - I can live up to my value of good relations with others regardless of how other people respond to me. My self-worth is based on my own behaviour.

You can't be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can't.

At some point, most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, where we avoid failure and stick only to what we're already good at. But this is stifling. We can only be truly successful at something we're willing to fail at. If we're unwilling to fail then we're unwilling to succeed.

It's easier to sit in the painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure. We don't know if we're lovable or not; we don't know how attractive we are; how successful we could potentially become. The way is to remain uncertain of these things and to be open to finding them out through experience.

While investing in one person, one place, one job, one activity, might deny us the breadth of experience we'd like, it rewards the depth of experience. There are some experiences that you can only have when you've lived in the same place for some time, been with the same person, worked on the same skill.

Say to yourself: I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?
Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it's existential, it's spiritual.

"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." - Freud

The paradox of choice: the more options we're given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we're aware of all the other options we're forfeiting.

The vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle
Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you're exceptional at one thing, chances are you're average or below average at most others things. To became truly great at something you have to dedicate shit-loads of time and energy to it, and because we have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all. For the most part, we're all pretty average people, but it's the extemes that get all the publicity. All day every day we are flooded with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because that's what gets the eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars.

"I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realised who was telling me." - Emo Philips

Russia had me examining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture, and asking myself if it wasn't somehow making us more insecure around each other and worse at intimacy.

False memory syndrome changed the way courtrooms operate. Thousands of therapists were sued and lost their licenses.

There is nothing to be afraid of. Ever.

// Hitch // 18.04.18
For a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty.

With a man you may freely say of him that he is lousy in the sack, or a bad driver, or an inefficient worker, and still wound him less deeply than you would if you accused him of being deficient in the humour department.

Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is (or they are) extremely stupid.

David Letterman's fans laugh in all the wrong places, lest they suspect themselves of not having a good time.

Asked by an intellectual lady to summarize the differences between the sexes, the bishop responded, "Madam, I cannot conceive."

"A witticism is an epitaph on the death of a feeling." - Nietzsche

No travail jamias
The workers are too dumb, and too grateful for their jobs, to consider the notions that might emancipate them.

Most work is a distasteful necessity which nobody in his right mind would ever dream of performing unless he needed the money desperately.

Fear is the mother of superstition
The word scientist was not in common use until 1834. Before that time the rather finer title of natural philosopher was the regnant one.

Mr. Coleman, it was said, made his fortune not from the mustard consumed, but from that left on the plate.

"All military defeats can be summarized in two words: too late." - General Douglas MacArthur

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins
Below-job? Cognate with going down?

// What a Circus! // 17.04.18
"We're all going to die, all of us. That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flatten by life's trivialities: we are eaten up by nothing." - Charles Bukowski

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly."

// Right Ho, Jeeves! // 14.04.18
I have generally found, with those under the influence of love, that what they want more than anything is the listening ear.

If a chap is such a rabbit that he can't get action when he's handed the thing on a plate, his case would appear to be pretty hopeless. Nevertheless, I reminded myself that this non-starter and I had been at school together, and one must make an effort for an old school friend.

So manifest was his lack of ginger and the spirit that wins to success that for an instant, I confess, I felt a bit stymied.

Possibly I am letting the thing prey on my mind too much. I may be wrong in supposing it the fate that is worse than death. But I'll tell you this much: the prospect of that prize-giving has been turning my existence into a nightmare. I haven't been able to sleep or think or eat.

On these occasions it is generally conceded that a moderate skinful is of the essence
It just shows, what any member of Parliament will tell you, that if you want real oratory, the preliminary noggin is essential. Unless pie-eyed, you cannot hope to grip.

I had invariably been well-oiled at the time, and when in that condition a chap is capable of feats at which in cooler moments his reason would rebel. Stimulated by the juice, men have even been known to ride alligators.

Doing their stuff for the entertainment of the many-headed.

"What the dickens shall I say?"
"Dash it, there are hundreds of things you can say. Talk about the sunset."
"The sunset?"
"Certainly. Half the married men you meet began by talking about the sunset."

// Guns, Germs, and Steel // 12.04.18
Our closest living relatives are three surviving species of great ape: the gorilla, the common chimpanzee and the pygmy chimpanzee, also known as the bonobo. The ancestors of modern humans diverged from the ancestors of these living great apes around 7 million years ago.

Java man: fossils found on the South-east Asian island of Java that are assumed to be over 1 million years old.

Homo erectus evolved into homo sapiens about half a million years ago. However, early homo sapiens still differed from us in skeletal details, had brains slightly smaller than ours, and were grossly different in their artefacts and tools.

The Great Leap Forward was about 50,000 years ago. The earliest signs of that leap come from East African sites with standardized tools and the first preserved jewellery (ostrich-shell beads).

Some 40,000 years ago, into Europe came the Cro-Magnons, with their moderns skeletons, superior weapons and other advanced cultural traits. Within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals, who had been evolving as the sole occupants of Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. That sequences strongly suggests that the modern Cro-Magnons somehow used their superior technology, language skills and/or brains, to infect, kill, or displace Neanderthals, leaving behind little or no evident of hybridization between the two.

North and South America were surely the last continents settled, for the obvious reasons that reaching the Americas from the Old World required either boats (for which there is no evidence until 40,000 years ago in Indonesia and none until much later in Europe), or else it required the occupation of Siberia (unoccupied until about 20,000 years ago) in order to cross the Bering land bridge. It is uncertain when, but the Americas were first colonized between about 14,000 and 35,000 years ago. The oldest unquestioned human remains are at sites in Alaska, dated round 12,000 BC, followed by a profusion of sites near the Canadian border and in Mexico in the centuries just before 11,000 BC. The latter sites are called Clovis sites, named after the type of site near the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where characteristic large stone spearpoints were first recognised.

A big qualifier must be added: "In the long run and over large areas"
Most plant and animal species are useless to us as food for one or more of the following reasons: they are indigestible, poisonous, low in nutrimental value, tedious to prepare, difficult to gather, or dangerous to hunt.

Most biomass (living biological matter) on land is in the form of wood and leaves, the majority of which we cannot digest. By selecting and growing those few species that we can eat so that they constitute 90% rather than 0.1% of the biomass, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed typically 10 to 100 times more herders and farmers than hunter-gatherers. That strength of numbers was the first of many advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherers.

In human societies possessing domestic animals, livestock fed more people in four distinctive ways: by furnishing meat, milk, fertilizer, and by pulling plows.

1: Domestic animals became society's major source of protein, replacing wild game.

2: Milked mammals served as sources of butter, cheese and yogurt, yielding several times more calories over their lifetime than if they were just slaughtered for their meat.

3: Big domestic mammals also interacted with domestic plants to increase production as crop yields can be greatly increased by applying manure as fertilizer. (Manure has also been a valuable source of fuel.)

4: Large domestic animals can also pull plows, thereby making it possible for people to till land that had previously been uneconomical for farming.

Crops and livestock have other uses too, such as providing us natural fibres for making clothing, blankets, nets and rope. Bones of domestic animals could be used as tools and some plants were grown for non-food purposes: the Bottle Gourd for example, was used as a container.

Big domestic mammals further revolutionised human society by becoming our main means of land transport, until the development of the railroads in the 19th century.

Of equal importance, in wars of conquest certainly, were the germs that evolved in human societies with domesticated animals. Infectious disease like small pox, measles and flu arose as mutations of very similar ancestral germs that had infected animals. The humans who domesticated animals were the first to fall victim to the newly-evolved germs, but subsequently evolved substantial resistance to the new diseases.

In short, plant and animal domestication meant much denser human populations; a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically-centralized, economically-complex, technologically-innovative societies. Why? Stored food is essential for feeding non-food producing specialists. Once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself and engage in full-time political activities. A stored food surplus built up by taxation can support full-time specialists besides kings and bureaucrats. And of course it can be used to feed professional soldiers.

The Fertile Crescent (because of the crescent-like shape of its uplands on a map) is in Southwest Asia. It appears to have been the earliest site for a whole string of developments; writing, cities, empires, civilisation (for better or worse). All those developments sprang from the dense human populations, stored food surpluses, and the feeding of non-farming specialists made possible by the rise of food production in the form of crop cultivation and animal husbandry.

Early cultivation
Human latrines may have been a testing ground for the first unconscious crop breeders. Our spittoons and garbage dumps joined our latrines to form the first agricultural research laboratories.

Wheat and barley exemplify the class of crops termed cereals or grains (members of the grass family). Peas and lentils exemplify pulses (members of the legume family, which includes beans). Cereals crops have the virtues of being fast growing, high in carbohydrates, and yielding up to a ton of edible food per hectare cultivated. As a result, cereals today account for over half of all the calories consumed by humans and include five of the modern world's 12 leading crops (wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum). Many cereal corns are low in protein, but that deficit is made up by pulses, which are often 25% protein (38% in the case of soya beans). Cereals and pulses together thus provide many of the ingredients of a balanced diet and account for more than half of the calories consumed by the world's human population.

Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.

Portugal, northern Iran, and Japan, all located at the same latitude but lying 4000 miles east or west of each other, are more similar in climate than each is to a location a mere 1000 miles due south. On all continents, the tropical rainforest is confined to within 10 degrees latitude of the equator. Mediterranean scrubs habitats (such as California) lie between 30 and 40 degrees of latitude. Day length is constant throughout the year at the equator, but at temperate latitudes it increases as the months advance from the winter solstice to the summer solstice, and then it declines again through the next half of the year. The east-west expanse of Eurasia is the largest land distance on Earth. By the time of Christ, cereals of Fertile Crescent origin were growing over the 8000-mile expanse from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Pacific coast of Japan.

The word 'science' means knowledge, from the Latin 'scire' - to know and 'scientia' - knowledge
The invention of grafting (a horticultural technique whereby tissues of plants are joined so as to continue their growth together) was more than a matter of some nomad relieving herself at a latrine and returning later to be pleasantly surprised by the resulting crop of fine fruit.

Seedlessness provides a good example of how human selection can completely reverse the original evolved function of a wild fruit, which in nature serves as a vehicle for dispersing seeds.

Supermarket strawberries and blueberries are gigantic compared to wild ones. Those differences only evolved in recent centuries.

A snack of wild almonds can kill a person foolish enough to ignore the warning of the bitter taste.

Flax: a source of fibre and oil (linseed oil). Flax seeds are about 40% oil.

Problems of Captive Breeding
Some potentially valuable animals don't like to breed under the watchful eyes of others. That's what derailed attempts to domesticate cheetahs, the swiftest of all land animals, despite our strong motivating to do so. One Mogul emperor of India kept a stable of a thousand cheetahs, but all were tamed ones caught in the wild. The prince's efforts to breed in captivity failed. Not until 1960 did biologists in modern zoos achieve the first successful cheetah birth. In the wild, several cheetah brothers chase a female for several days, and that rough courtship over large distances seems to be required to get the female to ovulate or become sexually receptive. Cheetahs can't, or refuse to carry out that elaborate courtship ritual inside a cage.

Language and writing
Like all alphabetic writing systems, English uses many logograms - arbitrary sings that represent words, not made up of phonetic elements - such as numerals, %, $, etc. The numeral sign 4 is variously pronounced four, chetwire, nelja, and empat by speakers of English, Russian, Finnish and Indonesian respectively.

New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1000 out of the world's 7000 languages crammed into an area only slightly larger than Texas. Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers.

The Sumerian adoption of a counting system based on 12 instead of 10 lead to our modern 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, 12-month year, and 360-degree circle.

By far the largest number of people whose first language is English live in North America, with others scattered over the globe in Britain, Australia and other countries. Each of those countries has its own dialect of English. If we knew nothing about language distributions and history we might have guessed that the English language arose in North American and was carried oversea by colonists. But all those English dialects form only one low-order subgroup of the Germanic language family. All the other subgroups are crammed into North-western Europe. Frisian, the Germanic language most closely related to English, is confined to a tiny coastal area of Holland and western Germany. Hence a linguist would immediately deduce correctly that the English language arouse in north-western Europe and spread around the world from there. In fact, we know that English was carried from there to England by invading Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

The invention of the wheel around 3000 BC in or near Southwest Asia rapidly spread west and east across much of Eurasia within a few centuries, whereas the wheels invented independently in prehistoric Mexico never spread south to the Andres. Similarly, writing developed in the western part of the Fertile Crescent by 1500 BC spread west to Carthage and east to the Indian subcontinent within a 1000 years, but the Mesoamerican writing systems that flourished in prehistoric times for at least 2000 years never reached the Andes.

The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left-hand side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all those seemingly counter-productive features is that typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were stuck in quick succession, so manufacturers had to slow typists down. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trails in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95%, but QWERTY keyboards were so entrenched by then that the vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 70 years.

Shoot Some Breeze
Columbus, an Italian by birth, switched his allegiance to the duke of Anjou in France, then to the king of Portugal. When the latter refused his request for ships in which to explore westward, Columbus turned to the duke of Medina-Sedonia, who also refused, then to the count of Medina-Celi, who did likewise, and finally to the king and queen of Spain, who denied his first request but eventually granted his renewed appeal. Had Europe been united under any one of these rulers, its colonization of the Americas may never have happened.

When Hernando de Soto became the first European conquistador to march through the south-eastern United States in 1540, he came across Indian towns abandoned two years earlier because the inhabitants had died in epidemics. The Spaniards' microbes spread to the interior in advance of the Spanish themselves. By the time of the next appearance of Europeans on the lower Mississippi - that of French settlers in the late 1600s - almost all of those big Indian towns had vanished.

The word 'Indian' conjures up an image of a horse-mounted brave, brandishing a rifle. We easily forget that horses and rifles were originally unknown to Native Americans. They were brought by Europeans.

British cities were still using gas street lighting into the 1920s, long after U.S. and German cities had converted to electrical street lighting. Why? Because British municipal governments had invested heavily in gas lighting and placed regulatory obstacles in the way of competing electric light companies.

Had Europeans not colonized Australia in 1788, Aboriginal Australians might - within a few thousand years - have become food producers; tending ponds of domesticated fish and growing domesticated Australian yams and small-seeded grasses.

// Enough Names, Enough Oil // 10.04.18
"Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness." - David Hume

"The amber in which social media is going to place everyone's juvenilia is not going to be good for anyone." - Tom Bissell

"I was well into my thirties before I stopped considering verbally abusive men more interesting than the nice ones." - Molly Ringwold

// Art is in the Eye of the Beholder // 02.04.18
The essential component of art is to represent a human emotion or experience that is difficult to express as concisely with language.

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint." - Edward Hopper

// Easter Joke // 21.03.18
Want to know the real Easter miracle?
Jesus having 12 close friends in his 30s!

// Atlas Shrugged // 15.03.18
Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy: a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction. Not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power. Not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real. Not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.

I damned the fact that my mind and body were a unit, and that my body responded to the values of my mind. I damned the fact that joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being, that it is the need of one's body as it is the goal of one's spirit, that my body was not a weight on inanimate muscles, but an instrument able to give me an experience of superlative joy to unite my flesh and spirit. I accepted their code and believed, as they taught me, that the values of one's spirit must remain as an impotent longing, unexpressed in action, untranslated into reality, while the life of one's body must be lived in misery, as a senseless, degrading performance, and those who attempt to enjoy it must be branded as inferior animals. I broke their code, but I fell into the trap they intended, the trap of a code devised to be broken. I took no pride in my rebellion, I took it as guilt. I did not damn them, I damned myself. I did not damn their code, I damned existence, and I hid my happiness as a shameful secret. I should have lived it openly, as of my right.

// Self-Medicating to Keep Loose // 22.02.18
Que la fuerza te acompañe.

// Education: My Part in its Downfall // 15.02.18
The days of having to do as a teacher tells you are long gone.

We are all simple creatures at heart. If doing something carries a severe penalty and the likelihood of that penalty being carried out is a certainty, then funnily enough we are less likely to do it than if there is no real deterrent.

We have allowed badly behaved kids to morph into children with behavioural difficulties (i.e. absolving them of any responsibilities for their actions) and now we are reaping the rewards.

The approach of turning up every day, but doing very little
Make it your aim this week to ignore at least one supposedly vital task that has been set by those above you. Use the time saved to do something you enjoy and if you do get pulled up about it, just say that you were too busy doing - insert fashionable phrase or buzzword here - and look a bit flustered.

They say teaching is never dull (actually it frequently is), but if you can appreciate irony, contradiction and the downright ridiculous, then you will laugh every single day of your working life.

Yeah, and I might really have won $250 million on the Nigerian State Lottery!
How did Great Britain manage to come up with 40% of the World's inventions since 1600 (according to a 2003 Japanese study).

Whilst not every spliff-toting youth turns into a junkie, every junkie started off by smoking weed.

'Vocation' is a word used by employers to describe jobs that are poorly paid for the hours they demand and have awful working conditions.

The National Curriculum was introduced in 1989 in order to make sure schools across England taught roughly the same things and could be compared using standard tests (SATS) and their results put into league tables. Anyone outside education must surely wonder why we don't go a lot further and have a standard syllabus for each school year in every subject. We could have a national website with the detailed plan for every single lesson every day. It would massively cut the teachers' workload and stop the endless duplication of work that we have now.

// The Sun Also Rises // 14.02.18
Listen Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

If you want people to like you, you only have to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me back. I would dine there again some time and he would be glad to see me back, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sounds basis.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of ethics that you should never seem to be working. - Ernest Hemingway

// Wiggaz With Attitude: My Life as a Failed White Rapper // 03.02.18
As I turn 13, I am your genuine teenager: Obsessed with a few things to the expense of everything else. Unpleasant to my family. My voice wavering and my body developing in strange ways. Discovering the joys of ‘titting up' in the bike sheds at school. Hip-hop, New York's greatest invention, has turned me into a lover of all things American. I have started following American Football. I have even started playing American Football. I BMX to practice in Bingham every Sunday, and play every lunchtime in the coach park at school. I am all set to waste my teenage years as a hip-hop listening, BMX riding, radio taping, American Football statistic collating waster.

I was in the same club, with the same clientele, when these records emptied the dancefloor and, a week later, emptied the bars.

I've always scoffed at couture fashion, and the self-importance of fashion journalists who cover that world. They may know more about stitching than I do, but they can only spot fashion trends that will be worn by people who read Vogue and don't realise that the Evening Standard's puddle-deep ES Magazine is a harbinger of the apocalypse. They can tell what handbags will be bought by 3000 people. What I can tell you is that the most influential fashion movement of the last 30 years, worldwide, has been hip-hop. It's so mainstream now that maybe it's not as noticeable, but throughout time, hip-hop fashions have been the biggest trendsetter in terms of what real people wear.

I'd advise you not to scoff at hip-hop fashion; we invented wearing hooded tops, we invented radical lacing concepts, we invented wearing baseballs caps and basketball boots, even when we'd never even watched those two sports on TV. And that's before we even get to customised jewellery, gold rope chains, four finger rings, bootleg Gucci sweatsuits and fake gold teeth.

Hang out with someone culturally naff for long enough and they're almost certain to do you their impression of a rapper. In fact, they're on a continuum of time between when they last did it, and the next time they'll do it. It is inevitable.

Given the huge numbers of white people into hip-hop, given the crowds who've tried their hands at being rappers and DJ's, the general lack of success at a mid-level is the most noticeable to me. Eminem was a phenomenon, up there with some of the biggest sellers of all time. But he's an exception, and I'm looking for artists who combine moderate critical acclaim with moderate sales as the true test of the health of a genre. It lives or dies on its foot-soldiers, not its heroes. And when you dig into the artists who sold a few thousand records and whose careers are remembered fondly for flickering briefly, there aren't many white guys in there. - Andrew Emery

// Love, Poverty & War // 30.01.18
Dostoyevsky wrote that if, in the last moments before a man's execution, he were given the alternative of passing the rest of his life on the summit of a bare rock, he would choose the rock with gratitude.

"A decent teacher will teach in order to learn."

"What matters is how you think and not what you think." - Chris Hitchens

Birds: feathered descendants of the dinosaurs.

Schadenfreude: Guilty joy.

"He controlled his urges." - Robin Ince's Dead Funny

"A Last Judgement is Necessary because Fools flourish." - William Blake

// The Believing Brain // 13.01.18
Whether you are a believer or a sceptic, the meaning of life is here. It is now. It is within us and without us. It is in our thoughts and in our actions. It is in our lives and in our loves. It is in our families and in our friends. It is in our communities and in our world. It is in the courage of our convictions and in the character of our commitments. Hope springs eternal, whether life is eternal or not.

"Everyman is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of their time." - Voltaire

"As I wished to show the satellites of Jupiter to the Professors in Florence, they would see neither them nor the telescope. These people believe there is no truth to seek in nature, but only in the comparison of texts." - Galileo

Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow
One we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them through a number of powerful cognitive heuristics. A heuristic is a mental method of solving a problem through intuition, trial and error, or informal methods when there is no formal means or formula for solving it. These heuristics are sometimes called rules of thumb, although they are better known as cognitive biases because they almost always distort precepts to fit preconceived concepts. Beliefs configure perceptions. No matter what belief system is in place - religious , political , economic, or social - these cognitive biases shape how we interpret information that comes through our senses and mold it to fit the way we want the word to be and not necessarily how it really is.

A common myth most of us intuitively accept is that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and belief: as intelligence goes up, belief in superstition or magic goes down. This in fact, turns out not to be the case. Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons. What happens is that the facts of the world are filtered by our brains through the coloured lenses of the world-views, paradigms, theories, hypotheses, conjectures, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through living. We then sort through the facts and select those that confirm what we already believe and ignore or rationalise away those that contradict our beliefs.

Superstitions are just an accidental form of learning
Spinoza conjected that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection.

We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range. We do no find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous. Uncertainty makes people anxious, and anxiety is related to magical thinking.

What people remember happening, rarely corresponds to what actually happened.

The invisible and the non-existent look the same
The awareness of our intention to do something trails the initial wave of brain activity associated with the action by about three hundred milliseconds - three tenths of a second lapse between the brain making a choice and our awareness of the choice. Add to this processing time the other two-tenths of a second to act on the choice, and it means a full half-second passes between our brains intention to do something and our awareness of the actual act of doing it. The neural activity that precedes the intention to act is inaccessible to our conscious mind, so we experience a sense of free will. But it is an illusion, caused by the fact that we cannot identify the cause of the awareness of our intention to act.

Inside a resting neuronal cell there is more potassium than there is sodium, and a predominance of anions - negatively charged ions - gives the cell a negative charge. Depending on which type of neuron it is, if you put a tiny electrode inside the neuronal cell body in a resting state it would read -70mv (a millivolt is equal to a one-thousandth of a volt). In this resting state the cell wall of the neuron is impermeable to sodium but permeable to potassium. When the neuron is stimulated by the action of other neurons (or the electrical machinations of curious neuroscientists with electrodes), the permeability of the cell wall changes, allowing sodium to enter and thereby shift the electrical balance from -70mv toward 0. This is called the excitatory postsynaptic potential or EPSP. By contrast, if the stimulation comes from inhibitory neurons it causes the voltage to shift downward from -70mv to -100mv, making the neuron less likely to fire, and this is called the inhibitory postsynaptic potential or IPSP. Altogether there are hundreds of different types of neurons and we can classify most of them as either excitatory or inhibitory in their actions. (The synapse is the tiny gap between neurons, so postsynaptic means the neuron on the receiving end of the signal.)

Belief-dependent realism
We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with precepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theatre of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyses its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else.

In our Middle Land of space, our senses evolved for perceiving objects of middling size - say, between grains of sand and mountain ranges. We are not equipped to perceived atoms and germs on one end of the scale, or galaxies and expanding universes on the other end. In the Middle Land of speed, we can detect objects moving at a walking or running pace, but the glacially slow movements of continents (and glaciers) and the bogglingly fast speed of light are literally imperceptible. Our Middle Land time scales range from the psychological 'now' of three second in duration to the few decades of a human lifetime, far too short to witness evolution, continental drift, or long-term environmental changes. Our Middle Land folk numeracy leads us to pay attention to and remember short-terms trends, meaningful coincidences and personal anecdotes.

Analysis paralysis
When I fall in love, my initial lustful feelings are enhanced by dopamine, a neurohormone produced by the hypothalamus that triggers the release of testosterone, the hormone that drives sexual desire. My deeper feelings of attachment are reinforced by oxytocin, a hormone synthesized in the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood by the pituitary. It is instructive to know that such hormone-induced neural pathways are exclusive to monogamous pair-bonding species and are an evolutionary adaptation for the long-term care of helpless infants. We fall in love because our children need us!

The more precisely you know a particle's position, the less precisely you know its speed, and vice versa. - Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle

Heisenberg said that atoms are not things, only tendencies. The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing my moment by moment experience.(It might prove an interesting experimental test of this theory for one to leap out of a 20-storey building and consciously choosing the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies.)

The left-hemisphere interpreter
Creativity in all fields appears to be related to right-brain dominance, and this make sense given that the ability to find new and interesting patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise is what creativity is all about. Were we only logic machines churning out products that were the result of strictly defined cognitive algorithms, nothing new would ever be created or discovered. At some point we must think outside the box and connect the dots into new patterns. Of course, the rub is in striking the right balance between finding a few new and interesting patterns within the background noise and finding nothing but patterns and leaving no noise. Perhaps this is the difference between creativity and madness.

Embrace the random. Find the patterns. Know the difference.

If big brains are so great, why did all but one of their owners go extinct? Historical experiment after experiment reveals the same answer: we are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. It is tempting to fall into the oldest trap of all pattern-seeking, story-telling animals: writing yourself into the story as the central pattern. But sceptical alarms bells should toll whenever anyone claims that science has discovered that our deepest desires and oldest myths are true after all. If there is an inevitability in this story, it is a purpose-seeking animals will find itself as the purpose of nature.

GOD: gold, oil, drugs
In order for there to be social harmony, society needs to have in place a system that both encourages generosity and punishes free-riding. There are two such systems in the modern world - religion and government - and both arose about 5000 - 7000 years ago to meet the needs of social control and political harmony when small bands of tribes of hunter-gathers, fishermen, and herders coalesced into much larger chiefdoms and states of agriculturists, craftsmen, and tradesman. When populations became too large for informal means of social control (such as gossip and shunning), religion and government evolved as social watchdogs and enforcers of the rules.

Ownership endows value by its own virtue, and nature has endowed us to hold dear what is ours. Why? Evolution. The endowment effect begins with a natural propensity for animals to mark their territories and defend them through threat gestures and even physical aggression if necessary, thereby declaring the equivalent of private ownership to what was once a public good. The evolutionary logic runs like this: once a territory is declared taken by one animal, would be trespassers have to invest considerable energy and risk grave bodily injury in attempts to acquire the property for themselves, so there is an endowment affect. We are more willing to invest in defending what is already ours than we are to take what is someone's else. The endowment effect with property ownership has a direct and connection to loss aversion, where we are twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss as we are to seek the pleasure of gain. Evolution has wired us to care more about what we have than what we might possess, and here we find the evolved moral emotion that undergirds the concept of private property.

Science is the ultimate bias detection machine
Confabulation bias: the tendency to conflate memories with imagination another people accounts as one's own.

Consistency bias: the tendency to recall one's past beliefs, attitudes and behaviours as resembling present beliefs, attitudes and behaviours more than they actually do.

Halo effect: the tendency for people to generalise one positive trait of a person to all the other traits of that person.

Singularity: a point at which infinitely strong gravity causes matter to have infinite density and zero volume

The circumference of the Earth is 40,075 km at the Equator.

Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries. It took 10,000 years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing.

Words matter and labels carry baggage
Several centuries ago, the English referred to night-time sensation of chest pressure from witches or other supernatural beings as the 'mare', from Anglo-Saxon 'merran', or to crush. So a nightmare was believed to represent a crusher who comes in the night.

// God is Not Great // 03.01.18
God did not create man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way around, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions. Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

It is hardly a surprise if religions choose to address themselves first to the majority who are poor and bewildered and uneducated. Our species will never run out of fools, but I dare say that there have been at least as many credulous idiots who professed faith in god as there have been dolts and simpletons who concluded otherwise.

There would have been no Protestant Reformation if it were not for the long struggle to have the Bible rendered into the vernacular and the priestly monopoly therefore broken. Only in Islam has there been no reformation, and to this day any vernacular version the Koran must still be printed with an Arabic parallel text.

The deep connection between repression and perversion
The Koran contains endless prohibitions on sex, yet a corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come.

Shia fundamentalists in Iran lowered the age of 'consent' to nine, perhaps in emulation of the age of the youngest wife of the prophet Mohammed.

It was noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of having a 'revelation' that happened to suit his short-term needs. We are further told that when he experienced 'revelations' in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in his ears. Some heartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic, though they fail to notice the same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus. It is enough to rephrase David Hume's unavoidable question: Which is more likely - that a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so? As for the pains and noises in the head, one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not an experience of calm, beauty and lucidity.

The Prophet is said to have cut off the long sleeve of his garment rather than disturb a cat that was slumbering on it. Cats in Muslim lands have been generally spared the awful treatment visited on them by Christians, who have often regarded them as satanic familiars or witches.

Liar, Lunatic or Lord
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman and something worse." - C.S Lewis

Those who have been fortunate enough to visit any good Spanish restaurant will be familiar with the gesture of hospitality: dozens of pieces of differently cured, differently sliced pig. But the grim origin of this lies in a constant effort to sniff out heresy.

Pigs display many signals of intelligence. It has been calculated that the crucial ratio - between brain weight and body weight - is almost as high with them as it is in dolphins.

Not Even Wrong
Scientist have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless, even for learning from mistakes: Not even wrong.

Pythagoras refuted astrology by pointing out that identical twins do not have the same future, the zodiac was drawn up long before several of the planets in our solar system had been detected, and of course one could not be shown their immediate further without this 'disclosure' altering the outcome.

One of the great emancipating results of genomics is to show that all 'racial' and colour differences are recent, superficial and misleading.

The razor of Ockham is clean and decisive
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

When Dr. Johnson completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up.

If the universe were found to be finite or infinite, either discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me.

I should not feel my own world destroyed if the greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals was finally revealed to have been the Earl of Oxford all along, thought I must admit that sole authorship is important to me, and I would be saddened and diminished to learn that Bacon had been the man.

If I search my own life for instances of good or fine behaviour, I am not overwhelmed by an excess of choice. - Chris Hitchens

// The Mind of a Survivor // 02.01.18
Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food.

Humans are pack animals.

We all need to feel respected. Those who are happy do not require so much external feedback, whereas those who are struggling emotionally or feel insecure require more support to make them feel like part of a group.

What make someone resilient is the ability to feel lots of different emotions, often conflicting ones, sometimes simultaneously.

Debilitating emotions from trying to fit in.

Stress
Picture a Stone Age woman coming face-to-face with a predator. Her stress hormones, mainly cortisol and adrenaline, would have been released; the cortisol to help her stay focused and motivated, the adrenalin increasing her heart rate, elevating blood pressure and boosting her energy. Blood would have been diverted from her organs to her muscles so she could run or fight. Stress is actually a survival mechanism designed to kick-start our bodies in an emergency. The problem is, we haven't yet evolved to deal with the constant stressors of modern life. Our primitive stress reaction isn't now triggered by short-term physical threats like a predator, but by lingering pressures such as work deadlines, relationship and family issues, even social media posts. Every time we have a thought that threatens our well-being, the evolutionary stress response is activated because our bodies can't differentiate between real and perceived threats.

Nature doesn't care if you're male or female, it doesn't care what you look like, or what you do for a living, which makes it really liberating place.

This is one of the great lessons the wilderness can teach us: bad stuff happens that isn't our fault. We look for reasons why we got ill, or why our boss is in a bad mood, and very often there just aren't any. And even if there is an explanation, there probably wasn't anything we could have done about it. Yet we spend so much energy beating ourselves up for not being who we want to be, or not living the life that we hoped to live. The wild constantly reminds us that getting up in the morning is a risky business.

Group dynamics: forming, storming, norming, performing, (then the cycle starts again).

// Romeo and Juliet on Xmas Eve // 24.12.17
So tedious is this day,
As is the night before some festival,
To an impatient child that hath new robes,
And may not wear them.

// The Gift of Fear // 07.12.17
Some Darwinians believe that the early humans who were most afraid were most likely to survive. The result is the emergence of man as we know him: a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even when there are none.

Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we're doing something.

When people are telling the truth, they don't feel doubted, so they don't feel the need for additional support in the form of details. When people lie, however, even if what they say sounds credible to you, it doesn't sound credible to them, so they keep talking.

Think of charm as a verb, not a trait. If you consciously tell yourself, “This person is trying to charm me” as opposed to, “This person is charming,” you'll be able to see around it.

Work is a place where many of us are forced to interact with people we did not choose to have in our lives.

Control freakery
Think of someone you know whom you might call a control freak. That person, like most violent people, grew up in a chaotic, violent, or addictive home. At a minimum, it was a home where parents did not act consistently and reliably, a place where love was uncertain or conditional. For him or her, controlling others became the only certain way to predict their behaviour.

An inability to predict behaviour is absolutely intolerable for human beings and every other social animal. The fact that most people act predictably is literally what holds human societies together.

Anger
“How much more grievous are the consequences of our anger than the acts which arouse it.” - Marcus Aurelius

Chronic anger is an important predictor of more than just violence. People who experience strong feelings of anger are at increased risk of heart attack (in fact, anger supersedes even such risk factors as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol). Such people place others at risk and are at risk themselves. Accordingly, chronic anger should never be ignored.

The Scriptwriter is the type of person who asks you a question, answers it himself, then walks away angry at what you said. When you try to manage or reason with such a person, you find that he is not reacting to what you say, but rather to what he expects you to say; he is reacting to his script. The Scriptwriter gives no credit when people are helpful, and this causes alienation from co-workers. His script actually begins to come true, and people treat him as he expects them to.

Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them
Rousseau asked: “Why do you consult their words, when it is not their mouths that speak?” Locke spoke of a man's winning “silent consent” by reading it in a woman's eyes, “in spite of the mouth's denial.”

If a man in the movies wants a sexual encounter or applies persistence, he's a regular everyday guy, but if a woman does the same thing, she's a maniac or a killer.

When the men pursue, they usually get the girl. When the women pursue, they usually get killed.

Until recent decades, situations with unwanted suitors who wouldn't let go were more likely to end in marriage than in stalking.

If a woman tells a man over and over again that she doesn't want to talk to him, that is talking to him, and every time she does it, she betrays her resolve in the matter. If you tell someone ten times that you don't want to talk to him, you are talking to him - nine more times than you wanted to. When a woman gets thirty messages from a pursuer and doesn't call him back, but then finally gives in and returns his calls, no matter what she says, he learns that the cost of reaching her is leaving thirty messages. For this type of man, any contact will be seen as progress. Of course, some victims are worried that by not responding, they'll provoke him, so they try letting him down easy. Often, the result is that he believes she is conflicted, uncertain, really likes him but just doesn't know it yet.

The Drug of the Nation
“Television exposes children to behaviour that man spent centuries protecting them from.” - Carrie Fisher

Since children learn by modelling and imitation, the 200,000 acts of violence they will witness in the media by age 18 pose a serious problem. Dr. Park Dietz has said that “the symbolic violence in an hour-long episode of a violent television show does more harm, when summed up over the millions of participants, than a single murder of the usual variety.”

Fathers are so important because they teach boys various ways to be men. Sadly, too many boys learn from the media or from each other what scholars call “protest masculinity,” characterized by toughness and the use of force. That is not the only way to be a man, of course, but it's the only way they know.

Better to be Wanted by the Police than not to be Wanted at All
In the lives of too many teenagers, recognition is more meaningful than accomplishment, and recognition is available through violence. With the pull of a trigger, a young person whose upbringing has not invested him with self-worth, can become significant and 'un-ignorable'.

Bizarre though it may seem, the greatest intimacy most assassins attain is with those they attack. Through stalking, they come to know their victims more closely than they know others in their lives, and through shooting them, they become partners of sorts.

“Residents here describe the killer as a shy man who kept to himself. They say he was a quiet and cordial neighbour.” A more accurate and honest way for TV news to interpret the banal interviews they conduct with neighbours would be to report, “Neighbours didn't know anything relevant.” Neighbours usually have only one qualification for being in news reports: they are willing to speak to reporters.

Noise is one of the few things that roams freely in a prison; the concrete walls that keep out so much carry it into every corner.

Hooking someone up to life-support systems when he has no quality of life and no chance for survival does not extend the process of life, it actually extends the process of death. - Gavin de Becker

// American Sketches // 06.12.17
Now, not only are military issues global, so are economic and even cultural ones. People everywhere are threatened by weapons, anywhere. They produce and consume in a single networked economy, and increasingly they have access to the same movies and music and ideas. Seek exposure to topics that expand your interests rather than narrow them, and hit you with ideas and opinions that challenge your prejudices, rather than reinforce them.

People are entitled to liberty, and that their rights should be guaranteed by governments whose legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed.

Einstein did not drive
For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”

The idea of an impersonal God, whose hand is reflected in the glory of creation but who does not meddle in daily existence, is part of a respectable tradition in both Europe and America. It is to be found in some of Einstein's favourite philosophers, and it generally accords with the religious beliefs of many of America's founders, such as Jefferson and Franklin.

"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."

In our age, however, many supposedly educated people feel comfortable joking about how they are clueless about science and intimidated by math. They would never admit to not knowing the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth, but they happily concede that they don't know the difference between a gene and a chromosome or between the uncertainty principle and relativity theory.

Determinism - for and against
“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” - Einstein

“To me, a deterministic world is quite abhorrent. Maybe you are right, and the world is that way, as you say. But at the moment it does not really look like it in physics - and even less so in the rest of the world.” - Max Born

Time is relative depending on your state of motion
Try to catch up with a light beam and, though the speed of light remains constant, time slows down.

“It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” - Einstein

In order to succeed they had to be awed by the magnitude of their task and be humbled.

Bill Clinton can always (as if performing a parlour trick) remember something you told him in a previous conversation and lead you to believe he had been thinking about it ever since.

He spent almost seventeen years as an envoy in London trying to hold together the British Empire, which he likened to a “fine and noble china vase . . . that, once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole.”

For three hundred years, ever since the Statute of Anne was established in Britain, there has been a system under which people who created things, such as books or articles or music or pictures, had a right to benefit from copies that were made of them. Because of this “copyright” system, we have encouraged and rewarded three centuries of creativity in various fields of endeavour, and this has produced a flourishing economy based on the creation by talented individuals of intellectual property

As a journalist, I discovered that there are a lot of smart people in this world. Indeed, they are a dime a dozen, and often they don't amount to much. What makes someone special is imagination or creativity, the ability to make a mental leap and see things differently. As Albert Einstein later noted, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” - Walter Isaacson

// The Fame Ladder // 05.12.17
"Say something controversial; move up one place on the fame ladder." - TC

"I use words as defined by their dictionary definition, not by how they make you feel." - Richard Dawkins

"Think how stupid the average person is, then think that another 50% are stupider still!" - George Carlin

// 10% Happier // 28.11.17
We live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. If you stay in the moment, you'll have what is called spontaneous right action, which is intuitive, which is creative, which is visionary, which eavesdrops on the mind of the universe.

Acknowledge other people's basic humanity.

Is this useful?
It's okay to worry, plot, and plan, but only until it's not useful anymore.

Whatever, man, everything's impermanent. - Dan Harris

// Lying // 24.11.17
Many lives are almost scandal-proof. Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.

To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us. The temptation to do this is often born of an understanding that others will disapprove of our behavior. Often, they would have good reason to do so.

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly.

Among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: they tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

When asked “How are you?” most of us reflexively say that we are well, understanding the question to be merely a greeting, rather than an invitation to discuss our career disappointments, our marital troubles, or the condition of our bowels.

It is one thing to reach into the till and steal $100; it is another to neglect to return $100 that one has received by mistake. - Sam Harris

// Accionar el Interruptor // 22.11.17
"LSD belongs to a class of psychoactive substances that provide the user with a new concept of life, and this new way of looking at life is opposite to the officially accepted view." - Albert Hofmann, who lived to 102 yers old

I believe that the brain is mediating consciousness but does not generate it, and that it mediates memories but does not store them.

The basic philosophy of the Western scientific worldview is seriously wrong, and in many ways shamans from illiterate and ancient cultures have had a more adequate understanding of reality than we do. We have learned a lot about the world of matter, but in terms of the basic metaphysical understanding of reality, Western science went astray.

Magic mushrooms seem to proliferate especially in areas where there has been a lot of disruptive human activity, almost as if they are a response to our use of the planet's resources. Could it be that psilocybin mushrooms are a response by the biosphere, like a chemical signalling system within the body, to help the wayward human species become more symbiotic with its environment?

// Baby Django // 19.11.17
"Movies used to be based on stories. Nowadays, Quentin, Edgar Wright et al. are making movies based on movies." - Mick Garris

"Westerns were a peculiarly American variation on old world tales of mythological heroes or wandering knights." - Anne Billson

// The Leaderless Revolution // 09.11.17
Wherever possible, travel, interact, make love, argue, live with people elsewhere. Engage; co-mingle. Resist the efforts of governments and others to paint the other in stark colours, whether black or white. Cease using the outdated nomenclature of a world that is already receding into history; stop naming; stop dividing.

This crowded planet
More people now dwell in cities than the countryside. The urban majority now barely encounter what their forebears took for granted: trees, fresh air, birdsong, silence. Lives are lived out in a frantic, noisy hecticness; fulfilment is distant, with peace and escape dreamt of, sometimes purchased, but all too rarely experienced.

The modern condition of prosperity, a sort of peace, a sort of freedom, is simply not enough. The yearning for more, for distraction, never quite goes away however much is purchased, however many holidays are taken.

Agency over events - the feeling of control - is a gross absence in the contemporary condition.

Norms are more important than rules: it is the actions of other people that have the most influence on what we do.

Today, we are too accustomed to distrusting one another, to perceiving 'the other' at home or abroad as hostile and malign, and we're angry because the girls and the luxury we see on MTV are unavailable to us.

If the teacher is present, what is going on in the playground must be, in some way, acceptable
People drive faster in vehicles that feel safer, cycle more dangerously when they wear helmets and take less care bathing infants when using child seats designed to reduce the risk of drowning. We tend to lower our guard when told that the coast is clear.

The press, in its complacency as the 'fourth estate' in the body politic, does little to enquire into and explain complexities.

“Process” is a word that implies movement, even progress, but conceals a reality that there is none.

Even the sceptical notice greater volatility in the weather - everything's hotter and colder, and wetter and windier than it used to be. This is consistent with science's predictions.

For most of us, politics is a spectator sport
Sending a text message or signing an internet petition is likely to achieve nothing, given that so little went into it. The measure of any political action is not how many hits you get on the campaign website, how many followers you have on Twitter, or supporters on your Facebook page. The measure is effects in the real world on the thing you are trying to change: are there fewer nuclear weapons, has the dictator been overthrown, is one child saved from starvation?

Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued that the mutual dependency of lobbyists and legislators is now so profound, and corrupt, that legislation is enacted with the sole purpose of extracting rents from corporate interests.

Gustav Landauer, a 19th-century theorist, once said, "The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently".

It was, of course, a complex story that we managed to divide into two distinct and opposing narratives
Only later will historians, masters of the reductive art of the narrative, be able to put shape to what seems today formless and even then they will be capturing but a tiny part of what comprises existence now.

It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums.

A small girl is drowning in a lake in front of you and you are the only person who can rescue her. You are however wearing expensive $400 shoes which will be ruined if you dive in to rescue the girl. In reality the crisis of the drowning child is presented to us constantly. Every minute, eighteen children die of hunger and preventable disease: 27,000 every day. Moreover, it costs far less than $400 to save them. Just as if the child were drowning directly in front of us, the moral imperative is clear and precise: we must act, even if there is a cost to ourselves, albeit a small one. If everyone in the rich world gave a mere one percent of their income, poverty and preventable disease in the world could be effectively eradicated.

Make up your own mind. Examine your own reactions. This is difficult in the banality yet ubiquity of contemporary culture, with its cacophony of voices and opinion. Space for contemplation is all too rare. But here's one suggestion which is doubtless revealing of my own dyspeptic disposition: what makes you angry? What never fails to irritate you for its stupidity and injustice? That may be the thing you should take up arms against. It was for me, and anger puts fuel in the tank. - Carne Ross

// Out of the Wreckage // 03.11.17
We are extraordinary creatures, whose capacity for altruism and reciprocity is unmatched in the animal kingdom. But these remarkable traits have been suppressed by an ideology of extreme individualism and competition. With the help of this ideology, and the story used to project it, alienation and loneliness have become the defining conditions of our time.

We are better than we are told we are, better than we are induced to be. By recognising our good nature and coming together to express it, we can overcome the multiple crises we face that cannot be solved alone. By reconnecting with each other we can conquer loneliness, unhappiness and the loss of our sense of meaning and purpose.

The longing for belonging
We, the supremely social mammal, cannot cope alone: we need connection - togetherness - just as we need food and shelter. Our extraordinary capacity for altruism and our remarkably social nature are the central, crucial facts about humankind. Yet we remain, to an astonishing degree, unaware of them. This is partly because our minds - which are always on the lookout for signs of danger - emphasise the rare but spectacular acts of violence a small proportion of the population inflicts on others, but not the daily acts of kindness and cooperation the rest of us perform, often unconsciously. This tendency is reinforced today by news reports.

Our tendency is to stop seeing ourselves as people striving together to overcome our common problems, and to view ourselves instead as people striving against each other to overcome our individual problems.

Our time is distinguished from previous eras by atomisation: the rupturing of social bonds, the collapse of shared ambitions and civic life, our unbearable isolation from each other. There are over 7 billion souls on Earth, but many people are unable to find anyone with whom they can connect.

Holiday and airline companies have worked hard to persuade us that living the dream means travelling the world, seeking novel experiences. But I suspect that what many people want above all else is a strong sense of home: to be embedded in a thriving and caring community.

We were once brought together by work, travel and entertainment. Now these activities tend to estrange us.

Democracy is diluted with increasing scale
Louis Brandeis: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

While a yes/no referendum treats us like simpletons by demanding the complete acceptance or complete rejection of an elaborate law or institution, a multiple-choice referendum reveals the complexity of the question, and encourages people to consider the implications of their choice.

Most of the money governments spend is provided by us in tax. But once we have surrendered it, we lose all sense of ownership. Public budgeting is experienced in many parts of the world as state-sponsored robbery. Money is siphoned into projects that are of great benefit to the friends of those in government. It is delivered disproportionately to favoured places (such as the metropolitan centre, or narrowly contested constituencies that the ruling party may wish to acquire), while bypassing other places, including those in greatest need.

Governments too often take the funds that belong to all of us and use them against us, advancing their power at our expense.

The market sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What the market wants tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want.

When you hear that something makes economic sense, this means it makes the opposite of common sense. Those sensible men and women who run the world's treasuries and central banks, who see an indefinite rise in consumption as normal and necessary, are beserkers: smashing through the wonders of the living world, destroying the prosperity of future generations to sustain a set of figures that bear ever less relation to general welfare.

As automation rips through the labour force, the safest jobs are now those that require creativity and social skills, as these are the hardest human attributes for machines to replicate. But education systems are still training humans to behave as if they were machines, setting them up for redundancy and failure.

I belong to the fortunate group whose form of intelligence - linear, analytical and hyperlexic - happens to be the kind that the education system rewards. I was told by the tests and the teachers that I was able. But as I became an adult, I began to notice something that was not evident at school: that my abilities were limited to a narrow range of tasks. Had I been tested in almost any area outside that narrow range, I would have failed, and perhaps I would have carried the expectation of failure throughout my life.

National identities typically had to be invented, with the help of flags, anthems, ideologies, revised histories and linguistic conformity.

People who would consider the idea of living in the Gobi Desert intolerable - where, an estate agent might point out, there is oxygen, radiation-screening, atmospheric pressure and one g of gravity - rhapsodise about living on Mars.

Com - with / Panis - bread
Cooking and eating together is often a first step. It could be seen as fundamental to the establishment of society: the original meaning of the word companion is someone who breaks bread with another.

What television tells us is that life is somewhere other than where we are. It encourages us to connect not with those around us, but with celebrities whom we will never meet, whose lives we are induced to believe we share. The rise in celebrity culture is not an accidental or emergent feature of our age. It is the means by which distant and impersonal corporations connect with their customers and construct desire. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise, owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours.

The streets were once our commons, where children played and adults talked. But cars have occupied the space that people used for other purposes, drowned out conversation and - through noise, pollution and stress - driven us indoors. They slash through the social fabric of the street like a knife.

Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a minute.

We chase brief spikes of satisfaction, which soon subside, to be replaced by the urge for another hit. - George Monbiot

// The Bleaching of Culture // 03.11.17
Money pouring into the city is the bleaching of culture.

// The Invisible Man // 20.10.17
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." - George Bernard Shaw

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion." - Muhammad Ali

The biggest prison people live in is the fear of what others think.

// Equanimity * // 15.10.17
Oscar Wilde's advice: "Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much".

Alain de Botton: "We are mercifully good at forgetting. What maddened us last year now seldom comes to mind. Even this will pass".

* Mental or emotional stability; composure under strain; equilibrium.

// The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment // 14.10.17
Participate in your experience. Experience your participation.

Why are you always fighting your life and treating it as a struggle? Why are you always resistant? Why do you try so hard? Let things happen. Relax. Be gentle.

// A Time for Gifs // 30.09.17
Along the way I've felt lonely, at times angry, jealous, rejected, pessimistic and fearful. Just like in London. It's strangely reassuring to discover your proclivity for emotional strife remains pretty consistent, whatever the longitude.

I have now some new and deep conviction that everything will be more or less okay (consider my privilege comprehensively checked here). It's as if the relative ease with which I've processed this summer has convinced me that (my) life is less hard than I've hitherto suspected, and the splendour of what's been seen along the way that it's much richer, much more valuable than I ever dared speculate.

Quite fun just having a mate for one afternoon. Like being a child on holiday.

I wanted Rotterdam to be just a smaller Amsterdam, which it isn't really, though it is an appealing city in its own right. - Liam Williams

// Boredom: A Lively History // 10.09.17
Boredom is not a primary emotion, such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise or disgust. Rather it has a derivative or secondary status, along with emotions such sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation or contempt. Emotions such as these are often termed social emotions. This means that they require other creatures for their acting out. Primary emotions seem to be, if not solitary things, at least emotions that have less need of a social settings. You may fear an inanimate object: a falling tree for example. But you are less likely to feel sympathy or envy for such an object.

It has been argued that boredom-prone individuals may have a naturally lower level of dopamine. This means they require a heightened sense of novelty to stimulate their brains: to get the dopamine flowing.

// Rob Newman's Neuropolis // 09.09.17
Language couldn't have emerged except as a product of living in complex groups, since it exceeds what any one person was ever equipped to do on their own.

That other person also has an equivalent sense of self.

The primary relation between the mind and the world is interaction, not representation.

// Melody and Lyrics / Track and Hooks // 10.08.17
Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

// The greatest corrupter of youth since Socrates // 02.08.17
The trouble for most of us isn't how to make children, but how to feed them.

// Comedians: Drunks, Thieves & Scoundrels // 01.08.17
For the first half of the twentieth century, comedians performed without referencing their personal lives onstage.

“I personally believe that comedy audiences have become less cognizant of the world around them, less well-read, and generally expect more vulgar and gratuitously cruel humor than the ones I started with in the late 1960s.” - Robert Klein

“I didn't respond with rage to any of what was happening in 1968. Dr. King's murder in April was depressingly predictable. There was a sinking feeling: that something good was ebbing away and being encouraged in that direction by its usual forces. The establishment was winning - its war, its assassins, its secret government - and that fact overpowered and debilitated me more than it enraged me.” - George Carlin

// The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 // 28.07.17
What best protects privacy isn't concealment, but apathy.

Anyone in a position of authority telling you something unpalatable is ‘temporary' is a red flag.

To be dutiful without fail is taking out emotional insurance
Old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside.

Receding hairline, true, but he exemplified that good looks were 50% conviction. He was neither as smart nor as entertaining as he thought he was either, but since he did think he was, other people did too.

Economists: modern day witchdoctors
Money excited the passions. He couldn't think of a soul who did not have powerful feelings about his or her capital; why, try removing two bucks from a beggar's hat and see what happens. To truly pull off proper apathy about the stuff would require so much energy, such contrived ideological zealotry, that the indifference would amount to a kind of caring.

For professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners thought money was real. Because the work was real and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. They had been promised that they could store the work and the time, later to exchange it, if only for other people's work, and other people's time. But money was just an idea, and natural forces also acted on the abstract.

You mistake the raffle ticket for the prize
The only thing that bargain hunting wins is more money - which is solely valuable as a route to buying more expensive things.

Belle Duval had once reflected on the disconcerting discovery of coming into means: that above a surprisingly low threshold of primitive needs, “there isn't that much to buy”. Since the affluent purchased up a storm anyway, the high-end detritus flooding American cities pressed Belle's point: if it didn't line your belly or protect you from the elements, it was junk.

These days, no one complains about the view
Clearly there was one situation direr than living in the country where the rest of the world wanted to live also: living in a country that everyone wanted to leave.

High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready-hand once helped to justify urban living.

Channels were streamed, but the format had survived - providing an open fire, the communal hearth, that a personal device could never quite replace.

If I wallop you over the head with a cudgel, you'll get mad and might even hit me back. If I prick you over and over again with a pin, you'll thank me when I stop.

// I Merge With The Essence // 21.07.17
"It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found." - Donald Winnicott

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." - William James

// Hunter // 14.07.17
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, "Wow! What a Ride!”.

// To quote Charlemagne // 04.07.17
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”

He might have added that to teach another language is to implant a second soul.

// Necropolitics // 03.07.17
"There are very few fashion magazines that make you feel empowered. Most leave you totally anxiety-ridden, for not having the right kind of dinner party, setting the table in the right kind of way or meeting the right kind of people. The clothes are just irrelevant for most people - so ridiculously expensive.
...
In fashion we are always trying to make people buy something they don't need. We don't need any more bags, shirts or shoes. So we cajole, bully or encourage people into continuing to buy." - Lucinda Chambers, fashion director of British Vogue for 25 years

// Farm Sanctuary // 28.06.17
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” - Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We can live in denial, looking the other way, or we can find it in ourselves to confront the cruelty and do something about it.

Agribusiness: whose blindness to the suffering of animals is almost equaled by their indifference to the well-being of the public. Accepting institutionalized animal cruelty as a cost of doing business requires a flexible conscience, and I guess we shouldn't be surprised when the same attitude starts slipping into the way we think about each other.

An 1886 Supreme Court decision defined corporations as persons with many of the same legal rights and protections as individuals. But unlike corporations (or human beings) animals do not have legal standing.

Farm animals are sentient beings, capable of awareness, feeling, and suffering, and we humans have an ethical obligation to refrain from behaviors that inflict suffering on them.

Our society mainly eats the young.

Damaged birds and those whose body parts are not suitable for display in clear plastic are further processed, ground up into nuggets and other products where the birds' damaged bodies will go unnoticed.

I once had a conversation with a filmmaker who told me about going to some built-up residential areas in Los Angeles. As he looked at those buildings with tier upon tier of identical apartments, he noticed wires snaking from the windows, each hooked up to a satellite dish. He saw the cables as intravenous drips, feeding the residents television's concoction of commercials and anesthetizing programming. I wondered to myself if we weren't more like the factory-farmed animals than we thought: all of us, locked in our cages, numbed by or pumped full of artificial stimulants, being fattened and sickened until we were ready to be taken away to our death.

Learn from the cows: chew your food carefully, ruminate, and experience what you're eating. Not only is this pleasurable, it actually helps your body digest the nutrients in food more thoroughly. Eating is supposed to satisfy our hunger and nourish our bodies, and when we eat well it does.

Supermarkets feel almost like a race to stockpile resources and elbow your way to the shortest checkout line, where a cashier swipes your purchases over a scanner as you peruse the tabloids and candy selection. As we push the shopping cart around the overly air-conditioned aisles, how often do we stop to remember the soil the food came from, the sun that shone and the rain that fell, or the animals whose lives were taken to feed us? How often do we stop and talk with our fellow shoppers about the food?

Pulling weeds, planting seeds, sampling fresh greens, or tilling the soil by hand. It's honest and straightforward work, and creates a sense of belonging.

The goodness of the Earth becomes shared bounty.

When you help sick animals, they seem to understand. They're grateful, and they don't forgot.

A bull is a male who has not, like a steer, been neutered.

Winston Churchill knew what he was talking about when he once said, "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals".

// Creating Freedom // 15.06.17
Education, cognitive development and political freedom all increase the power we have to act on our environment, but this does not make us more responsible for what we do with that power. What we do in a given situation is determined by the way we are - and for that we are not responsible. (The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the Editor)

Most of what goes on in the brain is completely inaccessible to the conscious mind. Rather than its functioning being a product of consciousness, it makes more sense to say that consciousness is a product of the brain's functioning. Eagleman writes: "The first thing we learn from studying brain circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The conscious you - the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning - is the smallest bit of what's transpiring in your brain."

Modern neuroimaging is so incomplete, it's like asking an astronaut in a space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

Why should the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many?
The strength of unions, the level of immigration control, the value of a minimum wage, the degree of corporate regulation and the structure of the tax system are central to any explanation of inequality and wages.

The most established environmental determinant of violence in a society is income inequality.

The hoarding of vast resources - resources that could save countless people and enrich numerous lives - has been normalised and celebrated in our society, but there is no moral justification for it. No path to extreme wealth entitles us to hold on to it - not in a world in which so many fundamental needs go unmet. The idea that we could ever be entitled to vast wealth - that a disproportionate amount of Earth's riches could ever really belong to us - is a dangerous fiction, one that has been cultivated to mask naked greed. Great wealth is never deserved. The fact that some people attain it is merely the product of strange institutions, emerging from an odd culture, developed by a flawed species.

Trillions of dollars rest in international tax havens while billions of people go without clean water, a nutritious diet, life-saving medicine or basic liberties. The claim that we should honour our obligations to billionaires and banks before honouring our obligations to the most vulnerable in society is a thinly veiled attempt to lend moral legitimacy to rampant greed.

Research seems to show that the wealthier we are the less ethically we behave, and the less empathetic and compassionate we become. In 2011, a UK report found that the poor are more generous than the rich when it comes to giving to good causes. The empathy deficit among the rich is, at least in part, down to isolation from poverty.

People at all levels of society tend to become less attentive when interacting with people below them in the hierarchy.

The more concentrated wealth becomes in a society, the more resources must be dedicated to its protection. One way to measure this is to look at the proportion of the national workforce dedicated to maintaining ‘security'.

Social Darwinism is alive and well
Decades of conditioning have told us that greed is good, that society is an illusion, and that people tend to get what they deserve. We have been sold an impoverished vision of humanity, one that binds our imagination and erodes our hope. Behind the technical debates of economists, the ideological rows of politicians, the pursuit of corporate profit and the passionate protests of the public is the most important question we can ask: what is life for? To compete, accumulate and dominate? Or is it to love and be loved - to create, share and experience beauty? Why, for instance, are we striving to attain happiness rather than, say, justice, peace, knowledge or meaning?

In the UK, each place in prison costs £75,000 to build and a further £37,000 a year to run. This expense is greater than the annual cost of studying at Eton.

Between 1997 and 2009, some 4,289 new criminal offences were created, approximately one for every day New Labour were in power.

A legal framework functions primarily to advance the interests of those who shape it. The sea of inequality on which the legal system floats makes a mockery of the principle of equal rights before the law.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains
Human labour manifests as highly constrained, temporary forms of consensual ownership: ‘employment'. Instead of being sold against our will into indefinite servitude, we rent ourselves out for a fee, for defined purposes and set periods of time.

From 1500 to the twentieth century, almost every country on Earth came under the direct or indirect control of European colonial powers. Native populations were wiped out or dispossessed of their land. Natural resources were stolen and used to enrich the colonising nations. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw almost all of Africa conquered and divided up between a handful of European nations. In the blink of an eye, 110 million Africans were turned into subjects. Nations were conjured out of thin air as territory was demarcated with clean straight lines across the continent.

Prior to the First World War, the European powers owned more than three-quarters of the industrial capital in Africa and Asia. During this period, writes Thomas Piketty, "The rest of the world worked to increase consumption by the colonial powers and at the same time became more and more indebted to those same powers. The advantage of owning things is that one can continue to consume and accumulate without having to work. The same was true on an international scale in the age of colonialism."

Utilitarianism
The nineteenth-century English philosopher and father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, based his moral philosophy on the idea that, "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". According to Bentham, the best allocation of resources is one that maximises human well-being. A key assumption he made was that the well-being a person experiences from an additional dollar decreases as that person becomes richer. That is to say, ten additional dollars produce more well-being in someone extremely poor than in someone very rich. The radical implication is that society as a whole becomes better off as material equality increases. We don't have to be utilitarians to see the value of this common-sense insight.

Propaganda, or ‘public relations ' as it came to be known
Hitler devoted three chapters of Mein Kampf to the subject of propaganda.

For well over a century, what has mattered most is the amount of advertising revenue a paper makes, not the number of copies it sells.

The primary product of television networks, radio stations, websites and magazines is not the content, but the public. They are sold by media institutions to advertisers who pay good money for their attention.

Advertisers regard programmes merely as the means by which audiences are delivered to them. These are the realities which help to determine what kinds of programmes are made, when they are shown and who sees them.

In this age of telecommunications, the media direct the thoughts of billions of people. They have vast potential to emancipate, and yet in the hands of the market they have become tools of oppression and misinformation wielded by the powerful. They do not always succeed in manufacturing consent, but simply creating the appearance of support for this war or that policy can be enough to give powerful institutions a licence to act. The appearance of widespread support gives the impression that no viable alternatives exist. Where consent is not possible, compliance will do.

The power of voters is dependent on what they know. Information is the oxygen of democracy: its health depends on the quality of the ideas and facts circulating through society. If voters can be systematically misled, they can be systematically manipulated. In a totalitarian society, the media is an extension of the government.

The great majority are incapable of thinking independently on most questions. They accept views which they find ready-made.

We're more likely to believe that a statement is true if we've heard it before. We also have a tendency to like or dislike everything about something, be it a person, an idea, a sports team or a nation. This is known as the ‘halo effect'.

Joseph Schumpeter
"Democracy does not mean, and cannot mean, that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms 'people' and 'rule'. Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them."

Power, Schumpeter believed, should be in the hands of ‘governments of experts'. His justification is interesting. Living through the emergence of advertising as a potent social force, he observed the increasing power of advertisers to shape needs, cultivate desires and direct behaviour. For him, this process discredited the notion of an authentic 'popular will'. If public opinion could be shaped by outside forces, it must lack any independent or rational basis . "If all the people can in the short run be fooled step-by-step into something they do not really want, and if this is not an exceptional case which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide issues, but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them."

Corporate welfare
With the elections of Reagan and Thatcher, Anglo-American corporations finally had governments ready to fight for their interests. They set about transferring resources and industry into private hands, stripping the unions of their power, reducing the top rate of income tax, and promoting a culture of consumerism and individualism.

Tony Blair - who was later described by Margaret Thatcher as her ‘greatest achievement' - dropped Labour's historical commitment to public ownership of industry and refused to raise taxes on the rich, repeal Thatcher's anti-union laws or reverse her privatisation of utilities and public services. But he did make a point of cutting corporate tax. In fact, never had so many Labour ministers been drawn from the world of business as when his party took power in 1997.

The UK railways were privatised in the 1990s, but more public money is spent subsidising them today than was spent running them when they were owned by the nation.

After attempting to wipe clean their own online history, the Conservative government proposed a bill in 2016 to extend the powers of police to access private web histories and to hack into smartphones.

The financial sector has managed to privatise profits while socialising risk: the rich take home the winnings while the poor are forced to cover the losses. Externalising costs is a form of theft. It is taking something for nothing and leaving others to foot the bill. It is ubiquitous, permeating almost every market exchange. As sea levels rise, as the oceans are acidified, as forests disappear, as workers around the world are prevented from enjoying the profits they help to create, the extent of this theft is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore - and it is vast.

Geo-engineering solutions remain dangerous fantasies that reveal a greater willingness to gamble with the survival of our species than to challenge the logic of capitalism. In a system driven by the pursuit of profit. Even survival is of secondary importance.

One dollar, one vote
Marking a ballot takes a second and, once it's done, a typical voter's democratic participation ends until the next election. Yet corporate participation is continuous and on an industrial scale. The work of corporate lobbyists, think tanks and lawyers never ends; the revolving door between industry and government never stops spinning. The ‘debts' to big campaign funders do not disappear, and neither does the influence of corporate funding in education and the media. Through numerous channels, vast wealth affords great political advantages to those who possess it, particularly when they work together to advance a common set of interests. It is not the best ideas but the best-funded ideas that win through. This is a politics of bribery, not participation. Yet the exercise of power through market mechanisms appears to be depersonalised, attributed not to individuals or even institutions but to sacred and impartial economic laws to which, we are told, there is no alternative. The enduring dominance of this doctrine is perhaps the greatest achievement of corporate public relations. By far the most powerful actor in the market, the corporation has every incentive to perpetuate the myth that government regulation is coercive, while markets - apparently characterised by voluntarism and cooperation - are not.

If democracy is something we value, why is it excluded from the institutions to which we devote so much of our lives? Why should workers not be able to participate in the decisions that impact them? Why should those who create profit not decide how it is spent? Why must the democratic rights of the citizen be left behind on entering the workplace?

If everyone with deposits in a particular bank decided to withdraw them on the same day, most people would get nothing. This is known as a bank run and it occurs when people lose faith in the bank's ability to pay back what has been deposited. Banks only hold in reserve a tiny proportion of deposits and reserve requirements have become increasingly lenient. On 31 January 2007, banks held just £12.50 of real money for every £1,000 shown in their customers' accounts, a total reserve of 1.25%.

The textbook response to economic downturns, as any student of the subject knows, is to increase spending.

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force
Between 1945 and 2005, the United States has attempted to overthrow fifty governments around the world, many of them democracies; it has dropped bombs on close to thirty countries; attempted to assassinate more than fifty foreign leaders; installed and supported some of the most oppressive regimes on the planet; and is responsible - directly and indirectly - for the deaths of many millions of innocent people.

Mandela was branded a terrorist, not just by the South African government but by the political establishments of the US and UK. And, although he was elevated in popular culture to the status of a modern-day saint after his release from prison in 1990, he remained on the terrorist watch list in the US until 2008.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 transferred $138 billion from the public purse to private security firms and reconstruction contractors.

Evaluate the ongoing experiment
There are those who are called ‘realists' because their map of the future deviates little from the conventional maps of the present. By contrast, those who imagine something different are often labelled ‘dreamers'. History teaches us that it has always taken ‘dreamers' to improve things. It took bold imaginations to abolish slavery, spread democracy, win rights for women, gay people and people of colour, and to expand our moral, artistic and scientific horizons. If the evolution of human culture is to continue, our collective imagination must travel far beyond the limits of present experience.

When someone chooses to buy a non-essential item - a fifth pair of shoes, a sports car or a yacht - they are also choosing not to give this money to others in dire need.

Society and nature are damaged by excessive consumption of the inane, the trivial and the luxurious, but our economic system demands such consumption, so it is celebrated.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbours as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. The prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathetic, and brave.

Strength lies in organisation, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years.

Mutually beneficial cooperation is the alternative - working together for a common end, one that benefits all those involved in its creation, in which unity of purpose is preserved by common interest, decisions are reached by dialogue rather than by manipulation or intimidation, and social cohesion is achieved not through carrot and stick incentives, but by cultivating social values, including a respect for reason, evidence, fairness, equality and democracy.

To follow the ideals we cherish, we need to free them from any labels, symbols or entities that claim to represent them. Patriotism is one example but the same holds for many of the ideological and religious labels we adopt. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of irrational prejudice are maintained in part by the power of symbols to conjure up the illusion of knowledge. To reduce a person to a label denoting their skin colour, place of birth, religion, sexuality or gender makes it easy to ignore all that we are ignorant of regarding that person. The ease with which we do this enables us to project our prejudices onto those we label. History shows us that for a group of people to treat another inhumanely, they must place them in a separate conceptual category through the use of derogatory, dehumanising labels.

Rationalisations for inaction are pervasive - from denial of problems to cynicism about solutions - and they need to be overcome.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

// 2010: A Space Odyssey // 08.06.17
The months contracted to weeks, the weeks dwindled to days, the days shriveled to hours; and suddenly Heywood Floyd was once more at the Cape.

Economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.

It was no more than the secret envy that normal homo or heterosexuals feel, if completely honest with themselves, toward cheerfully well-adjusted polymorphs.

Brutus and Claudias before battle
"If we do meet again - why, we shall smile. If not, why then this parting was well made."

They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed. Scattered across the universe was the evidence of many failures - some so inconspicuous that they were already lost against the cosmic background, others so spectacular that they awed and baffled the astronomers of a thousand worlds.

// 2001: A Space Odyssey // 22.05.17
Before you make a movie, you have to have a script. Before you have a script, you have to have a story. Though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

The Monolith
Though he was looking at a solid body, it reflected so little light that he could see it only in silhouette.

The surrounding brush was full of frozen shapes and staring eyes, as the creatures of the night suspended their business to see what would happen next.

They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important. It was now part of the disregarded background of their lives. Otherwise, there was no change in the normal routine. The tribe gathered just enough nourishment to survive for another day, and no one died.

He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

Not merely extra-terrestrial, but extrasolar
All the evidence was against intelligent life elsewhere in the Solar System. The inner planets were too hot, the outer ones far too cold, unless one descended into their atmosphere to depths where the pressures amounted to hundreds of tons to the square inch.

The surface of this star was no formless chaos; there was pattern here, as in everything that nature created.

Bowman looked upward, then checked himself sheepishly, as he remembered that here the main source of light was not the sky, but the blazing world below.

He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.

Then he remembered that he would never be alone, and his panic slowly ebbed. The crystal-clear perception of the universe was restored to him - not, he knew, wholly by his own efforts.

You could be terrified in space, but you could not be worried there.

He could do nothing but accept the images that were flooding into his mind, without attempting to interpret them.

Terrestrial
Earth was not forgotten, but another visit would serve little purpose. It was one of a million silent worlds, few of which would ever speak.

There are no sense organs in the human cortex. The human brain can be operated on without anaesthetics.

He recalled the cynical remark of one of the less reputable pontiffs: “Now that we have the papacy, let us enjoy it.”

The newspapers of Utopia would be terribly dull.

The refrigerator held only items that had already been packaged in some way.

More valuable than all the gold locked uselessly away in bank vaults.

Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr's “Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true.”

// A Short History of the Interweb // 10.05.17
In 2000, 361 million people were online. By 2012, there were 2.27 billion internet connections worldwide, an increase of 528%.

In 2005 YouTube came online. Today, 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, almost 8 years of content every day.

In 2007 the iPhone launched and the web went mobile.

// The Longest Way Home // 09.05.17
For me, travel has rarely been about escape; it's often not even about a particular destination. The motivation is to go - to meet life, and myself, head-on along the road. There's something in the act of setting out that renews me, that fills me with a feeling of possibility. On the road, I'm forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on the kindness of strangers, in ways that illuminate who I am, ways that shed light on my motivations, my fears. Because I spend so much time alone when I travel, those fears, my first companions in life, are confronted, resulting in a liberation that I'm convinced never would have happened had I not ventured out. Often, the farther afield I go, the more at home I feel. That's not because the avenues of Harare are more familiar to me than the streets of New York, but because my internal wiring relaxes and finds an ease of rhythm that it rarely does when at home.

At Ezeiza international airport in Buenos Aires I funnel toward customs. Down a long corridor, I move quickly past people shuffling along after the ten-hour overnight flight. I didn't sleep. I never do. It has become impossible for me to relax on a plane. Once carefree in the air, flying has become the receptacle for my anxiety and fear - an obvious desire for an impossible control. The higher the levels of stress in my life, the greater my yearning for such control, thus the greater my discomfort while flying. That I can see all this does nothing to alleviate my irrational responses. Images of calamity race through my mind and even the slightest turbulence has me jumping in my seat. I decided long ago that my fear wouldn't stop me from traveling, but still, flying haunts me, even when I am nowhere near a plane.

“Not quite a dream state, but it's certainly not wakefulness,” is how writer Pico Iyer describes the malady that has afflicted the traveler for only the last half century.

I needed no validation, no outside approval - I was myself
My initial reaction to nearly every social situation is to shy away. That in the end I often come out of such encounters energized and excited is something I've been slow to acknowledge. What stays with me is that I often stumble away anxious and fatigued, my internal monologue running parallel to each outward discussion. Add to this my acute barometer for shame - both my own and the one I perceive in others: when I see people behaving in ways that betray insecurity, masked with bravado, I feel embarrassed for them. I'm always shocked they don't. I judge them, harshly, and run for the exit.

Did I become a self-reliant loner because I was never welcomed into such a tribe, or did I realize early on that my desires could never be met in the rhythm of a group? The answer is impossible to discern from the myriad adjustments I've made through life. What is certain is that the sense of vulnerability that gathers between my shoulder blades as the gang of young men stride by - unaware of my individual gaze, but very conscious of their attractiveness as a group - is that this feeling is nearly as old as I am.

Because of my natural inclination toward solitude I drifted away from the others after the workday ended and wandered the cities alone. I began to find comfort in the transience and invisibility of being a stranger in a strange place. Unnoticed and anonymous.

I would go to the movies in the afternoon, by myself, while the world I knew carried on in my absence outside. It was my first real experience of travel-solo excursions to places that were so alien.

There is nothing here that is remotely reminiscent of my life back home - none of the threadbare shops, or primitive advertising, or restaurants have a familiar or even recognizable feeling about them. Such an alien sensation is increasingly rare in a world heading toward homogenization. The only thing familiar in this environment is me; consequently, I am acutely aware of my own thoughts, which in moments like this run toward a feeling of possibility. I wish I were staying in town for longer, possibly much longer.

Unfinished cinder block and raw cement seem to suffice for most newer structures.

On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.

The Lucidity of Loneliness
Only in the “lucidity of loneliness” can we see what we came to see, and learn what it is we came to this spot to learn.

I'm lonely. It's something I rarely feel, but when I do, I usually experience it as a pleasant sensation. Only occasionally does loneliness sadden me, or fill me with anxiety, and when it does, it takes me by surprise and leaves me feeling adrift, as if I have misplaced myself somehow.

I was miserable, lonely, and anxious. My long-established habit of solitude had left me completely isolated and without the resources to reach out.

Night has fallen fast, like it always does at the equator.

// Drugs Unlimited: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High // 08.05.17
"I am completely convinced that there is a wealth of information built into us, with miles of intuitive knowledge tucked away in the genetic material of every one of our cells. Something akin to a library containing uncountable reference volumes, but without any obvious route of entry. And, without some means of access, there is no way to even begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic* drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature." (*meaning ‘mind manifesting')

"I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyse its availability." - Sasha Shulgin

Chemistry
Strip drug culture of its mystique, and behind the magic and madness, there lie only molecules. At the end of it all, drugs are just carbon, hydrogen and a few other elements. In the most basic terms, they work because their molecular structures closely resemble naturally occurring chemicals, or neurotransmitters, that are generated by our brains to regulate mood, muscle action, appetite and dozens of other important physical processes. Drugs act as chemical ‘keys' that somehow fit into the transmitters' ‘locks' in our brains.

In the early 19th century, scientists did not believe it was possible to synthetically produce certain chemicals derived from living organisms. That was proven to be untrue by German chemist Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 when he produced urea, a constituent of human urine, in the lab.

While it's in no way comparable in terms of complexity and difficulty, drug chemistry is, to all intents and purposes, much like baking. Both aim to take one type of matter and use the physical forces of heat and chemical reactions to transform it. The cook and the chemist both need ingredients, techniques, equipment and expertise. Where a cook uses flour and fat and heat, a chemist might use an essential oil, such as oil of parsley, or safrole, as a precursor, its similarity to pre-existing drug structures, such as amphetamine, making fewer chemical reactions necessary.

Shulgin's experiments were carried out using precursors, or chemical building blocks, and reagents that set off chemical reactions to produce hundreds of new drugs, compounds that, until he invented them, did not exist anywhere in the universe. The process of producing new drugs in this way is known as ring substitution.

To identify the chemicals in the powders and pills, Ramsey has them crushed to a fine powder, then pinned with a diamond against a transparent plate, illuminated from below with a beam of infrared light. The resulting spectrum of each compound has a distinct signature, a translucent splash of psychedelia, which is then catalogued; check the library and if the image matches, it's a drug. Gas chromatography is the next test, which splits the compound in a solvent and then analyses the gases. Then it undergoes mass spectrometry, during which a beam of electrons is smashed into the molecules, which are then ionized. That data is parsed electromagnetically into the substance's likely chemical composition. Finally, if it's still not clear what the chemical is, it's sent off to the nuclear magnetic resonance machine, which ‘sees' into the molecular structure and identifies, once and for all, what it is.

Slices of rat brain are kept alive with alive in buffers fed with oxygen. Here, the new drugs that land in the laboratories have their first ever empirical and formal testing. This is pharmacokinetics, the study of the drug and how it reacts in vitro. Rats' aortas, cut from their hearts, are flooded with the chemicals Ramsey and thousands of users worldwide have bought online. There are serotonin receptors in mammalian hearts, and these and the rats' brain slices are monitored by micro electrodes that measure the amount of serotonin or dopamine released, as well as the pharmacokinetics – how the released neurotransmitters move around the tissue.

Tryptamine / Phenethylamine
These are the two categories of drug that prompt hallucinations and mystical experiences in humans.

Phen-ethyl-amine is naturally produced in our bodies and brains, especially when we first fall in love, and there are high levels of it in chocolate, cheese and sausages. It is a neurotransmitter – a molecule that passes around our brains and activates receptors that ultimately govern whether we are hungry, angry, elated or sleepy. Phenethylamine also modulates other neurotransmitters and can accentuate their effects upon our minds and bodies.

Where phenethylamine most closely resembles dopamine neurotransmitters, tryptamine resembles serotonin. Drugs containing tryptamine work by entering serotonin receptor sites in the brain, and by some sub-atomic magic, triggering a release of it, which affects mood, social behaviour and impulsiveness. It limits other neural activities and changes our perception of reality in the process. How these substances achieve this in neurological terms is hotly debated, but the latest research suggests that when flooded with serotonin the mind dampens down brain activity, rather than increasing it, as had long been thought.

Psilocybin, a naturally occurring substance, is found in hundreds of mushroom species at many latitudes on the planet. The backbone substance, tryptamine, is one of the two main chemical classes of drugs that can cause psychedelic or visionary experiences in humans. Skilled chemists can produce thousands of variations on the tryptamine form.

The active chemical in mescaline was first isolated from the peyote cactus by Arthur Heffter, a German pharmacologist, in 1897. Ernst Spath, an Austrian chemist, synthesized the drug in the lab in 1919. Mescaline, or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine, is the drug that startled author Aldous Huxley into writing The Doors of Perception, the 1954 psychedelic classic. Its chemical backbone is phenethylamine. The mescaline molecule fits into the dopamine receptors in the brain, and, in some way yet to be understood, affects our perception of reality in radical and unusual ways.

Phenethylamine is as malleable in the hands of a skilled chemist as the tryptamine skeleton, and can be manipulated in similar countless ways to produce hallucinogenic stimulant drugs.

Shulgin took the mescaline molecule, and swapped the hydrogen molecules attached to each of the carbons on the benzene ring for other chemicals. He added sulphur molecules, or cleaved off an atom or two of oxygen here, spliced in an iodine or a bromine there, exploring the possibilities of chemistry. He carried out the same process with both the mescaline molecule and with variants on the tryptamine skeleton, the parent structure for magic mushroom-like drugs.

There are literally millions of organic chemicals. The issue is trying to find out which ones can be used as drugs and which ones can't. We don't have that knowledge. The cannabinoid receptor agonists are a good example. They come from a wide variety of chemical groups, or families, so to try and define them chemically is extremely difficult. They all react with the CB1 (cannabinoid) receptor but there are some chemicals that are used in synthetic marijuana mixtures that are also used legitimately - there's one that is used as a lubricant in the manufacture of plastics.

The government will have to outlaw basic elements like nitrogen or oxygen soon to keep pace with chemists.

The Web
The first thing ever bought or sold on the internet was marijuana. The deal was done in 1971.

When you type a web address into a standard browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, your connection to the internet originates from and returns to a unique address, known as your Internet Protocol, or IP, address. This information is included inside the packet of data that you send when you press enter. The request, or packet, is then sent via the quickest possible route to the address you have specified, and then the request is delivered in the same way, but in reverse. The request for the information, and the data you receive, is stored by your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, and can be observed at many points along the entire transaction. Your ISP assigns you an IP address, which is a string of digits separated by decimal points.

Network effect: whereby the service became more useful as it became more populated.

As more and more people go online, the Net is beginning to reflect the tawdry conglomeration that is society at large. One mammoth, lowest common denominator, vainglorious, pseudo-intellectual whore-house.

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run, and underestimate the effect in the long run.

The vendors had also chanced upon a singularly effective web marketing strategy. When people entered the two search terms BENZO and FURY into Google, the sites owned by those selling this new drug appeared first in the search results, since it was such a strange and unusual phrase.

Drug Laws: an unwelcome intrusion into people's private lives
"Our generation is the first, ever, to have made the search for self-awareness a crime, if it is done with the use of plants or chemical compounds as the means of opening the psychic doors. But the urge to become aware is always present, and it increases in intensity as one grows older. This is the search that has been a part of human life from the very first moments of consciousness. The knowledge of his own mortality, knowledge which places him apart from his fellow animals, is what gives Man the right, the license, to explore the nature of his own soul and spirit, to discover what he can about the components of the human psyche." - Sasha Shulgin

Perhaps the difficulty we actually face in attempting to address the use and abuse of all drugs is in thinking there is actually a problem to solve at all.

If the solution we seek is to eliminate danger, to end addiction, to prevent all negative consequences from drug use, then we are destined to fail as surely as we have done over the last century - especially when the web expands the chemical palette so dramatically.

President Obama has spoken openly of his habitual and much-enjoyed marijuana use in his youth. As such, his administration offers no logical, scientific basis for the retention of the ban.

Bans on new drugs do nothing to eliminate them here or in the EU or the US; they simply hand the market to grateful gangsters who add the drugs to their repertoire, and prompt greater innovation in the chemical underground.

It was the act of banning substances for which demand was so high that made their manufacture, import and supply so disproportionately profitable - and popular. Drug laws have produced a situation where an ounce of gold, at around £1,000 in late 2012, costs about the same as an ounce of cocaine of average purity, which is a simple extract from a plant that grows wild with little attention.

Consider what the essential functions of the modern state look like to any politicised person under 30. The state comes to the rescue of banks while snatching away benefits. It strides into sovereign countries, and commits serial human rights abuses. It subjects doctors, nurses and teachers to ludicrous targets. It watches us constantly via CCTV, and hacks our email and phone data. It farms out some of its dirtiest business to private firms. Contrary to the vanities of the ‘free market', neoliberal capitalism needs the big centralised state to clear its way and enforce its insanities.

The global MDMA market is mainly controlled by Russian and Israeli organized crime groups, Dutch-born chemists and Israeli and Italian smugglers.

The Museum Dose
The more information people have about what is in pills, the less likely they are to take them.

It's pretty pointless trying to use street cocaine as a stimulant. The amount you need to take is so large, people would be better off with a cappuccino these days. It's much better value for money.

When cocaine is taken with alcohol, the liver bonds the two molecules - cocaine and ethanol - to produce cocaethylene, a more toxic and longer-lasting poison than either alone.

The Destruction of the Fiat Model
Change US$25 dollars in paper notes into pennies, and walk out with a box of 95% copper pennies with a metal value of approximately US$64 in copper. Not a bad deal! Of course not all of the pennies will be 95% copper, but the portion of 95% copper pennies in the box have the proportional gain.

Legitimate Chinese exports to the EU in 2003 were 106.2 billion euros. They more than doubled to 231 billion euros in 2007. By 2010 they stood at 292 billion euros - a threefold increase in under seven years. Business, both legal and para-legal, was booming.

China is a country where the well-established chemical and pharmaceutical industry was willing to turn a blind eye to sketchy export dockets, where local officials could be paid off cheaply, and where labour costs were lower.

Right on the edge of a psychedelic breakthrough, or his sanity
LSD's early users included James D. Watson and Francis Crick, who cracked the fundamental secret of life in March 1953 when they imagined the double helix form of DNA while under the influence of a small dose of the drug.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, amphetamines had been widely prescribed by doctors for fatigue, a fact that might go some way to explaining the gruesomely chipper and relentlessly chatty representation of the British squaddie in films of the era. Over seventy million amphetamine tablets were used by British soldiers during the Second World War.

// The Sirens of Titan // 01.05.17
The state of mind on Earth with regard to space exploration was much like the state of mind in Europe with regard to exploration of the Atlantic before Christopher Columbus set out.

Titan affords an incomparable view of the most appallingly beautiful things in the Solar System, the rings of Saturn. These dazzling bands are 40,000 miles across and scarcely thicker than a razor blade.

Hallucinations, usually drug-induced, were almost all that could surprise and entertain Constant any more.

The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than like a punchbowl in hell.

[Later] Constant was self-sufficient. He raised, gathered or made everything he needed. This satisfied him enormously.

An organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.

“You're not a bad sort, you know” he said, “particularly when you forget who you are.” He touched Constant lightly on the arm. It was a politician's gesture - a vulgar public gesture by a man who in private, among his own kind, would take wincing pains never to touch anyone.

Like most pieces of information on Mars, Boaz's pieces of information about Unk were underdeveloped. He could not say from where, exactly, the pieces had come. He had picked them out of the general background noises of army life.

You asked the impossible of a machine, and the machine complied.

// Childhood's End // 28.04.17
Imagine that every man's mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent. Their individuality would have gone.

No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart

Few people left college before 20, and that was merely the first stage, since they normally returned again at 25 for at least three more years, after travel and experience had broadened their minds. Even then, they would probably take refresher courses at intervals for the remainder of their lives in the subjects that particularly interested them.

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Few artists thrive in solitude, and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

He had reached the position where neither personal possessions nor official ceremony could add anything to his stature.

The French produce the best second-raters in the world.

Western man had relearned what the rest of the world had never forgotten; that there is nothing sinful in leisure, as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

The classic recipe for a small boy: “a noise surrounded by dirt.”

"Tell us what you see. The picture that reaches your eyes will be duplicated by our cameras. But the message that enters your brain may be very different, and it could tell us a great deal."

// The Biology of Desire: why addiction is not a disease // 26.04.17
Why take drugs?
An inability to be at peace in the moment.

The submissiveness motivated by fear of rejection.

The feeling of the drug itself. The taste of it from inside. The click of shackles released all over the nervous system, reaching back to smooth every jagged memory, and forward, a guarantee of the hours to come, a guardian against harsh thoughts and images, the settling in of a consciousness infused with peace.

Why abstinence?
The possibility of self-control becomes as attractive - more attractive - than any other possibility, including temporary relief.

The reduction of grey matter volume in specific regions of the prefrontal cortex, thought to progress with the length of addiction, reversed over several months of abstinence. Grey matter volume returned to a normal baseline level within six months to a year of abstinence, and similar results have been found by other studies as well. But then - and here comes the first surprise - grey matter volume (synaptic density) in these regions continued to increase, beyond the normal baseline level, the level recorded for people who've never been addicted. Which probably means that top-down cognitive control regions - what I call the bridge of the ship - became more elaborate, or sophisticated, or flexible, or resilient, than those of people who had never taken drugs. It makes sense. Abstinence requires sustained and seasoned cognitive effort, and that effort grows synapses as surely as any other motivated activity.

Brain change, or Neuroplasticity
Synapses are tiny spaces between neurons, where the fibres of one cell (the sender) connect to the fibres of another cell (the receiver). These way stations are where molecules cross over from the sender cell to the receiver cell, and when enough molecules get across (usually resulting from a group effort by many sending cells), the electrical charge of the receiving cell changes. This change in electrical charge results in an increase (called excitation) or a decrease (called inhibition) of that cell's firing rate. And that change in firing rate can influence the next neuron in line, making it more or less ready to send its energy to the following neuron, and so on. The result? A synaptic pathway: a train of neurons, connected by synapses, each affecting the next in line.

Brains don't have likes or dislikes, rewards or punishments, goals or cravings. Those are things people have. And brain cells don't contain thoughts or feelings. What they contain are membranes, molecules, proteins, blood, and constantly fluctuating levels of electricity.

Brain change is necessary for language acquisition and impulse control in early childhood, for learning to drive a car, play a musical instrument, or appreciate opera later in life. Brain change underlies religious conversion, becoming a parent, and, not surprisingly, falling in love. Brains have to change for learning to take place.

Lizards don't learn very much. Their repertoire of skills is innate. But humans learn almost everything they ever come to know or do. That's why babies are completely helpless. They can't do a thing, because they haven't learned how. So reptile brains are almost entirely prefabricated. But human brains require extensive cellular changes, from before birth to the end of our lives, in order to function at all.

Bad habits like addiction grow more deeply and often more quickly than other bad habits, because they result from feedback fuelled by intense desire, and because they crowd out the availability or appeal of alternative pursuits. The brain continues to shape itself with each repeat of the addictive experience, until the addictive habit converges with other habits lodged within one's personality.

Addictive issues are defined by behavioural patterns, not particular substances. Some people pursue certain activities repeatedly, often with little control, because those activities are highly attractive. That description can cover anything from spending sprees to helicopter parenting to jihadism.

In OCD, often considered the first cousin of addiction, rituals are performed to avoid or to ease anxiety. There is no reward in washing your hands for the fiftieth time, or checking the light switch yet again. Compulsive behaviour is a highly automatic response to a stimulus, but it can combine with the motivational flare of the accumbens and the fear networks of the amygdala, laid down over years of personality development.

Delay Discounting and No Fatigue
After suppressing one's desires, impulses, or habitual responses for some period of time, the cognitive machinery of self-control gets worn down and dysfunctional.

// Hunter 5 T. // 25.04.17
You must realize, I do what I want.

It's always good to act crazy first, because later you can appear normal.

Never give your real name.

// Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original // 21.04.17
“I like to stand out, man. I'm not one of the crowd. If the crowd goes that way, I go the other way.” - Thelonious Monk

The line between planned experiment and artistic abdication or incompetence is hazy, as in modern painting.

The employment of elaborate chord substitutions and rhythmic innovations in order to weed out the bad players, or so the story goes, ultimately contributed to the birth of bebop.

Mondays: the professional musicians' night off
"Today the big problem is that no one wants to work their left hand. Modern jazz is full of single-handed piano players. It takes long hours of practice and concentration to perfect a good bass moving with the left hand and it seems as though the younger cats have figured they can reach their destination without paying their dues."

Like Monk, when Chittison backed a soloist - including a singer - he was never content to simply feed him (or her) chords in the background. He tended to be extraordinarily busy, filling in every conceivable space to the point of competing with the soloist.

When Riley asked Monk about rehearsing, he replied, “Why do you want to do that, so you can learn how to cheat? You already know how to play. Now play wrong and make that right.”

Thelonious was feeling pretty good
It was dance music that you played. You were supposed to have some fun; they didn't come there to listen. They came there to party.

What Monk witnessed on the road with the evangelist reinforced for him the essential relationship between music and dance - music is supposed to move the body and touch the soul.

// Homo Dues // 06.04.17
The single authentic self is as real as the eternal Christian soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If you look really deep within yourself, the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self'. Humans aren't individuals. They are ‘dividuals'.

Narrating / Experiencing Self
The left hemisphere of the brain is the seat not only of our verbal abilities, but also of an internal interpreter that constantly tries to make sense of our life, using partial clues in order to concoct plausible stories.

At any particular moment my experience comprises everything I sense (heat, pleasure, tension, etc.), every emotion I feel (love, fear, anger, etc.) and whatever thoughts arise in my mind.

Most of our critical life choices - concerning partners, careers, residences and holidays - are taken by our narrating self. Suppose you can choose between two potential holidays. You can go to Jamestown, Virginia, and visit the historic colonial town where the first English settlement on mainland North America was founded in 1607. Alternatively, you can realise your number one dream vacation, whether it is trekking in Alaska, sunbathing in Florida or having an unbridled bacchanalia of sex, drugs and gambling in Las Vegas. But there is a caveat: if you choose your dream vacation, then just before you board the plane home, you must take a pill which will wipe out all your memories of that vacation. What happened in Vegas will forever remain in Vegas. Which holiday would you choose? Most people would opt for colonial Jamestown, because most people give their credit card to the narrating self, which cares only about stories and has zero interest in even the most mind-blowing experiences if it cannot remember them.

We see, then, that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we saw, novels we read, speeches we heard, and from our own daydreams, and weaves out of all that jumble a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that's what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

What would happen if we could rewrite our inner monologues, or even silence them completely on occasion?
“The thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up. My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head. I also started to have a lot of questions. Who was I apart from the angry, bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I'm too scared to try? And where did those voices come from?”

Humanism
In ethics, the humanist motto is ‘if it feels good - do it'. In politics, humanism instructs us that ‘the voter knows best'. In aesthetics, humanism says that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. In the Middle Ages this would have been considered the height of foolishness. The fleeting feelings of ignorant commoners were hardly a sound basis for important political decisions.

In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt - one of the chief architects of the modern education system - said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom'. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life - to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human'. This could well be the humanist motto.

Intelligence or consciousness?
When you read the Bible, you get advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment.

Yet in the twenty-first century, feelings are no longer the best algorithms in the world. We are developing superior algorithms which utilise unprecedented computing power and giant databases. The Google and Facebook algorithms not only know exactly how you feel, they also know a million other things about you that you hardly suspect. Consequently you should now stop listening to your feelings, and start listening to these external algorithms instead.

If you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis, but rather you should systematically collect biometric data and allow algorithms to analyse them for you and tell you who you are and what you should do.

In the high days of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloured beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.

Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don't look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?' - you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got. Writing a private diary - a common humanist practice in previous generations - sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something - record it. If you record something - upload it. If you upload something - share it.'

In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.

Throughout history, prophets and philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan, all law and order would vanish. Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and His all-encompassing plans. God-fearing Syria is a far more violent place than the atheist Netherlands.

// Everyone is afraid. Even those who frighten us // 29.03.17
"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out." - Robert Collier

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company." - Jean-Paul Sartre

Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.

"Reading is an active, not passive activity." - Bret Easton Eliis

"The singer gets all the attention. But the words don't."

"Our dislikes are as strongly held and as persuasive as our likes when it comes to taste." - Shane Mauss

// The Brain & Neuroplasticity // 21.03.17
A fetus starts out with a smooth brain, but the gyri develop as the fetus develops. This arrangement of wrinkles and cracks allows a much broader surface area of tissue to be packed into a relatively small space in much the same way you can take a piece of paper, crumble it up into a ball, and fit it into a much smaller container than you could if it were left flat. This maximizes the functional area of your brain without giving you a head the size of a table. The patterns of sulci and gyri in the human brain demonstrate quite a bit of variation between people and also between the two halves of any individual brain.

The brain builds itself via interactions with the environment and built-in genetic programs. Much assembly is still required even after birth, as the nervous system requires an incredible amount of assembly and even quite a bit of disassembly as a child matures. Some connections are discarded, while others are strengthened, as the child grows. Brain plasticity is the organizing principle of brain development.

If neural circuits form and then are not used, they will not survive or function normally. Therefore, the nature versus nurture debate is really not a debate at all, as neither can work without the interaction of the other.

If the organ that uses one-fifth of the body's intake of oxygen is only operating at 10% efficiency, then increasing its efficiency to full capacity would use up all the oxygen in the body. All other organs and tissues would die of suffocation.

The brains of men are about 15% larger than those of women, but brain size is not necessarily related to intelligence.

The larger the ratio of brain size to body size, the more intelligent the species tends to be, although this is not always the case. There also seems to be a link between intelligence and the relative size of the prefrontal cortex in animals. Primates and dolphins have the largest prefrontal cortices and also are the most intelligent of animals.

Learning & Intelligence
Neurotransmitters are chemical substances that the brain uses for communication between neurons and are created within neurons. There are hundreds of chemical substances that qualify as neurotransmitters. These substances are not used exclusively in the brain, although when they are utilized in the brain, they are called neurotransmitters. Outside of the brain when the same substances travel through the bloodstream, they are referred to as hormones. For example, the neurotransmitter serotonin, known to be important in mood, is also important in the process of digestion and is found in the gut. Most neurotransmitters have multiple functions. The neurotransmitter dopamine has important functions regarding your mood, movements, and memory.

Most neurons communicate via a neurotransmitter sent across the synapse from the axon of a sending neuron to the dendrite of another neuron The sending neuron is termed the presynaptic neuron and the receiving neuron is often termed the postsynaptic neuron. Learning at the cellular level would be dependent on an increase in the probability that a postsynaptic neuron would be activated in response to the neurotransmitters released from a presynaptic neuron. The more quickly this response takes place, the more learning is accomplished. Experimental studies have attempted to replicate this process by briefly applying high-frequency stimulation to presynaptic neurons and observing the response in the postsynaptic neuron. When this experiment is performed on the brains of rats and other animals, changes occur in the postsynaptic neuron that include the sprouting of new dendritic spines and a faster response to messages from the presynaptic neuron. When more presynaptic neurons that all synapse (connect) with the same postsynaptic neuron are stimulated, the effect is even stronger. This effect has been termed long-term potentiation.

There are 9 separate intelligences:
spatial
linguistic
logical-mathematical
bodily-kinesthetic (such as athletics)
musical
interpersonal (social abilities)
intrapersonal (self-knowledge)
naturalistic (relating information to one's natural surroundings)
existential (the ability to consider information transcending sensory inputs, such as infinity).

IQ is not the same thing as intelligence. Intelligence is a complex, abstract, psychological construct. Constructs are explanatory concepts that are not directly observable. What are observed are the results of these constructs - how they affect the world - and not the construct itself. For instance, things like thought, personality, feelings, the number 3. You can show someone three apples, three clocks, or three brains, but you can never show just three.

Learning & Memory
Learning and memory are actually two ways of thinking about the same phenomenon, in that they both describe an outcome based on the ability of the brain to change its structure and its functioning as a consequence of experience. Technically, learning is described as a change in brain structure in response to experience, and memory is associated with how these changes to the brain are subsequently stored, represented, and reactivated when needed.

Your memory is not like a tape recorder. When you remember something, you do not remember it exactly as it happened. In fact, when you remember events from your past, you actually re-create them in your mind. Research has shown that recall of past events, even events that are not in the distant past, can be affected by a number of things, such as the context in which they are recalled, the type of questions asked, and even trivial factors like a person's mood or physical state.

Working memory consists of a number of brain processes that have a limited capacity and a limited duration.

Familiar actions are stored as schemas. Schemas are well-learned plans or templates for action, such as the expected behavior one should engage in while at church. Schemas also consist of certain beliefs and attitudes. A complex task or belief may be stored as a hierarchical collection of schemas, which are often referred to as scripts. Schemas and scripts are activated and then utilized by the prefrontal cortex.

Complex systems of goals and plans exist at multiple levels in the brain, may be stored as long-term memories or short-term (working) memories, and require numerous connections to implement them. These connections require a well-developed and larger brain compared to animals that respond from a stimulus-response perspective (a stimulus or cue implements a specific plan or response). Humans sometimes respond in such a manner but also have the capacity to rationalize, contemplate, and initiate much more complex and varied responses.

Automatic cognitive processes like intuition are poorly designed for weighing out decisions that require an understanding of probability or statistics. Good poker players understand this and attempt to learn to ascertain the probability of the cards the other players are holding instead of betting solely on their hand or on hunches.

Left/Right Brained
Each hemisphere demonstrates some specialization of functions. For instance, the left hemisphere specializes in language, verbal memory, and logical thinking, whereas the right hemisphere appears to be more specialized for visual spatial functions, nonverbal functions, understanding humor, and is involved in more intuitive types of processes. In addition, motor and sensory functions are lateralized such that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body.

You might often hear people saying they are “left brained” or “right brained” due to their talents or learning preferences. It is important to remember that the brain does not know the distinction between being “left brained” or “right brained.” A person's strong points and their weak points result from complex interactions between genetics and environmental experiences. The distinction of being “left brained” or “right brained” is just a myth.

The famous neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga developed the notion that the left side of the brain tries to make sense of the world by using language and contains an interpreter that is constantly making up a verbal story about experiences. Without the interpreter, awareness would exist, but it would be awareness without context, and behavior would be expressed in terms of stimulus-response associations. Thus, consciousness and intelligence are intimately related.

Left-handed people tend to be more ambidextrous than right-handed people.

Body
The brain cannot transmit information or receive any information without the spinal cord. The human spinal cord is about 18 inches in length (about 44 to 45 cm, but it is typically slightly longer in men than in women). The spinal cord is housed by the spinal vertebrae that offer some protection from injury. Neurons project from the spinal cord to other areas of the body, and nerves from the body project to the spinal cord.

Body temperature levels, blood pressure, and others are detected by internal sensors that attempt to maintain these functions within an acceptable range of values. The acceptable range for these functions is typically referred to as homeostasis, a process that occurs largely without conscious awareness.

Muscles are very elastic, can stretch (within limits of course), and are attached to the bones by tendons (ligaments attach the bones to one another).

Chronic stress can be harmful, but no stress at all is also detrimental as the system is a like a muscle; it improves with exercise, but too much exertion can damage it.

Like the sensory systems, the motor systems are hierarchical, guided by sensory (especially somatosensory) feedback, and are physically changed by the amount of prior practice/learning that occurs in the system.

Vision
Vertebrates have 2 eyes to see on each side of their body. Those with eyes on the front of their heads are generally predators, whereas those with eyes on the sides of their heads are prey animals. Front-facing eyes allow distance judgments, whereas side-facing eyes provide larger visual fields. Primates have front-facing eyes to navigate in trees where depth perception is very important.

When illumination is high, the pupils are constricted and the images that fall on the retina are sharper; however, under low levels of illumination the pupils dilate, letting in more light but sacrificing the focus of the images.

Full images are not projected from the retina to the brain. The image falling on the retina is deconstructed and sent to different brain areas, reconstructed, and perceived.

The most common type of color blindness results from the absence of one cone type in the retina. The genes for these cones are coded on the X chromosome. It is more common for a male to have red or green color blindness as females have two X chromosomes and males just one (specific genes code for each cone). Blue-yellow color blindness occurs rarely.

Sound
Sounds are, in reality, vibrations of the molecules in the air that stimulate the auditory system. A person with “normal hearing” will be able to detect a sound wave between 20 and 20,000Hz (hertz, or cycles per second), but humans are typically most sensitive to vibrations between 1,000 and 4,000Hz. The frequency of the vibration determines its pitch (high or low). Dogs can hear pitches as high as 45,000 Hz and some other animals can hear much higher frequencies.

When one locates sounds coming from different locations, differences in the time of arrival of the signal from the two ears lead to differential stimulation in the superior olives, and this allows one to locate the direction of the sound.

Taste
Taste receptors are found on the tongue and in parts of the mouth (oral cavity). These receptors typically occur in groups of approximately fifty, termed taste buds. Taste buds located on the tongue are most often found in the papillae, which are the small protrusions located on the tongue. The average number of taste buds a person has is estimated to be at around 10,000.

Projections to the orbitofrontal cortex pair smells from food with information from taste receptors to create perceptions of flavor. This is why food tastes bland when you have a cold.

People who live in industrialized nations live in an environment with an endless variety of food that has the highest positive-incentive value, which coincidently includes a high calorie composition.

In humans, the main role of the chemical senses of taste and smell is recognition of flavors. However, in other species of animals chemical senses also play an important role in regulating social interactions between members of the same species. Many animals release pheromones, which are chemicals that can influence the behavior of animals within the same species. For example, when a female dog is “in heat,” she releases pheromones that notify male dogs that she is primed for mating.

Mammals
Humans are among the few mammals where males help care for their young.

Currently, the average age that puberty begins for males in the United States is about 11 1/2 and at around 10 1/2 for females. However, about a century and a half ago, these averages were 16 and 15 years old. Most attribute this to changes in diet, medical treatments, and even social conditions (another illustration of plasticity).

There is a theory known as the fraternal birth order effect that observes that the probability of a male being homosexual increases with the number of older brothers he has. This has been explained by the hypothesis that in some mothers there is a progressive immunity that has developed to masculinizing hormones in male fetuses, and as more children are born, there is a greater chance that males may be homosexual.

Joseph LeDoux makes an interesting observation about emotions: “Unfortunately, one of the most significant things ever said about emotion may be that everyone knows what it is until they are asked to define it.”

Before you fall asleep, there is a period of relaxed wakefulness that produces EEG waves known as alpha waves that have a frequency of about 8 to 12 waves per second. Alpha waves are characteristic of a relaxed state.

Diseases
Iatrogenic causes of insomnia are not uncommon. Iatrogenic means “created by a physician”.

There are no medical tests that can identify the presence or absence of ADHD in a person, such as a blood test or particular brainwave pattern. This is the case with the majority of psychiatric disorders. The diagnostic criteria for ADHD were decided on by a committee, and the diagnosis of ADHD is made on the basis of behavioral signs and childhood history.

Neurosis is a psychiatric disorder that does not include severe psychosis, such as hallucinations.

Pain thresholds in individuals are variable, and the ability to tolerate pain is also quite variable within the same person in different situations. Some studies suggest that pain tolerance increases as people get older, but it is not clear as to whether this finding is due to decreased sensitivity in the system, psychological factors, or other factors. Athletes and people with high levels of motivation appear to have higher pain tolerances, and there have been suggestions that people from different cultural backgrounds display different tolerances for pain. This last finding may be related to the cultural appropriateness of expressing pain that differs from culture to culture.

Dementia is a brain disorder that typically occurs in elderly people and most often initially presents itself as a loss of memory. The connection between the hippocampus (a brain structure important in creating new memories) and olfaction is so strong that specific tests for dementia have been developed that measure the loss of smell in an affected patient

4/5 of children diagnosed with autism are male.

Alcohol is classified as a depressant drug not because it causes depressed mood, although it can do that in large doses, but because at moderate or high levels, alcohol results in the inhibition of neural firing, whereas at low doses it may increase neural firing. This is why when one initially drinks alcohol, one may feel excited and uninhibited, but as one continues to drink alcohol, one experiences slowed reflexes, slurring of words, and other similar effects.

A person running from a bear will not suddenly stop and try to scratch his foot.

// Work! Consume! Die! // 11.03.17
I've got news for the Ministry of Defence: if you thought you'd erased all our memories, it didn't quite take. You may have to flash us again.

Our various wars are being fought purely to justify a £50 billion defence bill and maintain an army that is grossly oversized for the realistic needs of our country. Ours is the second largest military force in the EU. The last time Britain was successfully invaded was over a millennium ago in 1066. Our military is used to attack, not to defend. Amusingly, David Cameron was roaming around the Middle East with arms dealers trying to flog weapons while calling for an end to violence.

Some of us work for free to save lives, while special funding is ring-fenced to kill people.

I pity the Palestinians, who didn't do anything to deserve what happened to them. Israel should have been given some of Germany to start a country in.

Children from the dollar-a-day world. - Frankie Boyle

// Waking Up // 10.03.17
"There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight
Did seem to me appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore.
Turn whereso'er I may,
By night or day,
The light which I have seen I now can see no more." - William Wordsworth

Dealing with superego attacks
The internalized prohibitions of our culture are commonly referred to as the superego. A strong superego can flood us with anxiety and fear for even thinking about a prohibited action, much less doing it.

Why would the culture want you to be insecure in some ways? Because then you need the culture for protection and so will not be likely to question it or rebel against it in an effective way.

When you worry about what could go wrong, the fear or distress or anger or depression resulting from that can be just as powerful as or more powerful than the negative feelings generated by actual events. Your imaginings can have as much power over you as your reality, or even more.

All-or-none, black-or-white perceptions and responses are a major problem in human life. Someone makes a slighting remark to you and your adrenaline begins flowing, your muscles tighten, your body prepares for fight or flight, and you feel very threatened, angry, or anxious. Yet it was only a small verbal slight; no bodily response was called for. We overreact or underreact too often, whereas we need to react in correct proportion to the reality of the situation.

Question excessive busyness - look for the quiet feeling being hidden by all the activity;
Continue to self-remember;
Try not to identify with any identity states;
Use all life situations as teaching situations that I may learn things from;
Treat others in a friendly and considerate way.

How many unpleasant people have we met who claim that they usually find other people quite unpleasant?

If he chooses to live a lifestyle that looks simple or impoverished by cultural standards, that is a genuine choice, not a lack of ability to earn more money. It is important here to distinguish what we really need to be reasonably comfortable and secure from the vast inflation of these desires by advertising and other forms of cultural pressure. What may be comfortable and happy by realistic standards may get classified as poor by the standards of a consumer society in which material greed has often replaced spiritual striving.

A world simulator
Living in a world simulator means that what we think are direct perceptions of the physical world are arbitrary constructions of our brains, not the things themselves. Our apparently direct experience of the world is actually indirect.

What we visually see is not the actual light that strikes our eyes, but a pattern of neural impulses that was initiated by the light that struck our eyes. Take the experience of fire being red. We believe we understand the physical world well enough to be certain that the fire is emitting electromagnetic radiation. Some of this radiation is in a vibratory range that can stimulate the human eye, so radiation in this range is called light. Light of a particular frequency does not have any attributes of color; it is just light vibrating at that particular rate. In the most accurate description, it is just electromagnetic radiation: calling it "light" is talking about light in relation to human beings.

The construction of what we read, with only partial perception of what's actually there, is one of the reasons that proofreading is so difficult, especially for something we've written ourselves. We know what should be there and so perceive our expectations instead of what's actually there.

Illusions and hallucinations
Psychologists distinguish between illusions and hallucinations. An illusion is a distorted perception of a real physical stimulus in your environment. A hallucination is a total creation of a perception when nothing is really present.

We may never be able to explain awareness, but we can be aware: that is an axiom.

We can define one of the qualities of intelligence: it is responsive. Intelligent behavior is initiated as a result of sensing that an appropriate situation actually exists in the organism's environment, instead of automatically assuming that the situation is appropriate.

We are not one, but many
A comprehensive mental "photograph" taken at one moment in time may show a totally different person from that taken at another time. Indeed, if you took away the common body and mass of factual memories, the common name given to you and fixed expectations about you of others, it would sometimes seem ridiculous to believe that these two personalities had anything in common.

The original meaning of persona - a mask used by actors - is apropos here. Slowly we create a more and more comprehensive mask that is a socially approved presentation of ourselves, something that will get us acceptance and approval, something that makes us "normal," like everybody else.

Tasks are not boring or exciting, they are what they are. People get bored or excited. Yet what is an exciting or neutral task for one person may be boring to another. Was my initial boredom a function of having unknowingly identified with one self-concept that was bored by this task out of many possible self-concepts?

Hypnotic induction procedure
Basically it was just talking. The subject was given no powerful drugs, was not in a special environment, had nothing external done to his brain - and yet in twenty minutes I could drastically change the universe he lived in. With a few words, the subject could not lift his arm. With a few more he heard voices talking when no one was there. A few more words and he could open his eyes and see something that no one else could see, or, with the right suggestion, a real object in plain sight in the room would be invisible to him.

Enlightenment
Compared to the rest of us, a pilot is enlightened about flying airplanes, but he didn't get that way in a single magical act; he studied for a long time, moving along a continuum from being completely unenlightened about flying to knowing more and more about it. When we think about enlightenment on a continuum, we can see it as a process, not just a final state.

She was more concerned with my motivations and feelings on this issue than with the simple overt content of my concern: something I have found in several master teachers.

If a middle-aged, sedentary person goes to a psychotherapist complaining of depression, an interesting argument could be made that he should immediately be referred to a physical fitness program instead of being given psychotherapy.

In science there are supposed to be no "final" truths. All theories and understandings are treated as the best explanations we have at the moment, but are always subject to reexamination and revision in the light of subsequent observation. Observations are primary, explanations are secondary. The same rule should apply to our self-observations. Never let an idea you like get in the way to observing what is actually happening in your world and your self.

// This & That // 24.02.17
"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"They haven't woken up yet here, they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer." - John Lennon

Filmology
A: It's a cliché but it's true.
B: It's a cliché because it's true.

Richard Herring's Scotch Accent
When called on to say something in a comedy audience, do a call back.

"If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things." - Albert Einstein

"Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it." - W. Clement Stone

With Growing Children
I know him less everyday.

// The Pleasure of Reading // 10.02.17
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." - Logan Pearsall Smith

"Just as many people are inclined to ask where poverty rather than wealth comes from (as if wealth were the natural condition of mankind), so many are inclined to ask not where knowledge comes from, but ignorance. It is as if they believe that a human being at birth knows everything there is to be known, but that somehow in the process of living he loses this knowledge and becomes ignorant." - Theodore Dalrymple

"Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings." - Heine

Be not too hasty to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

So long as a man does not put his vile thoughts into action, he should not be excluded from our human sympathies: let him who is without vile thoughts consort only among the similarly pure-minded. God knows what they would talk about.

It is not that truth becomes relative, but rather the importance of truth in human existence that does so.

Most books are far too long and have said all that they are going to say within the first two or three pages.

You can look up at the stars and descant on the pettiness and insignificance of human existence as much as you like, but you will still be irritated if the train is late.

"A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward." - Hamlet

Taste is a more reliable guide to character than opinion
Taste is formed by what is presented to it; and under the British system what is presented to it, at least in very large part, is trash. The appetite grows with feeding.

Chastity
Tis a Triumph over the Desire which Nature has imprinted in the Heart of Man, fierce and unruly, full of false Hopes and imaginary Delights, which too often blinds the Understanding, and leads to Destruction.

More gourmand than gourmet
An indefinitely expanded range of products might not be all-important in the formation of the human soul.

Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return
Still a young man, for whom the past was not yet more interesting than the future.

The first person to whom one must admit something discreditable is oneself, or else all is lost.

What is not given with generosity is not received with grace, and what is received without grace rarely continues to be given with generosity.

Pride struggles with desire for knowledge, and triumphs in the struggle.

Knowledge can be lost, or rather forgotten, as well as gained.

// Postmortem // 10.02.17
"He was so handsome, it was hard not to stare openly at him.

What I did was so intelligent, it was as stupid as hell
Human relationships are not founded on reason any more than my roses are fertilized with debate. I know seeking asylum behind the wall of intellect and rationality is a selfish retreating into self-protectiveness at the expense of another's well-being.

Like Rain in a Drought
It was like dashing a bucket of water in the face of a thirsty man - it happened too fast for him to drink a drop.

Those dipsticks are as slow coming around as payday." - Patricia Cornwell

// Disfruta Más De Tu Estado Natural // 31.01.17
Save £1.80 on your grocery shopping every once in a while by toiling away on a garden plot for weeks and months.

// A Perfectly Good Family (Revisited) // 24.01.17
Whenever I talked to Mordecai I heard a clock ticking; if I tried to tell him a whole story, I pared the details until it was boring - just what I was afraid of becoming. One of the most gracious privileges you can extend to others is permission to be dull; surely it is only when provided this relaxing latitude that most people will successfully amuse.

Some are more fragile than others, but all relationships are breakable if you kick them hard enough.

// Social Media isn't Free // 18.01.17
If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the product.

"Amazing the kind of politics you can engineer when you systematically underfund a nation's education system for a generation." - Alain de Botton

// Flicker: Your Brain on Movies // 08.01.17
For tens of thousands of years, maybe more, we have been stimulating each other's brains by telling stories and acting them out.

Your brain wasn't built for movies. It wasn't built for computers, or newspapers, or airplanes either.

// Henry James // 07.01.17
He had a great aversion to taking things too hard; he thought that half the discomfort and many of the disappointments of life come from it.

She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow always in the line of the eye.

Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to choose the pace.

I don't pretend to be graceful, though I try to be neat.

You women are all the same! The type to which your brother belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you were made to be its handmaids and victims. The sign of the type in question is the determination - sometimes terrible in its quiet intensity - to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and to secure these pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women. What our young friends chiefly insist upon is that someone else shall suffer for them; and women do that sort of thing, as you must know, wonderfully well.

The London-lover loses himself in this swelling consciousness, delights in the idea that the town which encloses him is after all only a paved country, a state by itself. This is his condition of mind quite as much if he be an adoptive as if he be a matter-of-course son. I am by no means sure even that he need be of Anglo-Saxon race and have inherited the birthright of English speech; though, on the other hand, I make no doubt that these advantages minister greatly to closeness of allegiance. The great city spreads her dusky mantle over innumerable races and creeds, and I believe there is scarcely a known form of worship that has not some temple there (have I not attended at the Church of Humanity, in Lamb's Conduit, in company with an American lady, a vague old gentleman, and several seamstresses?) or any communion of men that has not some club or guild. London is indeed an epitome of the round world, and just as it is a commonplace to say that there is nothing one can't “get” there, so it is equally true that there is nothing one may not study at first hand.

It is difficult to be so rare that London can't match you.

It is a kind of humiliation in a great city not to know where you are going.

// It is difficult to wake a man who is pretending to be asleep // 04.01.17
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

"I do not believe in a personal God and have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If there is something within me that can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Einstein

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." - Winston Churchill

// Happy New Year // 01.01.17
"It isn't that I don't like other people, it's that I don't like myself when I'm around other people. The good news is that this is within my power to change." - The Breeze Boy

// Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine // 30.12.16
"Everything we need is easy to procure, while the things we desire but don't need are more difficulty to obtain." - Epicurus

The more necessary a desired thing is - such as food and shelter - the more readily we will usually find it is available and the more easily we will be satisfied. On the other hand, the entirely superfluous things we desire, whether they be gadgets, fame or wealth, are much more difficult to secure and very rarely satisfy us.

Would the material desires you harboured when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished? Probably not. Without anyone else to impress, why own an expensive car, a palace, fancy clothes or jewellery?

Seneca talks of attending an elaborate entertainment where conspicuous riches had been piled up to impress guests. “What else is this then a stirring-up of man's cravings, which are themselves provocative of lust? What is the meaning of all this display of money? Did we gather merely to learn what greed was?” - Letters from a Stoic

Two people with different judgements will live in two different worlds
“There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you're on the wrong wall.” - Joseph Campbell

“It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison.” - David Hume

Training
There is a sort of muscle-memory to ethics: we can learn to act in a way that is appropriate until it comes naturally.

“Just as a piece of land has to be prepared beforehand if it is to nourish the seed, so the mind of the pupil has to be prepeped in its habits if it is to enjoy and dislike the right things.” - Aristotle

"Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is right, and of ill is wrong, cannot be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him, for we have come into the world to work together." - Marcus Aurelius

Don't defer authorship to other people by allowing them to control your emotions.

Don't add to first impressions.

Ask, 'Do I have a problem right now?'

Wholeness cannot be found in the mere avoidance of troubling feelings. To live without anxiety is to live without growth. If you feel anxiety, let it sit. You don't need to fix it; it is a feeling that you have, it is not you. The need to fix it, to control it, is perhaps what fuelled the anxiety in the first place.

It is good to detach from worthless sources of worry, but also vital for our flourishing to listen to those rumblings and see from whence they arise.

The final call is not to merely seek tranquillity, but from its strong shores, to welcome its opposite. It is a strong society that encourages dialogue with its enemies, and a fearful one that promulgates reductive nouns and cateogiotreis (such as ‘terror') to demonise and avoid the unsettling complexities of active, untidy reality.

Don't be a dick
People around you are not there to make your life easier. Everyone is fighting a hard battle; everyone is just trying to do their best, in the same way you are. If you remember this, you treat people with compassion and are likely to feel better. You'll connect with more people and that is where good things and opportunities come from. Open-heartedness feels good and is conducive to good things happening. Irritation with other people and the world only closes them off. People don't need to agree with you or see your viewpoint. Growing up means tolerating different viewpoints and realising that you are not the sole dictate of what is right and wrong. There is rarely a right and wrong. Most of the time there's just a jumble of viewpoints, and it's okay to grant others the validity you grant yours, and to tolerate the contradiction. Objecting to the differing viewpoints of others is just a huge waste of time.

Our too high expectations of others are a return to an infantile stage, when we knew we could scream and get what we wanted.

"Humanity cannot bear very much reality." - T.S Elliot

While many of Freud's approaches have been revised, we now live in a society where we can understand and appreciate that our troublesome urges and predilections might be the result of early trauma and come to understand ourselves and our complexities all the better. Likewise, we can gain a more sensitive understanding of others and think more carefully than ever before about the way we bring up our children. Freud's desire to understand the human condition has bequeathed to us a similar impulse to discern the functioning of people around us whenever they surprise us with seemingly irrational behaviour. Because of the popularity of this extraordinary man's ideas (and, a little later, Carl Jung) we feel we can grasp something of the human condition, and this connects us with the rest of humanity. Perhaps then, above all, Freud's legacy is one of empathy.

"Neediness is the destroyer of love" - Lucretius
If we feel we could live sufficiently without our partners, this can greatly improve our relationships with them. When we are sure we could not survive without them, we are likely to bring a theme of intense jealousy or anxiety to the relationship. Once again, reviewing the nature of our attachments can reduce anxiety and increase contentment.

"Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own, nothing to grow to you that may give you agony when it is torn way." - Epictetus

If we wish to take the sting out of a crush, there is no better way than getting to know its object. It isn't long before a range of imperfections make themselves known and we realise we are not dealing with an ideal form, but a mere shadow cast on the wall.

"When anger is present, neither marriage nor friendships are endurable; but when anger is absent, even drunkenness is no burden." - Plutarch

Tabloids: The real motive of the story is to drive people to the information source.

There seems to be only so long I can stay present in the moment before my plan-making, future-fixated part comes to the fore. This is probably as it should be; after all, if we could truly remain in the present, immortality would present no problem to us.

We care a lot about endings when we consider stories. They tend to define the character of the whole tale.

// Radical in the tweets, Apolitical on the streets // 21.12.16
Sleep well?
No. I made a few mistakes.

// The As If Principle // 16.12.16
Darwin had shown that people are extremely skilled at knowing how another person feels from facial expression. James wondered whether exactly the same mechanism might also account for how they themselves experience emotions. He suggested that in the same way that you look at other people's expressions and work out how they feel, so you might monitor your own expressions and then decide what emotion you should experience.

Smile, and you feel happier. Hold hands with another person, and you find him or her strangely attractive. Tense your muscles, and you develop greater self-control.

In the same way that smiling will make you feel happy, and gazing into the eyes of another person will make you feel as if you are in love, acting in a calm fashion will quickly make you feel calm.

According to one theory, the more you hang around someone, the greater the likelihood of that person liking and eventually loving you. This principle was used to explain why people often end up marrying people from their neighborhoods.

43 facial muscles combine to produce thousands of expressions.

Happiness can spread through groups of people, like infectious disease, with people catching emotions from one another.

Want to get a group to quickly bond together and believe in a single cause? Get them to act in unison.

People feel happier when they move in a fluid way and unhappier when they make sharp and straight movements.

All bodily sensations are caused by a physiological system that operates much like a tug-of-war match. At one end of the rope is the red team. When this team bursts into action, you feel aroused and active. Adrenaline and sugar are quickly released into your bloodstream to help provide energy, your heartbeat and breathing rate increase to get more oxygen to your muscles, there is a reduction in blood flow to your skin to help reduce bleeding if you are injured, and the digestive juices in your stomach go into overdrive to help produce more energy. In short, your body undergoes the well-known fight-or-flight response. If you decide not to engage in fisticuffs or run away, the unspent energy in your body can make you feel light-headed and weak at the knees; you experience butterflies in your stomach, and you tremble. On the other end of the rope is the blue team. When they pull on their end of the rope, your body calms down. Your heart rate slows, and your digestive system returns to normal. When you lie down and take it easy, the blue team pulls on their end of the rope, causing your heart rate to decrease and your breathing to become slow and shallow. The moment you stand up and walk about, the red team bursts into action and restores your heart rate and breathing to normal.

Passionate love activates the parts of the brain that are commonly associated with drug abuse and alcohol addiction.

The key to long-term love involves people avoiding the lure of the familiar and instead inviting excitement into their lives.

Around half of Americans' first marriages failing, along with two-thirds of second marriages and three-quarters of third marriages.

Next time you want some help getting over the end of a relationship, write a brief description of what happened on a piece of paper, rip up the paper, put it in an envelope, and kiss the past good-bye.

“Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.” - Aristotle

A large part of people's personalities are not fixed. Instead, they often accept the roles that they have been assigned by themselves and others, behave accordingly, and then develop an identity that matches this role.

Imagine going shopping for a winter jacket and seeing an entire rack of great-looking coats. All of the jackets are very attractive, and it takes you an inordinate amount of time to decide which one to buy. However, the instant you pass your credit card to the cashier, you suddenly start to justify your behavior by thinking about all the reasons your coat is obviously so much better than the ones you left on the rack. Within moments, your behavior has caused you to form a new belief, and now you become certain that you have made the right decision.

If you are an introvert, your brain is naturally aroused, and so you will try to avoid situations that further excite your already stimulated brain. As a result, no matter what situation you are in, you will tend to avoid bright lights and noisy groups of people, and instead gravitate toward much more tranquil activities such as reading and quiet conversation.

“If ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.” - Alexander Pope

When bad things happen to depressed people, they tend to come up with explanations in which they take the blame, causing them to expect to fail again in the future and casting a dark cloud over every aspect of their lives. In contrast, those who are not depressed are far more likely to avoid personal shortcomings, expect the future to be bright, and prevent the failure from influencing other areas of their life.

Types of problematic thinking, including “mind reading” (where they jump to conclusions about what other people are thinking), “catastrophizing” (where they transform into drama queens and make mountains out of molehills), and “fusion” (where they confuse their beliefs for facts).

Most people can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine.

// The Great Gatsby // 15.12.16
He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

// That's not... not true // 02.12.16
"External circumstances take their savor and color from the inner constitution, just as clothes keep us warm, not by their heat but by our own." - Montaigne

// This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate // 29.11.16
Once, humans came up with the lethal concept of the earth as an inert machine and man its engineer.

Climate change isn't an issue to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered
We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.

What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.

Fortunately, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most responsible bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon sectors of our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-carbon sectors are encouraged to contract.

Of course Britain - the nation that invented the coal-fired steam engine - has been emitting industrial levels of carbon for longer than any nation on earth and therefore bears a particularly great responsibility to increase, as opposed to claw back, foreign aid. But never mind that. Screw the poor. Suck it up. Everyone for themselves.

What gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts
Austerity: passing on the bankers' bills to the people in the form of public sector layoffs, school closures, and the like. In many Western countries, when it came to constructing the security/surveillance state at home and waging war abroad, budgets never seemed to be an issue.

After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen?

The starved public sphere
The past thirty years have been a steady process of getting less and less in the public sphere. This is all defended in the name of austerity, the current justification for these never-ending demands for collective sacrifice. In the past, other words and phrases, equally abstracted from daily life, have served a similar purpose: balanced budgets, increased efficiency, fostering economic growth.

Denigration of collective action and veneration of the profit motive have infiltrated virtually every government on the planet, every major media organization, every university, our very souls. As that American Geophysical Union survey indicated, somewhere inside each of us dwells a belief in their central lie - that we are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines. And if we are that, then what hope do we have of taking on the grand, often difficult, collective work that will be required to save ourselves in time? This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism's single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.

“How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?” asked Observer columnist Nick Cohen despondently. The answer is that you don't. You point out, as Yoshitani does, that for a great many people, climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than anything else currently on offer.

Coalitions of rights-rich-but-cash-poor people teaming up with (relatively) cash-rich-but-rights-poor people carry tremendous political potential. If enough people demand that governments honor the legal commitments made to the people on whose land colonial nations were founded, and do so with sufficient force, politicians interested in reelection won't be able to ignore them forever. And the courts, too - however much they may claim to be above such influences - are inevitably shaped by the values of the societies in which they function. A handful of courageous rulings notwithstanding, if an obscure land right or treaty appears to be systematically ignored by the culture as a whole, it will generally be treated tentatively by the courts. If, however, the broader society takes those commitments seriously, then there is a far greater chance that the courts will follow.

Some of the most tangible responses to the ecological crisis today come not from utopian dropout projects, but rather are being forged in the flames of resistance, by communities on the front lines of the battles against extreme extraction. And at the same time, many of those who, decades ago, built alternatives at the local level are finding themselves forced back to the barricades. That's because many of the most idyllic pockets where the sixties-era dropouts went to build their utopias are suddenly under siege: oil and coal tankers threaten their shores, oil and coal trains threaten their downtowns, and frackers want their land.

Proponents of fossil and nuclear energy constantly tell us that renewables are not 'reliable', by which they mean that they require us to think closely about where we live, to pay attention to things like when the sun shines and when the wind blows, where and when rivers are fierce and where they are weak. And it's true: renewables, at least the way Henry Red Cloud sees them, require us to unlearn the myth that we are the masters of nature - the 'God Species' - and embrace the fact that we are in relationship with the rest of the natural world.

Locavore: a person whose diet consists only or principally of locally grown or produced food.

Jean-Paul Sartre called fossil fuels “capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings”; they are quite literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-forms.

"The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me." - Henry David Thoreau

Dependent on the whims of politicians
The real problem is not that trade deals are allowing fossil fuel companies to challenge governments, it's that governments are not fighting back against these corporate challenges. And that has far less to do with any individual trade agreement than it does with the profoundly corrupted state of our political systems.

The sort of flip flop that breeds cynicism about representative democracy the world over.

The idea that change is something that is handed down from above by our betters, rather than something we demand for ourselves.

The only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them.

The police are controlled by the state.

Exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal

Built-in redundancies and obsolescences
The burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels.

We are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage, while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are capable of solving problems big and small.

// Stoicism // 24.11.16
Indifference really is a power, selectively applied, and living in such a way is not only eminently possible, with a conscious adoption of certain attitudes, but facilitates a freer, more expansive, more adventurous mode of living. Joy and grief are still there, along with all the other emotions, but they are tempered - and, in their temperance, they are less tyrannical.

// The Sellout // 23.11.16
People thought it was his selflessness that allowed him to get so close, but to me it was his voice that got him over. Doo-wop bass deep, my father spoke in F-sharp. A resonant low-pitched tone that rooted you in place like a bobby-socked teenager listening to the Five Satins sing 'In the Still of the Night'. It's not music that soothes the savage beast but the systematic desensitization. And Father's voice had a way of relaxing the enraged and allowing them to confront their fears anxiety-free.

In the idyllic world of television advertisement, homosexuals are mythical beings. You see more ads featuring unicorns and leprechauns than you do gay men and women. But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn't Jewish people, homosexuals, or urban Negroes, it's traffic.

I think, therefore I jam
He cares about black people like a seven-footer cares about basketball. He has to care because what else would he be good at?

// Ni cuesta, ni engorda // 07.11.16
“Do the thing that you fear to do, and the death of fear is absolutely certain.” - R.W Emerson

Putative - commonly regarded as such: the putative boss of the mob.

// Mexico // 01.11.16
Not only is Mexico a country of beautiful extinct or dormant volcanoes, it is also a country of active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes.

It seems likely that the mounds constructed were, for the inhabitants of the Gulf region, models of the volcanoes which they had worshipped in the regions to the north.

This region lies just south of the Tropic of Cancer, so it is not surprising that vertical differences are much more important than horizontal ones in giving Mexico different climates. Seasons, too, are not of great significance.

There is no doubt that the first humans arrived from Asia across what is now the Behring Straits.

As late as 1910 some 365 languages were still in regular use in modern Mexico - each of them the distinguishing characteristic of a tribe or nation of pre-Conquest times - so without Spanish such a degree of unification would have been inconceivable.

Between the end of revolutionary violence in 1920 and 1950, the number of Mexicans doubled.

By the end of the century Mexico was by far the most populous Spanish-speaking country, with over a hundred million inhabitants.

Already in the top five tourist destinations in the world, increasing numbers of foreigners are moving to Mexico.

Mexico has a three color flag - green for independence, white for Church privileges, red for the mixed indigenous and European blood of the people.

Mexican muralism - the 'bibles for the illiterate' - had a profound impact on art throughout the world.

Opium poppies grow well in some parts of Mexico. Cocaine is made from coca, an Andean plant that does not grow in Mexico.

In Mexico, play Mexico's game by Mexico's rules.

For the size of its population, Mexico now has one of the smallest armies in the world, and it even turns a profit. The military forces have their own bank - Banjercito - supposedly to handle soldier's and sailor's paychecks and pensions, but the bank is also a successful home mortgage lender.

Conquest
The Spanish found the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán holding down with difficulty a loose federation of states united only under the military conquest of one dynasty, backed by ferocious sanctions for disobedience. So hated was the Aztec rule that the Spaniards had no difficulty in being welcomed as allies, rather as the British were later to become part of the power game of eighteenth-century India.

For the majority of Mexicans the establishment of Spanish rule, essentially completed during the four years from 1519 to 1523, was merely the imposition of a new hierarchy on top of the one they already had. For their rulers and priests it was their reduction to the status of their former subjects. But for all of them, despite the plagues that resulted from unfamiliar European diseases such as consumption and measles, and the disastrous population collapse that followed, it was a relief from endless war and the terrors of human sacrifice. The disadvantages of the bargain were in many ways only to appear in retrospect.

The apparent simplicity of the Spanish Conquest of 'the Aztecs', and the fact that the colonial period lasted so long, suggested, especially to the French, that the conquest of Mexico was an easy proposition. What they forgot was that Mexico in 1519 was not one country. She was even more divided than Spain herself; and the centralism imposed by the Crown of Castile was always illusory.

The catholic Church was integrally woven into the structure of Spanish government. The Protestants don't have saints (and thus no expensive fiestas in their honor) and have plain services. Poor people would have more money - but duller lives - if they were Protestants.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico's Indians and her poor. When Juan Diego saw “the dark virgin” in 1531, near the sanctuary of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, his vision allowed millions of Indians to make their own peace with the culture of the conquering Spaniards.

For the universal reason that always lies behind prejudice - the fear that if distinctions of colour are not maintained then those distinguished against may become economic rivals, or even superiors - colonial society maintained a very rigid concept of racial classification.

The possession of the Spanish language gives the Mexican who uses it access to a vast literature, both in the original and in translation. It is a literature that has traditionally been limited to a rather small clientele, and both books and newspapers have small circulations in numbers of copies bought. But they are read widely. A Latin American novelist or poet will be read by the intellectual élite from the Río Bravo to Cape Horn; he will be a national figure of pride, to whom much is forgiven that would not be to lesser men, and an international figure welcomed wherever he goes. So a poet can lead the liberation of Cuba (José Martí), a novelist become President of Venezuela (Rómulo Gallegos), or a university professor President of Guatemala (Juan José Arévalo).

After 1793, with Europe already embroiled in the French Revolutionary Wars, Spain was no longer able to count on its long-standing alliance with France, and was very vulnerable anyway. After the breakdown of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803 Napoleon wished to include Spain and Portugal in the so-called Continental system, a boycott of trade with Britain. But the victory of Nelson at Trafalgar over the combined fleets of France and Spain made an effective boycott impossible. In one of his daring strokes, in 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain itself, forcing both Carlos IV and his son Fernando to abdicate and imposing his brother Joseph as king.

Post-independence Mexico was a mess. It would average more than one president a year for the next forty years, have four different systems of government, be invaded several times and lose more than half of its territory.

On 5 May 1862, Mexican troops, led by Ignacio Zaragoza surprised themselves and beat the best army in the world at the time – the French. Juárez declared 5 May a national holiday - Cinco de Mayo.

Tierra Caliente
"We've never thought of Indians as people whose identity is in the future, but rather in the past."

Any Mexican will tell you that Oaxacan Indians are usually timid, taciturn people, not normally given to wild displays of feeling.

The Zapotecs of Oaxaca, who were later most bitterly to resist both the Spaniards and subsequently the French, were among the most important allies of Cortés himself.

Oil was known to the Aztecs, who called the black sticky substance chapopote and used it for religious purposes. They found it floating on lakes and rivers in the low-lying regions of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The entire state of Oaxaca has a population of only a million.

French soldiers in Oaxaca deserted and 'went native'. White Zapotecs - with their very French features - could still be distinguished from other Zapotecs until after the Second World War.

In Oaxaca, there was Benito Pablo Juárez García. In the United States, Juárez is usually compared with Lincoln. Both were country boys who overcame poverty, becoming shrewd country lawyers. Both, surprisingly, became president of their country, and both led their country through a civil war, but Juárez has the more amazing personal history. Schools became an important part of the Oaxaca State budget (the first public girls' schools were opened during his tenure). Juárez' proudest achievements had been in furthering public education, even if it meant letting the churches run schools.

Porfirio Díaz
Porfirio Díaz was the 19th century's favorite dictator. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Teddy Roosevelt, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie and even Karl Marx praised him. Although he looked more and more like a king and acted more and more like one as he grew older, he remained an honest country bumpkin. He didn't learn how to eat with a knife and fork until he was over fifty. His eighteen-year-old second wife finally taught the old soldier some table manners and got him to stop mopping up the gravy with his tortillas at state dinners.

Like Juárez, Porfirio Díaz was from a poor Oaxaca family. Like Juárez, his intelligence was noted, and he was sent to study for the priesthood. Again, like Juárez, he found his real calling elsewhere. For Díaz, it was the army. He was a hero of Cinco de Mayo, when the Mexican army, against all expectations, beat back a French attack on Puebla. During the French occupation, the thirty-two-year-old general became famous as a guerrilla fighter and proved his loyalty when he turned down a personal offer from Maximiliano to join the Imperial government.

During the thirty years he presided over Mexico, the country developed both agriculturally and industrially. It was considered a safe place to invest, or to visit; huge engineering projects were completed, and fortunes were made. Unfortunately, very few Mexicans made these fortunes. For the people, life became worse - the new industrial worker made less and less money, and farmers lost more of their land ending up in a form of slavery.

The Díaz motto was, "Poca de política, mucha de administración".

D.F
The city lies where it does, not because of economics, like so many other cities, but because of politics. Cortés as a deliberate act built his new capital on the site of Aztec Tenochtitlán, despite the fact that Tenochtitlán was built on artificial islands in the waters of Lake Texcoco, and joined to the land only by causeways and wooden bridges. He did so because he believed it was essential to show the Aztecs that the Conquest was a fact.

Mexico City was not just built on a swamp, it was built on a swamp more than a mile above sea level. It is not long before the visitor notices the shortness of breath, particularly perhaps by waking up in the middle of the night. The inhabitants of the capital have long since suited themselves to it by adopting the stately pace and relaxed style of movement which makes it more tolerable.

Starting in 1886, the British engineering firm of S. Pearson and Sons began one of the greatest engineering projects of the 19th century, or any century. It took 14 years to build the 36 mile canal and 6 mile tunnel to allow the city to flush its toilets.

Two future Nobel Prize winning writers, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, and a third, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, would make Mexico City their home. García Márquez would be the most prominent of the large number of leftist artists and writers who fled repressive regimes throughout Latin America for the intellectual and artistic freedom of Mexico.

Mexican-American War of 1846-48
As they marched, tradition has it that they sang 'Green Grow the Rashes O' - hence gringo.

“The worst injustice one nation has ever done to another”, as Ulysses S. Grant would call the United States war against Mexico.

The United States “bought” the northern 3/8s of the country, including California, for $15,000,000.

Santa Ana's final disgrace was in 1855, when he sold another 30,000 square miles of northern Mexico to the United States for $10,000,000 (the Gadsden purchase). Even then the United States cheated Mexico. The U.S. Congress only authorized $7,000,000.

The first American dollars were simply silver Mexican or Spanish eight reales - later known as a peso - coins, commonly called Spanish dollars. The symbol on the eight real coin shows a banner wrapped around a pillar, which may be the reason the dollar and peso both use “$” as a symbol.

North Americans had poor dental hygiene and paid no attention to how their teeth looked. Mexicans, including Santa Ana, worried about their teeth, which they kept clean by chewing chicle, a rubbery plant sap. Candy maker Thomas Adams thought the ex-general's chicle tasted awful but wasn't bad if it was mixed with mint and dipped in sugar. He sold Santa Ana's candy-coated tooth-cleanser as Chiclets. Adams, the landlord, became rich and famous as the inventor of chewing gum and created an entirely new agricultural export for Mexican farmers. Santa Ana never received the credit nor any profit from the idea.

She was familiar with Mexican religious and family customs and - unlike most foreign writers - accepted them as normal human behavior, not colorful local ceremonies to be written about as something exotic.

The long expected war started on 3 August 1914. While the British 'won' the First World War, they were bankrupt, and the United States replaced Britain as the major world power.

Buffalo Soldiers: the all-black frontier cavalry unit.

More Jews were saved from Hitler by Mexico than all the major allied countries combined. After the war, many of the Jews moved to Israel or the United States.

U.S
Some twelve million Mexicans reside year-round in the United States.

The L.A. area, in becoming a major Mexican city, has acquired one of the world's great populations of Oaxacan Indians. Today estimates of their population in that area range between 60,000 and 200,000 people - mostly Zapotecs, the largest of Oaxaca's sixteen Indian groups.

Los Angeles, as well as being the world's second or third largest Mexican metropolitan area, is Mexico's culture factory, an unswerving force that defines modern life with its image and its product.

Americans eat half of all the ice cream eaten in the world.

Mexico, generally, has offered only two routes to real economic progress to its poor and uneducated rural folk. One is emigration to the United States. The other, more recent, is growing and smuggling drugs.

Echar relajo (to take everything as a joke)
"This is an illiterate people. People don't read; they listen. The telenovela creates the image that's so strong, it makes you feel as if you were a witness. They say much more than written words. The telenovela had an impact because it deals in images, in emotions, and because melodrama is the genre closest to simple people from the pueblos."

Some people have tiled the sidewalks in front of their homes with the same tile that covers their house to make sure everything matches. Even the humblest houses are solid structures of concrete, with gates and glass windows. The village has services that most others in Mexico can only dream of. Tocumbo may be the only town in Mexico with all its streets paved.

Architect Pedro Ramírez Vásquez designed the Basílica to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City and Estadio Azteca - the country's largest soccer stadium.

Something besides civic beautification in mind
Elefantes blancos dot Mexico like acne - useless, unwanted or unnecessary projects that serve only as magnificent wastes of money and fountains of corruption. Every state and most cities have some white elephant project - some pointless bridge or unused convention center - its residents point to and shake their heads.

There weren't enough trees.

Montezuma's Revenge
He is the only man with boring mistresses.

Villa certainly attracted Communist supporters and is still seen as a Communist revolutionary.

Cochineal is produced from the bodies of flies that live on cactus. It was the best source of red dye before artificial dyes were invented in the late 1800s. It was the ONLY source for the shade of red the British army used for their coats. During the American Revolution, Mexico supplied both the red for the British redcoats and the dollars that paid George Washington's troops.

// Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film // 27.10.16
"As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film." - Frank Capra

Faces are scenes. People are films.

"They change their sky, not their soul, who run across the sea." - Horace, 65 BC

"If you die alone, you're a hero. Take anyone with you, you're dog shit." - Stephen King. I was feeling the same way about legal action.

It was one of the many times I've been completely, from-the-ground-up, wrong about how I saw the world and my assumptions about how to live in it. In that moment, looking at all of those little self-portraits, exchanged by a circle of friends to make a poverty-level Christmas bearable, all of my beacons were scrambled.

Let me give you a little background here
The blandness of a weeknight showcase of airline food, cats vs. dogs and men vs. women stand-up.

Beware of any comedian who writes for half an hour and then tells you they have thirty minutes of new material.

I'm finishing a set at a Borders bookstore. It's the Borders that used to be perched above the intersection of La Cienega and Blackburn. As I'm writing this it's a Men's Wearhouse. By the time you're reading this it might be a Chipotle. Welcome to Los Angeles.

George Sanders, who if you covered him in garbage would still have style, ended his movie career in the distinctively trashy movie Psychomania, before killing himself and leaving a suicide note that said, elegantly, "I am bored".

// Girl in a Band // 17.10.16
Criticize something in front of musicians and they'll take it personally. Criticize artists and they're more likely to take it intellectually.

Today, the nostalgia for pre-Internet life is pervasive. What was it like back then, wandering around in an eternally unknowing state, scrounging for bits of information?

You have to see them live. Kurt Cobain is like Jesus. People love him. He practically walks on the audience.

New York
Now that I no longer live in New York, I don't know if I could ever move back. All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now. That city I know doesn't exist anymore, and it's more alive in my head than it is when I'm there.

These days, when I'm in New York, I wonder, What's this place all about, really? The answer is consumption and moneymaking. Wall Street drives the whole country, with the fashion industry as the icing. Everything people call fabulous or amazing lasts for about ten minutes before the culture moves on to the next thing. Creative ideas and personal ambition are no longer mutually exclusive. A friend recently described the work of an artist we both know as “corporate,” and it wasn't a compliment. The Museum of Modern Art is like a giant midtown gift store.

Living there gives you a phony sense of self-importance and confidence. If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.

Small-town silence almost obliges you to have inner resources, which the racket of New York doesn't. New York is all about distraction and what's next. The city has seasons, but they're muted, and the transition of summer to fall to winter has more to do with changing temperatures than it does with the leaves turning, or the trees getting bare, or the grass going from brown to green, or getting older.

// The Power of Now // 07.10.16
Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering. You can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies.

Psychological fears are always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection - you cannot cope with the future.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.

The ego needs problems, conflict, and enemies to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends.

Be present as the watcher of your mind - of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.

Many people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, work, television, or even shopping as anesthetics in an unconscious attempt to remove the basic unease. When this happens, an activity that might be very enjoyable if used in moderation becomes imbued with a compulsive or addictive quality, and all that is ever achieved through it is extremely short-lived symptom relief.

If it weren't for alcohol, tranquilizers, antidepressants, as well as the illegal drugs, which are all consumed in vast quantities, the insanity of the human mind would become even more glaringly obvious than it is already. I believe that, if deprived of their drugs, a large part of the population would become a danger to themselves and others. These drugs, of course, simply keep you stuck in dysfunction. Their widespread use only delays the breakdown of the old mind structures and the emergence of higher consciousness. While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation.

What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.

A powerful meditation
When you are unoccupied for a few minutes, and especially last thing at night before falling asleep and first thing in the morning before getting up, 'flood' your body with consciousness. Close your eyes. Lie flat on your back. Choose different parts of your body to focus your attention on briefly at first: hands, feet, arms, legs, abdomen, chest, head, and so on. Feel the life energy inside those parts as intensely as you can. Stay with each part for fifteen seconds or so. Then let your attention run through the body like a wave a few times, from feet to head and back again. This need only take a minute or so. After that, feel the inner body in its totality, as a single field of energy. Hold that feeling for a few minutes. Be intensely present during that time, present in every cell of your body. Don't be concerned if the mind occasionally succeeds in drawing your attention out of the body and you lose yourself in some thought. As soon as you notice that this has happened, just return your attention to the inner body.

If at any time you are finding it hard to get in touch with the inner body, it is usually easier to focus on your breathing first. Conscious breathing, which is a powerful meditation in its own right, will gradually put you in touch with the body. Follow the breath with your attention as it moves in and out of your body. Breathe into the body, and feel your abdomen expanding and contracting slightly with each inhalation and exhalation. If you find it easy to visualize, close your eyes and see yourself surrounded by light or immersed in a luminous substance - a sea of consciousness. Then breathe in that light. Feel that luminous substance filling up your body and making it luminous also. Then gradually focus more on the feeling. You are now in your body.

I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them cats
Love as a continuous state is as yet very rare - as rare as conscious human beings. Brief and elusive glimpses of love, however, are possible whenever there is a gap in the stream of mind.

True communication is communion - the realization of oneness, which is love. Usually, this is quickly lost again, unless you are able to stay present enough to keep out the mind and its old patterns. As soon as the mind and mind identification return, you are no longer yourself but a mental image of yourself, and you start playing games and roles again to get your ego needs met. You are a human mind again, pretending to be a human being, interacting with another mind, playing a drama called 'love'.

The secret of life is to die before you die - and find that there is no death.

The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.

// The Sixth Extinction // 06.10.16
There have been five great mass extinctions during the history of life on this planet. These extinctions are described as events that led to 'a profound loss of biodiversity'. The first took place during the late Ordovician period, some 450 million years ago, when living things were still mainly confined to the water. The most devastating took place at the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago, and it came perilously close to emptying the earth out altogether. (This event is sometimes referred to as 'the mother of mass extinctions' or 'the great dying'.) The most recent - and famous - mass extinction came at the close of the Cretaceous period; it wiped out, in addition to the dinosaurs, the plesiosaurs, the mosasaurs, the ammonites, and the pterosaurs.

Some 444 million years ago, the oceans emptied out. Something like 85% of marine species died off. Today, it's seen as the first of the Big Five extinctions, and it's thought to have taken place in two brief, intensely deadly pulses.

Mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years. The conclusion of the last ice age was 11,700 years ago.

In ordinary times - times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs - extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. Since there are about 5500 mammal species wandering around today, at the background extinction rate you'd expect - very roughly - one species to disappear every seven hundred years. The history of life thus consists of long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.

Yucatán bolide
The bolide arrived from the southeast, traveling at a low angle relative to the earth, so that it came in not so much from above as from the side, like a plane losing altitude. When it slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula, it was moving at something like forty-five thousand miles per hour, and, due to its trajectory, North America was particularly hard-hit. A vast cloud of searing vapor and debris raced over the continent, expanding as it moved and incinerating anything in its path. “Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized” is how one geologist put it to me. In the process of excavating the enormous crater, the asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock. As the ejecta fell back through the atmosphere, the particles incandesced, lighting the sky everywhere at once from directly overhead and generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet. Owing to the composition of the Yucatán Peninsula, the dust thrown up was rich in sulfur. Sulfate aerosols are particularly effective at blocking sunlight, which is the reason a single volcanic eruption, like Krakatoa, can depress global temperatures for years. After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason 'impact winter'. Forests were decimated. Palynologists, who study ancient spores and pollen, have found that diverse plant communities were replaced entirely by rapidly dispersing ferns. (This phenomenon has become known as the 'fern spike'.) Marine ecosystems effectively collapsed, and they remained in that state for at least half a million, and perhaps as many as several million, years.

Correlation is not causation
When the chronology of extinction is critically set against the chronology of human migrations, man's arrival emerges as the only reasonable answer to the megafauna's disappearance.

One weedy species has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.

"We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared. And it is, no doubt, a much better world for us now they have gone." - Alfred Russel Wallace

Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that's been increasing by as much as 6% annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today - a little over 400 parts per million - is higher than at any other point in the last 800,000 years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top 500 parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between 3 and a half and 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap.

The word 'fossil' was used to refer to anything dug up from the ground, hence the term 'fossil fuels'.

A, T, G and C
DNA consists of molecules known as nucleotides knit together in the shape of a ladder - the famous double helix. Each nucleotide contains one of four bases: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, which are designated by the letters A, T, G and C, so that a stretch of the human genome might be represented as ACCTCCTCTAATGTCA. (This is an actual sequence, from chromosome 10; the comparable sequence in an elephant is ACCTCCCCTAATGTCA.) The human genome is three billion bases - or really base pairs - long. As far as can be determined, most of it codes for nothing.

Humans, just like any other species, were descended, with modification, from more ancient forebears. Even those qualities that seemed to set people apart - language, wisdom, a sense of right and wrong - evolved in the same manner as other adaptive traits, such as longer beaks or sharper incisors. At the heart of Darwin's theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is “the denial of humanity's special status.”

Modern humans arrived in Europe around forty thousand years ago, and again and again, the archaeological record shows, as soon as they made their way to a region where Neanderthals were living, the Neanderthals in that region disappeared. Perhaps the Neanderthals were actively pursued, or perhaps they were just outcompeted. Either way, their decline fits the familiar pattern, with one important (and unsettling) difference. Before humans finally did in the Neanderthals, they had sex with them. As a result of this interaction, most people alive today are slightly - up to 4% - Neanderthal.

It is often speculated that the humans who sketched on the walls of the Grotte des Combarelles thought their images had magical powers, and in a way they were right. The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate. There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.

A carnivore will have an intestinal system suited to digesting flesh. At the same time, its jaws will be constructed for devouring prey; the claws for seizing and tearing it, the teeth for cutting and dividing its flesh; the entire system of its locomotive organs for pursuing and catching it; its sense organs for detecting it from afar. Conversely, an animal with hooves must necessarily be an herbivore, since it has no means of seizing prey. It will have teeth with a flat crown to grind seeds and grasses, and a jaw capable of lateral motion.

“Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin.” Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains.”

Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.

Dynamite Fishing
It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.

The way corals change the world - with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations - might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference - instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them. Thousands - perhaps millions - of species have evolved to rely on coral reefs, either directly for protection or food, or indirectly, to prey on those species that come seeking protection or food. This coevolutionary venture has been under way for many geologic epochs. Researchers now believe it won't last out the Anthropocene.

The jungle teems, but in a manner mostly beyond the reach of the human senses
Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million. By comparison, there are only about ten thousand species of birds in the entire world and only fifty-five hundred species of mammals. Thus for every species with hair and mammary glands, there are, in the tropics alone, at least three hundred with antennae and compound eyes.

By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent - what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

During the mid-Cretaceous, which lasted from about 120 to 90 million years ago, breadfruit trees flourished as far north as the Gulf of Alaska. In the early Eocene, about 50 million years ago, palms grew in the Antarctic, and crocodiles paddled in the shallow seas around England.

Amphibians - the word comes from the Greek meaning 'double life' - have been around not just longer than mammals or birds; they have been around since before there were dinosaurs.

Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

By the time humans pushed into North America, around thirteen thousand years ago, they had domesticated dogs, which they brought with them across the Bering land bridge.

Lugubrious: looking or sounding sad and dismal
When animals get to a certain size they escape from predation. They're no longer vulnerable to being attacked. It's a terrible strategy on the reproductive side, but it's a great advantage on the predator-avoidance side.

Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things, but if you were at the zoo today, you wouldn't have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don't have this kind of collaborative impluse.

// The Fall // 19.09.16
Fortunately there is gin, the sole glimmer in this darkness. Do you feel the golden, copper-coloured light it kindles in you? I like walking through the city of an evening in the warmth of gin.

It was not a matter of the certainty I had of being more intelligent than everyone else. Besides, such certainty is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. - Albert Camus (translated Justin O'Brian)

// That's not... not true // 14.09.16
I'm a feminist, but some days my life doesn't even pass the Bechdel test.

Dudley Moore: I'm writing a book.
Peter Cook: Really? Neither am I.

"Changes of residence, of climate, of customs, of neighbours and oppressors will educate a man and free his soul." - Friedrich Nietzsche

// Adultery // 12.09.16
Smile: a fixed smile, however false, lights up the soul.

Be kind, while there's still time.

The rational mind disappears again and I'm grateful, but if you stayed this way forever you couldn't live in this world.

It's completely useless, but it was a bargain
Tourists get closer and take photos that will come out poorly lit. Wouldn't it be easier to just buy a postcard?

I have visited many monuments around the world, many of mighty men whose names are long forgotten, but who will remain eternally mounted on their beautiful horses. Of women holding their crowns or swords to the sky; symbolising victories that no longer appear even in textbooks. With very few exceptions, in the end, a city's landmarks aren't its statues, but unexpected things. When Eiffel built a steel tower for the world's fair, he never dreamed it would wind up being the symbol of Paris. An apple represents New York. A not so crowded bridge is the symbol of San Francisco. Another bridge, this one over the Tagus dominates the picture postcards of Lisbon. Barcelona has an unfinished cathedral as its most emblematic monument.

Nature, nurture or Nietzsche?
Our body is made almost entirely of water, through which electrical charges pass, communicating information. One such piece of information is called love, and it can interfere with the entire organism.

Love isn't just a feeling, it's an art. And like any art, it takes not only inspiration, but a lot of work.

The big problem is that people believe what they see in books and movies - the couple that strolls along the beach holding hands, gazes at the sunset, and makes passionate love every day in nice hotels overlooking the Alps. My husband and I have done all that, but the magic lasts one or two years at most. After three years of marriage, a person already knows exactly what the other wants and thinks. At dinner parties we are obliged to listen to the same stories we've heard time and time again, always feigning surprise and, occasionally, having to confirm them. Sex goes from being a passion to a duty, and that's why is becomes increasingly sporadic. Women hang out and brag of their man's insatiable fire, which is nothing but an outright lie. Everyone knows this, but no-one wants to be left behind.

Our life together is verging on monotony. Love can withstand this, but for lust, it's fatal.

No one can force himself to love, nor can he force another person. All you can do is look at love, fall in love with love and imitate it. There is no other way to achieve love and there is no mystery about it.

Men and women have exactly the same desire to cheat as their partner. It just happens that women have more self-control. Brief encounters without any emotional involvement on the part of the man, and with the sole aim of satisfying sexual urges, enable the preservation and proliferation of the species. Intelligent women should not blame men for this. They try to resist but they are biologically inclined to do it.

Unaccompanied men start looking around, discreetly seeking single women. The women, in turn, look at one another: how they're dressed, what make-up they're wearing, if they're with husbands or lovers.

Spiders and snakes
Have you noticed how human beings are more frightened of spiders and snakes than by automobiles despite the fact that deaths from traffic accidents are much more frequent? This occurs because our minds are still living in caveman times, when snakes and spiders were lethal. The same thing happens with a man's need to have multiple women. While women think about preserving the species, man's commitment to the species lasts, at most, eleven minutes. For the woman, each child means at least nine months of pregnancy, not to mention having to take care of the offspring, feed it, and protect it from danger like spiders and snakes. So our instincts were developed differently. Affection and self-control became more important.

Deep down we're all the same. We make the same mistakes and walk around with the same unanswered questions.

The fate of people who think they're so beautiful and powerful as they walk down the red carpet lies in the hands of an underpaid guy from the news department. - Paulo Coelho

// So You've Been Publicly Shamed // 08.09.16
"Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death. It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death. Did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error." - Benjamin Rush, 1787

The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
"By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct. In a crowd, every sentiment and act is contagious."

"A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning." - Gustave Le Bon

Attacks
An ad hominem attack is when someone can't defend a criticism against them so changes the subject by attacking the criticizer.

A DDoS attack is the automated version of a person sitting at a computer manually pressing Refresh relentlessly until the targeted website becomes overpowered and collapses.

Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behaviour.

Our imaginations are so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow.

Shame internalised can lead to agony, whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

// Straight Life // 25.08.16
I was a loner. Even playing with the bands, I was a loner. The only times I could act out or talk were when I was drunk. Sober I was completely cut off. Now I was in the army. I had trouble going to the bathroom; I couldn't urinate in front of people. I couldn't do the other thing.

I never went with any of the other guys. I'd stay by myself, wander around, riding the subway, drinking cognac, and every now and then I'd run into some pot. They had what they called Gunje , which was black, and I got some absinthe a few times, when it was the real stuff, and got wiped out.

I felt a tingly, burning sensation up in my sinuses, and I tasted a bitter taste in my throat, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all that feeling - wanting something but having no idea what it was, thinking it was sex and then when I had a chance to ball a chick not wanting to ball her because I was afraid of some disease and because of the guilt; that wandering and wandering like some derelict; that agony of drinking and drinking and nothing ever being resolved; and... no peace at all except when I was playing, and then the minute that I stopped playing there was nothing; that continual, insane search just to pass out somewhere and then to wake up in the morning and think, “Oh, my God,” to wake up and think, “Oh God, here we go again,” to drink a bottle of warm beer so I could vomit, so I could start all over again, so I could start that ridiculous, sickening, horrible, horrible life again - all of a sudden, all of a sudden, the demons and the devils and the wandering and wondering and all the frustrations just vanished and they didn't exist at all anymore because I'd finally found peace. I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. That's the word they used. That's the word they still use. That is what I became at that moment. That's what I practiced; and that's what I still am. And that's what I will die as - a junkie.

I found that certain people have a lot of confidence. I don't know if it's something they really have or if it's a front, but it would really come out playing a game like Ping-Pong. If I'd play a black guy and he'd start talking and ranking me, telling me how he was going to beat me, that would really unnerve me. When the blacks would signify, talk all that shit that they talk - "Yeah, baby, you ain't got no chance against me, suckah! I'm the king! That's my road game, jack!" - all that shit, I hated them for it. And I realized that it was a weakness on my part to allow that not only to make me afraid but to make me crumble. I would fall apart. And I would lose to a guy that I actually had more skill than. When I was able to relax and disregard that stuff - if I was loaded - then I could play over it and not let it get to me. And I'd destroy the person; I'd wipe them out; I'd win without question. So I realized a lot of things that were wrong with me in playing that game, and it was very interesting.

Take me on a trip, Art
On the street nobody will listen to anyone else for more than a minute, a couple minutes at most, but in jail people will listen, if a guy can talk, for two or three hours straight without ever saying a word. Some are better than others at it and they'll paint some beautiful things, sometimes about women but mostly about different junk they've had, how good it was, and about big scores they've made.

I forgot everything, and everything came out. I played way over my head. I played completely different than he did. I searched and found my own way, and what I said reached the people. I played myself, and I knew I was right, and the people loved it, and they felt it. I blew and I blew, and when I finally finished I was shaking all over; my heart was pounding ; I was soaked in sweat, and the people were screaming; the people were clapping, and I looked at Sonny, but I just kind of nodded, and he went, “All right.” And that was it. That's what it's all about. - Art Pepper

// Submission // 19.08.16
A couple is a world, autonomous and enclosed, that moves through the larger world essentially untouched; on my own, I was full of chips and cracks, and it took a certain amount of courage for me to go out into the village.

In the beginning the solitary traveller meets with scorn, even hostility. Then, little by little, people get used to him, whether they're hoteliers or restaurateurs, and dismiss him as a harmless eccentric.

In the eyes of the owner and his staff, I was a type: a bachelor, rather cultured, rather sad, without much in the way of distractions – all of which was an accurate description. In the end, I was the kind of guest who never gives you any trouble, which was all that mattered. - Michel Houellebecq

// Biocentrism // 10.08.16
“We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these coloured and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When science tries to resolve a theory's conflicts by adding and subtracting dimensions to the universe like houses on a Monopoly board, dimensions unknown to our senses and for which not a shred of observational or experimental evidence exists, we need to take a time-out and examine our dogmas. And when ideas are thrown around with no physical backing and no hope of experimental confirmation, one may wonder whether this can still be called science at all. Yet the simplest explanation - that subatomic particles actually do interact with consciousness at some level - is too far outside the model to be seriously considered.

The lack of any credible explanation - always a deficiency in science, if not in politics!

No chemist who studied only the properties of chlorine - a poison - and sodium - an element that reacts explosively when it meets water - could have possibly guessed the properties that would be exhibited when the two combine as sodium chloride: table salt. Here suddenly we have a compound that is not only not a poison but is indispensable to life. Moreover, sodium chloride not only doesn't react violently when it meets water, it meekly dissolves in it! This larger reality could not have been inferred from a mere study of the nature of its components.

Looking around, we see only our own minds
Nothing is real that is not perceived. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential - or more mathematically speaking - as a haze of probability. It's like a CD: the music only leaps into reality when you play one of the songs. Imagine a closed box in which we have a bit of radioactive material that might or might not release a particle. Both possibilities exist and, according to Copenhagen, these potential outcomes do not become real until they are observed. Only then does what we call the 'wave function' collapse, and the particle manifests itself, or doesn't.

The alive feeling is, so far as science can tell, a sprightly neuro-electrical fountain operating with about 100 watts of energy - the same as a bright light bulb. We even emit the same heat as a bulb. Energy is known with scientific certainty to be deathless; it can neither be created nor destroyed. It merely changes form.

We can label all cognition as an amalgam of our experiential selves and whatever energy field may pervade the cosmos.

The brain's electrochemical connections, its neural impulses travelling at 240 miles per hour, cause decisions to be made faster than we are even aware of them. The brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that they made a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that - unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys - a me is in charge of the brain's workings, but the brain and mind operate all by themselves, without any need for external meddling. As Einstein put it, “We can will ourselves to act, but we cannot will ourselves to will.”

Language was created to work exclusively through symbolism and to divide nature into parts and actions. Absence of verbal thought (or day-dreaming) doesn't mean torpor and vacuity. Rather, it's as if the seat of consciousness escapes from its jumpy, nervous, verbal isolation cell and takes residence in some other section of the theatre, where the lights shine more brightly and where things feel more direct, more real.

The plays of experience are never random, nor ultimately scary. Rather, they may be conceived as adventures. Or perhaps as interludes in a melody so vast and eternal that human ears cannot appreciate the tonal range of the symphony.

No one has explained love, yet few experiences are its equal when it comes to prompting behaviour.

Moving at Superluminal Speeds (faster than light)
Our planet moves at 18 miles per second around the sun.

Our sun is a third-generation star, and its surrounding planets, including all materials comprising the living organisms on Earth, are composed of its nicely enriched, third-generation, complex-material inventory.

The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. A pre-life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of consciousness. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

Space & Time
Space and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real. They are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely subjective nature. They are modes of interpretation and understanding. They are part of the mental logic of the animal organism, the software that moulds sensations into multidimensional objects.

Space is a projection from inside our minds, where experience begins. It is a tool of life, the form of outer sense that allows an organism to coordinate sensory information, and to make judgments regarding the quality and intensity of what is being perceived. An 'external reality' - if it existed - would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities, but the tools of the human and animal mind.

Time's existence cannot be found between the tick and tock of a clock. It is the language of life and, as such, is most powerfully felt in the context of human experience. The persistent human perception of time almost certainly stems from the chronic act of thinking, the one-word-at-a-time thought process by which ideas and events are visualized and anticipated.

Consider a glass containing soda and ice cubes. At first, there is definite structure. Ice is separate from the liquid and so are the bubbles, and the ice and liquid have different temperatures. But return later and the ice has melted, the soda has gone flat, and the contents of the glass have merged into a structureless oneness. Barring evaporation, no further change will occur. This evolution away from structure and activity toward sameness, randomness, and inertness is 'entropy'. The process pervades the universe. But another view is that the molecules just moved, and movement is not time. Anything else is just human imposition of what we consider to be order.

There are onion layers of 'truth' depending on our level of understanding, and we can build our habitual mental cages of less dense material.

// See You in the Next Reel // 06.08.16
"Joy is what happens when we allow ourselves to recognise how good things really are." - Marianne Williamson

"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it." - William James

// The Stranger // 05.08.16
I felt as you do just after boarding a streetcar, and you're conscious of all the people on the opposite seat staring at you in the hope of finding something in your appearance to amuse them.

It is always interesting, even in the prisoner's dock, to hear oneself being talked about.

I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back. - Albert Camus

// Nausea // 04.08.16
Three o clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. A peculiar moment in the afternoon.

When I was twenty I used to get drunk and explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes. I knew very well that I was puffing myself up with heroism, but I let myself go, I enjoyed it. After that, the next day I felt as disgusted as if I had woken in a bed full of vomit. I don't vomit when I'm drunk, but it would be better if I did.

It is out of laziness, I suppose, that the world looks the same day after day.

He stretched out on a divan and spoke at length, his eyes half-closed, surrounded by the eager crowd of his disciples. He evoked memories and told anecdotes, drawing an amusing and profound moral from each. And if, among these well-bred young men, there was one who showed a liking for advanced ideas, Parrottin would take a special interest in him. He encouraged him to speak, listened to him attentively, provided him with ideas and subjects for meditation. Inevitably the young man, full of generous ideas, excited by his family's hostility, and weary of thinking by himself and in opposition to everybody else, would ask the Master one day if he might see him alone, and, stammering with shyness, would confide to him his most intimate thoughts, his indignations, his hopes. Parrottin would clasp him in his arms. Hew would say: "I understand you, I have understood you from the very first day".

Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.

I don't feel the same despair as she does, because I have never expected very much. I am rather astonished at this life which is given to me - given for nothing.

She hesitates for a second, then realises she has nothing more to say to me.

Madeleine is going put it on the turn-table of the gramophone, it is going to spin; in the grooves, the steel needle is going to start jumping and grating and then, when they have spiralled it into the centre of the record, it will be finished.

// The Course of Love // 31.07.16
If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.

Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

Marriage
There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn't necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and college are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there's no one left to call or hang our with. It's hardly surprisingly, then, if we find someone halfway decent, we might cling.

The Sulk: one of the odder gifts of love
At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and a desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means that the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal than can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. Only when we don't have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood. We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker's fury.

It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out in the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.

Avoidant vs. Anxious attachment style
An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge and go cold. Regrettably, the avoidant party cannot normally explain their fearful and defensive pattern to their partner, so that the reasons behind their distant and absent behaviour remains clouded and are easy to mistake for being uncaring and unengaged, when in fact the opposite is true: the avoidant party cares very deeply indeed, it is just that loving has come to feel far too risky.

A sign of an anxiously attached person is an intolerance of, and dramatic reaction to, ambiguous situations - like a silence, a delay or a non-committal remark. These are quickly interpreted in negative ways, as insults or malevolent attacks. For the anxiously attached, any minor slight, hasty word or oversight can be experienced as an intense threat, looming as the harbinger of the break-up of a relationship. More objective explanations slip out of reach. Inside, anxiously attached people often feel as if they were fighting for their lives – though they are typically unable to explain their fragility to those around them, who, understandably, may instead label them as cantankerous, irritable or cruel.

Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be an evolutionary advantage in being hard-wired for such striving; relentlessness has given us cities, libraries, spaceships. But this impulse doesn't leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and disappointment.

Didactics* of Love
1) Life depends of the capacity for love, to raise children.
2) Love is a skill.
3) What we typically call romantic love is only the start of love.

In a number of significant areas our partner will be wiser, more reasonable and more mature than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. And at other moments we should be ready to model ourselves on the best pedagogues and deliver our suggestions without shouting or expecting the other simply to know. Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual education be dismissed as unloving.

* Didactics is a theory of teaching and practical application.

// At The Existential Cafe // 28.07.16
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism. They pioneered a kind of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself - the life of an individual.

Nietzsche believed that every great philosopher actually wrote 'a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir' rather than conducting an impersonal search for knowledge. Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to to escape or transcend ourselves, but it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.

The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, conducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate.

A writer stretches language to its utmost to avoid the dulling effect of ordinary perceptions.

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time, because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it.” - Kierkegaard.

People had become yoked to their habits and to mass media; forgetting to stop and think or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.

Beneath their brashness, they had the easy confidence of the impeccably educated.

Treadmill Thinking
“All consciousness is consciousness of something.” - Husserl's Intentionality, the roots of Phenomenology

“A small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration.” - Simone de Beauvoir on humanity

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” - Camus

“Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.” - Hegel.

We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of enquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again.

Bad Faith
Most of us keep ourselves entangled in all kinds of subtle ways throughout the day. Sartre gives examples: 'I have an appointment this evening with Pierre. I must not forget to reply to Simon. I do not have the right to conceal the truth any longer from Claude'. Such phrases imply that we are boxed in, but for Sartre they are ‘projections' of my choices. They are, in his great vertiginous turn of phrase, ‘so many guards rails against anguish'.

Perfervid (intense and impassioned)
Sartre felt that tolerance failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. We must all become deeply engaged in our shared world.

Hell is Other People
Sartre asks us to imagine walking in a park. If I'm alone, the park arranges itself comfortably around my point of view: everything I see presents itself to me. But then I notice a man crossing the lawn towards me. This causes a sudden cosmic shift. I become conscious that the man is also arranging his own universe around himself and some of my universe drains off in his direction. Some of me drains off too, for I am an object in his world as he is in mine. I am no longer a pure perceiving nothingness: I have a visible outside, which I know he can see. Sartre then adds a twist. This time he puts us in a hallway of a Parisian hotel, peering through the keyhole of someone's door. Then we hear footsteps in hall - someone is coming! The whole set-up changes. Instead of being lost in the scene inside the room, I am now aware of myself as a peeping Tom, which is how I'll appear to the third party coming down the hall. My ‘transcendence' - my ability to pour out of myself towards what I am perceiving - is itself ‘transcended' by the transcendence of another. That other has the power to stamp me as a certain kind of object, ascribing definite characteristics to me rather than leaving me to be free.

// We Ride With Claudius // 22.07.16
"A person is a success if they get up in the morning and go to bed at night and in between do what they want to do." - Bob Dylan

"Screenwriting tip: You're confined only by the limits of your imagination and the unfathomably bad taste of the global marketplace." - Christopher McQuarrie

"Took a picture of my lunch. You don't need to see it." - Chris Addison

"Not all those who wander are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"Sex: in giving pleasure to ourselves we also give pleasure to another person - an uncommonly benevolent arrangement in life." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"It's complex, yes,
But here's a start:
Swap gods and guns
For books and art." - Tim Minchin

"Whatever your wizard wants you to wear." - Stig of the Dump

Films are like people; you either like them or you don't.

// The Children Act // 13.07.16
It was the larger estates that came to the High Court. Wealth mostly failed to bring extended happiness. Parents soon learned the new vocabulary and patient procedures of the law, and were dazed to find themselves in vicious combat with the one they once loved.

When she came to imagine wanting something like it for herself - her ‘last fling' would be her first - she could think only of disruption, assignations, disappointments, ill-timed phone calls. The sticky business of learning to be with someone new in bed, newly devised endearments, all the fakery. Finally, the necessary disentangling, the effort required to be open and sincere. And nothing quite the same when she came away. No, she preferred an imperfect existence, the one she had now.

A child born today may well live into the 22nd century.

Life's Variety Narrowed
A hundred million years into the future, when much of the oceans had sunk into the earth's mantle and there wasn't enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sustain plants and the surface of the world was lifeless rocky desert, what evidence would a visiting extra-terrestrial geologist find of our civilisation? A few feet below the ground a thick dark line in the rock would mark us off from all that had gone before. Condensed into that six-inch sooty layer would be our cities, vehicles, roads, bridges, weapons. Also, all sorts of chemical compounds not found in the pervious geological record. Concrete and brick would weather down as easily as limestone. Our finest steel would become a crumbling ferrous stain. A more detailed microscopic examination might reveal a preponderance of pollen from the monotonous grassland we had made to feed a giant population of livestock. With luck, the geologist might find fossilised bones, even ours. But wild creatures, including all the fish, would barely make make up a tenth of the weight of all the sheep and cows. - Ian McEwan

// S.O.F.T.E.N*, not Taciturn // 30.06.16
He was doing that inexcusable thing that men who liked cannabis tended to do, which was to go on about it.

As you know, I dislike getting stoned. It's such a mental constriction. That prickly, electric self-consciousness just doesn't suit me and nor does a joyless chemical appetite for sweet things.

If any utterance of his were to be disproved, he would change his view in line with the facts.

I fantasied at length of how it might be, to have enough money and single-mindedness to leave suddenly without explaining myself, go somewhere simple and clean, far from here. I saw myself walking in watery sunlight, divested of all obligations and connections, walking without luggage along a narrow road by a sandy bay, a road that road to a promontory and a plain white country church. – Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan

* Smile. Open arms. Forward lean. Touch. Eye contact. Nod

// O Algo Parecido // 28.06.16
“The embodiment of every awful relationship decision you made when not smart enough to masturbate before deciding what's right.” - Sage Francis

// Things I Learned From Famous People // 25.06.16
“There's always a fucking third door, you know.” - Alanis Morissette

“There is no job harder than being a wife and a mother. It is the most difficult task any women could ever embark on. It requires infinite patience, humility, empathy and dignity - or lack of dignity. It's a position that should be respected and honoured, not looked upon as some sappy alternative. It was much more demanding and required much more nobility than the other work I did.” - Patti Smith

“I run into less and less (sic) people who are able to quit playing it cool and just be for real and just be scared and just be fucking lonely and just be on the fucking edge for a moment.” - Ryan Adams

“Poets have changed more live than politicians.” - Timothy Leary

“When I got there I discovered what was at the top. You know what was there? Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences that you had to get there.” - Lionel Richie

Almost everyone who reaches a plateau where he or she is happy and comfortable says it's because of finding balance, creating boundaries and dedicating each week to a mix of work, relaxation, exercise, socialising and family - plus some alone time to do something contemplative, creative or educational.

When people are talking shit about someone, their goal is not actually to make that person look bad, but to make themselves feel good.

Most of the time when we vehemently detest something in another person's behaviour, it's either because we recognise a part of it in ourselves or we're secretly envious. - Neil Strauss

// Ignore the Cuñados // 22.06.16
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

// Machines of Loving Grace // 17.06.16
"No-one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously. You must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from the idea that people are watching you." - Russell Brand

// How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution // 09.06.16
The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the belief that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian diktats should be circumvented. As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

Over the course of more than three decades, the federal government, working with private industry and research universities, had designed and built a massive infrastructure project, like the interstate highway system but vastly more complex, and then threw it open to ordinary citizens and commercial enterprises. It was funded primarily by public dollars, but it paid off thousands of times over by seeding a new economy and an era of economic growth.

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

“Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers - or at least terminals connected to a central computer - automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment.” - Gordon Moore, April 1965 issue of Electronics magazine

Internetwork(ing)
An essential component of Mauchly's personality was that he liked to share ideas - usually with a broad grin and a sense of flair - which made him a wildly popular teacher. “He loved to talk and seemed to develop many of his ideas in the give-and-take of conversation,” recalled a colleague. “John loved social occasions, liked to eat good food and drink good liquor. He liked women, attractive young people, the intelligent and the unusual.” It was dangerous to ask him a question, because he could discourse earnestly and passionately about almost anything, from theatre to literature to physics.

Because of their desire to be liked, they were reluctant to be tough.

To put it more bluntly, Engelbart sometimes gave the impression that he had not been born on this planet.

“I don't like single-issue people, nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and ‘it depends' is almost always the right answer in any big question.” - Linus Torvalds on Richard Stallman

Augmented vs. Artificial Intelligence
We possess an imagination that, as Ada said, “brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations.” We discern patterns and appreciate their beauty. We weave information into narratives. We are storytelling as well as social animals. Human creativity involves values, intentions, aesthetic judgments, emotions, personal consciousness, and a moral sense.

Vannevar Bush conjured up the possibility of a personal machine, which he dubbed a memex, that would store and retrieve a person's words, pictures, and other information: “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. . . . A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” The word intimate was important. Bush and his followers focused on ways to make close, personal connections between man and machine. - July 1945 issue of the Atlantic titled ‘As We May Think'.

Digital - meaning calculated using digits: discrete and distinct integers such as 0, 1, 2, 3. In early machines, integers were added and subtracted using cogs and wheels that clicked one digit at a time, like counters. Analogue computers do not rely on discrete integers to make their calculations; instead, they use continuous functions. In analogue computers, a variable quantity such as electrical voltage, the position of a rope on a pulley, hydraulic pressure, or a measurement of distance is employed as an analogue for the corresponding quantities of the problem to be solved. A slide rule is analogue; an abacus is digital. Clocks with sweeping hands are analogue, and those with displayed numerals are digital.

A human's mental process includes many signal pulses and analogue waves from different nerves that flow together to produce not just binary yes/no data, but also answers such as ‘maybe' and ‘probably' and infinite other nuances, including occasional bafflement. Von Neumann suggested that the future of intelligent computing might require abandoning the purely digital approach and creating ‘mixed procedures' that include a combination of digital and analogue methods.

“Computers today are brilliant idiots. The machines will be more rational and analytic. People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity. They have tremendous capacities for storing information and performing numerical calculations - far superior to those of any human. Yet when it comes to another class of skills, the capacities for understanding, learning, adapting, and interacting, computers are woefully inferior to humans.” - IBM's research director John Kelly

Anti-Deterministic
Because events at the subatomic level are not predetermined, that opens the way for our thoughts and actions not to be predetermined.

Quantum mechanics is based on theories developed by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and others about what goes on inside an atom. In 1913 Bohr had come up with a model of atomic structure in which electrons orbited around a nucleus at specific levels. They could make a quantum leap from one level to the next, but never be in between. The number of electrons in the outer orbital level helped to determine the chemical and electronic properties of the element, including how well it conducted electricity. Some elements, such as copper, are good conductors of electricity. Others, such as sulphur, are horrible conductors, and are thus good insulators. And then there are those in between, such as silicon and germanium, which are known as semiconductors.

When we are dealing with atoms and electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being made of atoms and electrons themselves.

The old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?

“Intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.” - Einstein

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)
The ideal of simplicity - making products that humans find convivial and easy to use - is central to the innovations that made computers personal.

Make it efficient enough to run on batteries, small enough to put into a shirt pocket, and cheap enough to buy on impulse.

“I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed. Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don't know how it works. They don't fully understand what I knew, and parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination.”

“The only regret I have about the transistor is its use for rock and roll,” its co-inventor Walter Brattain often lamented, presumably half in jest.

Communication
It was what would make the digital age different from the era of television.

One truth about the digital age is that the desire to communicate, connect, collaborate, and form community tends to create killer apps. And in 1972 the ARPANET got its first. It was email.

“The largest single surprise of the ARPANET program has been the incredible popularity and success of network mail,” a BBN report concluded a few years later. It should not have been a surprise. The desire to socially network not only drives innovations, it co-opts them.

The secret sauce was not games or published content; it was a yearning for connection. Our big bet, even back in 1985, was what we called community. Now people refer to it as social media. We thought the killer app of the Internet was going to be people. People interacting with people they already knew in new ways that were more convenient, but also people interacting with people they didn't yet know, but should know because they had some kind of shared interest.

“The best use of our technology enhances our humanity. It lets us shape our narrative and share our story and connects us.”

By publishing ourselves on the web, we reject the role of passive media marketing recipient. If we all have a place to post our pages, there's no way the web will end up as banal and mediocre as television. There will be as many places to find fresh and engaging content as there are people who yearn to be heard. Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a vast wasteland.

They got the chance to express their ideas, tailor them for public consumption, and get feedback. This was a new opportunity for people who had previously spent evenings passively consuming what was fed to them through their television screens. “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Clive Thompson noted in his book, Smarter Than You Think.

As the Internet goes through different cycles - it has been a platform for time-sharing, community, publishing, blogging, and social networking - there may come a time when the natural yearning that humans have for forging trusted communities, akin to corner bars, will reassert itself, and The WELL or start-ups that replicate its spirit will become the next hot innovation. Sometimes innovation involves recovering what has been lost.

You own your own words. You were accountable for what you posted.

T.B.L
The emphasis on display rather than editing tools nudged the Web into becoming a publishing platform for people who had servers rather than a place for collaboration and shared creativity. “I was disappointed that Marc didn't put editing tools in Mosaic,” Berners-Lee said. “If there had been more of an attitude of using the Web as a collaborative medium rather than a publishing medium, then I think it would be much more powerful today.”

“Tim's not in it for the money. He accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would.”

Search ‘Duck Soup'
In January 1994 there were only seven hundred websites in the world. By the end of that year there were 10,000, and by the end of the following year there were 100,000. The combination of personal computers and networks had led to something amazing: anyone could get content from anywhere and distribute their own content everywhere. But for this exploding universe to be useful, it was necessary to find an easy way, a simple human-computer-network interface, that would enable people to find what they needed.

Before the rise of search engines, among the hottest Internet services were Web directories, which featured human-assembled lists and categories of cool sites, and Web rings, which created through a common navigation bar a circle of related sites that were linked to one another. The first attempts to do this were hand-compiled directories.

Whole Earth Catalogue
"A realm of intimate, personal power is developing - power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."

// Pagafantas // 09.06.16
"The better you look, the more you see." - Bret Easton Ellis

// Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets // 22.05.16
Like having sex: When it is good it's great, and even when it isn't so hot, it is still pretty damn good.

God is a first-rate novelist and to be there when He's strutting his stuff is not only legitimate but honorable, part and parcel of fighting the good fight.

Nothing in this world can come between a cop and his attitude.

In this graceless age of ours, any sense of duty is remarkable enough to excuse any number of lesser sins.

The New York attitude; the inner sense that tells a city boy to speak first in a crowded room, before someone else opens his mouth and the opportunity is gone.

A bullet stops a human being by doing one of two things: striking the brain, brain stem or spinal cord, causing immediate damage to the central nervous system; or damaging enough of the cardiovascular system to cause massive blood loss to the brain and eventual collapse. Although the popular belief that many people fall down upon being shot is generally accurate, experts have determined that this occurs not for physiological reasons, but as a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do. Proof of the phenomenon is evident in its opposite: There are countless cases in which people - often people whose mental processes are impaired by drugs or alcohol - are shot repeatedly, sustaining lethal wounds; yet despite the severity of their injuries, they continue to flee or resist for long periods of time.

In life, Rudy Newsome was a faceless drone in Baltimore's million-dollar-a-day drug trade, a street-corner entrepreneur who proved himself entirely expendable. In death, he is again supplanted, this time by a greater tragedy, one that cries louder for vengeance.

A good lawyer never asks any question without knowing the answer.

// Come, Sit and Suspend Belief // 15.05.16
"With the joint in my hand, glowing in the night as I inhaled, I figured, well... I may as well get as numb as I can."

'Hell,' I said, starting the engine, 'We're all champs when we're drunk'.

"I was getting too nervous to continue without chemical assistance."

"In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome."

"Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested."

"Politics is the art of controlling your environment." - Hunter S. Thompson

// The Theory of Money and Credit // 20.04.16
The requirements of the market have gradually led to the selection of certain commodities as common media of exchange. The group of commodities from which these were drawn was originally large and differed from country to country, but it has more and more contracted. Whenever a direct exchange seemed out of the question, each of the parties to a transaction would naturally endeavour to exchange his superfluous commodities, not merely for more marketable commodities in general, but for the most marketable commodities; and among these again he would naturally prefer whichever particular commodity was the most marketable of all. The greater the marketability of the goods first acquired in indirect exchange, the greater would be the prospect of being able to reach the ultimate objective without further manoeuvring. Thus there would be an inevitable tendency for the less marketable of the series of goods used as media of exchange to be one by one rejected until at last only a single commodity remained, which was universally employed as a medium of exchange; in a word, money. - Ludwig von Mises

// Drugs Without the Hot Air // 03.04.16
Deliberately creating altered states of consciousness is one of the human universals, like language and music. The few societies who haven't historically had some kind of botanical help have used fasting or long periods of sleeplessness to achieve these kinds of mental states, and have quickly taken to drugs like alcohol when they've encountered them.

Many animals in the wild can be seen seeking out drugs, from goats eating coffee beans, to pigs and elephants gorging on the alcohol in rotting fruit. In laboratory settings, small mammals such as mice and rats have remarkably similar reactions to humans, and become addicted to the same sort of drugs as we do.

The Avenue des Champs Elysees in Paris is named after the Elysian Fields in ancient Greece, where people went annually to eat psychedelic mushrooms and experience trips.

In 1863, French chemist Angelo Mariani hit upon the idea of fortifying alcohol with coca leaves to produce Vin Mariani. This was about 10% alcohol and 8.5% cocaine. It was marketed as a tonic capable of preventing illnesses such as stomach and lung troubles, malaria and influenza, “giving life and vigour... invaluable for all bodily and mental over-exertions”. It became hugely popular, with fans as eminent as Queen Victoria and Pope Leo XIII, who appeared in an advertisement for the drink and even awarded it a Vatican gold medal.

By the late 1800s, pretty much everything on sale in the pharmacy, including cough medicines for children, contained extracts of cannabis, heroin or cocaine.

High-strength drugs have been a common feature of battle zones, starting with the use of gin by William of Orange's soldiers; hence the phrase ‘Dutch courage'.

Policy
Politicians like to play party politics with drug regulation, and policy-making is largely based on moral views rather than scientific evidence.

The proud exhortation of the UN in 2001 that we'd have a drug-free world in 2010 has been exposed as a ridiculous rhetoric rather than a thought-out plan.

The illicit drugs trade is the second largest in the world, second only to oil. The money involved - perhaps £300 billion a year - is about 1% of the global economy, and operates almost entirely under the radar, untaxed and unregulated.

When you factor-in the opium trade in China, and the vast profits made from trading tea, coffee and alcohol, the British Empire was easily the largest drug dealer in the history of the world.

Drug-control laws that limit research on psychoactive substances are so damaging to neuroscience. So much of what we know about brain chemistry, neurotransmitters, receptors, and how to treat the most severe types of mental illness, has been learned from studying the changes induced by (now-illegal) drugs that change the way we see the world.

Drugs is a unique type of crime because it's a crime against yourself. The state has decided that the harms are so great you should be penalised, even to the point of imprisonment, to protect you from it. This only makes sense as a harm-reduction measure if taking cannabis is considerably more harmful than going to jail.

Cannabis
It's not surprising that cannabis has unique effects, because we have a specific natural system in the brain which the drug interacts with, known as the endocannabinoid system. Somewhere in our evolutionary history, cannabis must have been a very important part of the ecosystems that our animal ancestors lived in, since it developed the ability to target one particular element of our brain chemistry so precisely.

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report in 1894 - which assembled seven volumes' worth of evidence on the medicinal and social uses of cannabis in the subcontinent - concluded that the drug was not harmful and should not be controlled.

Cannabis dependence occurs in about 10% of users, and there is a physical withdrawal syndrome with some unpleasant symptoms, such as decreased appetite, weight loss, mood changes and insomnia. These symptoms are real and not just psychosomatic.

Schizophrenia seems to be reducing in the general population even though cannabis use has increased 20-fold in the last 40 years.

Cannabis doesn't dissolve in water so it can't be injected, and it is too complex to make into tablets (in the same way that you can't make tablets out of tobacco).

Among the most vocal part of the press spreading rumours about its negative effects were the outlets owned by William Randolph Hearst, a media tycoon who had invested heavily in the wood pulp industry. Since hemp paper posed direct competition to wood pulp paper, he had an economic stake in limiting hemp production, and recognised that if controls were placed on cannabis because of its psychoactive effects, it would become more difficult to grow the plant for other purposes. Hearst's media empire spread stories about violent attacks on white women by Mexican immigrants intoxicated with marijuana, creating a sense of moral panic and support for controls on the drug, and therefore on the plant as well.

Alcohol
Depressants seem to promote sociability and enhance mood, probably because they reduce anxiety.

The only significant dip or levelling out in Britain's steady increase in alcohol consumption over the past five decades was from the end of the 1980s to the mid-1990s, because so many people switched to ecstasy during that period.

Alcohol is a toxin that kill cells and organisms, which is why we use it to preserve food and sterilise needles. Alcohol is particularly damaging to the liver and brain because the body breaks alcohol down to the toxin acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is even more toxic, and any food or drink contaminated with the amount of acetaldehyde that a unit of alcohol produces would immediately be banned as having an unacceptable health risk.

While it's true that most people who become addicted to heroin and crack have used cannabis, their first drug experiences tend to be alcohol and tobacco, so it's arguable that these are as much of a gateway to hard drug use. (Also, the vast majority of cannabis users never take heroin or crack.)

Terrifying New Legal High Hits Our Streets!
Methylcarbonol - known by the street name ‘wiz' - is a clear liquid that causes cancers, liver problems, and brain disease, and is more toxic than ecstasy and cocaine. Addiction can occur after just one drink, and addicts will go to any lengths to get their next fix - even letting their kids go hungry or beating up their partners to obtain money. Casual users can go into blind rages when they're high, and police have reported a huge increase in crime where the drug is being used. Worst of all, drinks companies are adding ‘wiz' to fizzy drinks and advertising them to kids like they're Coca-Cola. Two or three teenagers die from it every week, overdosing on a binge, and another ten from having accidents caused by reckless driving. ‘Wiz' is a public menace! When will the Home Secretary think of the children and make this dangerous substance Class A?

People understand that much of the reporting on these issues is exaggerated, which is why the media coverage of the supposed harms of mephedrone led to an increase in use.

There is a lot of evidence that the drinks industry relies upon hazardous drinking as a major source of income. In fact, it has been calculated that if everyone who drinks more than the recommended daily limit started drinking moderately there would be a drop in total alcohol consumption of 40% - equivalent to over £13 billion in sales. However much the industry talks about taking the harms, nothing can change the fact that their success is indirectly related to the amount of damage they inflict on society at large. This is not to say that they bring no benefit to society at all - brewers contribute billions every year in tax revenue, and the industry does provide a lot of jobs. Pubs in particular are important social spaces and local employers, but they've seen their profits plummet in recent years as a result of the cut-price alcohol available from supermarkets and off-licences.

Psychedelics
It's virtually impossible to die from an overdose of psychedelics; they cause no physical harm; and if anything they are anti-addictive, as they cause a sudden tolerance which means that if you immediately take another dose it will probably have very little effect, so there is no incentive to take more.

We now have the ridiculous situation that if you find magic mushrooms in the wild you can sit in the field and munch them to your heart's content, but if you take them home you could go to prison for up to seven years, and if you give them to a friend you'll be supplying a Class A drug and you could spend 14 years in jail. This silliness weakens respect for the law, and makes people distrust the classification system as an objective indicator of the relative harm of different drugs.

Heroin
Heroin targets our endorphin receptors more effectively than almost any other drug, making it one of the most powerful painkillers we know of. Most of the world's supply is produced in Afghanistan and South East Asia.

Heroin was first synthesised in 1874 and named heroin for its 'heroic' effects. It was marketed at first as a cough medicine and as a non-addictive alternative to morphine, but was soon found to be even more habit-forming. Its main effects are a sense of dreamy well-being, detachment and lack of concern about life's problems, and the absence of physical pain. The drug itself causes little physical damage to the body, apart from chronic constipation.

A recent study found that one in eight prisoners overdose on heroin or methadone within two weeks of being released. Having stopped or reduced their intake in prison, their tolerance is reset, so if they take what was their usual dose prior to going to jail their brain can't cope and they overdose. About 500 people a year die as a result of this.

Coffee
The active ingredient in coffee is caffeine, which is also present in tea and chocolate (though in smaller quantities). When the brain engages in metabolic activity, it produces a small molecule called adenosine as a by-product, which builds up in the brain and makes you feel tired - a bit like mental lactic acid. Caffeine blocks the effects of adenosine, which is why it makes you feel more awake (and why your sensitivity to caffeine depends partly on what sort of adenosine receptors you have.) No drug can actually give you more energy. It can delay fatigue, but you'll have to come down at some point, and the longer you put it off, the harder you will crash on the other side.

Metal Health
Mental health is the biggest health burden in Europe today, costing more than heart disease and cancer combined. The leading problem for men is alcoholism, and the leading problem for women is depression. Although most addicts are male, drugs usually have more of an effect on women, because women are smaller and have a higher proportion of body fat (and fat doesn't absorb most drugs).

Actively choosing to take a drug is an essential part of the effect it has. We have to be expecting to experience pleasure. Most of us would find taking a drug by accident deeply unpleasant, and would think that we had been poisoned or were having a psychotic episode.

The brain's reaction to big increases in dopamine is often to reduce the number of functioning dopamine receptors, leading to a reduced sense of reward from other activities and greater dependence on the drug.

The cheaper and more available something is, the more addiction there will be. This applies to both legal and illegal drugs, and to behaviours such as gambling. In common with many other countries, we've seen a substantial rise in gambling addiction in the UK since gambling laws were relaxed.

People respond to 'near wins' (getting three out of four matches on a fruit machine for example) with a sense of reward almost as good as if they'd actually won something. This encourages them to continue playing, as they're getting some of the high they want, even though they're actually losing. Fruit machines and scratch-card lotteries are often designed to ensure a higher-than-chance frequency of near misses.

Properties
The ways in which a drug can be taken depend on various properties: whether it's available as a solid, liquid or gas; whether it's soluble; and what its melting point is, i.e if it evaporates at a low enough temperature to be smoked. The most likely form a drug will be sold in on the street is as a hydrochloride salt.

Most of the drugs we use today are either made directly from plants, or are synthetic derivatives of these plant chemicals. Advances in chemistry created recognisably modern drugs. In 1817, a young German called Friedrich Sertürner was the first to isolate in its pure form the active ingredient from a plant, extracting morphine from opium. That made it possible to study pure psychoactive compounds, and develop medicines that were far stronger and more effective than the plants they were derived from. Once we understood the make up of these chemicals, we could produce them synthetically in the laboratory, and it was only a short step from there to experimenting with the psychoactive effects of chemically similar compounds. Heroin, amphetamines and mephedrone are, respectively, synthetic analogues of the opium found in poppies, the ephedra found in ephedra plants, and the cathinone found in khat.

Both faster onset and faster offset times tend to increase the addictiveness of a drug. - David Nutt

// L'esprit de l'Escalier * // 30.03.16
"Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." - Alfred Lord Tennyson

"We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls." - Winston Churchill

"That we must neither hate nor condemn but instruct is right in general (Hegesias), but not if the person can make no use of our aid." - Montaigne

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - C.G. Jung

"Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors." - Jim Morrison

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life." - Henry David Thoreau

"It's a gala day!" "I don't think I could handle any more than that." - Groucho Marx

"We're all artists. I just happen to be a piss artist!" - Born against Christians

* We all know the feeling of walking away from an argument and instantly thinking of the ideal comeback, or leaving a conversation and remembering the perfect contribution to a no-longer relevant subject. In French, l'esprit de l'escalier is the term used to refer to that irritating feeling. It literally translates as ‘the spirit of the staircase', more commonly known as ‘staircase wit'. It comes from the idea of thinking of a response as you're leaving somebody's house, via their staircase.

// Maron // 18.03.16
There is a weird truth to the idea that if you really don't care, things will generally go your way. If you're really invested and emotionally attached, things will get away from you or at least get chaotic and scary. That's been my experience with relationships.

I used to be afraid to fly but at some point I realized that I just don't have the energy for it anymore. I have better things to do with my brain. So I stopped worrying and when the planes still took off and flew and landed, even without my emotionally and mentally flying them from my seat, I realized that maybe I hadn't really been in charge all along. This was one of the most powerful spiritual revelations I have had in my life. The moment that I knew in my soul that nothing I was doing in my head had any bearing on actual events or possible outcomes, I was suddenly free.

People don't talk to each other about real things because they're afraid of how they'll be judged. Or they think other people don't have the capacity to carry the burden of what they have to say.

The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from.

We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

Planned obsolescence has forever denied us the ability to believe in workmanship, institutions, and lifetime guarantees.

Running away works. Sometimes you have to change it up: new people, new restaurants, new Laundromat, new barista, new life. Yeah, the adage is true - that wherever you go, there you are - but you in an entirely new setting is a new you, or at least the old you in a new context, and that's not nothing.

// Agent of Evolution // 05.02.16
Bill was aware that coke was the drug that made you feel an endless void. You were constantly chasing. After that initial rush you were beset with the feeling of: God, I need something. That's so much of what Bill was like when he was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He was a black hole, trying desperately to fill some huge void in his life. He would suck anything in if he thought it might help.

"You judge a culture by how happy the people are, not by how much money they have."

"I don't do drugs anymore ... than say, the average touring funk band."

"I'm kinda tired of travelling. Kinda tired of doing comedy. Kinda tired of staring out at your blank faces looking back at me."

"If you're not cynical, you're not paying attention." - Noam Chomsky

// Make a Connection // 12.01.16
Here's a suggestion: why not try talking to people in ordinary situations? You can do this by talking to the cashier at the grocery store, people you see on the elevator at work, people on the subway or on buses. The point is to try and hone your conversation skills in everyday situations. That way, when you have an opportunity to talk to a beautiful lady, you'll be ready. However, if you're at a grocery store, she might not want to be bothered, that's why you have to look for the signs that she's interested in talking with you. Context is everything.

Rejection happens. If you make an effort, it will inevitably occur to you. But, and this is the biggie, don't get down about it. It's just part of the process. Learn to live with it and learn to shrug it off. A person who can handle rejection with a smile will always come off as a class act. You should know that rejection usually doesn't have anything to do with you personally. In any situation there are extenuating circumstances. Women have baggage and sometimes they can't put it down long enough to see a golden opportunity right in front of them. Her mistake and her loss. Not yours. If you move on, you win. The crucial thing to do is pat yourself on the back every single time you try. Even if you fail miserably, pat yourself on the back for making the effort.

If you want to talk to a hot woman, she already knows you want to talk to her. It's no secret. You know it. She knows it. So, why hide it? Women want men to talk to them and they want to get approached. If you're in a bar or club or whatever, women usually go to these places because they want men to talk to them. Get the sign to approach and approach with confidence. You're a cool guy and cool guys have confidence. Yes, you may be nervous and, if so, try to get those nerves under control. Just relax and be ready to talk. Be loose and inviting with your body language. She will more than likely be just as nervous as you are about meeting someone new. If you're nice, someone will want to talk to you. Approach with a “Hi, how are you?” and wait for the response. Then say something about the situation/place you two are in, “Man, it's busy in here tonight.” Then let her respond then say, “Oh, by the way, I'm Bubba. And you are?” Asking her name is important to the conversation. Now ask her what's she drinking and buy the lady a drink. Women love to talk about themselves so this is relatively easy to do. Just ask her a question like, “Are you from around here?” Everyone loves to talk and everyone, more importantly, loves to be heard. When you are talking to a woman it is wise to never contradict her, even if you know for a fact she's in the wrong about something. Yes, this might be a double standard but do you want to deal with it just to make a point? Most smart men don't. Just let her talk and nod like you agree and move on. Like anyone else, women like to seem like experts, so do something that lets her show off how smart she is.

There's a reason the sounds of crickets is more prevalent at open-mike nights than laughter. This is because there are very few natural born comedians. This is a fact and should be accepted as such. The point? Don't try to be a funnyman if you're not. Don't become the guy who thinks he has to talk to every single woman in the world he sees. No. You don't want to seem like you're hitting on everyone. No, no and no. Be more selective than that. If you don't, you may come off as seeming a little desperate. No one wants to talk to someone desperate. It's just puts people off. - Romy Miller

// Bad Science // 10.01.16
The very core of why we do science is to prevent ourselves from being misled by our own atomised experiences and prejudices.

Experiments have shown that people are quite bad at estimating the knowledge of others: if we know the answer to a question about a piece of trivia, we overestimate the extent to which other people will know that answer too.

We all have a rather Victorian fetish for reductionist explanations about the world. They just feel neat.

“The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” - Voltaire

“The true genius in advertising is to sell you the problem and the solution.” - George Orwell

Studies funded by a pharmaceutical company were found to be four times more likely to give results that were favourable to the company than independent studies.

Hydrolysis
A carbohydrate is a long string of sugar molecules all stuck together. Starch is a carbohydrate, for example, and in your body this is broken down gradually into the individual sugar molecules by your digestive enzymes, so that you can absorb it. The process of breaking down a carbohydrate molecule into its individual sugars is called ‘hydrolysis'.

Food is broken down into its constituent parts, and then those components are converted between each other, and then those new building blocks are assembled into muscle, and bone, and tongue, and bile, and sweat, and bogey, and hair, and skin, and sperm, and brain, and everything that makes you you.

No effects without side-effects
I can very happily view posh cosmetics - and other forms of quackery - as a special, self-administered, voluntary tax on people who don't understand science properly. I would also be the first to agree that people don't buy expensive cosmetics simply because they have a belief in their efficacy: these are luxury goods, status items, and they are bought for all kinds of interesting reasons.

Most people know what constitutes a healthy diet already - regular breaks, intermittent light exercise, and drinking plenty of water. If you want to make money out of it, you have to make a space for yourself in the market: and to do this, you must overcomplicate it, attach your own dubious stamp.

Essential fatty acids
For over five years now, newspapers and television stations have tried to persuade us, with ‘science', that fish-oil pills have been proven to improve children's school performance, IQ, behaviour, attention, and more. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Omega-3 oils are ‘essential fatty acids'. They're called ‘essential' because they're not made by the body (unlike glucose or vitamin D, for example), so you have to eat them. This is true of a lot of things, like many vitamins, for example, and it's one of the many reasons why it's a good idea to eat a varied diet, pleasure being another. Whatever you do to children, in a trial of a pill to improve their performance, their performance will improve. Children are exquisitely sensitive to our expectations of them, and anyone who doubts that fact should have their parenting permit revoked. We don't want to talk about social inequality, the disintegration of local communities, the breakdown of the family, the impact of employment uncertainty, changing expectations and notions of personhood, or any of the other complex, difficult factors that play into the apparent rise of antisocial behaviour in schools.

// The Idiot // 08.12.15
The general never regretted his early marriage, or regarded it as a foolish youthful escapade; and he so respected and feared his wife that he was very near loving her.

This gentleman made it his business to amaze people with his originality and wit, but it did not as a rule “come off.” He even produced a bad impression on some people, which grieved him sorely; but he did not change his ways for all that.

He was experiencing a last humiliation, the bitterest of all, at this moment - the humiliation of blushing for his own kindred in his own house.

There is nothing so offensive to a man of our time and race than to be told that he is wanting in originality, that he is weak in character, has no particular talent, and is, in short, an ordinary person.

His clothes certainly were very different; they were more fashionable, perhaps even too much so, and anyone inclined to mockery might have found something to smile at in his appearance. But what is there that people will not smile at?

I am always wiser on second thoughts.

It seems hardly necessary to remark that her family worries and anxieties had little or no foundation, or that her imagination increased them to an absurd degree; but if you have a wart on your forehead or nose, you imagine that all the world is looking at it, and that people would make fun of you because of it, even if you had discovered America!

The whole episode had not lasted more than a couple of minutes. Some of the spectators had risen from their places , and departed altogether; some merely exchanged their seats for others a little further off; some were delighted with the occurrence, and talked and laughed over it for a long time. In a word, the incident closed as such incidents do, and the band began to play again.

"The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!" groans some solitary thinker. Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul.

I could not bear to see all those preoccupied, anxious-looking creatures continuously surging along the streets past me! Why are they always anxious? What is the meaning of their eternal care and worry? It is their wickedness, their perpetual detestable malice? That's what it is! They are all full of malice, malice! Whose fault is it that they are all miserable, that they don't know how to live, though they have fifty or sixty years of life before them?

“My dear sir, a man of such noble aspirations is worthy of all esteem by virtue of those aspirations alone.” The prince brought out his 'copy-book sentence' in the firm belief that it would produce a good effect. He felt instinctively that some such well-sounding humbug, brought out at the proper moment, would soothe the old man's feelings, and would be specially acceptable to such a man in such a position. At all hazards, his guest must be despatched with heart relieved and spirit comforted; that was the problem before the prince at this moment.

// Russ, Kurt & River // 08.12.15
"History creates great men, great men don't create history."

"You can't think your way into acting differently, but you can act your way into thinking differently."

"In order to talk about anything serious now you have you make it fun." - Russell Brand.

"That was one of the things about the end of the war: Absolutely anybody who wanted a weapon could have one. They were lying all around." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"A guitarist friend of River's came over to his table, holding a cup. "Hey Riv, drink this - it'll make you feel fabulous," he told him. River didn't know what was in it, but since he had taken this friend to rehab twice, he could guess that it wasn't ginger ale. Being the sort of person who would jump off cliffs to travel through clouds, River downed it in one gulp." - Last Night at the Viper Room by Gavin Edwards

// Sex at Dawn // 07.12.15
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.” - Khalil Gibran

“One can choose what to do, but not what to want.” - Schopenhauer

Genetics
Homo sapiens is one of the five surviving species of great apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (gibbons are considered a 'lesser ape'). We shared a common ancestor with two of these apes - bonobos and chimps - just five million years ago. That's the day before yesterday in evolutionary terms.

We are genetically equidistant from chimps and bonobos. Genetically, the chimps and bonoboos at the zoo are far closer to you and the other paying customers than they are to the gorillas, orangutans, monkeys, or anything else in a cage. Our DNA differs from that of chimps and bonobos by roughly 1.6%, making us closer to them than a dog is to a fox, or an Indian elephant to an African elephant.

The ancestral line leading to chimps and bonobos splits off from that leading to humans just 5 to 6 million years ago (though inter-breeding probably continued for a million or so years after the split). The chimp and bonobo lines separate somewhere between 3 million and 860,000 years ago. The gorilla peeled away from the common line around 9 million years ago, orangutans 16 million, and gibbons (the only monogamous ape) took an early exit about 22 million years ago. DNA evidence indicates that the last common ancestor for apes and monkeys lived about 30 million years ago.

Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except - if the standard narrative is to be believed - us.

“All that we can surmise of humankind's genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as a means for procreation.” - E. O. Wilson

The Penis
“We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward too inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both of the mind and hand.” - Michel de Montaigne

The great size of the erect human penis is in marked contrast to that of the Great Apes. Geoffrey Miller just comes out and says it: “Adult male humans have the longest, thickest, and most flexible penises of any living primate.” So there.

The human male has testicles far larger than any monogamous primate would ever need, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve stand-by sperm cells for multiple ejaculations. A scrotum is like a spare refrigerator in the garage just for beer. If you've got a spare beer fridge, you're probably the type who expects a party to break out at any moment. You want to be prepared. A scrotum fulfills the same function. By keeping the testicles a few degrees cooler than they would be inside the body, a scrotum allows chilled spermatozoa to accumulate and remain viable longer, available if needed. Anyone who's been kicked in the beer fridge can tell you this is a potentially costly arrangement. The increased vulnerability of having testes out there in the wind inviting attack or accident rather than tucked away safely inside the body is hard to overstate - especially if you're crumpled in the fetal position, unable to breathe. Given the unrelenting logic of evolutionary cost/benefit analyses, we can be quite certain this is not an adaptation without good reason. Why carry the tools if you don't have the job? If a species has cojones grandes, you can bet that males have frequent ejaculations. Where the females save it for Mr. Right, the males have smaller testes, relative to their overall body mass.

It bears repeating that the human penis is the longest and thickest of any primate's - in both absolute and relative terms - and, despite all the bad press they get, men last far longer in the saddle than bonobos (fifteen seconds), chimps (seven seconds), or gorillas (sixty seconds), clocking in between four and seven minutes, on average.

Although an adult silverback gorilla weighs in at around four hundred pounds, his penis is just over an inch long, at full mast, and his testicles are the size of kidney beans, though you'd have trouble finding them, as they're safely tucked up inside his body. A one-hundred-pound bonobo has a penis three times as long as the gorilla's and testicles the size of chicken eggs; the extra-large, AAA type. As always, natural selection targets the relevant organs and systems for adaptation. Through the generations, male gorillas evolved impressive muscles for their reproductive struggle, while their relatively unimportant genitals dwindled down to the bare minimum needed for uncontested fertilization. Conversely, male chimps, bonobos, and humans had less need for oversized muscles for fighting but evolved larger, more powerful testicles and, in the case of humans, a much more interesting penis.

Because fit is so important in the effectiveness of condoms, World Health Organization guidelines specify different sizes for various parts of the world: a 49mm width condom for Asia, a 52mm width for North America and Europe, and a 53mm width for Africa. All condoms are longer than most men will ever need.

Male nipples: a structural echo (without function) in one sex, of a trait vital in the other.

Women & Sex
For thousands of years, men have seen women not as women could be, but only as men want them to be.

The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use. By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes. But before it became an instrument for self-treatment (“All the pleasures of youth... will throb within you,” one suggestive ad promised), vibrators had already been in use for decades in the offices of physicians.

Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and have plenty of sex. Got that, fellas? If you're unhappy at the amount of sexual opportunity in your life, don't blame the women. Instead, make sure they have equal access to power, wealth, and status. Then watch what happens. As with bonobos - where female coalitions are the ultimate social authority and individual females need not fear the larger males - human societies in which women are “sassy and confident,” (as Barnes described the Mosuo girls) tend to be far more comfortable places for most men than societies ruled by a male elite.

Zero Sum Game
Why is it so easy to believe that a mother's love isn't a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins asks the pertinent question with characteristic elegance: “Is it so very obvious that you can't love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love, love of books, of food, of wine, love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends. Why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?"

If you've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex - and who hasn't? - which partner was louder? It just doesn't make sense for the female of a monogamous (or even mildly polygynous) species to call attention to herself when mating. On the other hand, if thousands of generations of multiple mating are built into modern human sexuality, it's pretty clear what all the shouting is about. Women's pendulous breasts (utterly unnecessary for breastfeeding children), impossible-to-ignore cries of delight (female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard-carrying crowd), and capacity for orgasm after orgasm all support a vision of prehistoric promiscuity.

True, it may take most women a bit longer to get the sexual motor running than it does men, but once warmed up, most women are fully capable of leaving any man far behind. You have to wonder: if men and women evolved together in sexually monogamous couples for millions of years, how did we end up being so incompatible? It's as if we've been sitting down to dinner together, millennium after millennium, but half of us can't help wolfing everything down in a few frantic, sloppy minutes, while the other half are still setting the table and lighting candles.

Unlike her closest primate cousins, the standard human female doesn't come equipped with private parts that swell up to double their normal size and turn bright red when she is about to ovulate. In fact, men have few ways of knowing when a woman is fertile. As we're supposed to be the smartest creatures around, it's interesting that humans are thought to be almost unique in this ignorance. The vast majority of other female mammals advertise when they are fertile, and are decidedly not interested in sex at other times. 'Concealed ovulation' is said to be a significant human exception. Among primates, the female capacity and willingness to have sex any time, any place is characteristic only of bonobos and humans. ‘Extended receptivity' is just a scientific way of saying that women can be sexually active throughout their menstrual cycle, whereas most mammals have sex only when it ‘matters' - that is, when pregnancy can occur.

Love & Marriage
"Women and men should not marry, for love is like the seasons - it comes and goes.” - Mosuo woman

"Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being 'in love' which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.” - Louis de Bernières, Captain Correlli's Mandolin

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).” - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

How many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life's irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy?

If the independent, isolated nuclear family unit is, in fact, the structure into which human beings most naturally configure themselves, why do contemporary societies and religions find it necessary to prop it up with tax breaks and supportive legislation while fiercely defending it from same-sex couples and others proposing to marry in supposedly 'nontraditional' ways? One wonders, in fact, why marriage is a legal issue at all - apart from its relevance to immigration and property laws. Why would something so integral to human nature require such vigilant legal protection?

Married men consistently show lower levels of the hormone than single men of the same age; fathers of young children, even less. Men who are particularly responsive to infants show declines of 30% or more right after their child is born. Married men having affairs, however, were found to have higher testosterone levels than those who weren't. Additionally, most of the men having affairs have told researchers they were actually quite happy in their marriages, while only one-third of women having affairs felt that way. Of course, sharp-thinking readers will point out that these correlations don't imply causation: maybe men with higher levels of testosterone simply seek more affairs. Probably so, but there is good reason to believe that even casual contact with novel, attractive women can have a tonic effect on men's hormonal health. In fact, researcher James Roney and his colleagues found that even a brief chat with an attractive woman raised men's testosterone levels by an average of 14%. When these same men spent a few minutes talking with other men, their testosterone level fell by 2%.

How many families have been ripped apart because middle-aged men misinterpreted the surge of vitality and energy resulting from a novel sexual partner as love for a soul mate. And how many of these men then found themselves isolated, shamed, and devastated when the curse of Coolidge returned after a few months or years to reveal that the now-familiar partner was not, in fact, the true source of those feelings after all?

As Susan Squire, author of I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage, asks: “Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children's lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?”

The strongest explanation for the prevalence and intensity of the Coolidge effect among social mammals is that the male drive for sexual variety is evolution's way of avoiding incest. Our species evolved on a sparsely populated planet - there were never more than a few million and probably fewer than 100,000 of us on Earth for most of our evolutionary past. To avoid the genetic stagnation that would have dragged our ancestors into extinction long ago - children born of parents with different immunities are likely to benefit from a broader, more robust immune response - males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar. While this carrot-and-stick mechanism worked well to promote genetic diversity in the prehistoric environment, it's causing lots of problems now. When a couple have been living together for years, when they've become family, this ancient anti-incest mechanism can effectively block eroticism for many men, leading to confusion and hurt feelings all around.

Desire, particularly male desire, is notoriously unresponsive to religious dictate, legal retribution, family pressure, self-preservation, or common sense. It does respond to one thing, however: testosterone. A reasonable relaxation of moralistic social codes making sexual satisfaction more easily available would also make it less problematic.

Human
If you want to live longer, sleep more and eat less.

Cortisol - the hormone your body releases when under stress - is the strongest immunosuppressant known. In other words, nothing weakens our defenses against disease quite like stress.

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” - Walt Whitman

“An arbitrary definition of man: a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial.” - John Stuart Mill

"Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie - but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.” - Immanuel Kant

When communities grow beyond the point where every individual has at least a passing acquaintance with everyone else, our behavior changes, our choices shift, and our sense of the possible and of the acceptable grows ever more abstract. The argument can be made concerning the tragic misunderstanding of human nature that underlies communism: community ownership doesn't work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity.

In the ubiquitous political egalitarianism of foraging people, leaders are simply those who are followed - individuals who have earned the respect of their companions.

Worldwide, pornography is reported to rake in anywhere from $57 billion to $100 billion dollars annually. In the United States, it generates more revenue than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined and more than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises. According to U.S. News and World Report, “Americans spend more money at strip clubs than on Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and nonprofit theaters, the opera, the ballet and jazz and classical music performances combined.” One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old.

Physics
In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind. But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun's distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon's, thus bringing them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet with anyone around to notice.

// Duende * // 01.12.15
"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint." - Edward Hopper

* This Spanish term implies something magical or enchanting. It originally referred to a supernatural being or spirit similar to an imp or pixie. Now, it has adapted to refer to the spirit of art or the power that a song or piece of art has to deeply move a person.

// Welcome to the Point // 01.12.15
"One does not repay a teacher well by remaining a pupil." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"A teacher's authority, which ought to be supreme with the child, is checked and hindered by the presence of parents." - Montaigne

Language is a dialect with an army.

"If a language is a dialect with an army, as philologists say, then a religion is a cult with a tax exemption." - Gavin Edwards

// Dem Bills // 20.11.15
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." - William Shakespeare

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. - William Blake

// You drink hard liquor? // 02.11.15
"You drink hard liquor?" - Buddy Guy to Keith Richards

// Siddhartha // 02.11.15
Pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.

There is just one knowledge. This is everywhere. This is Atman. This is within me and within you and within every creature. And so I'm starting to believe that this knowledge has no worser enemy than the desire to know it, than learning.

His face and his walk, his quietly lowered glance, his quietly dangling hand and even every finger of his quietly dangling hand expressed peace, expressed perfection, did not search, did not imitate, breathed softly in an unwhithering calm, in an unwhithering light, an untouchable peace.

Moderate living, joy of thinking, hours of mediation, secret knowledge of the self, of his eternal entity, which is neither body nor consciousness.

Was not all suffering time, were not all forms of tormenting oneself and being afraid time, was not everything hard, everything hostile in the world gone and overcome as soon as one had overcome time, as soon as time would have been out out of existence by one's thoughts?

Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy.

Their life was not guided by thoughts and insights, but solely by urges and wishes
He had been captured by the world, by lust, covetousness, sloth and finally also by that vice which he used to despise and mock the most as the most foolish one of all vices: greed. Property, possessions and riches also had finally captured him; they were no longer a game and trifles to him, they had become a shackle and a burden.

He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had; the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes.

That fear, that terrible and petrifying fear, which he felt while he was rolling the dice, while he was worried about losing his high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew, always increase, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life.

Knowledge can be conveyed but not wisdom
I've had thoughts, yes, and insight, again and again. Sometimes for an hour or for an entire day I have felt knowledge in me, as one would feel life in one's heart. There have been many thoughts, but it would be hard for me to convey them to you. Wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.

When someone is searching then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means having a goal. But finding means being free, being open, having no goal.

// Montaigne // 24.10.15
Some learn more by avoidance than by imitation, by shunning than by following. Thus the wise learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

It is delusion to think people who cannot express themselves have good things in mind. They do not yet understand their half-shaped ideas.

The first and most perfect degree of excellence is when virtue becomes a habit.

// Great Minds Quotes // 10.10.15
"Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday." - Dale Carnegie

"He is able who thinks he is able." - Buddha

"My South African friend said he'd bought me a kindle for my birthday. I was chuffed until he told me he'd got me the matching Barbie as well!"

// Women On Top // 27.09.15
It was a patriarchal society that needed, for its establishment and its survival, to believe in male sexual supremacy, or more exactly, women's asexuality. How could a man wage his wars or put his shoulder to the industrial wheel if half his brain feared that he was being cuckolded, that the little woman was at home - or worse, not at home - satisfying her insatiable lust? Even her hand on her own body nagged at his suspicion as it awakened the fire he feared he could never quench.

How to live in a society that is brazenly sexual on the outside and deeply puritanical and twisted about sex on the inside
Girls today don't banish the girl who has sex, but they do if she has sex with two men when they only have one. They may accept sex but still police one another to be sure no one gets more than her share.

The truth is some of us are born with higher libidos than others; some of the low scorers are men, some of the higher scorers women. Wouldn't it be nice to know what our true sexual appetite is? No one can tell us better than our own bodies. When we mate, marry, we choose one another for reasons as various as a shared desire of dancing, walks in the woods, Chinese food. Wouldn't it make sense to select a partner who has a common interest or disinterest in sex? Whatever our libido, sex is an energy, a soure of life to be felt, enjoyed, and also used to fuel and feed all the other areas of our life - social, intellectual, abstract as well as the physical. Some of us are less social, less intellectual than others; we know this and therefore apply ourselves elsewhere so that we may enjoy life more. What a waste of life not to learn from our own bodies the true level of sexual interest so that we may better know who we are.

We resent it that men can have an extraordinary night of sex, then bound out of bed the next morning refreshed, refuelled, more independent than ever. He will have a better day at work because of his wonderful erotic adventure with us. We loved the night of sex too, but in the morning we are reluctant to leave the bed; we lie there waiting of him to stop whistling around the bedroom and come and sit beside us, touch us, reconnect. We want him to say what he said last night and to tell us when we will be together again. We don't have a better day at the office, we are less focused on work because we are listening for the phone, his voice, the words that will say when and where. Far from being refuelled by a night of sex, we are weakened, having left part of ourself in that bed. Men are no crueller than women, they simply approach sex and love from a different point of view. Let's say the man waits four days to telephone. Not because the night was like any other but precisely because it was so very special. He needs to regain his sense of independence, of separateness, not because he doesn't like/love us but because he came so very close to those emotions. Man overplay the role of the lone cowboy because women exaggerate their role of being the emotional ones, the sirens who would love to wrap their arms around him and never let go.

// The Discomfort Zone // 24.09.15
You awaken and stir a powerful resolve,
To strive, henceforth, for the highest form of being.

It's something to be anxious about, if you want to be anxious about something
I'd begun to peruse her with the passive, low pressure methods that, although they had invariably failed me in the past, I continued to place my faith in.

Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom.

To be able to hear what's really happening in the world, you have to block out 99% of the noise. The remaining 1% is still a lot of information.

Parking lots full of nature lovers' cars.

It is anthropomorphic to see yourself in other species, not to see them in you
To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be short-sighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were all ways of being like a bird.

At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tyres; I pretend I'm never going to die.

"The eternal feminine draws us ever onward and upward." - Goethe

// Oh Brave New World! // 24.09.15
Bradley defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one beloved anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they have been conditioned to.

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.

Truth or Happiness
I'm interested in truth, I like science, but truth is a menace, science is a public danger.

Strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of a new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.

Ignominy: public shame or disgrace
Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does no feel himself too secure in his superiority.

The return to civilisation was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday was perfect and if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday.

Troilus and Cressida
“Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice;
Handiest in thy discourse O! that her hand,
In whose comparison all whites are ink
Writing their own reproach; to whose soft seizure
The cygnet's down is hash.
As true thou tell'st me, when I say I love her;
But, saying thus, instead of oil and balm,
Thou lay'st in every gash that love hath given me
The knife that made it.”

Island
Here and now boys, here and now.

There are no sheeplike flocks and no ecclesiastical Good Shepherds to shear and castrate; there are no bovine or swinish herds and no licensed drovers, royal or military, capitalistic or revolutionary, to brand, confine and butcher. There are only voluntary associations of men and women on the road to full humanity.

With the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth.

Do it until it becomes a yoga
Accept the world, make use of it, make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.

Which of the two antagonists can inhale most deeply and say ‘om' on the outgoing breath for the longest time?

“Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.” - Wordsworth

// Point Omega // 08.09.15
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic* moments. - Don Delillo

* too small to be seen by an ordinary light microscope

// Rap with a silent 'C' // 07.09.15
"All dressed up for the opera?" - Three Night Stand

// "Just Say Know" - Timothy Leary // 06.09.15
“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts
Einstein realised that a scientific measurement is dependent on the relative relationship between the observer and the observed. The moral or metaphysical relativist denies that there is a fixed view of reality that is 'true' in all circumstances.

The realisation that what you believe to be 'reality' is in fact a flawed, personal construction can be a frightening idea, which can leave you feeling groundless, lost or alone. This explains the importance of religious, social and political movements, such as Christianity, environmentalism or communism. Movements like these attempt to 'synchronise' the individual realities of a large mass of people around accepted priorities and attitudes - a process that can be personally comforting.

“Everything I perceive, everything within and around me, is a creation of my own consciousness. Everyone lives in a neural cocoon of private reality. I have never lost the sense that I am an actor, surrounded by characters, props, and sets for the comic drama being written in my brain.”

It is crazy to live in a reality that's negative and unrewarding because there are an infinite number of other 'realities' that the brain can use instead.

Tim studiously avoided routine, sleeping in different rooms, brushing his teeth with different hands, and ordering different drinks in bars.

He was more carefree and joyous because he now knew that, whatever happened, everything was ultimately fine and it always would be.

“Dying is the most fascinating experience in life. You've got to approach dying the way you live your life - with curiosity, hope, experimentation, and with the help of your friends. I have set out to design my own death, or deanimation as I prefer to call it. It's a hip, chic thing to do. It's the most elegant thing you can do. Even if you've lived your life like a complete slob, you can die with terrific style.”

LSD
Try describing the taste of ice cream to someone who has never had any, and multiply that difficulty by a thousand, and you will get some idea of how hard it was to describe what it felt like to be one with the universe, to know that you existed on a multitude of levels, and not just on the puny one called I. So many things happened in the psychedelic state that just couldn't be expressed in language.

LSD is essentially neutral; it will open up the mind but it will leave it to the individual to make sense of what they find inside.

As Leary noted after his first few experiences with psilocybin (si-lo-si-bin), the psychedelic experience did not actually solve anything itself. What it did do, he claimed, was give a much clearer understanding of life's problems, and that was a useful springboard for finding solutions.

A state previously considered a blessing from God could be induced by man more or less at will. The Church might not be able to achieve this, but Leary's magic pill could.

The Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, a devotee of Aldous Huxley and co-founder of Soma - a group campaigning to legalise cannabis - later confided to his friend Dick Kemp that he had perceived the double-helix shape whilst on LSD.

These early advocates were not dealing LSD in order to make money; they were doing it because they thought that it was their sacred duty. They were doing it to make the world a better place: to save souls. They called themselves Cosmic Couriers. They believed that when they delivered a shipment of LSD to a new town or country, they were actually dropping off a psychic time bomb that detonated after they left, spreading love and understanding, saving the world from itself one mind at a time.

Tim, like the CIA before him, was interested in the effect LSD had on what was known as ‘imprinting'. This is the idea that not all behaviour is learnt through a long process of repetition. Instead, there are certain times when a behavioural trait is ‘imprinted' in the psyche during one specific event. The classic demonstration of this is a famous experiment by the zoologist Konrad Lorenz in which ducklings were hatched, not in the presence of their mother, but in the presence of a tennis ball. The newborn birds then imprinted this ball as their mother image. From that point on the poor ducklings would blindly follow the ball around, even after their real mother had been introduced to them.

The first e-commerce transaction took place in the early 1970s, on the ARPAnet network, which later evolved into the Internet. It was a drug deal. Students of MIT used the network to arrange the sale of some marijuana with students of Stanford.

Drink Coke (or else)
They had grown up in a time of plenty, watching television and making consumer choices. They were concerned with play and gratification, and the hard realities of life rarely intruded on them in the way they had on previous generations.

“Once the foundation of a revolution has been laid down, it is almost always in the next generation that the revolution is accomplished.” - Jean le Rond d'Alembert

“The choice is between being rebellious and being religious. Don't vote. Don't politic. Don't petition. You can't do anything about America politically”. Politics for Leary had been just another example of destructive ‘robot behaviour'. “People should not be allowed to talk politics,” he had joked, “except on all fours”.

Semmelweis Effect
The Semmelweis Effect claims that the opposition to a scientific discovery is directly proportional to its importance. This effect is named after the 19-century obstetrician (pregnanacy docotr) who massively reduced the mortality rate in surgery by insisting that doctors wash their hands, but who was ridiculed and cast out by his colleagues for his troubles. Semmelweis was eventually driven to madness and suicide.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that the act of observing an event changes the event.

Panspermia (noun) - the theory that life on the earth originated from microorganisms or chemical precursors of life present in outer space and able to initiate life on reaching a suitable environment.

Too often what we consider abnormal, neurotic or psychotic behaviour is a healthy pro-survival adaptation of an individual to an unhealthy situation.

No matter what types of psychotherapy were being used, a third of patients would get better, a third would stay the same and a third would get worse. Control groups, where the patient didn't receive any treatment, showed exactly the same scores.

// Chasing the Scream // 26.08.15
“The founding fathers of the Western world were drug users, plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff and more importantly they used the stuff. The ancient world didn't have a Nancy Reagan, it didn't wage a billion dollar drug war, it didn't imprison people who used drugs, and it didn't embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged, and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science and philosophy. The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.” – Dr. D.C.A Hillman

DuPont + Racism
Harry Anslinger wrote to 30 scientific experts asking a series of questions about marijuana. 29 of them wrote back saying it would be wrong to ban it, and that it was being widely misrepresented in the press. Anslinger decided to ignore them and quoted instead the one expert who believed it was a great evil that had to be eradicated.

“The idea that every human life has genuine value and therefore is something to be treasured is an absurd banality. The world would be far better off if 40% of its inhabitants had never been born.” - Dr. Henry Smith Williams (1863 - 1943)

Temple at Eleusis
The annual ritual in the Temple at Eleusis (frequented by Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato and Cicero among others) was a drug party on a vast scale. It happened every year for 2000 years and anybody who spoke Greek was free to come. Harry Anslinger said that drug use represents “nothing less than an assault on the foundations of Western civilisation”, but here at the actual foundations of Western civilisation, drug use was ritualized and celebrated.

Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup
“We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.” - Terrance McKenna.

Hyper-individualistic
Humans seem to have evolved with a deep need to bond because it was absolutely essential to staying alive.

If we legalized ecstasy and lots of people transferred from getting drunk on a Saturday night to taking ecstasy, that would count on the official statistics as an increase in ‘drug use', but it would be an improvement. This is a more complex calculation than can be measured on a narrowly statistical balance sheet.

Legalisation slightly increases drug use, but significantly reduces drug harms.

// How to Use the News // 10.08.15
Societies become modern, Hegel suggested, when news replaces religion as the central source of guidance and touchstone of authority. But Hegel's argument misses out an important difference between the two fields of knowledge: religions have traditionally been particularly sensitive to how bad we are at focusing on anything. Exactly like the news, religions want to tell us important things everyday, but unlike the news, they know that if they tell us too much in one go, and only once, we will remember and do nothing. They therefore take care to serve up only a little of their fare each day, taking us patiently through a few issues, and then returning to them again and again. Repetition and rehearsal are key to the pedagogical methods of the major faiths. They know there is no point in informing us of a vital cause in a hurried and excitable way. Instead they sit us down in a solemn place, quieten our minds, and then speak to us with dignified urgency, understanding that we will have to return to their ideas over days and weeks if we are to stand any chance of being influenced in how we think and behave.

A contemporary dictator wishing to establish power would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: he or she would only have to see to it that news organisations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that kept changing, without giving any sense of the on-going relevance of an issue that had seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colourful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most people's capacity to grasp political reality - as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it.

The irony of being able to imagine perfection while not being able to secure it.

Nothing can be achieved very quickly or by any one person or party; it would be impossible for anyone to change matters at a pace that would flatter the expectations of the news cycle.

Flaubert hated newspapers because of his conviction that they slyly encouraged readers to hand over to others a task that no honest person should ever consent to offload to someone else: thinking.

The elite implication is that there is something demeaning and childish about the need to hero-worship a famous person who is our contemporary but who doesn't know us: it seems passive and inferior, a confession of inadequacy, a proof that we are insufficiently engaged with our own projects and ambitions and have chosen to ‘escape' from our lives because we have no idea how to lead them properly.

The real cause of celebrity culture isn't narcissistic shallowness, it is a deficit of kindness. A society where everyone wants to be famous is also one where being ordinary has failed to deliver the degree of respect necessary to satisfy people's natural appetite for dignity. In so far as the modern world is celebrity-obsessed, we are living not so much in superficial times as in unkind ones.

A lack of a serous criminal record is in large measure a matter of luck and good circumstance, not proof of an incorruptible nature. A clean consciousness is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.

It is ultimately easier to dig, rescues, save and resuscitate than to meet the challenges of those quieter, more temperate days when we are left alone to bear the responsibilities of making a living, staying in love, raising sane children and not wasting our brief lives.

Every year humanity produces 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum of art gallery.

// $HE // 09.08.15
If philosophers wanted to be taken seriously, they shouldn't have been born into a deeply anti-intellectual society!

// Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind // 09.08.15
Animals are said to belong the the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring.

Genus Homo
Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called The Great Apes. Out closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago a single female ape had two daughters; one become the ancestor of all chimps, the other is our own grandmother.

We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last 10,000 years our species has indeed been the only human species around. Yet the real meaning of the word ‘human' is an animal belonging to the genus Homo, and there used to be many other species of this genus besides homo sapiens. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes bears and pigs.

Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago, from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus - which means Southern Ape. About 2 million years ago some of these archaic men and woman left their homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of North Africa, Europe and Asia. Since survival in the snowy forests of northern Europe required different traits than those needed to stay alive in Indonesia's steaming jungles, human populations evolved in different directions.

Around 70,000 years ago sapiens left Africa for a second time. This time they drove Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth.

Replacement vs. Interbreeding Theory
If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years.

In homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2-3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25 % of the the body's energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brain of other apes require only 8% of rest-time energy.

It takes a tribe to raise a human
An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal - and this just when babies' heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infants' brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth for example. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders.

Fire
Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms - such as wheat, rice, and potatoes - became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Fire not only changed food's chemistry, it changed its biology, as cooking killed germs and parasites that infested it.

The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way for the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and homo sapiens.

Genus Homo's position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. The spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, etc. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contract is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

The Cognitive Revolution: Myth, Fiction and Imagination
The Cognitive Revolution constitutes of the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years. What caused it? We're not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner-wiring of the brains of sapiens, enabling to them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.

Myths and fictions accustom people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture'.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, or gossip effectively about more than 150 people. But once the 150 threshold is crossed, things can no longer work that way. How did homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising of millions of people? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large scale human co-operation is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination. When it is used it gives sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

One on one, or even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the 150 threshold. When we reach 2000 the differences are astounding. If you tired to bunch thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Square or the Vatican, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, Sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places. Together they create orderly patterns - such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political initiations - that they could never have created in isolation. The real difference between us and the chimps is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue made us the masters of creation.

Ever since the cognitive revolution, sapiens have been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions, and one the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the U.S and Google.

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and belief of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective conscious of many individuals. Many of history's most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

Because the sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Imagined orders can be maintained only if large segments of the population - and in particular large segments of the elite and security forces - truly believe in it.

Time is a modern day myth
If a lost time traveller popped-up in a medieval village and asked a passer-by, ‘What year is this?' the villager would be as bewildered by the question as by the strangers ridiculous clothing. Today a single affluent family generally has more timepieces at home than an entire medieval country.

Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systemically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Money is the apogee (the highest point in the development of something) of human tolerance. Money is more open minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that dose not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

An ivory figure of lion man (or woman) from the Stadel Cave in Germany 32,000 years ago is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist.

We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house. Foregoers moved house every month, every week and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. It's reasonable to presume then that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives were conducted without the help of artefacts.

Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller that that of today's Cairo. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands, but at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles' were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or on an assembly line.

We should beware of demonising or idealising anything on the basis of a superficial acquaintance.

During the 20th century only 5% of human deaths resulted from human violence - and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocide in history.

Biology enables, culture forbids
Biology is wiling to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesis, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.

Full Script
Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

Dharma
Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving, and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. If the mind of a person is free from craving, no god can make him miserable. Conversely, once craving arises in a person's mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering. This law, know as dharma, is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature.

It is like a man standing for decades on the shoreline, embracing certain ‘good' waves and trying to prevent them for disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad' waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach driving himself crazy with his fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions, so it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent Devil.

Britain
On September 15th 1830 the first commercial railway line was opened connecting Liverpool with Manchester. A mere 20 years later Britain had tens of thousands of kilometres of railway tracks.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, fewer than 500 British officials, about 70,000 British soldiers and perhaps 100,000 British business people were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.

Napoleon made fun of the British calling them a nation of shopkeepers, yet those shop keepers defeated Napoleon, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.

Smith claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth. But when growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily led to catastrophe.

Economic growth requires energy and raw materials, and these are finite. When and if they run out, the entire system will collapse. But the evidence provided by the past is that they are finite only in theory. Counter-intuitively, while humankind's use of energy and raw materials has mushroomed in the last few centuries, the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased. Whenever a shortage of either has threatened to slow economic growth, investments have flowed into scientific and technological research. These have invariably produced not only more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources, but also completely new types of energy and materials.

Prior to the industrial revolution the only machine that converted energy was the body. At heart, the industrial revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just keeps growing. Clearly the world does not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs.

Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.

It is not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, occur in places where the wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. Armies could flee, but the old fields would stay put.

Unless you're not human
We can only congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern sapiens if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us for disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, diary cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries, tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth.

Our children's book, our iconography, and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees in contrast to billions of humans.

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful live can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. Assessing life minute by minute, mediaeval people certainly had it rough. However if they believed in the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may we have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long-term, can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. The other-worldly meanings mediaeval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find.

Perhaps happiness is synchronising one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As along as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

“What I feel to be good is good. What I feel to be bad is bad.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

// All the colours of the rainbow produce just one colour // 05.08.15
"There has to be something wrong with a world where the best employment option for a farmer in sub-Saharan Africa isn't being a farmer in sub-Saharan Africa, but crossing the Mediterranean on a punctured lilo, only to spend days dangling under a lorry so that he can end up selling lollipops in a nightclub toilet.

We invade their countries and justify it by saying that our way of life is better, then boggle at the idea they might think living here is great. We pay no attention to how our actions in other countries have precipitated this situation.

If we can look at another human being and categorise them as 'illegal' - or that chilling American word 'alien' - then what has become of our own humanity? To support policies that dehumanise others is to dehumanise yourself. I think most people resist that, but are pressed towards it by an increasingly sadistic elite.

If you're worried about threats to your way of life, look to the people who are selling your public services out from under you. The people who will destroy this society are already here: printing their own money, printing their own newspapers, and responding to undesirables at the gates by releasing the hounds." - Frankie Boyle

// The Untethered Soul (pt. 2) // 18.07.15
There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it. If you don't understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find oneself”. They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.

If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside of your control, regardless of what your mind says about it.

If so much of what the voice says is meaningless and unnecessary, then why does it exists? The secret to answering this question lies in understanding why it says what it says when it says it. In some cases the mental voice talks for the same reason that a kettle whistles. That is, there is a build-up of energy inside that needs to be released. If you watch objectively, you will see that when there's a build-up of nervous, fearful, or desire-based energies inside, the voice becomes extremely active.

The ‘I' who is talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something. Honestly, when was the last time you really had nothing bothering you? Before you had your current problem, there was a different problem. And if you're wise, you will realise that after this one's gone, there will be another one.

To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them. No solution can possible exist while you're lost in the energy of a problem. Everyone knows you can't deal well with a situation if you're getting anxious, scared or angry about it. The first problem you have to deal with is your reaction.

When the voice narrates the outside world to you, those thoughts are now side by side, in parity, with all your other thoughts. All these thoughts intermix and actually influence your experience of the world around you. What you end up experiencing is really a personal representation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in. For example, there are myriad things that you see at any given moment, yet you only narrate a few of them. The ones you discuss in your mind are the ones that matter to you. With this subtle form of pre-processing, you manage to control the experience of reality so that it all fits together inside your mind. Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.

Our society considers psychological sensitivities normal. Because most of us don't have to worry about food, clothing or shelter, we have the luxury of worrying about a spot on our pants, or laughing too loud, or saying something wrong. Because we've developed this hypersensitive psyche, we constantly use our energies to close around it and protect ourselves. But this process only hides the problem, it doesn't fix it. The mind has to try to make it so that everyone likes you, nobody speaks badly of you, everything you do and say is perfectly acceptable and pleasing to everyone. You don't want anyone to hurt you or anything to happen that you don't like. The mind is constantly trying to give you advice about how to make it all okay. That is why the mind is so active; it has an impossible task to do.

When you become truly spiritual, you are totally different from everyone else. That which everybody else wants, you don't want. That which everyday else resists, you totally accept.

When you are an aware being, you no longer become completely immersed in the events around you. Instead, you remain inwardly aware that you are the one who is experiencing both the events and the corresponding thoughts and emotions.

If you ever want to re-centre, just start saying “hello” inside, over and over. Then notice that you are aware of that thought. Don't think about being aware of it; that's just another though. Simply relax and be aware that you can hear “hello” being echoed in your mind. That is the seat of centred consciousness.

The teacher says, “Concentrate on what I'm saying”
What does that mean? It means focus your consciousness on one place. Consciousness has the ability to focus. It is part of the nature of consciousness. The essence of consciousness is awareness, and awareness has the ability to become more aware of one thing and less aware of something else. In other words it has the ability to focus itself on certain object.

Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object. That which doesn't disturb you is okay, that which does is not.

Fear is the cause of every problem. It's the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness.

The id, the ego and the superego
Freud divided the psyche into three parts; the id, the ego and the superego. He saw the id as our primal, animal nature; the superego as the judgement system that society has instilled within us; and the ego as our representative to the outside world that struggles to maintain a balance between the other two powerful forces.

To see, to experience and to honour is to participate in life
What it means to live life is to experience the moment that is passing through you, and then experience the next moment, and then the next.

If you watch carefully you'll notice that you have a phenomenal amount of energy inside of you. It doesn't come for food and it doesn't come from sleep. This energy is always available to you. At any moment you can draw upon it like a well. The only reason you don't feel this energy all the time is because you block it.

Imagine if you started to feel tremendous love for all creatures, every plant, every animal. Imagine if every child seemed like your own, and every person you saw looked life a beautiful flower, with its own colour, expression, shape and sound.

How can anyone really know anything about God? We have so many teaching, so many concepts, and so many views about God, but they've all been touched by people. In the end, it's amazing how much our ideas about God conform to the different cultures from which they come. Fortunately, deep within us, there is a direct connection to the Divine. There is a part of our being that is beyond the personal self. You can consciously choose to identify with that part, rather than with the psyche or the body. When you do this, a natural transformation begins to take place within you.

Does the sun shine more brightly on a saint than on anyone else? Is the air more available to the saint? Does the rain fall on one neighbour's trees more than another's? You can turn your eyes from the sun's light and live in darkness for 100 years, but if you then turn back towards the light it is still there. It is there for you just the same as for the person who has enjoyed its brilliance for 100 years. All of nature is like this. The fruits on the tree willingly gives itself to everyone. Do any of the forces of nature differentiate? Does anything in God's creation other than the human mind actually pass judgement?

You are not put on Earth to suffer. You are not helping anyone by being miserable. Regardless of your philosophical beliefs, the fact remains that you were born and you are going to die. During the time in between you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience.

One of the great saints, Ramana Maharishi, used to ask, “Who am I?” We see now that this is a very deep question. Ask it ceaselessly, constantly. Ask it and you will notice that you are the answer. There is no intellectual answer - you are the answer. Be the answer and everything will change.

// Your Brain on Music // 11.07.15
The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.

The prevailing view of the brain is that it is a computational system, and we think of the brain as a type of computer. Networks of interconnected neurons perform computations on information and combine their computations in ways that lead to thoughts, decisions, perceptions, and ultimately consciousness. Different subsystems are responsible for different aspects of cognition.

Sensory perception creates mental images in our minds - representations of the world outside our heads - so quickly and seamlessly that it seems there is nothing to it. This is an illusion. Our perceptions are the end product of a long chain of neural events that give us the illusion of an instantaneous image. There are many domains in which our strongest intuitions mislead us. The intuition that our senses give us an undistorted view of the world is one.

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge they go well beyond our everyday experience (unless you are a cosmologist). The average brain consists of one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. Each neuron is connected to other neurons - usually 1000 to 10,000 others. Just four neurons can be connected in 63 ways, or not at all, for a total of possibilities. As the number of neurons increases, the number of possible connections grows exponentially. The number of combinations becomes so large that it is unlikely that we will ever understand all the possible connections in the brain, or what they mean. The number of combinations possible - and hence the number of possible different thoughts or brain states each of us can have - exceeds the number of known particles in the entire known universe.

The human brain is divided up into four lobes - the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital - plus the cerebellum. We can make some gross generalizations about function, but in fact behaviour is complex and not readily reducible to simple mappings.

The frontal lobe is associated with planning, and with self-control, and with making sense out of the dense and jumbled signals that our senses receive. The temporal lobe is associated with hearing and memory. The posterior part of the frontal lobe is associated with motor movements and spatial skill, and the occipital lobe with vision.

The cerebellum is involved in emotions and the planning of movements, and is the evolutionarily oldest part of our brain. Even many animals, such as reptiles, that lack the “higher” brain region of the cortex, still have a cerebellum.

Damage to an area of the brain just above and behind the left ear - Wernicke's area - causes difficulty in understanding spoken language; damage to a region at the very top of the head - the motor cortex - causes difficulty moving your fingers; damage to an area in the centre of the brain - the hippocampal complex - can block the ability to form new memories, while leaving old memories intact. Damage to an area just behind your forehead can cause dramatic changes in personality - it can rob aspects of you from you.

We have known since 1848 that the frontal lobes are intimately related to aspects of self and personality, but even 150 years later, most of what we can say about personality and neural structures is vague and quite general. We have not located the “patience” region of the brain, nor the “jealousy” or “generous” regions, and it seems unlikely that we ever will. The brain has regional differentiation of structure and function, but complex personality attributes are no doubt distributed widely throughout the brain.

Ohrwurm (earworm)
Memory affects the music listening experience so profoundly that it would be not be hyperbole to say that without memory there would be no music.

Music works because we remember the tones we have just heard and are relating them to the ones that are just now being played. Those groups of tones - phrases - might come up later in the piece in a variation or transposition that tickles our memory system at the same time as it activates our emotional centres.

In the past ten years, neuroscientists have shown just how intimately related our memory system is with our emotional system. The amygdala, long considered the seat of emotions in mammals, sits adjacent to the hippocampus, long considered the crucial structure for memory storage, if not memory retrieval. Now we know that the amygdala is involved in memory; in particular, it is highly activated by any experience or memory that has a strong emotional component.

Every neuroimaging study that my laboratory has done has shown amygdala activation to music, but not to random collections of sounds or musical tones. Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. Repetition, when done skilfully by a master composer, is emotionally satisfying to our brains, and makes the listening experience as pleasurable as it is. Too much organization may technically still be music, but it would be music that no one wants to listen to (scales, for example).

Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations. These violations can occur in any domain - the domain of pitch, timbre, contour, rhythm, tempo, and so on but occur they must. We know through culture and experience that music is not threatening, and our cognitive system interprets these violations as a source of pleasure and amusement.

Hearing a song that you like is a lot like having any other pleasant sensory experience - eating chocolate, fresh-picked raspberries, smelling coffee in the morning, seeing a work of art or the peaceful face of someone you love who is sleeping.

When we perceive something, a particular pattern of neurons fire in a particular way for a particular stimulus. Although smelling a rose and smelling rotten eggs both invoke the olfactory system, they use different neural circuits. Remember, neurons can connect to one another in millions of different ways. One configuration of a group of olfactory neurons may signal “rose” and another may signal “rotten eggs.” To add to the complexity of the system, even the same neurons may have different settings associated with a different event-in-the-world. The act of perceiving then entails that an interconnected set of neurons becomes activated in a particular way, giving rise to our mental representation of the object that is out-there-in-the-world. Remembering may simply be the process of recruiting that same group of neurons we used during perception to help us form a mental image during recollection. We remember the neurons, pulling them together again from their disparate locations to become members of the original club of neurons that were active during perception.

Think for a moment of your third-grade teacher - this is probably something you haven't thought about in a long time, but there it is - an instant memory. If you continue to think about your teacher, your classroom, you might be able to recall some other things about third grade such as the desks in the classroom, the hallways of your school, your playmates. These cues are rather generic and not very vivid. However, if I could show you your third-grade class photo, you might suddenly begin to recall all kinds of things you had forgotten - the names of your classmates, the subjects you learned in class, the games you played at lunchtime. A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience. Neurochemical tags associated with memories mark them for importance, and we tend to code as important things that carry with them a lot of emotion, either positive or negative. Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged; in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to “tag” the memories as something important.

I tell my students if they want to do well on a test, they have to really care about the material as they study it. Caring may, in part, account for some of the early differences we see in how quickly people acquire new skills. Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged; in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to “tag” the memories as something important. If I really like a particular piece of music, I'm going to want to practice it more, and because I care about it, I'm going to attach neurochemical tags to each aspect of the memory that label it as important.

This suggests that practice is the cause of achievement, not merely something correlated with it. It further suggests that talent is a label that we're using in a circular fashion: When we say that someone is talented, we think we mean that they have some innate predisposition to excel, but in the end, we only apply the term retrospectively, after they have made significant achievements.

Although many people say that music lessons didn't take, cognitive neuroscientists have found otherwise in their laboratories. Even just a small exposure to music lessons as a child creates neural circuits for music processing that are enhanced and more efficient than for those who lack training. Music lessons teach us to listen better, and they accelerate our ability to discern structure and form in music, making it easier for us to tell what music we like and what we don't like.

The Reptilian Brain
The cerebellum is the part of the brain that is involved closely with timing and with coordinating movements of the body. The word cerebellum derives from the Latin for “little brain,” and in fact, it looks like a small brain hanging down underneath your cerebrum (the larger, main part of the brain), right at the back of your neck.

The cerebellum has two sides, like the cerebrum, and each is divided into sub regions. From phylogenetic studies - studies of the brains of different animals up and down the genetic ladder - we've learned that the cerebellum is one of the oldest parts of the brain, evolutionarily speaking. In popular language, it has sometimes been referred to as the reptilian brain. Although it weighs only 10% as much as the rest of the brain, it contains 50 to 80% of the total number of neurons. The function of this oldest part of the brain is something that is crucial to music: timing.

In my laboratory we found strong activations in the cerebellum when we asked people to listen to music, but not when we asked them to listen to noise. The cerebellum appears to be involved in tracking the beat.

The frontal lobe - the centre of the most advanced cognitions in humans - is connected directly to the cerebellum, the most primitive part of the human brain. The connections run in both directions, with each structure influencing the other.

Ancestor Emotions
Emotions for our ancient hominid ancestors were a neurochemical state that served to motivate us to act, generally for survival. We see a lion and that instantly generates fear, an internal state - an emotion - that results when a particular cocktail of neurotransmitters and firing rates is achieved. This state that we call “fear” motivates us to stop what we're doing and - without thinking about it - run.

We eat a piece of bad food and we feel the emotion of disgust; immediately certain physiological reflexes kick in, such as a scrunching up of the nose (to avoid letting in a possible toxic odour) and a sticking out of the tongue (to eject the offending food); we also constrict our throat to limit the amount of food that gets into our stomach. We see a body of water after we've been wandering for hours, and we're elated - we drink and the satiety fills us with a sense of well-being and contentment, emotions that cause us to remember where that watering hole is for next time.

Those of our ancestors who were endowed with an emotional system that was directly connected to their motor system could react more quickly, and thus live to reproduce and pass on those genes to another generation.

Our perceptual system is exquisitely tuned to detect changes in the environment, because change can be a signal that danger is imminent. We see this in each of the five senses. Our visual system, while endowed with a capacity to see millions of colours and to see in the dark when illumination is as dim as one photon in a million, is most sensitive to sudden change. An entire region of the visual cortex specializes in detecting motion; neurons there fire when an object in our visual field moves.

We've all had the experience of an insect landing on our neck and we instinctively slap it - our touch system noticed an extremely subtle change in pressure on our skin. And although it is now a staple of children's cartoons, the power of a change in smell - the odour wafting through the air from an apple pie cooling on a neighbour's windowsill - can cause an alerting and orienting reaction in us.

But sounds typically trigger the greatest startle reactions. A sudden noise causes us to jump out of our seats, to turn out heads, to duck, or to cover our ears. The auditory startle is the fastest and arguably the most important of our startle responses. This makes sense: In the world we live in, surrounded by a blanket of atmosphere, the sudden movement of an object - particularly a large one - causes an air disturbance. This movement of air molecules is perceived by us as sound.

Sound is transmitted through the air by molecules vibrating at certain frequencies. These molecules bombard the eardrum, causing it to wiggle in and out depending on how hard they hit it (related to the volume or amplitude of the sound) and on how fast they're vibrating (related to what we call pitch). But there is nothing in the molecules that tells the eardrum where they came from, or which ones are associated with which object. The molecules that were set in motion by the cat purring don't carry an identifying tag that says cat, and they may arrive on the eardrum at the same time and in the same region of the eardrum as the sounds from the refrigerator, the heater, Debussy, and everything else.

3 Problems That All Higher Animals Need To Solve
In order to survive, to find edible food, water, shelter, to escape predators, and to mate, the organism must deal with three scenarios.

First, objects, though in presentation they may be similar, are inherently different. Objects that may create identical, or nearly identical, patterns of stimulation on our eardrums, retinas, taste buds, or touch sensors may actually be different entities. The apple I saw on the tree is different from the one I am holding in my hand. The different violin sounds I hear coming from the symphony, even when they're all playing the same note, represent several different instruments.

Second, objects, though in presentation they may be different, are inherently identical. When we look at an apple from above, or from the side, it appears to be an entirely different object. Successful cognition requires a computational system that can integrate these separate views into a coherent representation of a single object. Even when our sensory receptors receive distinct and non-overlapping patterns of activation, we need to abstract out information that is critical to creating a unified representation of the object. Although I may be used to hearing your voice in person, through both ears, when I hear you over the phone, in one ear, I need to recognize that you're the same person.

The first two are perceptual processes: understanding that a single object may manifest itself in multiple viewpoints, or that several objects may have (nearly) identical viewpoints. The third problem states that objects, although different in presentation, are of the same natural kind. This is an issue in categorization, and it is the most powerful and advanced principle of all. All higher mammals, many lower mammals and birds, and even fish, can categorize. Categorization entails treating objects that appear different as of the same kind. A red apple may look different from a green apple, but they are both still apples.

“The waves themselves are not coloured.”
Newton was the first to point out that light is colourless, and consequently that colour has to occur inside our brains. Since his time, we have learned that light waves are characterized by different frequencies of oscillation, and when they impinge on the retina of an observer, they set off a chain of neurochemical events, the end product of which is an internal mental image that we call colour. What we perceive as colour is not made up of colour. Although an apple may appear red, its atoms are not themselves red.

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth, when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavour sitting in my fridge, only the potential. Similarly, the walls in my kitchen are not white when I leave the room. They still have paint on them, of course, but colour only occurs when they interact with my eyes.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Simply, no. Sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Sound waves impinge on the eardrums, setting off a chain of mechanical and neurochemical events, the end product of which is an internal mental image we call pitch. There can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.

Similarly, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, heat is not made up of tiny hot things.

Dynamic Range - a million to one
The range of loudnesses we can perceive is called the dynamic range. Sometimes critics talk about the dynamic range that is achieved on a high-quality music recording; if a record has a dynamic range of 90 dB, it means that the difference between the softest parts on the record and the loudest parts is 90 dB.

The ratio between the loudest sound we can hear without causing permanent damage and the softest sound we can detect is a million to one, when measured as sound-pressure levels in the air. On the dB scale this is 120 dB.

The digital stream of numbers that starts the MP3 file doesn't give us anything that is readily translated to melody, rhythm, or loudness, and we don't yet know how to make this translation. The brain does this with ease, but no one has invented a computer that can even begin to do this.

Pitch
Pitch is so important that the brain represents it directly; we could place electrodes in the brain and be able to determine what pitches were being played to a person just by looking at the brain activity.

Sound can theoretically be heard for vibrations from just over 0 cycles per second up to 100,000 cycles per second or more, but each animal hears only a subset of the possible sounds. No animal can hear a pitch for every frequency that exists, just as the colours that we actually see are only a small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Humans who are not suffering from any kind of hearing loss can usually hear sounds from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Some frequencies - those below 20 Hz - are inaudible to humans because the physiological properties of our ears aren't sensitive to them.

Timbre
Timbre is more than the different sounds that instruments make. Composers use timbre as a compositional tool; they choose musical instruments - and combinations of musical instruments - to express particular emotions, and to convey a sense of atmosphere or mood.

New musical instruments have been invented so that composers might have a larger palette of timbral colours from which to draw. When a country or popular singer stops singing and another instrument takes up the melody - even without changing it in any way - we find pleasurable the repetition of the same melody with a different timbre.

Composers such as Scriabin and Ravel talk about their works as sound paintings, in which the notes and melodies are the equivalent of shape and form, and the timbre is equivalent to the use of colour and shading; timbre playing a role equivalent to the one that colour does in visual art, separating melodic shapes from one another.

While I believe timbre is now at the centre of our appreciation of music, rhythm has held supreme power over listeners for much longer.

Attack
The introduction of energy to an instrument - the attack phase - usually creates energy at many different frequencies that are not related to one another by simple integer multiples. In other words, for the brief period after we strike, blow into, pluck, or otherwise cause an instrument to start making sound, the impact itself has a rather noisy quality that is not especially musical - more like the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of wood, say, than like a hammer hitting a bell or a piano string, or like the sound of wind rushing through a tube. Following the attack is a more stable phase in which the musical tone takes on the orderly pattern of overtone frequencies as the metal or wood (or other material) that the instrument is made out of starts to resonate. This middle part of a musical tone is referred to as the steady state.

Without the attack, pianos and bells sounded remarkably unlike pianos and bells, and remarkably similar to one another. If you splice the attack of one instrument onto the steady state of another, you get varied results: In some cases, you hear an ambiguous hybrid instrument that sounds more like the instrument that the attack came from than the one the steady state came from, showing the importnce fo the attack.

Radio Waves
Heinrich Hertz was a German theoretical physicist and the first person to transmit radio waves. When asked what practical use radio waves might have, he said, “None”. When radio waves were discovered they weren't called radio waves. The radio had not yet been invented.

Music
The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation. Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higher-level concepts - just as a painter arranges lines into forms - and these include meter, harmony, and melody.

Music appears to mimic some of the features of language and to convey some of the same emotions that vocal communication does. It also invokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward, and emotion. Computational systems in the brain synchronize neural oscillators with the pulse of the music, and begin to predict when the next strong beat will occur. As the music unfolds, the brain constantly updates its estimates of when new beats will occur, and takes satisfaction in matching a mental beat with a real-in-the-world one, and takes delight when a skilful musician violates that expectation in an interesting way - a sort of musical joke that we're all in on. Music breathes, speeds up, and slows down just as the real world does, and our cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized.

// Book of Life // 09.07.15
"The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts." – Bertrand Russell

"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it." – William James

"The secret to humour is surprise." – Aristotle

// Superstition - Believing in Magic // 18.06.15
Superstition is a product of human learning and conditioning. Some of the characteristics that have led to our emergence as the dominant species on earth are the very ones that make us superstitious.

Superstitious behaviour occurs when an important future outcome is unknown. These 'magical' beliefs often reduce the anxiety associated with events that are outside of our control.

Children believe what they are told. Scepticism is an adult characteristic, acquired - if at all - with age. A number of psychological characteristics are at least partially hereditary in nature, including shyness, activity level, introversion or extroversion, and general temperament.

Superstitious beliefs of all kinds are encouraged by a social environment rich in believers. For the detective who wants to predict whether the individual is superstitious or not, the best single piece of information is whether he or she is a member of one of the traditionally superstitious social or occupational subgroups.

Life's Slings and Arrows
We manage to survive the unpredictable and uncontrollable aspects of our lives by avoiding those risks we can avoid, and finding ways to cope with those we cannot. Some achieve this feat with ease. These rationalists and fatalists seem constitutionally equipped to prevail over the indeterminacy of everyday events. They neither seek external support for life's slings and arrows, nor show visible signs of wounding. Still others find explanations in religious faith or personal philosophy. But some people, many of whom are quite sensible about other aspects of their lives, respond to uncertainty with superstitious beliefs or actions.

Anti-Intellectual
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.” - Herman Melville.

Space Invaders
In most contexts it is not acceptable to stand very close to a person who is not a family member or a lover. Crowded subways cars and other congested locations are exceptions to this rule, but in open environments where adequate space is available, people choose to stand a comfortable distance apart. The actual boundary of one's personal space may vary from person to person and across cultures, but most people have a distinct line that, when crossed, causes them some discomfort.

Lest We Not Forget
In many cases, the true nature of events is hidden by a lack of information, making it possible that one's belief may be based on the best evidence available, and still be false.

Phenomenon of the laboratory are far removed from the uncontrolled complexity of the outside world
"This underscores an on-going problem that plagues all of empirical science: the tension between rigorous experimental control and real-world situations. The trade-off is that in achieving one, there is often a compromise of the other. The scientific method requires that we control all possible variables in order to be able to draw firm conclusions about the phenomenon under study. Yet such control often creates stimuli or conditions that would never be encountered in the real world, situations that are so far removed from the real world as not even to be valid. The British philosopher Alan Watts, author of The Wisdom of Insecurity, put it this way: If you want to study a river, you don't take out a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow." - Daniel Levitin

// Theoretical vs Experimental Physics // 08.06.15
"The things we do which are the least important to our survival, are the things which make us the most human."

"And anyway we had something to do." - Particle Fever movie

"I went from negative to positive, and it's all good!" - B.I.G (stop thinking and start acting Breeze)

// Penn Jillette // 13.05.15
When you take something easy and safe and make it look difficult and death-defying, you are a cheesy circus act. When you take something impossible and make it look easy, you're an artist.

I love quiet crowds now; I don't see them as lacking enthusiasm, I see them as paying attention. We've learned that a joke that didn't get a loud laugh might be someone's favourite line.

Reality exists outside of humans. Religion does not.

"Better to be uneducated than educated by your government." – Thomas Jefferson.

You Keep Magic Secret by Making the Secrets Really Ugly
Genius magic designer Jim Steinmeyer said the real secret of magic is that magicians are all guarding an empty safe. There are no real secrets in magic.

It's a cool trick, but the method is ugly. You won't get through two pages before you lose interest. You'll skim over the diagrams. That's what keeps professional magic secrets secret: they're ugly and boring. We do things just the way they have to be done. We sneak things around, we use gaffer's tape, and we lie.

// Plutonomy, we suspect, is elastic // 07.05.15
"When neither their property nor honour is touched, the majority of men live content." - Machiavelli.

But what happens when they lose both? Citigroup advices its clients "not to worry" because "we live in a plutonomy, and the rich are in control". Even if a crisis does occur, they have the economic and political power to deal with it. Their huge economic and political power allows them to act like blacks holes, sucking in all the available recources, leaving none for the rest.

However, "Plutonomy, we suspect is elastic. Concentration of wealth and spending in the hands of a few, probably has its limits."

// The 400 Blows // 02.05.15
"If you're really good at your job, the movie begins long before they get to the theater. And if you're a fucking magician? It never ends, even after the credits roll.” - Harvey Weinstein

// Memoirs of an Addicted Brain // 02.05.15
Sense (Cortex) & Emotion/Meaning (Limbic System)
The Limbic System is a bean-shaped tube called the hippocampus- responsible for memory of facts and events (times and places) - and just ahead of it is the amygdala, which records the emotional colour and intensity of things experienced.

The cortex feeds the limbic system with sensibly organized detail: this is how the world looks and sounds. This is what's going on and here's what can be done about it. Meanwhile, the limbic system has to charge the cortex with meaning: this is what I expect, what I want, what I need. This is what I remember. This is what's important.

All sensory information is coloured with emotion, and that colouring, that meaning, determines what happens next. The amygdala connects forward to the OFC, which elaborates emotional meaning and begins to prepare actions. It connects downward to the hypothalamus, where it fires up ancient response patterns, laid down in the brains of our ancestors at least a couple of hundred million years ago - patterns like the rage response: baring our teeth and thrusting our bodies forward to repel our enemies. It then connects farther down to the brain stem, where the most primitive emotional urges are orchestrated by tissues that go back at least to reptilian times.

A well-functioning brain synchronizes limbic meaning (feeling and familiarity) with cortical sense (our best approximation of reality) in a single, seamless exchange. It starts within a twentieth of a second; meaning, memory, associations, instincts, and impulses ignited from the initial flash of perception. Waves from the spot where the stone hit the water. All before the conscious mind has a chance to figure out what's going on.

"We are governed by two reasoning systems working simultaneously, One is quick, intuitive and unconscious - the kind of reasoning you do when you look into your spouse's face to assess how the bad news you have brought home has been received. The other system is slow, analytical and conscious - the kind required to solve maths problems. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses and everyone uses both kinds of reasoning in different situations. Research shows that superstitious and paranormal views stem from intuitive thinking and suggest that some of women's greater acceptance of the paranormal stems from their adoption of more intuitive and less analytical reasoning styles." - Stuart A. Vyse

Unmoored Meaning: it looked like truth to James and the explorers who followed him
"The keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel.

Only as sobriety returns the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled.” - William James

It looks like truth. It feels like truth. It has that profound gushing certainty that comes when the clouds disperse and the landscape is revealed. But its credentials are highly suspect.

Wanting & Liking
Wanting and liking are distinct psychological states, underpinned by distinct neural processes. Opioids cause liking - the sensation of pleasure or wellbeing - and dopamine produces wanting - the feeling of desire or attraction. Both neurochemicals do much of their job in the ventral striatum, where there are receptors for each, and here in one neat package is the fundamental chemistry of learning, which really means learning what feels good and how to get more of it.

Yet there's a downside: the slippery slope, the repetition compulsion, that constitutes addiction. Addiction may be a form of learning gone bad.

The Brain Controls the Mind (Neurons that Fire Together, Wire Together)
All along the pathways joining the OFC and striatum, the active synapses become strengthened with each cycle, while the synapses standing aside, the wallflowers never asked to join the dance, wither and recede. This process of synaptic sculpting goes on in many parts of the brain, and it's how the brain develops in childhood and adolescence. It's how experience moulds the very circuitry of the brain, how memories are formed, how meaning is encoded, how expectancies are laid down. And it's how the addict's brain, fertilized by the emotional potency of repeated drug experiences, develops, like that of a child, but way too fast, way too conclusively: tightening, rigidifying, becoming more caricatured, through its own relentless action.

This drug isn't chewing gum. It's evolved for centuries, apace with human civilization, because it feels really good. Because it does the job of pain relief, it provides that incomparable warmth of connection, even better than the internal opioids it mimics. That's what's so insidious, so toxic, about addiction. The neural traffic routes get more and more constrained, thanks to the sculpting - the shaping and pruning - of synapses, augmented by dopamine and glutamate, night after night after night, empowered by the emotional potency of the goal - the craving and then the relief, the heights and depths of emotional space.

Synapses used are synapses strengthened; they are the ruts in the garden where rainwater flows, forming deeper and deeper troughs. The congealing and narrowing of synaptic traffic, crisscrossing among the OFC, the amygdala, the VTA, and the ventral striatum, leave less and less choice. There are fewer routes to take with each replay of the fundamental storyline, leading to more repetition, less flexibility; more habit, less choice.

The psychological realities of diminished choice and narrowed interests - those well-known attributes of addiction - are precisely paralleled by the neural reality of reduced flexibility in synaptic traffic patterns. But here's the thing: the brain doesn't really parallel the mind. That would be a misnomer, a poetic approximation. It's the other way around: the mind parallels the brain. The way the brain works - the biological laws of synaptic sculpting and neurochemical enhancement, each reinforcing the other - are what constrict the addict's mind, his behaviour, his hopes, his dreams.

No Fatigue
In doing its routine chores, the brain uses up a fantastic amount of energy - more than the rest of the body combined - and a lot of that energy comes from glucose, or sugar, which is an important source of glutamate and GABA, those work-horse neurotransmitters that carry messages from neuron to neuron. When the dACC has to keep working to control an impulse that keeps recurring, or just won't go away, it uses up its supply of energy. It can't replenish its store of neurotransmitters. It gets tired. Very much like a muscle. Try holding your arm out at your side for half an hour. It's pretty easy for the first five minutes, but it gets harder and harder after that. Just a simple physical action, maintained too long, soon exhausts the resources that made it possible.

Learn to say no in a way that can catch and take hold, and support it with a different view of yourself, so that ego fatigue doesn't leach away all your resolve. Fill your life with meanings rich enough at least to compete with, if not defeat, the well-worn synapses of imagined value. Remind yourself that the imagined value is deceptive - that's the way it works.

Your brain echoes with messages that can inspire victory or defeat, even when they don't come out in words. Those messages can't be eradicated, but you can add other, gentler voices to the mix. And don't give up. The brain loses a great deal of flexibility with addiction, but it doesn't lose it all.

Possibility
You could stay here. It's not so bad this world, with its subtle shadings, its uncertainties, its tiresome regularities. The sting of loneliness is a mere mosquito bite. Or..., just keep walking forward, and something else will come. And then something else.

This world means change, uncertainty, boredom, freedom, and possibility. Yes, possibility. That's the one thing that was entirely missing. There was only necessity, and something far worse: absolute, utter repetition.

Cannabinoids: Self-Amplifying Thought and Perception
Cannabinoids occur naturally in the brain. They are specialized neurotransmitters released by neurons that have only just fired. Normally, neurons take a little break after firing and become unresponsive for a few milliseconds. That's the brain's way of preventing the more vociferous neurons from taking over the party; going on and on after they've already shared their message with the next neuron in line. But cannabinoids interfere with this natural etiquette. They declare, “More of the same!” and enhance with exponential power whatever show is playing at the moment.

Dissociatives
Drugs like ketamine, PCP, angel dust, glue and gasoline, are called dissociatives because they dissociate feelings from reality - meaning from sense. They don't speed you up or slow you down, and they're not physically addictive. They just close down the cortico-limbic bridge so that your limbic system - the centre of meaning in your brain - is no longer tied to the world.

Anhedonia: an Absence of Hedonistic Feeling
No doubt my attachment to drugs had become way too strong, but there were moments of sublime beauty.

I am awash with dopamine and it's gift of connection.

I had perfected my aloneness, and it conferred a sense of purity, a protective shield.

The meeting of pipe and lips, of needle and vain, is the same, or nearly the same, every time. It's the means of getting there that provides the drama.

Sounds good in theory, except for the comedown.

One way or another, whether they are junkies or executives, people take drugs because they're not feeling right. The whole point of taking drugs is to change the way you feel. Which is extremely convenient when the world isn't a nice place to be.

// Irritability // 23.04.15
The complaint against the irritable person is that they are getting worked up over ‘nothing'. But symbols offer a way of seeing how a detail can stand for something much bigger and more serious. Irritations are the outward indications of stifled debates between competing conceptions of existence. The solution is, ideally, to concentrate on what the bigger issue is. Entire philosophies of life stir and collide beneath the surface of apparently petty squabbles.

// Ain't no gift like the present tense // 23.04.15
The prerequisite of calm in a teacher is a degree of indifference as to the success or failure of the lesson. One naturally wants for things to go well, but if an obdurate pupil flunks trigonometry, it is – at base – their problem. Tempers can stay even because individual students do not have very much power over teachers' lives. Fortunately, as not caring too much turns out to be a critical aspect of successful pedagogy.

The real merits of learning a tricky language: that one gets practice in doing things that are difficult (which is an ideal preparation for much of life); that the experience of gradual but real progress is an important one; that cultivating a habit of getting exact about fiddly things (like tenses) is maybe just the training they need to balance out their inclination to be vague.

// Quizás no escuchara // 19.04.15
"If there is a God, atheism must strike him as less of an insult than religion.” - Edmond de Goncourt

// Too much information, too little understanding // 12.04.15
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal

// Surely some revelation is at hand // 09.04.15
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming (1919), William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

// There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all // 04.04.15
"Whatever faults the post-war Government might have, Franco's regime would certainly be worse. To the workers — the town proletariat — it might in the end make very little difference who won, but Spain is primarily an agricultural country and the peasants would almost certainly benefit by a Government victory. Some at least of the seized lands would remain in their possession, in which case there would also be a distribution of land in the territory that had been Franco's, and the virtual serfdom that had existed in some parts of Spain was not likely to be restored. The Government in control at the end of the war would at any rate be anti- clerical and anti-feudal. It would keep the Church in check, at least for the time being, and would modernize the country — build roads, for instance, and promote education and public health; a certain amount had been done in this direction even during the war. Franco, on the other hand, in so far as he was not merely the puppet of Italy and Germany, was tied to the big feudal landlords and stood for a stuffy clerico-military reaction. The Popular Front might be a swindle, but Franco was an anachronism. Only millionaires or romantics could want him to win."

"In such circumstances there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached."

"With every mile that you went northward France grew greener and softer. Away from the mountain and the vine, back to the meadow and the elm. When I had passed through Paris on my way to Spain it had seemed to me decayed and gloomy, very different from the Paris I had known eight years earlier, when living was cheap and Hitler was not heard of. Half the cafés I used to know were shut for lack of custom, and everyone was obsessed with the high cost of living and the fear of war. Now, after poor Spain, even Paris seemed gay and prosperous. And the Exhibition was in full swing, though we managed to avoid visiting it.

And then England - southern England - probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.

The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway- cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen — all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. The End." 1938

George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia

// Lord Jim // 11.03.15
“A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance of everlasting security.”

// Instinct or the Divine Spark of Consciousness // 09.03.15
An animal which lives entirely by instinct can live only in the moment. Although many other species can learn from experience, only human beings can rise above the present moment altogether, to cast their mind's eye forward and back in time, to summon up memories of that which happened in the past, or to imagine events which have not happened. The power of imagination is the ability to create mental images of that which is not present to the physical senses.

When Prometheus steals fire from the gods, what he is really stealing is that divine spark of consciousness which distinguishes humanity from all those other forms of life which live in unconscious thrall to instinct. Yet for all the new freedom this gives, there is a terrible price to be paid, symbolised in the image of Prometheus stretched out in agony on that Caucasian rock, having his liver eaten away every day by the insatiable eagle. It is the state of perpetual nagging discontent which must follow from that most crucial of all the new faculties that ego-consciouness brings with it: the ability to imagine that things might be different from what they are.

Creating Patterns
The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life, set in a framework of order. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution.

From music to painting, architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured.

// Old Timer's One Liners // 19.01.15
"We have nothing to say, except that we have nothing to say." - Samuel Beckett

"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." - Noel Coward

"Men make the eternal error of imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes." - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"As long as man has existed, he has enjoyed himself too little: that alone is our original sin." - Friedrich Nietzsche

// Pursue pleasure and avoid pain // 17.01.15
Convince yourslef of the essential goodness of the human race by turning off the TV and staying at home alone, in the dark.

// Into the small hours... and back into the big ones // 29.01.15
"Este es un país en el que se pone un hombre delante de un toro. Pero póngale un libro y sale huyendo." - Julio Anguita

// Jokes // 12.01.15
"Simulate sex by having a wank while laughing at yourself in the mirror, then hugging a radiator for 8 hours." - Top Twips

"Radiators make excellent house-warming gifts." - Top Twips

"As cinemas are so frightfully loud these days, make sure your ringtone volume is turned all the way up." - Top Twips

"I'm watching Executive Decision with Kurt Russell. He keeps talking and hogging the popcorn though."

"Hitting the snooze button is just starting out your day with a nap." – Bill Murray

Police: How high are you?
Me: No officer, it's 'Hi, how are you?' – Bill Murray

"Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw." - Simon Munnery

"I can't decide if people who wear pajamas in public have given up on life or are living it to the fullest."

The definition of a bore is someone who when you ask him “How are you?” actually tells you.

"Never marry a tennis player. Love means nothing to them."

"Don't die a virgin. Jihadists are up there waiting for you."

"People often ask me the secret to my success. Well, one man asked. Well, it was a face drawn on a balloon. And I think it was taking the piss."

“I don't mean it man. I'm so free of ego you wouldn't even know me from two years ago.” - Breezy

// Your age is the number of times you've been around the sun // 12.01.15
"I'd recently turned 40. More recently than that I'd turned 44."

"Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. By God, do you learn." - C.S. Lewis

"Self-taught? You've got a fool for a student and a fool for a teacher." - Mike Tyson

Cocaine destroys lives; it must be stopped. Alcohol destroys lives; it must be attractively packaged and cleverly marketed.

"In the old days they loved wisdom . . . nowadays they love the title Philosopher." - Kierkegaard

"Wisdom is acting on knowledge." - Russell Brand

"Nicolas Winding Refn; visually amazing, narratively frustrating." - Bret EE

"What matters more than inequality is the extreme disproportion between merits and earning." - Alain de Botton

// Montaigne // 12.01.15
Stupidity is a bad quality, but being unable to bear it, being vexed and fretted by it - as I am - is another disease, hardly less troublesome.

Our conscience must amend itself by the strengthening of our reason, not by the weakening of our appetites.

In conversation, the most painful quality is perfect harmony.

It is impossible to say how much our mind loses and is debased by constant intercourse and association with mean and feeble intellects.

// The Untethered Soul//12.03.14
Since the analytical mind cannot handle the infinite, you created an alternate reality of finite thoughts that can remain fixed within your mind. You have taken the whole, broken it into pieces, and selected a handful of these pieces to be put together in a certain way within your mind. This mental model has become your reality. You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn't fit as wrong, bad, or unfair. If anything happens that challenges how you view things, you fight. You defend. You rationalize. You get frustrated and angry over simple little things. This is the result of being unable to fit what's actually happening into your model of reality.

Your personality traits and behavior patterns are all about avoiding this pain. You avoid it by keeping your weight a certain way, wearing certain clothes, talking a certain way, and choosing a certain hairstyle. Everything you do is about the avoidance of this pain. If you want to validate this, just see what happens if someone mentions your weight or criticizes your clothes: you feel pain. Every time you do something in the name of avoiding pain, that something becomes a link that holds the potential for the pain you're avoiding.

// Master Game // 20.12.14
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. - Freud on religion.

I presume that you have chosen the right moment for this expedition. Every perfect debauch requires perfect leisure. Besides, hashish not only magnifies the individual, but also the circumstance and environment. You much have no duties to accomplish that require punctuality or exactitude, no pangs of love, no domestic preoccupations, grief or anxieties. The memories of duty will sound a death kneel through your intoxication and poison your pleasure. Anxiety will change to anguish, grief to torture. But if the conditions are right and the weather is good, if you are in a favourable environment as in the midst of a picturesque landscape or in a room artistically decorated, if, moreover, you can hope to hear some music, then all's for the best. - Baudelaire.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man. Lo! I show you the last man. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like the ground flea. The last man lives longest. - Nietzsche

It may be asked why one should make great efforts to enter the fourth room when things have been made so easy and pleasant in the third room. For there is no doubt about it; we of the so-called advanced nations live, on the whole, like kings. Better than kings. Not all the wealth of Croesus could have bought him even so common-place an experience as a flight through the air. Nor did all the riches of Egypt suffice to give Cleopatra freedom from the pangs of childbirth. The great ones of antiquity were as prone to pestilence as the meanest of their slaves. Even for the rich, life was dangerous and uncomfortable. For the poor it was one long struggle to keep body and soul together. Things are very different now. Watched over from cradle to grave by a paternalistic government, protected from overwork by unions, from hunger by the bounty of a scientific agriculture, from pestilence by an art of medicine so advanced that all the great plagues of antiquity have been conquered, soothed by tranquilisers or stimulated by anti-depressants, perpetually hypnotized by the unending circuses offered by television, radio, the movies, why should we ask for more? When the third room is comfortable, safe and full of delights, why should we strive to ascend to the fourth? What does it have to offer that the third does not? The answer is of course freedom. Only when he enters the fourth room does a man become free. Man in the third room may think he is his own master, but actually he has no control over his actions. He can not do so much as walk down a street without losing his attention to every stray impression that takes his fancy. Man in the fourth room really is his own master. He knows where he is going, what he is doing, why he is doing it. His secret is that he remains unattached to the results of his activity, measures his success and failures not in terms of outward achievement, but in terms of inner awareness. He is able, as a results of his knowledge of forces at work about him, to know what is possible and what is impossible, what can be achieved and what cannot be achieved. All sort of miraculous achievements are accepted as possible, for man in the third state of consciousness tends to love miracles and to believe all sorts of nonsense that could not possibly happen. In the fourth state of consciousness such naiveté disappears. A man knows what combination of forces can produce what sort of results. He knows everything happens in accordance with certain laws governing the relations of matter and energy. He knows that there is no miracle and anything that appears to be a miracle is merely a manifestation of some rare combination or forces, like the rare combination of skill and knowledge that enabled the master magician Houdini to extricate himself for every form of restraint that was ever applied to him.

There is no such thing as a perfect diet, because the needs of the organism change from day to day, and food intake must be adjusted to balance these needs.

Live unknown. Make your wants few. Fame is a delusion, grandeur a pitiful rag, wealth a mirage, security a will-o-the wisp. He alone is rich who has transcended his personal ego, is no loner deluded by ideas of ‘I' and ‘Mine'. He alone is secure who has created within himself an island which no flood can engulf.

No matter how intensely he practices Creative Psychology, it will no change a person's type. The slender, skinny ectomorph will never become a roly-poly endomorph, nor will the high cerebrotonic, with his love of solitude, hatred of noise and crowds, ever acquire the temperament of a high somatotonic, with his indifference to noise, or a high viserotonic, with his love of company and his gluttonous appetite.

// As You Like It // 17.12.14
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

His acts being seven ages.

1) At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

2) Then, the whining school-boy with his satchel and shining morning face,
Creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

3) And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

4) Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.

5) And then the justice,
In fair round belly, with a good capon lined,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances.

And so he plays his part.

6) The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank
And his big manly voice turning again toward childish treble
Pipes and whistles in his sound.

7) Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

// Middlemarch // 01.12.14
Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.

That mysterious influence of Naming, which determines so much of mortal choice.

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our actions.

Mr Bambridge had open manners and appeared to give forth his ideas without economy. He was loud, robust and sometimes spoken of as being given to to indulgence – chiefly in swearing, drinking and beating his wife. He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore their moderation, and on the whole, flourished like the Green Bay Tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine old tune Drops of Brandy, gave you after a while, a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a slight infusion of Mr Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to several circles in Middlemarch, and he was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard rooms. In short, Mr Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.

‘The theatre of all my actions is fallen' said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

It seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama, a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life – the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it – can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Party is Nature too; and you shall see
By the force of Logic how they both agree:
The Many in the One, the One in Many;
All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any.

What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Let the music - which can take possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us - sound once more. What does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its absence.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death – who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of water upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace ‘We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die – and soon' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moments of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

You must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it for play to begin.

With a favour to ask, we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offences, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might be have been, is half owing to the number of people who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. - George Elliot

// Secret Life of Words // 04.11.14
English has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages. Borrowings have their origins in political or diplomatic moments and testify at a more profound level to a social, cultural or economical motive. Nowhere in Britain is more than 70 miles from the sea. As a result there is much nautical vocabulary in the English language.

“It is usage which regulates the laws and conventions of speech.” - Horace. Usage is what makes words live and usage will always prevail over theory.

Often we have three terms for the same thing - one Anglo Saxon, one French and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo Saxon word is typically a neutral one, the French word connotes sophistication and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion. Consider for example rise, mount and ascend, or go, depart and exit. In each case the first word has an Anglo Saxon source and is informal, the second is French and comparatively formal, while the third is Latin and suggests something more specialised or technical. One of the strengths of English is that it affords its speakers choices of this kind. The different levels of sophistication allow us greater precision, and even is if our exact wording is not consciously achieved, it reveals our attitudes, self-image and purpose.

After the Norman conquest, ‘Those who fought used French, those who worked used English, and those who prayed used Latin.' By the end of the 20 century the status of French was closer to that of Latin - a language of administration, culture and learning, but not common in daily speech. In the wake of the conquest, even as French became the language of power, ‘Old English phrases, syntax and idioms remained the expressive baseline of the land'.

“And who in time knows whether we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?” - Samuel Daniel 1603

Today there are around 6,900 different, mutually unintelligible natural languages. A mere 11 of these account for the speech of more than half of the world's population. These are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese and English. Realistically, 50 years from now the worlds ‘big' languages may be just six: Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic and English. The last two of these are distinguished by having significant numbers of non-native speakers.

96% of the world's languages are spoken by 4% of it's inhabitants, and four fifths in only one country.

English is the world's most wide-spread language. It tops the list as it occupies a dominant position in so many fields. Among these are diplomacy, trade, shipping, the entertainment industry and youth culture. English is the lingua franca of computing and technology, of science and medicine. Its position is prominent, if not dominate, in education, international business and journalism. It is the working language of the Untied Nations. It holds sways in scholarly research and publications. English language teaching is less a branch of pedagogy that a fully-developed industry, and there are other, less glamorous areas of dominance; when you are on a place, the safety instructions will always be relayed in English, and English is used right across the globe as the language of air traffic control.

Once upon a time you might have learnt English so that you could read its literature, digest the heady ideas contained within its scientific volumes, or follow the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Today however, leaners of English are more concerned with commerce, fashion and the entertainment industry. It is a language of material, not spiritual aspiration.

American English and British English are adjacent parts of the big continuum of the intelligibility known simply as English.

Languages become ‘great 'not because of any inherent qualities they may be deemed to have, but because of the political, military and intellectual force behind them.

// Queen Elizabeth I: Speech to the Troops at Tilbury (August 1588) // 16.09.14
"I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field."

This speech to the troops at Tilbury was delivered on 19 August 1588 by Queen Elizabeth I of England to the land forces assembled at Tilbury in Essex in preparation for repelling the expected invasion by the Spanish Armada.

// The English and their Manners // 02.04.14
Evelyn Waugh said that ‘manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.' The trouble is we all think we're pretty now - or deserve to be. We're surrounded by images that encourage us to believe that the way we look is our most important feature. They sap our self-worth and we react with a paroxysm* (*a sudden outburst of activity or emotion) of exaggerated confidence, or a noisy sense of entitlement. Who needs to be empathetic when you can be omnipotent? But behind this apparent shamelessness are flickers of self-disgust and boredom, as well as a persistent feeling of being unfulfilled.

"If we do not control our desires, they control us." - Henry Hitchings

Good Form
“The mind is frayed and crushed by continual reminders of service rendered. Your service, if I recall it at my pleasure, is life to me. If I do it at yours, it is death.” - Seneca

Alone Together
People who pierce the skin of our privacy are regarded not just with distaste, but with violence.

Debrett's' Etiquette and Modern Manners states that an essential part of civilized living is ‘every person's right to privacy, even in public.' Consequently ‘distracting behaviour of any kind - speaking loudly, shouting in the street, excessive gesticulation, whistling, singing, playing radios, or arguing - breaches good manners'.

The idea that each of us should do what makes us feel comfortable, does not result in other people's comfort, and hardly seems to improve our own.

Teasing the sweet fibres of our narcissism
Charm and irritation work in the same way, by teasing the sweet fibres of our narcissism. The capacity to be charming and the capacity to irritate occupy the same space in people. Both give them power over the other's moods. The flipside of instant intimacy is instant hostility.

The Paradox of Laxity
Today we are obliged to be relaxed. We are constrained to be unconstrained. Casualness is mistaken for fairness. There is a self-consciousness about this relaxedness: when someone professes to be chilling, the mood is often not so sedate.

Our understanding of all behaviour is tied to location. Our very sense of self is positional; when I think of myself, it is not as a dislocated entity, but as being in a place. The ways we express our psychological and emotional states are similar to the ways we express physical ones. The language we use for our everyday activities and feeling is suffused with in and out, up and down, here and there. Principal among these is in. We have a consistent sense of being located in space and in time.

Ours is a fearful age...
Familiar threats replaced in part by nebulous anxieties; the belief that changes in every area of life are speeding-up, and that threats are all around us - in the food we eat, the air we breathe, the sun and the soil.

Decline is something we are always noticing...
When we talk about decline, we praise a state of affairs for which we would never have expected to feel such affection. Declinism is the dark side of nostalgia, homesickness for a place we never really loved.

Long historical perspectives are not usually available to us, so the comparisons we make are confident but historically dubious. We regard ourselves as good at identifying excess and deficit; someone is drinking or eating too much. We fancy that we know what the right amount of these things is, yet the right amount is something rarely appreciated when not present.

According to Steven Pinker, society has become so peaceful that we can relax the mannerly inhibitions that were once necessary to curb violence. Lots of people may look edgy and bohemian, rebellious and dysfunctional, but they are just experimenting with style and roles, and on investigation they turn out to lead pretty conventional lives. What pessimists see as evidence of a deep social malaise can instead be interpreted as evidence of society's comfortableness. The fact that woman shows a lot of skin, or a man swears in public, is not a sign of cultural decay, but that the society they live in is so civilised they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.'

// Silas Marner // 12.03.14
“The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in the logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.” - George Elliot

// Oxytocin // 09.02.14
“When you have an orgasm your brain pumps out the attachment chemical oxytocin, heightening feelings of closeness. In fact semen itself contains oxytocin, which is thought to have an effect on women's post-coital moods.”

Neurons that fire together, wire together
“The theory here is that the brain is similar to a ski slope; the more times you perform an activity in the same way, the deeper the rut you carve in your brain. “ – A.J Jacobs

// You are old, Father William // 09.02.14
"You are old, Father William" the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white,
And yet you incessantly stand on your head
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

“In my youth” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain,
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth “as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat,
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door
Pray, what is the reason for that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
“I kept all my limbs very supple,
By the use of this ointment – one shilling a box;
Allow me to sell you a couple?”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak
Pray how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose;
What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions and that is enough”
Said his father; “don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!” - Lewis Carroll, 1865

// From polar bears in the North to penguins in the South // 04.02.14
“Good literature is writing I want to remember - not for its content alone, as one might want to remember a computer manual - but for itself; those particular words in that particular order.” – John Carey

// We are all actors I suppose // 28.01.14
It seems to be a human need, because it is a human universal, to tell stories about human experience. There are may reasons for this apart from the entrainment value. We watch or read tales about lives like or unlike our own, to understand ourselves better, to understand other possibilities better, and sometimes to escape both.

The acting of roles comes naturally in ordinary life, because ordinary life demands it. It helps to know this so that one can be prepared not just to play one's part when required, but to act a part if required too. Thinking of a person as a troupe of actors explains much. It explains the difficulty each individual has in defining a sense of self, at least until the members of the trope have each had their turn on life's stage. It explains the mistake in thinking that there is a royal route (psychotherapy for example) which could help one to find the truth about oneself, for it shows that there are many routes to many truths about oneself, and at least several of them have to be travelled before the relation between those truths can be understood. And it explains why when instructed to be yourself, it is so hard to comply.” - A.C Grayling

// Tyson // 22.01.14
“Going to Mecca and Median was an amazing experience. I got closer to my faith but in some ways I was putt off by the actions of some my brother Muslims. When I go there they immediately started broadcasting my visit to show off that Islam was a better religion that Christianity or the rest of the religions. It wasn't about me becoming a better person, it was more like, ‘We've got the mighty Mike Tyson making hajj here'. They didn't care about me as a person, they just cared about their publicity agenda. I was just a dumb nigga being used, that's all I've ever been all my life.”

“I was in a state of harmony, I was so harmonious.”

// An Evening with Cary Grant // 15.01.14
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even me.” - Cary Grant

// Shockaholic // 13.01.14
“I am not a stupid person. I am a fairly intelligent person who does stupid things. Incredibly stupid things. I can't defend it. I can explain it till the end of time, but that still doesn't make it excusable. And I do it knowing full well how painful it is to have a parent unable to resist the impulse to get consistently altered. Altered and unavailable.”

“To be a feast for an army of snacking eyes requires devoting enormous chunks of your time to denying yourself on the one hand, and forcing yourself on the other.” - Carrie Fisher

// Moral Disorder // 11.01.14
"She drove us briskly through the curriculum as if herding sheep, heading us off from false detours and perilous cliff edges, nipping at our heels when we slowed down in the wrong places, making us linger in the right ones so we could assimilate the material of importance."

"Why should I care about being shut out of the Noah's ark of coupledom – in effect a glorified zoo, with locks on the bars and fodder dished out at set intervals. I wouldn't allow myself to be tempted; I'd keep my distance; I'd stay lean and wolf-like and skirt the edges. I would be a creature of the night, in a trench coat with the collar turned up, pacing between streetlights, my heels making an impressively hollow and echoing sound, casting a long shadow before me, having serious thoughts about topics of importance."

"As any bank robber will tell you, the best thing to do when running away is not to run. Just walk. Just stroll. A combination of ease and purposefulness is desirable. Then no one will notice you're running. Leave everything behind you except what is in your pockets. Lightest is best." - Margret Atwood

// The Goldfinch // 31.12.13
“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become dugished to ourselves.” - François de la Rochefoucauld

“Stay away from the ones you love too much, those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a women who has her own life and let's you have yours.”

Be Yourself
“From William Blake to Rousseau it is a curiously uniform message. How do we know what is right for us? Every head-shrinker, public speaker and Disney Princess knows the answer: be yourself. Follow your heart.

But what if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted? What if the heart, for it's own unfathomable reasons, leads one wilfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility, strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues, and instead towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self immolation and disaster?

If your deepest self is signing and coaxing you straight towards the bonfire, is it better to turn away, stop your ears with wax and set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm; reasonable hours, regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and sturdy career advancement, the New York Times and branch on Sunday, all with the promise of somehow being a better person? Or is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage that is calling your name?

// Slow // 29.12.13
"What we do with our spare time gives texture, shape and meaning to our lives." - Carl Honore

"It is in his leisure that a man really lives. It is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self." - Agnes Repplier

Plato believed that the highest form of leisure was to be still and receptive to the world. Franz Kafka put it this way: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

Unified field theory: a secret about a secret
"Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled. It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged."

// Feynman's Rainbow // 30.11.13
“The creative mind has a vast attic. That homework problem you did in college, that intriguing but seemingly pointless paper you spent a week deciphering, that offhand remark of a colleague, all are stored in hope chests somewhere up in a creative person's brain, often to be picked through and applied by the subconscious at the most unexpected moments.” – Leonard Mlodinow

“The germ of future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly... if the soil is ready.” – Tchaikovsky

“Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” – Mary Shelly

“There is nothing we imagine which we do not already know, and our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.” - Stephen Spender

“Physicists separated in time - like Einstein and Newton - are as much part of my community as physicist friends who live elsewhere. We are all members of a noble society, each contributing whatever bricks we can to the edifice of theoretical physics.”

// Empty TV // 06.11.13
"You have to get over your own need for reassurance and resist the comfort zone of knowing that you're only doing what others have done or are doing around you. Innovation can't work like that." - Julian Assange

// Football Wisdom // 01.11.13
If a cat can fit its head through, it can fit through. - Jon Gruden

// Tim Burgess // 01.11.13
City-centre nightclubs are little more than weekend hunting grounds.

I don't know what it is exactly, but whatever it is, accountants can definitely tax it, merchandise it and take a percentage.

// Man on the Run // 13.10.13
There was too much material, and yet not enough of it to gel into a cohesive album." - Tom Doyle

// India Rising // 03.10.13
TV is engineered primarily for minds to vegetate, not cogitate.

A sparse, square room, it is decorated with a bachelor's eye for functional furniture and foreign-made electronics. - Oliver Balch

// Speak to us of love // 04.09.13
“I used to look on love with feverish joy or childish fondness.
All madness or folly, though delight.
Thou hast shown me it rational, pure from evil
How keen the fire that thus clears the dross from the most precious ore.”

James Boswell to Margret Caroline Rudd.

// Quantum Physics For Poets // 02.09.13
“See a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in a hour.” - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

The Fast & The Small
NASA relies on and encodes Newton's laws into its computer programs to predict the complex orbits for it planetary satellites. Students apply these laws to mechanical, civil and architectural engineering. These laws make space travel possible and allow us to design bridges, skyscrapers, automobiles and aircraft. They have enabled modern civilisation to become the thriving, multifarious complexity it is. So what is wrong with Newton's theory? Simple; despite 300 years of satisfied customers, the Newtonian system fails in two domains; the domain of huge velocities (things approaching the speed of light) and the domain of the very small (the scale of the atom).

Newton's theory of gravity is ultimately only an approximation, residing in the domain of small velocities of motion compared to the speed of light. General relativity correctly accounts for the residual anomalies in planetary motion, such as the fact that Mercury's perihelion advances about one and a half degrees per century. General relativity also correctly predicted the bending, lensing, and colour shifting of starlight as it passes or leaves gravitational objects. General relativity applies to the universe as a whole and correctly predicts that is should be expanding, that space is being created.

General relativity explains gravity as a curvature, bending, or warping of the geometry of space-time. The curvature of space is being produced by the presence of matter, by its mass and energy. Once the curvature of space is established by matter then objects in motion simply “free fall” along geodesics through curved space-time. A space shuttle in orbit about Earth is simply experiencing free fall, where space-time is warped by the presence of Earth, causing the circular orbital motion. Free fall, according to Einstein, is indistinguishable for being out in empty uncurved space, so this produces weightlessness. The curvature of space around the sun is due to the mass of the sun and produces curved geodesics* in space and time in it's vicinity. The planets move on the geodesics, essentially free falling through the curved space. The curvature causes the geodesics to become the elliptical orbits of the planets, with tiny relativistic corrections that have been correctly and calculated and measured. Planets in orbits seeming to feel a force of attraction to the sun are actually in free fall in a curved space-time that is produced by the sun.

Note that the curvature of space-time causing free fall along a geodic is a purely geometrical concept and doesn't incorporate any inertial mass – m – of the moving particle in Newton's f=ma. The moving particle's mass must – and does – cancel out in the formula for the planet's orbit. The principle of Equivalence – that all objects move the same way due to gravity irrespective of their mass (recall Galileo: a heavy object and a light object fall at the same rate to the ground) happens automatically in general relativity.

Another astounding consequence of this, unanticipated by Newton's theory, is that light – made of massless photons – must also move along geodesics. Light is therefore influenced by gravity. That a light beam, grazing our sun on it's way to a telescope on Earth would be deflected by the sun's gravitation was a key prediction of the general theory of relativity. The crucial predication – that starlight, travelling on a geodesics, would be bent by the sun was confirmed by observations of solar eclipses in 1919 and established General relativity as scientific fact.

* Geodesics
Airplanes navigate the globe by following geodesic, since they are the shortest-distance paths between two airports. To find the geodesic between two points on the globe, stretch a piece of string across the globe's surface. Over short distances the string makes an approximately straight line, but for large distance it is seen to be a curved geodesic.

Your twin brother taking a trip to Alpha Centauri at nearly the speed of light will return to find you have aged 8 years while he has aged a mere two weeks.

Thermal Equilibrium
All objects radiate energy and also absorb energy from their surroundings. (By object we mean something big or ‘macroscopic', something that is composed of perhaps many billions of atoms.) The higher the temperature of an object the greater the amount of energy it radiates. Hot objects come into a balance eventually between the amount of energy they are radiating outward and the amount they are absorbing inward. This ultimate balance is called thermal equilibrium. A particularly hot spot within an object will cool down to its surroundings while a particularly cool spot will warm up. When we reach thermal equilibrium, all parts of the object will have the same temperate. At that point, equivalent parts (which we can think of as individual sub objects) are radiating and absorbing energy between one another at the same rate.

Periodic table
Pauli's exclusion principle* controls the way heavier and heavier atoms fill up their electron orbitals and this simple rule allows us to build up the elements of the periodic table and understand their chemical properties.

* Exclusion Principle (1925)
To prevent electrons from excessively over crowding the 1S orbital, Wolfgang Pauli proposed the ‘exclusion principle' - no two electrons in an atom can be in the same quantum state simultaneously. The wave function for two identical electrons to be in the same quantum state is zero – the ultimate repelling force. Such situations are excluded, as if there were a strong repulsive force.

This prevents us from walking through walls. Why? The electrons in your body are not allowed to occupy the same state as the electrons in the wall; they must be separated by lots of great open spaces. Now we can begin to see why we cannot sink our hands through a table even though the matter – the orbitals of atoms – is about 99 per cent empty space. The electrons in your body can not penetrate the ‘wall' atoms because they are ruled by Pauli's exclusion principle; the prohibition against having electrons too close together.

Wave Function
Particles are a good hypothesis of what light is since they can carry energy. Particles can scatter, that is, be reflected by surfaces, they can induce chemical reactions, but they must also have some kind of an internal structure that generates colour.

Newton said that a particle should be described by stating where it is in space, x, at time, t. This is a trajectory, or a mathematical function called x(t). The actual trajectory that the particle takes is then determined by solving Newton's equation of motion. But Schrodinger et al used quantum physics to descried it in completely different way; a particle does not take a definitive path, rather a particle is described by a wave function that gives us the quantum amplitude, and the square of the amplitude is the probability that the particle will be at position x at time t.

Atomic particles need not have definitive values for their quantum properties until they are measured. One member of Bohr's research group, Pascual Jordan, proposed that the measurement act not only disturbs the particle but actually forces it into one of its various distinct possibilities. “We ourselves produce the result of the measurement” he said. The act of measurement forces a system into a definite state and place at a given time. In mathematical language the initial mixed wave function “collapses” into a precise state.

All this is encapsulated in the quantum wave function, which describes all we can say about a given particle. From the wave function you can get the probability of finding the particle in a given place.

Feynman gave us the answer: the wave function is just the sum of all the possible paths the particle could take in getting to x at time t.

Sons of Gods
"Quantum phenomena challenge our primitive understanding of reality; they force us to re-examine what the concept of existence means. These things are important because our belief about what is must affect how we see our place within it. What we believe we are ultimately affects what we actually are, and how we behave.” - E.J Squires

"So irrelevant is the philosophy of quantum mechanics to its its use that one begins to suspect that all the deep questions are really empty." – Steven Weinberg

The mind does appear in quantum science when we make measurements. The observer (a mind) always interferes with the system being observed. One may well ask whether this requires understanding of how human consciousness fits into the physical world. Does the mind-body problem connect with quantum science? For all our recent progress in understanding how the brain encodes, processes information and controls behaviour, a deep mystery remains; how do these physiochemical activities develop an ‘inner' or subjective life? How do they generate what it is like to be you?

Computers v Cars
Gordon Moore enunciated in Moore's Law that the number of transistors on chip doubles every 24 months. If automotive technology had progressed as rapidly as computers have over the past 30 years, a car would weigh 60g, cost $40, have about a cubic mile of luggage space and use only a gallon of gasoline to travel one 1 million miles in one hour.

// Stuff Matters // 05.08.13
On Earth, 94 different types of atom naturally exist, but eight of these elements make up 98.8% of the mass of the Earth: iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulphur, nickel, calcium and aluminium. The rest are technically trace elements, including carbon.

The Age of Silicon
We are one of the first generations who have not had to taste their cutlery.

The fact that we still wipe our bums with paper, despite the invention of numerous other more hygienic and more effective ways to perform this most smelly and visceral act, still amazes me. The global wiping of bottoms requires the cutting down and processing of 27,000 trees every day. That the paper is used only once and then disposed of down the drain seems a terrible end to the lives of so many trees.

‘Nano' mean ‘a billionth' and this world of the nanoscale features things that are roughly a billion times smaller than us. This is the scale of macromolecules, where tens and hundreds of atoms get together to form much larger structures. These include the proteins and fats in our bodies.

// Big Brother // 31.07.13
All before pictures seem serene only in retrospect.

Having nursed my loves in private, I had kept them inviolate (safe from injury or violation), and was now spared looking back at a string of deranged entrancements with mortified incredulity.

Fame
This pervasive craving to be recognised as someone special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that ‘feeling special' was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.

An oblivious aspic of apathy
Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you when they didn't? I adored the fortification of proper strangers, whose blithe disinterest constituted a form of protection, a soft, oblivious aspic (a savoury gelatine) of apathy in which I could hide, like a square of fruit cocktail in strawberry Jell-O. How raw and exposing instead to be surrounded by strangers who want something for you, who believe that they not only know, but own you. I couldn't imagine why you'd want droves of nit-pickers to comment on your change of hairstyle, to regard everything from your peculiar furniture to the cellulite in your thighs as their business. For me, nothing was more precious than the ability to walk down the street unrecognized, or take a seat in a restaurant and be left in peace.

A pale tide of dilute well-meaningness
The more carefully planned a single occasion the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Events are swallowed up by planning on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened. I'm not sure what the problem is, besides a species-wide incapacity to seize the day, or a universal inability to anticipate that standing around with a drink in your hand is never going to be that great. Yet once a while the stars align, and a company convened for a purpose will all be fully present.

// Speak to us of Love // 31.07.13
“Once again Eros looks at me meltingly from under his dark eyelids, and with all his enchantments flings me into the inescapable nets of Aphrodite.” – Ibycus

// The Examined Life // 24.07.13
“Where they love they do no desire and where they desire they cannot love.” - Freud.
Better would be: “Where they love they cannot desire. Where they desire they do not love.”

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
We all have a cheering voice that says, ‘Let us start now, right away' and an opposing, negative voice that responds, ‘I would prefer not to'.

// Jim Morrison // 22.07.13
“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes.” - William James

“I enjoy drinking. It loosens people up and stimulates conversation. Somehow it's like gambling; you go out for a night of drinking and you don't know where you'll end up the next morning. It could be good, it could be a disaster. It's a throw of the dice; the difference between suicide and slow capitulation.” - Jim Morrison

A feeling that things were on the brink of lost control.

“I can construct a universe within the skull to rival the real.” - Jim Morrison

Paradise Now: 5 key, cathartic phrases
1: “I am not allowed to travel without a passport. I cannot move about at will. I am separated from my fellow man by boundaries set arbitrarily by others.”

2: “I don't know how to stop the wars.”

3: “You can't live if you don't have money.”

4: “I'm not allowed to smoke marijuana.”

5: “I'm not allowed to take my clothes off. We are ashamed of what is most beautiful.”

The gates of paradise are closed to me!!

// Free Tibet (with every purchase) // 22.07.13
“Be wise, pour the wine, and, since life is short,
Hold back from long-term dreams. While we're
speaking, jealous time is fleeing:
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in
tomorrow.” - Odes, Horace.

// The Symposium // 12.07.13
I take an extraordinary pleasure in talking, and in hearing others talk, on philosophical topics; but any other type of conversation - and particularly the talk of you rich business men - fills me with stress on my own account, and with pity for those of you who are with me, because you think that you are accomplishing something, when in fact you are accomplishing nothing.

To good men's parties good men flock unasked
My medical experience has convinced me that drunkenness is bad for people; and I should be very unwilling either to drink at all deeply myself, or to recommend such a course to anyone else, especially anyone who still had a hang-over from the previous day.

Platonic Love
It is not Love absolutely that is good or praiseworthy, but only that Love which impels men to love right. There can be no doubt of the common nature of the Love which goes with Common Aphrodite; it is quite random in the effects which it produces, and it is this love which the baser sort of men feel. Its marks are, first, that it is directed towards women quite as much as young men; second, that in either case it is physical rather than spiritual; third, that it prefers that its objects should be as unintelligent as possible, because its only aim is the satisfaction of its desires, and it takes no account of the manner in which this is achieved.

The truth of the matter I I believe to be this. There is no absolute right and wrong in love, but everything depends upon the circumstances; to yield to a bad man in a bad way is wrong, but to yield to a worthy man in a right way is right. The bad man is the common or vulgar lover, who is in love with the body rather than the soul, he is not constant because what he loves is not constant; as soon as the flower of physical beauty, which is what he loves, begins to fade, he is gone “even as a dream”, and all his professions and promises are as nothing. But the lover of a Nobel nature remains its lover for life, because the thing to which he cleaves is constant. The object of our custom then is to subject lovers to a thorough test; it encourages the lover to pursue and the beloved to flee, in order that the right kind of lover may in the end be gratified and the wrong kind eluded; it sets up a kind of competition to determine to which kind lover and beloved respectively belong. This is the motive which lies behind our general feeling that two things are discreditable, first to give in quickly to a lover - time, which is the best test of most things, must be allowed to elapse - and second, to give in on account of his wealth or power, either because one is frightened and cannot hold out under the hardships which he inflicts, or because one cannot resist the material and political advantages which he confers; none of these things is stable or constant, quite apart from the fact that no noble friendship can be founded upon them.

During the period for which any living being is said to live and to retain his identity - as a man, for example, is called the same man from boyhood to old age - he does not in fact retain the same attributes, although he is called the same person; he is always becoming a new being and undergoing a process of loss and reparation, which affects his hair, his flesh, his bones, his blood, and his whole body. And not only his body, but his soul as well. No man's character, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, and fears remain the always the same; new ones come into existence and old ones disappear.

Anyone who sets out to the listen to Socrates talking will probably find his conversation utterly ridiculous at first.... but if a man penetrates within and sees the content of Socrates' talk exposed, he will find that there is nothing but sound sense inside.

The Republic
Shall we not reasonably plead that the genuine lover of learning has a natural tendency to strive towards true being, and does not remain among the multiplicity of particular things which men believe to be real?

// The Hemlock Cup // 22.06.13
A direct democracy is ideologically perfect, but in practice flawed. Why believe the outcome of a political process will be communal order and justice? Socrates had the kind of questing intelligence that challenged the value of absolute democracy. He was the child of a child-like political system and no one knew yet where this democratic experiment would lead.

“It is easier to persuade 30,000 to act than it is one, easier to deceive a multitude than one man.” - Herodotus

“Either you shouldn't have children or you should share in their lives by nurturing and educating them completely.” - Plato.

Man's basic needs, as well as his more elevated tastes, must be catered for.

Great works may come a from great strength, but they neither represent nor guarantee it.

S: By Hera, it is a charming resting place.
PHAEDRUS: You are an amazing and most remarkable person, for you really do seem like a stranger who is being guided about, and not like a native.
In this particular line in one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates drinks in the delights of the banks of the Ilissos as if it is new to him, suggesting that the clear-sighted are noted for looking on the world everyday as if with new eyes.

“I am a fiend for exercise.” - Socrates

Lucky the lover who gets a workout when he arrives home, sleeping all day with a beautiful boy.

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body, but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

The philosopher must have been every seller's nightmare. In his ragged cloak he mocked those who sought out gewgaws for themselves. “How many things I don't need” he says as he marches along barefoot through the irrelevant market stalls.

S: Where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases.
Clearly.
S: Then in this kind of state, there will be the greatest variety of human natures.
There will.
S: This then, seem likely to be the fairest of States, being an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.

Socrates said he would travel to the end of the Earth for human company. His credo was that we cannot be wise and utterly alone. The further we quest for knowledge, the more human companionship we need. Ignorance is evil, knowledge is good. If we know (and admit) what is good, we will enact it. And we do that not by shutting ourselves away from the world, but by engaging with it, by taking it on, warts and all.

In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras, Socrates offers good advice: we need to know what it is that we are scared of. Courage is knowledge of what is and is not truly to be feared. Our inability to distinguish between real and perceived threat is of course what every terrorist, then and now, plays upon.

“Our anxieties quickly diminish if we take the time to think them through.” – Epicurus

“Wealth that is more than natural is nothing more than an overlapping container.” – Epicurus

”I hate a drinking companion with a memory.” – at the Athenian Symposium

Aristotle recommends 37 as the prime age to get hitched. Brides were usually around 14 or so.

”The creeping humiliations of old age.” - Homer

”I go to die and you to live, who knows which is the better journey.” - Socrates

// The $12 Million Stuffed Shark // 20.06.13
Art has the greatest impact when it makes the thinking part of the brain talk to the feeling part. Great work speaks clearly, while more trivial work does what critics call ‘going dead'. The experienced art collector will take a work home before buying it, to look at it several times a day. The question is whether a week or a month hence, after the novelty disappears, the message and the painter's skill will still be apparent.

85% of new contemporary art is bad. Most of the art world would agree on the percentage, but disagree on how any particular work should be ranked.” - Jerry Saltz

A work offered in a prestigious evening auction at Christies or Sotheby's will bring an average 20% more than the same work auctioned the following day in a less prestigious sale. ‘Evening Sale' adds value.

“We sneer at Hirst, his dealers and collectors for having bad taste and bad values; they scoff at us for being old-fashioned, out-of-the-money sourpusses. We all tell ourselves what we already know.” - Jerry Saltz

When you visit museums and galleries, do no expect to like very much of the contemporary art you see, and don't be put off by disliking everything in a show. Everyone dislikes most of what they see. There is an art-world saying that you have to see hundreds of works you don't like before you being to understand what you do. According to MoMA the average patron looks at a work of art for 7 seconds. When you enter an art gallery, look around and think ‘If I were going to steal one, which one would it be?' Once you have circled the room, come back and spend 30 seconds looking at the object of your criminal lust and try to understand why you chose it. Don't look at new art for more than 30 minutes at a time. You cannot absorb that many images and still make judgments.

What sells?
A portrait of an attractive woman or a child will do better than that of an older woman or unattractive man. Warhol's Orange Marilyn brings 20 times the price of his equal-sized Richard Nixon. Colours matter. Some claim the grading from most saleable to least is red, white, blue, yellow, green and black. Except when it comes to Warhol, when green moves up. Green is the colour of money. Bright colours do better than pale colours. Horizontal canvases do better than vertical ones. Nudity sells for more than modesty and female nudes for much more than males. Figurative works do better than landscapes. Still lifes with flowers are worth more than ones with fruit, and roses are worth more than chrysanthemums. Calm water adds value (Monet's Water Lilies), rough water lowers prices. Pure bred dogs are worth more than mongrels and racehorses more than cart horses. For paintings which include game birds, the more expensive it is to hunt the bird, the more the bird adds to the value of a painting; a grouse is worth three times as much as a mallard. Paintings with cows never do well. Never.

“Originality is the art of remembering ing what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” - L. J. Peter (The Peter Principle)

“There's no such thing as 'great art', only art that works well for you.” - Alain de Botton

// Sacred Balance // 27.05.13
Explaining the internet to my cat
Einstein was asked one day, ‘Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?' ‘It would be possible, but it would make no sense' he replied. ‘It would be description without meaning; as if you'd described a Beethoven symphony as variations in air pressure'.

Must be deep
Science is a journey that gets longer with every step we take, each discovery merely revealing the magnitude of our ignorance.

Air (and how long you'd survive without it)
Once we have restored the breath of life to its rightful primacy - the first above all other human rights and responsibilities, the reference point from which all decisions flow - we can start to work in the long term to retrieve an ancient equilibrium.

Like the creation of soil, feeding is a mater of taking things apart in order to put other things together. You might think of digestion as a version of ‘weathering'. We perform heroic acts of physical and chemical weathering on our food stuffs to break them down for use in our own vital processes. Most of the (extremely complex) process of absorbing food is done by reflex, without conscious thought. Like breathing, eating is so central to our existence that our bodies are designed to bypass the conscious mind and get on with the job.

Civilised man has marched across the face of the Earth and left a desert in his footprints.

A one-time only gift
For most of its history our species has burned animal fat, dung, straw and wood as fuel. Coal has been used for a few centuries, oil and gas are new fuels, in use only since the Industrial Revolution. In this brief period we have become utterly dependent on fossil fuels, consuming them on a global scale. Yet they are the result of a long process in Earth's history, a legacy of countless generations of life that flourished and died with energy stored in the molecules of their bodies. It took hundreds of millions of years for this energy to accumulate and cook into coal, gas and oil, and during all that time these substances have been keeping carbon out of circulation, helping to balance the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Now, in a flicker of an eyelash relatively speaking, the work of ages is being undone.

Diversity confers resilience, adaptability and the capacity for regeneration
Life and death are a balanced pair. It is a strange irony that death has been a critical instrument in the perseveration of life. Humanity's age-old dream of eternal life, if ever realised, would lock any species into an evolutionary straight jacket, eliminating the flexibility required to adapt to the planet's ever changing conditions. By allowing adaptive changes to arise in successive generations, individual mortality enables species to survive over long periods of time.

A human-engineered habituation of asphalt, concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of nature, immune from uncertainty and the unexpected of the wild.

Wilderness transformed into city streets, subways, giant buildings and factories. The complete substitution of the real world for the artificial, where the warning signals aren't the shape of the sky, the cry of the animals or the changing of the seasons, but the wail of the police car, the flashing of traffic lights. Urban people have no idea what a natural universe is like.

Continuity between work and meaning

Consciousness and its creation: culture, art.

Alienation
Here in the the West we have cut ourselves loose from the living web of the world. Instead of seeing ourselves as physically and spiritually connected to family, clan and land, we now chiefly live by the mind, as separate individuals acting on and relating to other separate individuals and a lifeless, dumb world beyond the body. Applying our mind to the matter around us, we have produced an extraordinary material culture; cities and highways, toasters and blenders, but we find ourselves separated, fragmented, lonely and fearful of death. We have coined a word for this state of mind: alienation, which means being estranged. We are strangers it the world. We no longer belong. Because it is separated from us, we think we can act on it, abstract it, use it, take it apart, wreck it. Because it is another. It is alien. We may feel despair, grief and guilt about the damage we cause, but seem unable to change the way we live.

Mind Within Body: The Ghost in the Machine
Eventual the machine wears out. When it does the ghost will disappear.

An anxious quest in a universe of solitude.

Only human-beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist.

We are our names in ways we cannot describe. We hear ourselves called across a noisy room, we feel as though the letters are somehow ours.

“Great works of art are works of nature just as truly as mountains, streams and plains.” - Goethe

Concerning all acts of initiation and creation
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin. Until one commits there is always hesitancy, ineffectiveness. The moment one definitely commits then Providence comes along too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” - Goethe

You needn't be confused about which expert to believe, just talk to your elders; people who have lived in the same part of the world for 70 or 80 years. Ask them what they remember about the air, the water, about other species, about neighbourhoods and communities, about caring between people and the ways they communicated and entertained each other. Our elders tell us of the immense changes that have occurred in the span of a single human lifetime. All you have to do is project the rate of change they have experienced into the future to get an idea of what might be left in the coming decades.

// Thinking Clearly // 18.05.13
Cognitive errors are far too ingrained for us to be able to rid ourselves of them completely. Silencing them would require super-human will power and isn't a worthy goal anyway, as not all cognitive errors are toxic. Some are even necessary for living the good life.

Confirmation Bias
Try writing down your beliefs - your world view on marriage, healthcare, diet, career strategies - then go and find disconfirming evidence.

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” - Warren Buffet

Loss Aversion
Imagine that an invisible Martian decides to follow you around with an equally invisible notebook, recording what you do and think and dream. The rundown of your life would consist of entries such as, ‘drank coffee with two sugars', ‘stepped on a thumbtack and swore like a sailor', ‘booked a vacation' and so on. We like to knit this jumble of details into a neat story. We want our lives to form a pattern that can be easily followed. Some call this ‘meaning'. If our stories advance evenly over the years, many refer to it as ‘identity'.

Halo Effect
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” - Aldous Huxley.

Social Loafing
The larger the group, the weaker my participation.

Our preoccupation with other people stems from our evolutionary past; belonging to a group was necessary for survival. Today our lives depend on and revolve around others. The result of his infatuation is that we spend 90% of our time thinking about other people and only 10% assessing other factors.

Blaise Pascal: “All of man's misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”.

// Dave Haslam // 01.05.13
We had entered the digital age and our lives were being played out to a new soundtrack.

Catalyst
The atmosphere in a club is down to the music, the mix of people and the drugs/alcohol, but the most significant chemistry is that between the music and the crowd. The DJ is somewhere as the centre of all that - a catalyst.

// Mike Skinner // 01.05.13
The first album I ever owned was Vanilla Ice's II The Extreme. I'm quiet proud of the fact that I listened to it once and thought, ‘That first song is a tune, but the rest is rubbish'.

Freddie couldn't give them any old rubbish, he had to give them Bohemian Rhapsody
When people see Freddie Mercury controlling a crowd of a hundred thousand people at Live Aid, they somehow imbue Freddie with the power of a hundred thousand people. But he only had that power because those people decided to like him. He was just the thing they happened to be into and any power he had was contingent on his ability to carry on giving them what they wanted. If he was truly powerful he'd have been able to give them any old any old rubbish and they still would have responded in the same way. But Freddie couldn't give them any old rubbish, he had to give them Bohemian Rhapsody.

It is possible to trigger change, but that change only comes about as a result of people acting according to their own free will, and no one can have control of that. You might think governments have infinite power, but in reality they're pretty powerless, simply hoping to make decisions people agree with, or tying to take the credit for these they already do.

A lot of artists do a good song, then a shit one. They can retain their audience's interest while writing shit songs for a certain amount of time, until ultimately people will go, ‘Actually that's shit' and you get this very rapid depreciation in the value they're perceived to have as an artist. The duration of that grace period depends entirely on the charisma or mythological presence of the individuals concerned.

The most important scene in any film is the last one.

Every political dream pursued to its end becomes fascism.

Pop art
If you think about what really succeeds in art, it's that unquantifiable newness that demonstrates why what went previously was wrong.

// Superstar DJs - Dom Phillips // 25.04.13
The ‘underground' is an imaginary place that never actually existed outside of the fantasies of boys in record shops. It's a throwback to the punk days, a redundant philosophy. What matters now is the result, only that.

We live in a society that is saturated in terms of pleasure and experience. We want it all, now. That goes for shopping and materialism as much as it goes for pornography and prostitution. Modern British people expect their desires to be satisfied. Drugs are part of that ride. It is only if they become socially unacceptable that their use will decline. Smoking is going that way, just as drink-driving did 20 years ago.

“The thing is, if you don't have the responsibilities of work and you can afford to sleep a lot and eat nice food after partying, then you can party a lot. You recover by not having the normal stresses and strains of what people have to do.” - James Sparrow (Scream promoter)

No Soup 4 U!
“DJing is the ultimate glorified manual labour. It's great, but you have to be there. I want to make more money doing things when I asleep than when I'm awake!” - Pete Tong

Jeremy Healy: someone who only makes sense in a club
“Wave your arms. Take your hat off. I enjoy showing off. I love dancing. I've got a feel for music and I can show that. You feed off people, but you can stir people up as well.”

“To tell you the truth, if you see people liking a record it makes you like it too.”

“It's a good thing the Conga. It unties people and everyone can do it. And it's a ridiculous dance.” - Jeremy Healy

Ministry v Cream
Their rivalry was as famous as that other North-South battle of the 1990s; the Britpop grudge match between working class Manc lads Oasis and educated southerners Blur. In both cases, the posh southerners won, but in both cases the Northerners still made a shed load of money. The metropolitan southerners proved more adaptable, constantly shifting the central proposition they were selling. In the case of Blur, they glided from the chirpy cod cockney of Park Life to the MTV rock of Song 2, while Oasis got artistically stuck in years of muddy, if lucrative, pub rock. Likewise the central proposition at Cream is essentially the same: a northern knees-up exported around the world. Ministry has proven infinitely more flexible. It started out as a purist, New York-style house club, but by the end of the night they were flogging everything from gritty London garage to euphoric European trance. Now they also sell car stereos, music systems, vodka and a fragrance.

The 1990s is too often seen as the decade of Britpop, personified by the high-profile battles between Blur and Oasis and their coteries of celebrity girlfriends. But Britpop, despite its vitality, was essentially a derivative sound, one that took classic 1960s guitar pop and updated it. Dance music meanwhile was hurtling forward, dispensing with traditional performance as readily as they dispensed with rock's song structure. They replaced choruses with screaming roars of synthesizers, guitar solos with cascades of beats, charismatic singers with visuals and flashing lights. What sampling allowed in music was the introduction of a completely random element. Opposites could be put together and fused into something new.

// Bob Monkhouse // 15.04.13
“My relationships with women have been most agreeable. They're generally much nicer than men, more emotionally genuine, less selfish and less lazily impatient about life's dull necessities. They cope with the untidiness of human existence better. Women's humour is more realistic and honest than ours. They laugh at truth while we laugh at fiction. Women don't want to watch Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges; unsexy, middle-aged men behaving like little boys. They see enough of that in real life.”

“As for funerals, I rather like them. Such nice things are always said about the deceased. I feel sad that they had to miss hearing it all by just a few days.”.

// Earl Young and the birth of the disco beat // 11.04.13
Music is like a time machine. It is the fuel that powers your day dreams.

Disco requires no cultural information, no previous education.

// Andy Warhola // 08.04.13
How decisive a break from tradition did Warhol bring about? To travel back to art before 1962 is to enter another age, yet his early 60s work remains wide open to the present.

How can I make a painting that's only a painting? - Jasper Johns
Old Masters used a canvas metaphorically, to suggest a world other than reality itself. Renaissance painters, armed with the new science of perspective, took up the challenge of using a flat surface, the canvas, to create the illusion of space, as if the painting's surface were a window through which viewers beheld an exact replica of the world. From late Impressionism on, painters came to consider illusionism a mere bag of tricks, a fiction that obscured a painting's essential characteristic: flatness. The modernist painters' goal was to make painting own up to what it was: paint applied to a flat surface. The eye has it's own tricks, restoring depth wherever it can. As soon as a painter makes a mark on a blank canvas, the eye interprets it as being in front of a background, reasserting an illusory depth.

Chelsea Girls
”Though I don't want to live with them, they are certainly worth visiting if you're interested in life on this planet.” - Andrew Sarris

You don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

// Death is brutal // 06.04.13
"Death is brutal and unfair and wrenching, but without it I don't think life would have much meaning. We need to appreciate each other while we're here, do our best to keep each other safe, but when one of us goes we can't let that destroy us.

My grandmother wouldn't have wanted my grandfather to have endured a half-decade of misery without her. And yet it's easier said than done to suggest he should have consoled himself with the time they had together rather than them being ripped apart. Or for him to have been philosophical enough to realise that without the possibility of death, their life and love would have had none of meaning it did.

Yeah, might struggle to make this stuff funny then." - Richard Herring

// The Whole Equation // 25.03.13
The 40 years between 1880 and 1920 had witnessed not just the advance of the movies, but the absolute domestication of the still photograph, the telegraph, the telephone and radio, as well as air flight, the full nocturnal illumination of cities and even reports of the subconscious mind.

I regret the way that America has elected to make films for its bluntest section of society, and in ways which flatter them. We have to recognise how that is being done for the money.

So much in American films now supports the worst views held of it in other parts of the world; that they are combat-ready, aggressive, adolescent, greedy sensationalists without humour, depth or imagination, rampant devotees of technology as opposed to enlightenment.

The American movie is often more directed at an audience of arrested and indulged children than at a society of alert and responsible adults.

Hollywood produces roughly 200 films a year.

Put it all on red
Greed remains a pejorative term, but in actual practice we live by a delight in money and possessions that is authentic and unstoppable.

// Nocturnal // 25.03.13
Too glamorous for the mundane activities of the day.

// An enormous yes // 12.03.13
"Getting married at 21 sounds a lot like leaving a party at 9:30pm." - Tracy Morgan

// Opium of the people // 12.03.13
1, Internationally-respected worldwide ratings service

2, An Kindle app that remembers all the words you look up in the dictionary and reminds you off them sporadically, so you can try and fit them into conversation.

// Understanding Physics // 12.03.13
The reverse process of boiling is condensation. If a gas in a container is cooled sufficiently, liquid forms on the surface of the container due to condensation.

Density = mass/volume, or Mass = volume x density

// Fabric of the Cosmos: the beginning is nigh // 01.03.13
Understanding requires context. Insight must be anchored.

Classical physics
Newton's law of universal gravitation follows an inverse-square law - as do the effects of electric, magnetic, light, sound and radiation phenomena - and proves that these forces are evenly distributed across all space dimensions.

Relativistic physics
In general relativity space and time are dynamic. They are mutable; they respond to the presence of mass and energy. In this sense, space-time is the incarnation of gravity.

Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics doesn't pit theory against experiment, it pits theory confirmed by experiment against intuition.

Concepts and conclusions relevant on one scale may be not be applicable on all scales. This is a key principle in physics and one that we encounter repeatedly even in far more prosaic contexts. Take a glass of water: describing the water as a smooth uniform liquid is useful and relevant on everyday scales, but it's an approximation that breaks down if we analyse the water with submicroscopic precision. On tiny scales the smooth image gives way to a completely different framework of widely separated molecules and atoms.

Whereas human intuition, and its embodiment in classical physics, envisions a reality in which things are always definitely one way or another, quantum mechanics describes a reality in which things sometimes hover in a haze of being partly one way and partly another. Things become definite only when a suitable observation forces them to relinquish their quantum possibilities and settle on a specific outcome. The outcome that's realised cannot be predicated; we can predict only the odds that things will turn out one way or another.

From classical to quantum
Although today's science differs sharply from that of even 50 years ago, it would be simplistic to summarize scientific progress in terms of new theories overthrowing their predecessors. A more correct description is that each new theory refines its predecessor by providing a more accurate and more wide-reaching framework.

Newton's theory of gravity has been superseded by Einstein's general relativity, but it would be naive to say that Newton was wrong. In the domain of objects that don't move anywhere near as fast as light and don't produce gravitational fields anywhere near as strong as those of black holes, Newton's theory is fantastically accurate. Within the domain he intended it for (planetary motion, commonplace terrestrial motion, and so on) Newton's discovery is unassailable.

We envision each new theory taking us closer to the elusive goal of truth, but whether there is an ultimate theory - a theory that cannot be refined any further because it has finally revelled the working of the universe at the deepest possible level - remains unknown.

Space and time are in the eye of the beholder
Everyday experience fails to reveal how the universe really works. Newton thought that motion through time was totally separate from motion through space, Einstein found that they are intimately linked.

But even 100 years after Einstein almost no one, not even professional physicists, feels relativity in their bones. This isn't surprising; one is hard pressed to find the survival advantages offered by a solid grasp of relativity. Newton's flawed conceptions of absolute time and absolute space work wonderfully well at the slow speeds and moderate gravity we encounter in our daily life, so our senses are under no evolutionary pressure to develop relativistic acumen. Deep awareness and true understanding require that we diligently use our intellect to fill in the gaps left by our senses.

Special relativity declares a law for all motion: the combined speed of any object's motion through space AND its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light. If space and time did not behave this way, the speed of light would not be be constant and would depend on the observer's state of motion. But it is constant. Observations of light's speed always yield the same result, regardless of the observer's velocity.

We are all used to the idea that nothing but light can travel at light speed, but that familiar idea refers SOLELY to motion through space. We are now talking about an object's COMBINED motion through space AND time.

When you look at something like a parked car, which from your point of view is stationary (not moving through space that is) all of its motion is through time. The car, its driver, the street, are all moving through time in perfect sync, but if the car speeds away, some if its motion through time is diverted into motion through space, and the car's progress through time slows down.

Truly. This is not dextrous wordplay, sleight of hand, or psychological illusions. This is how the universe works.

What really happens is that some of it's light speed motion is diverted from motion through time into motion through space, keeping their combined total unchanged. Such diversion unassailably means that the car's motion through time slows down. This means that time elapses more slowly for the moving car and it's driver that it elapses for you and everything else that remains stationary.

Each of us carries our own clock, our own monitor of the passage of time. Each clock is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these clocks do not agree. They fall out of synchronization, measuring different amounts of elapsed time between chosen events. The same is true of distance. Each of us carries our own yardstick, our own monitor of distance in space. Each yardstick is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these yardsticks do not agree.

Whenever you move around, imagine your ‘now' shifting away for the ‘nows' experienced by all others that aren't moving with you. While driving, imagine your watch ticking away at a different rate compared with the timepieces in the houses you are speeding past. While gazing out from a mountaintop, image that because of the warping of space-time, time passes more quickly for you than for those subject to stronger gravity on the ground below. ‘Imagine' because in ordinary circumstances such as these, the effects of relativity are so tiny they go completely unnoticed.

"You are travelling..., through time!"

For example
If you want to see what's happening on planet earth in the future, the laws of Einsteinian physics will tell you how to go about it. Build a vehicle which can reach say, 99.9% of the speed of light. Head off at full throttle into deep space for ten days according to your ship's clock, then abruptly turn round and head back to Earth, again at full throttle. On your return 10,000 years of Earth time will have passed.

Another example
If a rocket were to leave Earth and head for the Andromeda galaxy, traveling at 99.9% the light speed, we'd have to wait nearly 6 million years for it to return, but at that speed, time on the rocket slows down relative to time on earth so dramatically, that upon returning the astronaut would have aged only eight hours. (Setting aside the fact that she couldn't have survived the accelerations to get up to speed, turn back or even stop.)

Inflationary cosmology
The inflationary burst is best thought of as an event occurring in a pre-existing universe, rather than as the creation of the universe itself.

Decoherence
Decoherence forces much of the ‘weirdness' of quantum physics to ‘leak' from large objects, as their quantum uncertainty collapses into one possibility or another through interaction with the innumerable impinging particles in their environment.

Non-locality and quantum entanglement
We used to think that a basic property of space was that it separates and distinguishes one object from another. But we now see that quantum mechanics radically changes this view. Two things can be separated by an enormous amount of space and yet not have a fully independent existence. A quantum connection can unite them, making the properties of one contingent on the properties of the other. Space does not distinguish such entangled objects. Space, even a huge amount of space, does not weaken their quantum mechanical interdependence.

// Guess the trailer // 01.03.13
"Music didn't begin with the recording industry and it won't end with P2P." - Steal This Movie 2

// From Dad // 23.02.13
"The great essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." - Joseph Addison

// Good Times // 23.02.13
Grammar: the difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit. - Tracy Morgan

// The Marriage of Heaven and Hell // 23.02.13
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” - William Blake

“Enlightenment is lightening-up and travelling lightly.” - Mike Myers

// A deep margarita // 25.01.13
“I never heard what Beethoven was saying until I was 40. You gain a great deal by simply living long enough.” - Marlon Brando

// One grand subjectivity // 25.01.13
Life is one grand subjectivity. It isn't what it is, it is how you interpret it." - Yann Martel

// Story // 25.01.13
"Currently we are suffering from a sheer overload of story; a slide that became an avalanche with the widespread adoption of TV. Our stories - the narrative shapes that we invent to explain the world to ourselves - now resemble one another. As you watch movies, the formulaic ones being to congeal and their patterns become inseparable.

TV series are worse. Their situations only endure with an avoidance of resolution. They have the same characters episode after episode, who solve problems so relentlessly that we can't avoid seeing story like a game; with the same cards repeated, just in a different arrangement. Their set-ups are so consistent that we don't need to concentrate every minute, and our attentiveness is compromise as a result.

‘Roller-coaster movies' are story flattened into action. The label is a provocative one: on a roller coaster you are caught up in the moment and afterwards agog with incoherent babble about it, but part of the fun is that the commotion meant nothing. Sensation eclipsed sensibility. Such films offer great danger and adventure, without any lasting downer. Audiences can revel in things that could not possibly happen in life, but still take the illusion seriously.

The highest grossing of these films become franchises. Movies have always been onto the repetition trick, but franchises make no effort to hide their intention: give the audience something they know they like. Make it like fast food.

But what is story without character or moral consequence? We are wowed but are we engaged?

Few things are more decisive in the history of the mass media than the undermining of story as a thing of educational value.” - David Thomson

Religion as Story
"Religion is all about story - character, plot, denouement. Science has anecdotes - Newton's apple for example - but is largely formula." - Yann Martel

Scientists: give your conclusions a ‘religious feel' by not showing your working!

The Big Screen
"In Melancholia, bipolar Kirsten Dunst shows us that she has an exceptionally beautiful body. I'm not sure whether this is statistically associated with depression, but it can often be found in art house movies looking to hold an audience's attention."

"Optical effects - wipes, fades, dissolves (not common now) - remind us of the existence of the screen." – David Thomson

// Poesia // 17.01.13
He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)
"Had I the Heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."

// The Child in Time // 03.01.13
The art of bad government was to sever the link between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what was right.

He was spending a great deal of time alone these days. A room full of people did not so much lessen his introspection as intensify it.

A disruptive minority of humankind regarded journeys, even short ones, as the occasion for pleasant encounters. They were people ready to inflict intimacies on strangers. Such travellers were to be avoided if you belonged to the majority for whom a journey was the occasion for silence, reflection, daydream. The requirements were simple: an unobstructed view of a changing landscape, however dull, and freedom from the breath of other passengers, their body warmth, sandwiches and limbs.

Scientific revolutions were said to redefine rather than discard all previous knowledge. - Ian McEwan

// Diligence, application, discipline & jolly hard work // 03.01.13
There is no language in the world which is not arduous to learn. If learning can be fun, that is all very well, but fun is peripheral. Teachers and pupils should embrace the fact that at the heart of learning a language is difficulty. The English language is a minefield of irregularity, of expectations outnumbering rules, but it has to be crossed and crossing it is work. Teachers are too afraid of nonpopularity, too fond of sugaring pills. They should accept difficulty, celebrate it and make their pupils do likewise. There is only one way to learn a language and that is through exposure to it and immersion in it.

// Folderol* // 16.12.12
“Because I myself am literal-minded and perhaps a little self-doubting, I assume other people are happy to examine their contradictions, but it isn't so. In many cases, those whose faith is most important to them are those least able to hold their beliefs up to question.” – Louis Theroux

* Trivial or nonsensical fuss

// William Blake? Couldn't draw, couldn't colour in // 03.12.12
We cannot all play the game of 'it is art because I say it is, it is art because it hangs in a gallery'. David hockey once said that his working definition of a piece of art was a made object that if left in the street, leaning against a bus shelter, would cause passers-by to stop and stare. Like all brave stabs at defining the indefinable it has its limitations. It is not, as Aristotle would say, necessary and sufficient, but we might agree that it is not so bad. - Stephen Fry

// Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 // 03.12.12
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

(When I've fallen out of favour with fortune and men,
All alone I weep over my position as a social outcast,
And pray to heaven, but my cries go unheard,
And I look at myself, cursing my fate,
Wishing I were like one who had more hope,
Wishing I looked like him; wishing I were surrounded by friends,
Wishing I had this man's skill and that man's freedom.
I am least contented with what I used to enjoy most.
But, with these thoughts – almost despising myself,
I, by chance, think of you and then my melancholy
Like the lark at the break of day, rises
From the dark earth and I sing hymns to heaven;
For thinking of your love brings such happiness
That then I would not change my position in life with kings.)

Merchant of Venice
"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me; you say it wearies you.
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn.
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself."

(To be honest, I don't know why I'm so sad.
I'm tired of it, and you say you're tired of it too.
But I have no idea how I got so depressed.
And if I can't figure out what's making me depressed,
I must not understand myself very well.)

// How you doing? Too soon to tell // 03.12.12
If the universe was found to be finite or infinite, either discovery would be equally stupefying and impenetrable to me.

If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding.

Dante writes in Inferno about Jesus going to hell to rescue Aristotle and others who were presumably sent there, as they lived before the church could ‘save' them.

Children who have felt cruelty know very well how to inflict it.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. (The good Samaritan was a morally decent man who predated Christianity. [And that's the gospel!])

"The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found.” - Gotthold Lessing (1778)

Of course it is better and healthier for the mind to chose the path of skepticism and inquiry, because only by continual exercise of these facilities can we hope to achieve anything.

Religions, as defined by Simon Blackburn are merely “false philosophies” or philosophy with the questions left out. - Christopher Hitchens

// Poesia // 27.11.12
Wordsworth wrote Daffodils in a straight four beat tetrameter. Tetrameter, the four line stress, is immensely popular in English verse. If iambic pentameter, the Heroic Line, may be described as the great joint of beef, the tetrameters are the sandwiches – the everyday form if you like, and no less capable of greatness. The four beat instinct is deep within us, much as in music the 4/4 time signature is so standard as to be the default; you don't even have to write it in the score, just a letter C for Common Time.

“You gentlemen, by dint of long seclusion
From better company, have kept your own
at Keswick, and, through still continued fusion
of one another's minds, at last have grown
to deem as a most logical conclusion,
that Poesy has wreaths for you alone:
There is a narrowness in such a notion,
Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean.” - Byron opens Don Juan with a savage blast at Wordsworth and his romantic poet compatriots, hating them for what he saw as their pretentions and vain belief that theirs was the only Poesy (poetry) worth Wreaths (prises and plaudits).

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." – William Blake (Blake – couldn't draw couldn't colour in)

“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” - G.K. Chesterton

“No metropolis worth visiting is without its red light district, its cruising areas and bohemian village where absinthe flows, refer glows and love is free.” – Stephen Fry

"On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes" - Philip Larkin

"We measure wealth in friends and family." – Kid Rock, Redneck Paradise

“I tell you this;
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars.
Out here we is stoned... immaculate." – Jim Morrison

"Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye." - William Blake

// That'd be fireman Dandy // 15.11.12
"My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind in the future. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford.

The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances. Performing in so many varied situations made every predicament manageable. - Steve Martin on stand-up. It also relates to DJing to me.

How many people have never raised their hand before?"

// Gropecunt Lane // 15.11.12
"Dope scared him. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dope, it was that smoking it made him afraid of everything else." - David Foster Wallace

”Formally we suffered from crime. Now we suffer from laws.” – Tacitus

“I never understand how the same people who are against abortion coz life is sacred, can also be against universal healthcare.”

"If you're attracted to someone, you become hyper-sensitive to their touch."

"Too much beauty is revolting."

// Joy Division's song Digital is digital // 24.10.12
“They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.” - Alexander Pope

“If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.” - Mark Nigh

”A theory which explains everything, explains nothing.” - Karl Popper

“I hate pretending to like people who are pretending to like me.” - Tracy Morgan

“In a truly pluralistic society all people feel equally foreign and equally at home.”

“If you're attractive people need a reason to dislike you, if you're ugly people need a reason to like you. The ugly learn the hard way that every vulgar slob on the block is an aesthete.”

“Permission to be dull is the biggest favour one can grant. When you're in love the tedium is not unbearable, it's lovely.” – Lionel Shriver

// Comma, then // 14.10.12
"My obsession with how I appear to other people."

"The stories that mattered to me were the ones told - selected, clarified - in retrospect."

"Most Europe languages make no distinction between the words 'romance' and 'novel'."

"Privacy to me is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people, it's about sparing me from the invasion of other people's personal lives."

"The very essence of the cell phones' hideousness as a social phenomenon is that it enables and encourages the inflicting of the personal and individual on the public and communal." - Jon Franzen

"We can endure a lot more than we think." - Frida Kahlo

// International London // 06.10.12
"If individuals are completely cut off from external stimuli, the most extraordinary things begin happening. Curiously horrifying visions and nightmares invade the mind, so we discover that stimuli from the external world are required to keep us sane."

Ook-eh!
"Cocaine use had spread like an epidemic. A lot of gangsters stayed at home to get high and didn't want to go out as much. That's the difference between coke and ecstasy; you don't want music when you're on coke, you want to sit and talk shit." - (Peter Hook)

// Magical Thinking // 03.10.12
"Once you've accepted that the brain constructs reality and that the brain has evolved, like any other organ, to help it survive and reproduce, it follows that the brain constructs reality in the most useful way possible for its owner. The key word here is useful, which is not to say accurate.

The brain doesn't care so much what's really out there, it just needs to stay alive and be replicated, which might involve telling us a white lie now and again. For example, we overestimate heights when looking down to make us conscious of falling. In the social realm, men overestimate sexual interest from women because the cost of hitting on someone and receiving a brush-off is small compared to the benefit of scoring and spreading one's seed.

Superstitious rituals may result from believing we have more control over the world then we actually do, a bias that prevents counterproductive feelings of helplessness."

"We didn't evolve in an environment that had photographs so we don't have natural cognitive mechanisms for differentiating photos from real life. As far as our ancient brains are concerned, if it looks like something it is something." - Matthew Hutson

A cat may look at the king
It is very easy to consider man unique among living organisms. Great civilisations have developed and changed our world's environments in ways inconceivable from any other form of life. There has thus always been a tendency to think that something special differentiates man from everything else. These beliefs often find expression in man's religions, that try to give an origin to our existence. It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths. But life is in no sense a metaphysical entity. Rather it is a precisely patterned structure, right down to the atomic level. Genetic info within DNA molecules is used by cells to order the amino acids in proteins.

"That man is the noblest creature may be inferred from the fact that no other creature has contested this claim." - G.C Lichtenberg

// Julio Bashmore tweets // 03.10.12
"Played Ignition Remix last year. I don't know if I can face the amount of alcohol required to get to that point again!"

// Shauney's show // 03.10.12
“The way I look at it now, if you're not having the piss taken out of you on TV, then you're not a player. When things happen like guys taking the piss out of you on TV, you know it's really happening. Stuff like that helps make the dough and pay the bills. It's not life and death.” - Shaun Ryder

// Teach Us How To Sit Still // 18.09.12
Self-pity is a great teller of boring tales.

Simply eating had become an intense, slow pleasure; feeling a rough crust of bread on the roof of your mouth, a crisp carrot between your teeth, a forkful of rice melting in saliva on the tongue and slithering down the throat, then the cool cleanness of the water that washed it all away, the quiet sense of repletion.

Always ask yourself, ‘In what way am I contributing to my own suffering?' If you can do nothing about it, don't torment yourself. - Tim Parks

// The Mill on the Floss // 29.08.12
"No dream world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure. She had need of some tender, demonstrative love. She wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in understanding, endure the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught real wisdom and learning, such as great men knew, she thought she should have held the secrets of life. If she had only books that she might learn for herself what wise men knew!"

"Certain strains of music affect me so strangely I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time. If the effect would last I might be capable of heroisms."

"I think that I should have no mortal wants if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filed with music."

"The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history." – George Eliot

"Blessed are those ears which hearken not unto the voice with soundeth outwardly, but unto the Truth which teacheth inwardly." – Thomas a Kempis

// Solve problems. Make art. Think deeply // 20.08.12
(Engineer, artist, thinker - Susan Cain's examples)

Myers-Brigs
In ‘Psychological Types' (1921) Carl Jung popularised the terms ‘introvert' and ‘extrovert' as the central building blocks of personality. Introverts he said, are drawn to the inner world of thoughts and feelings, extroverts to the external life of people and activity. Introverts focus on the meaning of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge in. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don't socialise enough.” *

“If you leave them to their own devises, introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from the past and making plans for the future. Extroverts are more likely to focus on what's happening around them.” (Editor's note - is the distinction here between introvert and extrovert, or rather something else? *)

* Unknowns are always made truer by added shades of nuance

“There is no such thing as a pure introvert or pure extrovert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.” - Carl Jung

The Great Pretender / In endeavour of...
According to Free Trait Theory we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits, but we can and do act out of character in the service of core personal projects. In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love or anything they value highly.

At first blush, Free Trait Theory seems to run counter to, “To thine own self be true”. Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of taking on a false persona. To act out of character is exhausting and convincing ourselves that our pseudo-self is real may mean we eventually burn out. But here we are only pretending to be extroverts in the service of a love, or a professional calling, and as such are doing just as Shakey advised.

Our lives are dramatically enhanced when we are involved in personal projects we consider meaningful, manageable and not unduly stressful, especially when we are supported by others. When someone asks us, “How's it going?”, we may give a throwaway answer, but our true response should be a reflection of how well our core personal projects are going.

Bus to Abilene
The anecdote reveals our tendency to follow those who initiate action - any action. We similarly empower dynamic speakers. “It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those people end up in positions of authority, but they don't have good ideas. Those traits may be important, but we put too much of a premium on presention and not enough on substance or critical thinking.”

Buzz junkies / reward sensitivity
'Flow' is an optimum state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity - long distance swimming, writing, sumo wrestling, sex. In a state of flow you are neither bored nor anxious and don't question your own adequacy. Hours pass without you noticing.

The key to flow is to peruse an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it may bring. Many of the flow experiences Csikszentmihalyi writes about are solitary pursuits. Flow often occurs in conditions in which people become “independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of it's rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy a person has to provide his own rewards." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Character vs. Personality or East vs. West
('The Age of Character' became 'The Age of Personality')

Words are potentially dangerous weapons that can reveal things better left unsaid. They hurt other people and can get their speaker into trouble.

Talk is for communicating need-to-know information. Quiet and introspection are signs of deep thought and higher truth.

Compare this proverb from the East:
“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” – The Way of Lao Zi

with these from the West:
“Be a craftsmen in speech, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.” – The Maxims of Ptahhotep

“Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact. It is silence which isolates.” Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Neo Cortex: old brain vs. new
“There is no single best animal personality, but a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.” - David Sloane Wilson

Smile. Stand up straight. Make eye contact
Be a role model by greeting strangers in a calm and friendly way, and by getting together with your own friends.

"Mark this well ye proud men of action; ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of men of thought!” – Heinrich Heine

// What is Good? // 03.08.12
Reason, the emotions and the appetite. When these three are in harmony the individual is happy.

A degree of psychical comfort is a great aide to living virtuously.

Ask yourself, 'Which pleasures are true pleasures?'

Who is to tell which pleasures are higher than others?
Mill answers ‘competent judges'. The man who has read both Aeschylus and drank beer is in a better position to judge than he who has only drunk beer. But what if the man who has done both prefers drinking beer? And who is to say that the pleasure of the non-Aeschylus-reading beer drinker is any less, and perhaps not more, than that of an Aeschylus reader, on a Benthamite* calculation of the quantity of pleasure?

*The utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, holding that pleasure is the only good and that the greatest happiness for the greatest number should be the ultimate goal of humans. (Goodness is whatever produces the greatest happiness in the greatest number.)

One has to accept two things in order to be comfortable with Mill's views; first, that some people have higher facilities than others, which makes them better judges of the value of different pleasures; and second, that some pleasures have objectively more or less value than others. Both points may well be true, but it is at least contentious to say so.

Mill was not however, an elitist of unrecoverable kind; he believed that anyone is capable of cultivating the ‘higher faculties' and thus living the best life in the best way.

“Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowances of a beast's pleasures. No intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.” – J.S Mill

High culture was always the preserve of a tiny minority; its tender candle has been kept alight among the gales of barbarism throughout history by little bands of devotees.

Mass culture is by no means incapable of producing things of great value, whether in the form of art or knowledge; and the technologies designed to serve the interests of mass culture are equally capable of producing art as refined as any elitist could require.

Feuerbach
“He who says of me that I am an atheist says and knows nothing of me. The question as to the existence or non-existence of God, the opposition between theism and atheism, belongs to the 16th and 17th centuries, not to the 19th. I deny God. But that means for me that I deny the negation of man. In the place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly position of man - which in actual life necessarily leads to the degradation of man - I substitute the tangible, actual and consequently also the political and social position of mankind.” - Ludwig Feuerbach, German philosopher and anthropologist (1804-1872)

To Feuerbach is owed the thesis that religion makes man alienate himself from himself by worshipping a ghost he himself has created. Rather than attributing love, justice and wisdom to this projected fiction, man should see that these concepts apply to the best of himself. Religion turns everything on its head by pointing the good things towards a transcendental abstraction, whereas they really belong to mankind, at least in potential. We only have to ‘invert the religious relations... to destroy the illusion, and the unclouded light of truth streams in upon us'.

Most human progress has occurred in the face of religious reaction, and most human suffering (other than that caused by disease or other natural evils) has been the result of religion-inspired conflict or religious oppression. This is an unhappy fact, but one that is over-whelming attested to by the evidence of history.

A religious morality imposed by enthusiasts of the faith would contravene almost every liberal tenant - tolerance, openness, personal autonomy and choice. Instead it would impose a harsh and limiting uniformity on behaviour, opinion, dress and recreation, and would not reflect or accommodate much in the way of facts about human nature and human occupancy of a natural psychical world.

Death is nothing to us
"Death is nothing to us. It is simply the dissolution of the psychical elements that we are made of, which return to the cosmos they came from. To fear the non-existence that ensues is as irrational as to regret that we did not exist before we were born. Those who fear death perform an impossible feat: they imagine themselves witnessing their own non-existence, and lamenting it. Superstitions and religions beliefs that tell of punishment in a post-mortem state make people afraid of dying, but as soon as we see that death is simply an end, all such fears evaporate and once again we are free to live." - AC Grayling

Cicero the Stoic
Cicero was a widely read and reflective man who made a lifelong study of the Greek philosophers and adapting them to the conditions of contemporary Romans - ‘popularising' them as we would say. But he was not a mere transmitter - he was an adapter who selected eclectically (“as all the wise do” - Lofstedt) from the works of Greek thinkers and wove together the best of their ideas for his contemporaries, thereby creating a body of writing with value for all time. Later scholars disdained Cicero because he was not an original thinker but Humanists of the Renaissance would have been unable to understand such a limited view of a figure whose grace of style and thought gave them so much.

What the Renaissance valued in Cicero was his belief in the human individual. He believed that individuals are autonomous, at liberty to think and decide for themselves. He believed that all men are brothers and all have rights which carry responsibilities. His view was that all men have the divine spark of reason, and possession of reason confers on human beings a duty to develop themselves as civilised, educated individuals. The fact that everyone has reason forges unbreakable ties between us which is what imposes the duty on us all to treat each other with respect and generosity. Cicero advanced these views during a terrible period in Roman history - the last years of the Republic as it collapsed into a civil war that culminated in the first dictatorship of Caser. When Caser became dictator, Cicero left Rome for his estate in Tusculum and there wrote some of his greatest works in a matter of months.

The Stages of Love
In the Symposium Plato has Socrates recount a discourse by a prophetess called Diotima, who described an ascent through several, increasingly rarefied stages of love:

from passion for an individual body;
to love of beauty wherever it is manifested in the physical world;
thence to love of the beauty of souls, as something higher than psychical beauty;
then - by way of love of life, law and different kinds of knowledge - to love of the eternal and perfect Form Of Beauty, from which all beautiful things get their nature.

Sapere Aude! (dare to know) - Kant
"Nothing is required for enlightenment except freedom, and the freedom in question here is the least harmful of all; namely the freedom to use reason publically in all matters. But on all sides I hear ‘Do not argue', ‘do not go there', ‘drill', ‘pay', ‘believe'." - Kant

The enlightenment was a period of application rather than invention, when the pervious centuries' innovations were put to work and introduced to wider audiences.

“Not the fruit of experience but the experience itself is the end.” - Walter Parter

“How can the study of stars or the weather be expected to bring a man self-knowledge, and to teach him how to live?” – Socrates

In all times and places the great majority of people have accepted conventional views about what life is for, and by entering into a particular line of work - as most must - thereby accept the goals native to those endeavours.

// Stephen Mangan tweets // 23.07.12
Kids are good but books are better.

// B'ball Wisdom // 21.07.12
"Every second you spend doing something builds habits. Build good habits." - John Amaechi

// Solar // 11.07.12
Repression
Empirically, no such mechanism has been shown to exist. On the contrary, unwanted memories are hard to forget.

Apocalyptic tendency
"Were we not always bound by our history and our guilty natures to dream of our annihilation?" – Ian McEwan

"Of course he knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range and that humankind was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities, but he was unimpressed by some of the wild commentary that suggested the world was in ‘peril', that humankind was drifting towards a calamity where coastal cities would disappear under the waves, crops fail and hundreds of millions of refuges would surge from one country, one continent to another, driven by drought, floods, famine, tempests and unceasing wars for diminishing resources.

There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one's own demise was urgently bound-up with the end of the world, and therefore made more sense, or at least was just a little less irrelevant.

The end of the world was never pitched in the present, where it could be seen for the fantasy it was, but just around the corner, and when it did not happen, a new issue, a new date would emerge. When, in the absence of any other overwhelming concern beyond boring, intransient global poverty, the apocalyptic tendency had conjured yet another beast - global warming."

Quantum mechanics
What a repository. What a dump of human aspiration. The borderland where mathematical rigour defeated common sense and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required and claim science as their proof.

They did not know enough, but they knew too much to have anyone talk to. What mate waiting down the pub, what hard-pressed wife was going to follow them down these warped funnels into the space-time continuum?

The laws of psychics are so benign, so generous.
There is a guy in forest in the rain, and he's dying of thirst. He has an axe and starts cutting down the trees to drink the sap - one mouthful in each tree. All around him is wasteland, no wildlife, and he knows that thanks to him the forest is disappearing fast. Why doesn't he just open his mouth and drink the rain? Because he's brilliant at chopping down tress, he's always done things this way, and he thinks that people who advocate rain-drinking are weird. That rain is our sunlight. It drenches our planet, drives our climate and it's life. A sweet rain of photons, and all we have to do is hold out our cups.

The future has arrived
The UN estimates that a third of a million people a year are dying of climate change already. Bangladesh is going down because the oceans are warming and expanding and rising. There is drought in the Amazonian rainforest. Methane is pouring out of the Serbian permafrost. There's a meltdown under the Greenland ice sheet that no-one wants to talk about. Amateur yachtsmen have been sailing the northwest passage and two years ago we lost forty per cent of the artic summer ice. Now the eastern Antarctic is going. Then we still have the problems of energy security, air pollution and peak oil.

// The unwitting thief // 11.07.12
The 'victim-turned-thief' is usually a woman, although some versions starring a man do exist. She's journeying by train or bus, and at the point where she has to change routes, she stops in the station's cafeteria.

The presumed thief is always male and usually described as 'Black', 'West Indian', 'a punk', or in some fashion that would brand him as one not aware of social custom or not inclined to follow it. It's worth noting that he is almost always a marginal and at least vaguely threatening figure, while the true cookie snatcher is positioned as one who is normally above reproach.

The item 'shared' between the two varies: cookies (biscuits), a chocolate bar, a bag of potato chips. The man often offers the old bat the last piece.

Sometimes the 'victim' enacts a final piece of revenge before storming off: she takes a bite out of the donuts or drinks the water the other had in front of him.

Later they discover the contested item in their pocket.

// Thinking, Fast & Slow // 30.06.12
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality, but it is not what people or organizations want.

What You See Is (Not) All There Is
You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you and if it is a good story you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, as there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle.

The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted even occurs we immediately adjust our world view to accommodate the surprise. Imagine yourself before a football game between two teams that have the same record of wins and losses. Now the game is over and one team thrashed the other. In your revised model of the world the winning team is much stronger and your view of the past as well as of the future has been altered.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it) you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before you changed your mind.

Inside vs. outside view
Statistical information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one's personal impressions of a case. In the competition with the inside view the outside view doesn't stand a chance.

Do say: "He's taking an inside view. He should forget about his own case and look for what happened in other cases.”

Do say: “The sample of observations is too small to make any inferences. Let's ignore the results until they have a suitably large sample.”

Politicians for example
Decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinised with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions and an extreme reluctance to take risks. As malpractice litigation became more common, physicians changed their procedures in multiple ways; ordered more tests, referred more cases to specialists, applied conventional treatments even when they were unlikely to help. These actions protected the physicians more than they benefited the patients.

Although hindsight and the outcome bias generally foster risk aversion, they also bring underserved rewards to irresponsible risk takers, such as a general or an entrepreneur who took a crazy gamble and won. Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid and weak. A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness.

Warning: overconfidence!
People who attempt to predict the future make many errors. Errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable, but it is also worth noting that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy. Those with the most knowledge are often the least reliable, as the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of their skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. Low confidence could often be more informative.

The statement, ‘I had a premonition that the marriage would not last, but I was wrong' sounds odd, as does any sentence about an intuition that turned out to be false.

Priming
We know from studies of priming that unnoticed stimuli in our environment have a substantial influence on our thoughts and actions. These influences fluctuate from moment to moment. The brief pleasure of a cool breeze on a hot day may make you slightly more positive and optimistic about whatever you are evaluating at the time. The chances of a convict being granted parole may change significantly during the time that elapses between successive food breaks in the parole judge's schedule. Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgement or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances.

90% of people questioned think they are above average drivers.

// One of Gil's brighter moments // 09.06.12
“Show business is just like any other business in certain respects. Of course, people in show business have a visibility that paints a larger than life aura around them. Their work in music, movies, or some facet of entertainment makes them a part of people's lives. They are known so well in the corners of everywhere that it feels as though they've lived more than one lifetime. The fact that certain aspects of the arts endure beyond the span of normal expectations makes them a part of generations born after their contributions were completed.

The exploits and exploitations of the arts make individuals with no more talent than a turnip famous for ages. The stories their lives inspire give them reputations that inspire continued repetition. There are heroes and zeros. There are people of sincere and genuine talent and others who couldn't do wrong right. Jut like, I imagine, every other walk of life.

Everybody appreciates movie stars and music icons, even people who share their profession. We are all fans, marvelling at they mastery over their medium and fascinated by their fame.” - Gil Scott-Heron

// AdB tweets // 08.06.12
Engage with your anxieties as they contain oblique clues on how to change the aspects of your life that are troubling you.

// Take the edge off // 08.06.12
“Let's go have a beer, take the edge off” - Quentin Tarantino to Fiona Apple.

// Religion for Atheists // 23.05.12
We are, from a purely financial point of view, greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half our income for the communal good. But we do this almost without realising it, through the anonymous agency of the taxation system. Our donations are never framed as the lifeblood of an intricate tangle of mutually interdependent relationships.

Anti-superbia* (*Wikipedia translates it as Pride?)
What do you regret?
Whom can you never forgive?
What do you fear?

Conversations like these - rather than ‘Where do you work? Where do your kids go to school?' - would free us from some of our more distorted fantasies about other's lives by revealing the extent to which, behind our well-defended facades, most of us are a bit little out of our minds, and so have reason to stretch out a hand to our equally-tortured neighbours.

Locked away in private cocoons, our chief way of imagining what other people are like has become the media; as a consequence we naturally expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles - thereby enforcing our impulse to trust only those who have been vetted for us by pre-existing family and class networks.

The prestige of the news media is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation, thanks to the two driving forces of modern history - politics and technology.

Feast of Fools (NYE)
Belonging to a community is both highly desirable and very difficult. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to do otherwise every once in a while they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites.

In 1445 the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days; so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.'

Auguste Comte - Religion of Humanity
We are embodied creatures - sensory animals as well as rational beings.

We are aware in our more mature moments of the scale of our imperfections and the depths of our childishness. There is so much that we would like to do but never end up doing, and so many ways of behaving that we subscribe to in our hearts but ignore in our day-to-day lives.

“The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers, it is to make capable and cultivated human beings.” - John Stuart Mill.

Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name. It is not precisely intelligence or emption, not character or personality, but another even more abstract entity, loosely connected with all of those, yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension, and to which we may refer - following Christian terminology - as the soul.

// AdB tweets, Derren retweets // 23.05.12
"Much of how we feel about the rest of our lives is determined by what lies ahead of us in the next few hours."

// Tracy tweets // 20.05.12
"Relationships are like garage sales - at a distance it looks like it could be interesting, up close it's just a ton shit you don't need!"

// B-ball Wisdom II // 15.05.12
You get out what you put in. Improve every day.

// The Choice of Hercules // 13.05.12
The Greeks used their tales of gods and heroes to explore aspects of morality and psychology because such tales allow for generalisation. A fable can apply to many experiences that merely resemble them in overall contour, whereas actual historical episodes have too many specifics to make them applicable to lots of, although similar, different cases.

"The famous are used like fictional characters to tell stories, to give us warnings of the perils of success, or to be held aloft as examples of cotemporary ideals. One figure can be used to represent either extremes, depending on the cultural mood. David Beckham or Lady Diana can be an example of domestic excellence or individual indulgence depending on the day." - Russell Brand

Socrates urged reflection and consideration
Epicurus, founder of the Epicurean school in the third century BC, taught that the true pleasures of life are those of intellectual discourse and friendship, and that the highest enjoyment is attained by sitting in the shade discussing philosophy. In this sense Epicurus favoured life's higher pleasures, which John Stuart Mill described as those containing complexity, depth, nuance, power and insight.

Pursue pleasure and avoid pain
‘Epicurean' has come to denote something quite different - a life of sensory indulgence - but this is simply a misreading of Epicurus' outlook, which was summed up in the adjuration* (*an earnest appeal) to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

Epicures urged moderation in all things. That does however include moderation, and the Epicureans were not adverse to a party every once in a while!* (editor's note - very cheesy writing!)

Most people are other people
No mind can be imprisoned if it does not choose to be so, but most people's minds lie in the narrowest prisons of convention, religion, ignorance and/or laziness. As one astute observer put it, ‘most people are other people' - that is, they live borrowed lives; they borrow their opinions, their emotions, their goals and their beliefs, because they are either too timid to make up their own, or do not know how to.

Thinking for one's self is one of the essentials of the good life because what issues from doing so is one's own. If others, or orthodoxies of some kind, do one's thinking for one, nothing is one's own. The life well lived is not any form of servitude, expect as service to one's aims and loves. Thus freedom is central to meaning, as meaning is central to the good life.

The best education is found in responsive reading and discussion.There are many distractions available in our world to diminish the appetite for both, but there are no excuses. There is a false idea that the only things worth knowing or listening to are novelties. Wisdom and truth are not the preserve of the latest fashion.

Harm principle
We should give other people the least we give a painting; the benefit of good lighting.

When we recognise the variety of human needs and desires, our first step must be to tolerance, because that variety is so great that we cannot expect to have a ready insight into all of it. The only way to avoid being mistaken or prejudiced is to be open-minded.

We wish for sufficient latitude from others to carry out our own projects, even when they do not understand what they mean to us. Because we wish this to be a world in which this happens, we have to extend the same courtesy others. Rather than the biblical dictum, it would be better to say, ‘don't do unto other as you wouldn't want them to do unto you'.

“Evil is for the dull-witted. Anyone with traces of sensibility should avoid it if possible for he will have to smart for it. That he has a conscience makes him worse off than ever; he will be punished precisely on account of his conscience.” - Thomas Mann

“There is nothing to be said for a society in which those who chose leisure, although they could work, are regaled with the produce of the industrious.” - Ronald Dworkin

Marriage
Legal marriage is a institution that controls the age and sex of the parties involved, dictates what they can and must do in it, and on what terms - if any - they can leave it. So viewed, marriage looks like monstrous public interference into personal relations and it is surprising how many people still go in for it.

The truth, no doubt, is that people continue to marry merely because it is traditional, but in doing so they perpetuate an institution which was originated for social and economic reasons, chief among them to control the sexual activity and fertility of woman, and to help men ensure that any property they bequeathed had a better chance of going to the children who were truly theirs. If there was a clearer sense of the history of the institution - as a tripartite contract between two persons and the state, giving the later rights over the couple's relationship and goods - it would surely be less pervasive.

In a richer and fuller sense, a marriage is the coming together of people, irrespective of whether or not they have singed pieces of papers or have been given the sanction of municipal authorities, who wish to have and enjoy each other, to share life's projects, to pool their resources and perhaps raise children together.

Sex: nature's gift
If sexual activity were allowed its natural place in human life, it would consume considerably less time and energy than it does now. The kindness of nature has made sexual activity pleasurable, not just to encourage reproduction, but to promote bonding and plausibly, health.

Social beings?
A solitary life is not necessarily a lonely life, but can be a strong and productive one, and very peaceful.

N.B: (nota bene or note well) Empty hearts have room for nothing while full hearts always have room for more.

A large part of each individual's character and outlook is shaped by the nature of the relationships they have, for good and ill, because relationships can warp, poison, cause misery and stand as a barrier to the growth of gifts and the taking of opportunities, as well as being sources of good.

Why would one wish to escape opportunities to make advances in the things that concern us? Answer: timidity, a dislike of embarrassment, fear of failure or ridicule, anxiety about being conspicuous. But these reasons are not good ones for shrinking to the back of the crowd or for risking the chance of learning something by being disagreed with or proved wrong.

The tabloid press
The tabloid formula is one of lasciviousness masquerading as moral outrage, using rabid attitudes and hypocritical ways to titillate readers with what it pretends to condemn. One very real cost of this is that politicians, not a notably courageous race, are reluctant to institute any serious reform for fear of the negative headlines it might generate.

Even though most political organisations have existed for the benefit of a few, or a class, the real point of politics is to build circumstances in which good individual lives can flourish. The point of making good societies and good communities is to make conditions right for there to be good individual lives.

Today we have made a fetish of choice, but to choose to die is forbidden
One must distinguish between the state of death and the act of dying. Death, or being dead, is not anything we experience, it is a non-existence, indistinguishable from being unborn. As an act of living, dying is one of life's most significant events, and as such how it is experienced is integral to the quality of one's overall existence.

Dying is a living process, something that happens when one is alive and when all one's rights are, or should be, fully engaged. In the same way that we hope most of our living acts will be pleasant, we hope that the experience of dying will be likewise - or, if not pleasant, at least not painful, frightening or undignified.

In the darkest, rawest moments of grief there seems no help other than what endurance can afford; unless we remember to reflect on what the dead would wish for us; that they would not want us to mourn too long or too bitterly, but instead to remember the best of them and the best of our time with them, and to live courageously with face turned to the world, in ways they would applaud if they could know of them.

Desideratum – something considered necessary or highly desirable
Religion began as the science and technology of earliest man who, surrounded by fearsome nature, devised explanations for the universe and attempted to devise a means of controlling its phenomena using prayer and sacrifice. The development of science and technology shows us that, as a species, we have grown clever, their misuse for war and oppression shows us that we have not yet grown wise.

// Two dishes, but to one table // 06.05.12
CLAUDIUS
Now Hamlet, where is Polonius?

HAMLET
At supper.

CLAUDIUS
At supper? Where?

HAMLET
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service - two dishes, but to one table. That's the end.

CLAUDIUS
Alas, alas!

HAMLET
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

CLAUDIUS
What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

CLAUDIUS
Where is Polonius?

HAMLET
In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.

CLAUDIUS
(to attendants) Go seek him there.

HAMLET
He will stay till ye come.

// Tracy tweets // 06.05.12
"That awkward moment when you shout out the wrong answer to a question with confidence."

"Boys insult each other but don't really mean it. Girls compliment each other but don't really mean it."

// Tweet Olympics // 03.05.12
Another parlour game to add to Robin Ince's suggestion, this time suggested by Edgar Wright:

"I'm not a betting man but..."

// Funny tweet // 30.04.12
"Stupid zip broke on my coat so I'm trapped in it!" - Skinny Rach

// Robin tweets // 28.04.12
Please remember that in many public places talking is not required. Think, "Do I need to say this sentence?"

// Frustration tolerance // 27.04.12
The more we accept anxiety the faster it will fade. The more you avoid anxiety in the short term, the more of it you're likely to get in the long. While it may be uncomfortable, anxiety will not damage you.

// Chiaroscuro // 19.04.12
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a difficult and dangerous man, largely defined by his violence (often stirred by an insecurity about his status), his weird dress sense, his sexual proclivities and an unerring gift for getting himself into trouble. Yet his art was so original and compelling that those who saw it were transfixed by it. They fought to look at it, gathering in their hundreds every time a new altar piece was unveiled, and those who could afford it fought to acquire it.

Caravaggio painted with such force, with such a stunning sense of drama and deep sense of humanity, that prestigious commissions flooded in, but despite his network of rich protectors, he never found a secure place in the hierarchies of power. He painted as if the rich were his enemies and he lived in the same way. The one time in his life he came close to achieving a settled position among men of power and influence - on Malta - he managed to have himself thrown in jail and defrocked almost as soon as he was knighted.

Caravaggio was not only the most disturbed, but also the most unconventional of all the truly great painters of the Italian tradition. Essentially, he taught himself to paint and was unique in how he went about his painting too. He had no studio in anything like the conventional sense. He sometimes had a boy to assist him, but otherwise painted all by himself. He did not draw, or have assistants to paint drapery or landscapes as other artists did. He gathered no circle of pupils and there were no acolytes to spread the word. There were no portfolios of his drawings to pass around, there were only his paintings, and not very many of those as he died so young.

The fact that he was obliged to invent himself may partially explain his deep originality.

Carpaccio
There is very little landscape in Caravaggio, very little feel of the open air. The scenes he depicts are mostly to be imagined taking place in doors. He habitually collapses the immensity of the world to the confines of a room, in which he can control the action and limit the cast of actors. The blank background has been a peculiarity of Caravaggio's works since the start of his career. It is a hallmark of an artist utterly uninterested in extraneous detail. For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purpose of contemplation.

Caravaggio was a painter of extraordinary innate talent, a unique virtuoso when it came to conjuring the illusion of three-dimensional reality within the two dimensions of a painting (perspective). Yet his earliest works, while forceful, are relatively gauche and crude. The breakneck pace of Caravaggio subsequent acceleration, from unknown beginnings to full-blown mastery, begs the question of whether is it possible that he taught himself most of what he knew about painting on the job, and spent much of his presumed apprenticeship playing truant. This hypothesis has the virtue of helping to explain Caravaggio's original technique. It is easier, in some way, for a man to reinvent painting if he has almost nothing in the way of conventionally imagined techniques to impede him. His contemporaries described him as a difficult young man who liked to settle disagreements with violence and who was prone to disappear for days on end. There is no reason to suggest he was anything other than a bad student.

// Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow // 18.04.12
"Life is but a walking shadow. A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

// B-ball wisdom // 12.04.12
“Drama is draining.”

"You don't need that drama." - Chris Rock

// Sotto voce // 12.04.12
To speak a single language is to be enclosed in one cultural possibility, to be preordained to live in the linguistic and cultural cage into which you are born. If you don't have another language, you are condemned to occupy the same positions, the same phrases all your life. It's harder to outwit yourself, harder to doubt yourself in just one language. It's harder to play.

// Eclectic or esoteric // 12.04.12
Eclectic means mish-mash. Reduce confusion by remembering that eclectic is a more common word than esoteric.

// Ab Lincoln // 06.04.12
"If you have 8 hours to chop down a tree, spend 6 hours sharpening your axe."

// Chimp Paradox // 06.04.12
As we go about our day we continually receive information from all around us. The Human and the Chimp both receive this information and interpret it. The message always go to the chimp first.

The purpose and the agenda of the chimp is survival
The chimp interprets information using feelings and emotions. It needs to know that it is safe, so is continually vigilant to danger, making it prone to paranoia. The chimp makes guesses and fills in the details by assumptions that are based on hunch, paranoid feelings or defensive thoughts. The chimp thinks it is far safer to be paranoid and wary than to relax and lose it's life. Therefore it is not usual for our chimps to be suspicious of others and have some mistrust.

As chimps are constantly looking for danger, they tend to think catastrophically. They overreact to situations and fuel them with intense emotion.

The more vulnerable a chimp feels, the more paranoid it will become. Chimps that are insecure read a lot of things into harmless situations. They read intrigue or malice into comments that others make, then allow their imaginations to run wild. Where they perceive something is wrong they have a tendency to start worrying about what might happen and get things out of perspective.

The chimp does not work rationally. It doesn't try to decide if something is likely or feasible, but typically fills in the missing details with anything it chooses and jumps to conclusions. Sometimes gut feeling has it right, but it can only think and act with emotion.

The human's agenda is self-fulfilment
The human will interpret information by searching for facts and establishing the truth. When it has done this, it will put together things in a logical manner using rational thinking. The chimp constantly wants to go back in time and change things whereas the human accepts that you cannot change what has happened.

Chimps like to go on how they feel at that moment, whereas humans tend to go on how they will feel at the end of the day when they look back on how they used their time.

Everyday we suffer at the hands of other people's chimps and even at the hand's of our own. Whenever the brain recognises that it doesn't have full control of the situation it sends the blood supply to the chimp. This results in unease and you will feel under threat. However if the brain recognises that it is in full control of situation then the chimp relaxes and the blood supply goes to the human. This results in calmness and a feeling of opportunity. So whatever you are doing, there are two of you interpreting what is going on and forming an opinion as to what you should do. Often the two disagree. When you disagree the chimp is more powerful and gets control of thoughts and actions. However if you recognise what is happening and have strategies for managing it, you will gain control of your thinking and be able to act in a rational manner.

Questions
All too often we have feelings of paranoia or persecution that disappear rapidly when we ask the right questions and listen to the answers in a neutral way.

‘Do I want to feel this way?' is the question to ask in order to recognise if the chimps is hijacking you. If the answer is ‘No' then you are being hijacked.

Whenever you want to stop your chimp: actively slow down your thinking. This will work in all situations. If possible, distance yourself from the situation. If you can't do this physically, then try to relax and imagine you have climbed into a helicopter that has taken off and is now hovering above the situation, so you can look down and get some perspective on what is happening. Imagine your whole life as a timeline from start to finish and see where you are at this very moment. Ask yourself, how important is this situation to the rest of my life? Is this situation going to last forever or will it pass? Remind yourself that everything in life will pass. You will soon look back on this moment as a distant memory. Very little in life is important in the long run.

Whenever you experience any form of chimp activity that you do not manage well, stop and think: I accept that this is the way the machine works and will take care of the situation without getting down. Ask yourself how long you want to brood or dwell on something unpleasant that has happened and how long you plan to stay in that frame of mind. What good is brooding doing? Things won't get better by attacking and demeaning yourself. Relax and encourage yourself instead. Guilt and frustration are there to help us make repairs, not to destroy us.

Whenever a situation occurs where things are not going to plan, try to develop the habit of looking for solutions rather than dwelling on problems. Choose to look more objectively and see what you can do to improve, or accept the way that you are, with a smile. Seeing everything as all or nothing, win or lose, success or failure is dichotomous thinking and shows inflexibility. The chimp enters discussions with a win or lose attitude, the human enters with a plan to engage. Have an autopilot of seeing shades of grey and being flexible.

One approach to life guaranteed to help you be happy is to learn to laugh at yourself and keep a sense of humour. This is an autopilot in the computer of happy people. Laughing at yourself or at situations is one of the most powerful ways to remove stress from the chimp. Learning to have a realistic but positive approach to life is a learnt behaviour.

The best way of setting of an autopilot is to have a word or action to wake the computer up. For example, saying the word ‘change' as soon as you get the feelings. This word will wake the computer up and set off the autopilot, which is to change my immediate reactions to stress.

Method
Dedicated development time: the human reviewing what is in the computer and if necessary modifying it. Putting autopilots instead of gremlins into the computer is done through experience. When you experience anything in life you will interpret it. If you interpret it in a negative or unhelpful way the gremlins will appear in your computer for future reference. Interpret the event or experience in positive, or at least constrictive way, then a positive autopilot gets into your computer. Very often the way we interpret our experiences is more important than the experiences we have.

The thoughts in your head and the approach you take to life are your choice. You can choose how much a situation bothers you. Anything in life is only as important as you want it to be. It is for you to decide what in your life is important and what isn't. If you don't want something to be important then it doesn't have to be. Believe that being happy is not something you have to battle for, instead see being happy as normal for you. Happiness is a lifestyle choice. Happiness is more about being at ease with yourself than it is about being at ease with others.

If you always measure success in life by what you attain, then you must accept the emotional consequences when you do not attain what you want. If you measure success by effort and doing your best, then it is always in your hands to succeed and be proud of yourself. Remember that partial success is better than no success at all. Try to see failure or set-backs as a challenge. It can be an opportunity to develop yourself.

Possessions are similar to achievements. It has been shown that happiness derived from possessions is short-lived. Some people think they would be happy forever if they won the lottery. After period of adjustment, it has been found that lottery winners go back to their previous levels of happiness. It is similar to getting something new; after a period of time it usually diminishes in value to you. Be sure that you don't forget to cherish precious things that you have before they are gone.

Worry
:: Most worries are trivial in the long run and often take care of themselves
:: Worrying never does any good
:: Worrying is an option and we can choose not to worry
:: Relaxing is a powerful worry remover
:: Learning to get perspective and laugh at yourself is one of the most powerful things you can do

Work out what you can control and what you can't. Generally you can control everything about yourself and your reactions, you can control a little of the circumstances, but you can't control another people. Accept this. Your chimp wants to control the uncontrollable and they become very distressed when they can't do this. The human accepts that some things we cannot control and therefore we must deal with them at the time they appear.

Crystal-ball gazing
Crystal-ball gazing is looking into the future and tying to predict what is going to happen. First the crystal-ball gremlin looks into the future and sees doom and gloom, because crystal balls rarely show a happy future. Then the crystal-ball gremlin makes a what might be snowball and pushes it down the slope. As the snowball gathers more and more snow it becomes a what might be mountain.

Smash the crystal ball and kick out the gremlin! Replace it with an autopilot of cross each bridge as I come to it. The autopilot says, I will stay in the here and now and deal with things as they unfold. Very often things don't work out badly and you have put yourself through misery for no reason.

Many of us took our driving test when we were young. At this age if someone failed their test it could have quite a devastating effect. Somehow, passing first time was crucially important and got muddled up with ideas involving self-esteem. However, when you ask people who are older about their experience with their first driving test, they often laugh about failed attempts because they perceive failing first time as unimportant. It is merely an inconvenience and didn't have anything to do with their self-esteem, or even how they would ultimately drive. Getting perspective can take time but can be speeded-up if you make time to develop perspective on life events.

Others
Being tolerant means understanding how we are all different and the easiest way to be tolerant is to have little, if any, expectation of the people you meet, but just to accept them as they are and to work with this.

A common destructive thought is often brought into being by using the words should and must. Try replacing them with could and might. The difference between the two phrases are that using the words like should often evokes a sense of judgement, a command, or a feeling of failure, whereas the word could evokes feelings of possibility, hope, an option, a choice. It is reasonably to have expectations of what might happen but it may be unreasonable to demand that these must happen.

Clearly there are some occasions when the words must and should would be appropriate. I am not proposing that we excuse everyone from all responsibilities but we have to live in the real world. We can't change the way others present themselves to us - they have to want to do this - but we can decide if we want to work out how to get the best out of them and accept their limitations. Those who have unrealistic expectations of others and shout, get frustrated, angry or upset are unlikely to get anywhere and often end up looking pretty foolish.

Of course, the alternative is to move on if we can't tolerate their behaviour or if we have done our best and we still can't get on with them.

:: The best relationships are the ones where you accept the person as they are and work with this
:: Walk away from people whose behaviours or beliefs you can't accept
:: The one in five rule (out of every five people, one will love you, one hate you and the remaining three will base their options on your personality) means that you need to accept that some people you will never please and they will never like you and it has nothing to do with you
:: Recognise when you need help and get it from the best sources
:: Invest a lot in those who you care about

Be personable but not personal
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Drives have to be strong in order to keep the species going and the individual alive, so they have reward pathways in the brain to enforce them. These pathways release chemicals that have a good or compelling feeling attached to them and make the individual want to repeat the behaviour. When we fall in love our brains release a lot of chemicals that basically diminish our ability to think straight. Our judgment of this person can be vey impaired and this poses a risk. If you are in love, remember that you're not quite in a balanced state of mind, you're a little mentally deranged! When two people fall in love, it can be easy for them to expect their partner to fulfil all of the roles in their life. This is highly unlikely to work. Usually a partner cannot fulfil all of our needs. There are some drives such as female bonding or male bonding that our partner cannot fulfil.

Remember, changes within you take time and effort. They usually happen gradually and often occur unnoticed by you, but not by others. Don't be disheartened if you have setbacks; instead learn from them. Remember you always have a choice. The choices you make and how you chose to deal with life will determine your success and happiness.

The normal state for the human is confidence because you can always do your best and deal with any consequences, therefore there is no fear. Nothing lasts forever. Life and people are in a constant state of flux. This is how it is meant to be, so enjoy the journey.

// Nu:Ton // 26.03.12
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Sir Isaac Newton's letter to Robert Hooke (1676)

"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

// Carbon-14 (or The Half-life of Isotopes) // 26.03.12
"If one might make use of Darwin's theory to think about Einstein's, we could speculate that evolution has granted us only sufficient understanding of space and time as is necessary to function and reproduce effectively. The relentless logic of natural selection is not organised to grant organisms, even most humans, an intuitive grasp of the kinds of counter-intuitive insights that the special and general theories of Einstein present.

Gravity may well be a function of the bending of space-time, matter and energy may lie along a continuum, but most of us cannot feel this as part of our immediate world. We are the evolved inhabitants of Middle Earth. You might say we continue to dwell in a Newtonian universe, but in fact it is one that would also be familiar to Jesus and Plato.

When a well-known scientist, John Wheeler, writes that 'matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move', we may or may not be impressed, but it is hard to reorient one's worldview accordingly, to abandon the sense that there is an absolute "now" in every corner of the universe and that empty space is just a void ready to be filled, and cannot be bent, and is a distinct entity from time. The Einsteinian revolution may have redefined the absolute basics of matter, energy, space and time, but the limits of our mental equipment keep us in our evolutionary homelands, in the savannah of commonsense." - Ian McEwan

// One Last Job II // 22.03.12
"Big fucking deal” as my man Brain-tiggy would say.

// AdB Tweets // 20.03.12
"Forgiveness requires a sharp memory - of all the times we wouldn't have made it unless someone had cut us some slack."

"Feeling you're basically leading the right life is entirely compatible with being grumpy most of the time."

// Sebastian Horsley's aphorisms // 14.03.12
Style has little to do with wealth, it is just a way of being yourself. To be ‘well dressed' is not to have the ‘right' or expensive clothes; you can wear rags as long as they suit you. Style is not elegance but consistency.

Style is a way of buying people rather than things.

Wales - a country where Sunday starts early and lasts for several years.

Art doesn't pay but the hours are good.

When a man steals your wife there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.

M: "Have I failed you as a mother Sylvester?"
S: "It's Sebastian mother."

Appeal is always inversely proportional to attainability.

OCD is petitions of prayer where you try to manipulate the result. And prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use or comfort, but shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Teens must dress alike to assert their individuality.

The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.

Not that I considered myself a bad lover. What I lacked in size I made up for in speed.

It is important to watch out when you are getting all you want. Only hogs being fattened for the slaughter get all they want.

The fear of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage; that is why we get married. I detested married life. I didn't enjoy or want sex with my wife. I could not mate in captivity. Domesticity destroys desire. Once you get to know someone well the last thing you want to do is screw them. The key to happiness is to avoid the imprisoning events of life: property, possessions, marriage, babies.

God created alcohol to stop brilliant deviants like us from ruling the world.

I couldn't change the world. I couldn't even change a fuse.

Journalists need scandal as the police need crime.

Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a crime.

A snob is someone who treats the commonplace accident of birth as a sign of moral worth.

4x4s - the sort of car mothers kills other mothers' children in.

The only thing I despise are heartless one night stands where you tell all sots of lies to get a woman you don't care for into bed.

Deceit always made me so loving. (After an indiscretion he was always extra-nice to his deceived partner.)

I can't put into words how much I despise religion. It is an illusion fit only for children. But aren't drugs the same? Doesn't a drug addict have a fundamentally religious outlook on life? A faith in oblivion. Just another evasion of the courage to be, another way to comfort us for our deficiencies, to shelter us from the hurricane of life?

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what”'. - Andy Warhol

// Insert coin. Avoid Klingons // 11.03.12
"Toy Story sprang from the belief that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If objects were to have feelings they would be based on their desire to fulfil that essence. The purpose of a glass for example, is to hold water. If it had feelings it would be happy when full and sad when empty. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of begin discarded or upstaged by new toys." - John Lasseter & Steve Jobs

Memento Mori
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You're already naked so there is no reason not to follow your heart."

No shit, that's super!
"LSD shows you there's another side to the coin. You can't remember what it is when it wears off, but you know it's there. It reinforced my sense of what was important - creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."

// Brevity is the soul of wit // 11.03.12
Polonius: "To expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is, why day is day, night night, and time is time, were nothing but to waste night, day, and time."

Frailty thy name is woman.

// I'm a million different people from one day to the next // 08.03.12
"Get up tomorrow and try to be better." - John Lennon

// It's just a ride // 06.03.12
I'm Ray Charles to the bullshit.

// Robin tweets // 06.03.12
I think therefore I am...
watching a lot less telly.

// Super Bowl Day // 04.03.12
"Many hours of work to become that good." - Jeff van Grundy on D. Rose

// Alain de B tweets // 01.03.12
Tragedy is mistakes without any more chances.

// Derren tweets // 25.02.12
Thank u for asking if I have plans to get married. Seems like a lot of hassle. I'll just find someone I hate and buy them a house.

// King Lear // 22.02.12
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeits of our own behaviour - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulaters by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!

// Zero intolerance // 22.02.12
There is nothing those on welfare can do that will deprive them of the state's obligation to house, feed and entertain them. On the contrary, the more extreme their behaviour, the more support is given. Anti-social behaviour seems to expand to fit the level of support offered. One the one hand, authority can not tell them what to do; on the other, it has an infinitude of responsibilities towards them.

When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behaviour, that he is easily led, I ask him whether he was easily led to study mathematics, or the subjunctives of French verbs.

Liberal intellectuals consider the purity of their ideas more important than the consequences of those ideas. They tend to express themselves more to flaunt the magnanimity of their intentions than to propagate the truth.

Entertainment, absorbed passively through television, informs them of a materially more abundant and glamorous way of life, and thus feeds resentment, jealousy and the intense desire to dominate or posses someone else in order to feel in control of at least one aspect of life. It is a world in which men dominate women to inflate their egos, and women want children, “So that I can have something of my own. Someone to love and who'll love me.”

A combination of bovine vacancy and lupine malignity
Without education, the young are condemned to live in an eternal present, a present that merely exists, without connection to a past that might explain it, or a future that might develop from it.

Keeping it real
He was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others; that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side, and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of modern popular culture.

Multi-culturalism
Not all cultural values are compatible or can be reconciled by the enunciation of platitudes.

The belief these days is that there is no better or worse, simply popular or unpopular.

The daughter is the mother of the women, the son the father of the man
To develop an interest requires powers of concentration and an ability to tolerate a degree of boredom while the elements of a skill are learned for the sake of a worthwhile end. - Theo D

// Departures upstairs, Arrivals downstairs // 21.02.12
“The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an essential element of the religious pilgrimage, defined as an excursion through the outer world undertaken in an effort to promote and enforce an inner evolution. Pilgrims were not in the least troubled by the dangers, discomforts or expense posed by pilgrimages, for they regarded these and other apparent disadvantages as mechanisms whereby the underlying spiritual intent of the trip could be more vividly rendered. Snowbound passes in the Alps, storms off the coast of Italy, brigands (highway robbers) in Malta, corrupt Ottoman guards; all such trials merely helped to ensure that a trip would not be easily forgotten. This might remind us of one of the reasons we went travelling in the first place; to make sure that we would be better able to resist the mundane and angry moods in which daily life is so ready to embroil us. We may ask of our destination, ‘Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious. Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame'. Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.” - Alain de Botton

“For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy and approbation (approval, commendation).” Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

// Henry V // 15.02.12
"All things are ready if our minds be so." - Shakespeare

// Hitch: A Very Public Intellectual // 14.02.12
"If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or making if it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated."

"He much preferred the predictability and loyalty of animals to the vagaries and frailties of human beings."

"I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception – of pain."

"Gore Vidal points out the distinction between homosexual people and homosexual acts."

"I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy and usually a desire to perform the very act that is being condemned. This is why, whenever I hear some bigwig in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch for the time when he will be discovered down on his well-worn knees in some dreary latrine, trying to pay a transsexual hooker well over the odds to pee on him."

"What great self-persuaders we all are."

"For all it's outwardly easy Latin charm, Buenos Aires was making me feel sick and upset."

"People who knew Mozart said that he was not so much composing music as hearing it and then writing it down."

"You only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already."

"Many truths or useful remarks go unspoken for fear of rupturing intimacy."

// It will much repay your interest // 13.02.12
"The task of philosophy is to turn tears into knowledge" wisely observes Schopenhauer, who shed a few.

// Mark Kermode's 4 essentials of film criticism // 09.02.12
1, Opinion
2, Description
3, Contextualisation
4, Analysis

// Self-obsessed, highly-strung, tightly wound // 09.02.12
"When people ask you no questions about yourself, the issue tends to be envy, not lack of interest." - Alain de Botton

// Skinner's 1st world problems // 01.02.12
- On some 11th hour shit with the book

- I'm finishing my homework on the bus to school

- I'm in the classroom and the teacher is a bit late which gives me 5 crucial minutes more

// The rest is history // 03.01.12
"Our only chance of happiness lays in welcoming change." - Michael Cunningham

"Chance favours the mind prepared" - Louis Pasteur

// The Franklin Effect // 20.12.11
"We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do them." - Leo Tolstoy.

Although it may sound strange, this curious phenomenon (know as the Franklin Effect after Ben Franklin) is theoretically sound. Most of the time, people's behaviour follows from their thoughts and feelings - they feel happy so they smile, they find someone attractive so they look longingly into their eyes However, the reverse can also be true. Get someone to smile and they feel happier. Ask them to look into someone's eyes and they find a person more attractive. Exactly the same principle applies to favours. To encourage others to like you, ask for their help!

// Down at the Disco // 20.12.11
If you make what seems like a major mistake, don't over react. The chances are that it is far more noticeable to you than others and your excessive response or apologising could just draw more attention to it. Instead, acknowledge it if appropriate and continue as if nothing has happened.

Trait transference
Spreading unpleasant gossip about someone just makes you seem unpleasant.

“Bullies make you covert their attention, as you confuse their attention for mercy.” - Gary Shteyngart

// Under-pricing risk // 25.11.11
"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the necessary." - Voltaire

// Skinner's Pigeons // 25.11.11
"We like to believe we are in control and find ways of making our behaviour seem to matter in areas where it simply makes no difference. Our innate and important capacity to look for patterns makes us terrible at thinking in terms of coincidence or randomness, and we become like Skinner's pigeons, needlessly twirling and tapping in a largely indifferent universe." – BF Skinner in 1948.

// Cynic or open sceptic // 24.11.11
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." - Christopher Hitchens

"It can be very difficult and troubling to question ideas and belief systems that we feel define who we are. To look at things objectively and step outside our comfort zone can be almost impossible.” - Derren Brown

"I suspect that the reason people prefer to think of psychics and mediums as mere harmless quacks, or genuinely having ‘a special gift', is that the alternative is a lie so ugly and exploitative that is too unpleasant to accept." - Derren Brown

"Religion is ego masquerading as humility." – Bill Maher

DNA recipe
"What you meant to be is not what you are. What you mean to communicate about yourself is not the point, it is what you actually communicate that is important. In social life we are defined by our actions not by our motives; our thoughts or intentions mean very little unless they lead to action. It is how we behave, or sometimes even how much we make the effort, that makes the difference.” - Derren Brown

"Americans, like Brazilians are warm and open in anticipation of a good encounter; Brits only as a reward for one." - Alain de Botton

// Primary Representational System // 24.11.11
It is said that people tend to be predisposed to one or another representational system. One person will tend to make pictures in her head, while another might have a PRS that is auditory, because it is the sensory word of sounds that he is most comfortable in.

// Cerebral // 14.11.11
Book, films and music are necessary companions in the pursuit of happiness.

// Park Life // 14.11.11
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen." - Thomas Smothers

// RK Maroon // 07.11.11
Why do girls wear make-up and perfume? Cos they're ugly and they stink!

// Pure Montaigne // 24.10.11
“If others examine themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as the other; but those who are aware of it are a little better off - though I don't know.” That final coda - though I don't know - is pure Montaigne. One must imagine it appended, in spirit, to almost everything he wrote. His whole philosophy is captured in this paragraph. Yes he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way, so we might as well relax and live with it.

“My footing is so unsteady and insecure on an empty stomach, I find it so vacillating and ready to slip, that I feel myself another man after a meal. If my health smiles upon me, and the brightness of a beautiful day, I am a fine fellow; if I have a corn bothering my toe, I am surly, unpleasant and unapproachable.”

“There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.”

Conscious Purpose
“Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.”

“The great Stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order ‘find themselves', as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death. Montaigne writes, ‘Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone, and to live that way at our ease'.” - Sarah Bakewell

"The Renaissance was a period in which, while any hint of real homosexuality was regarded with horror, men routinely wrote to each other like love-struck teenagers. They were usually less in love with each other than with an elevated ideal of friendship, absorbed from Greek and Latin literature. Such a bond between two well-born young men was the pinnacle of philosophy; they studied together, lived under each others' gaze, and helped each other to perfect the art of living.” - Sarah Bakewell

“Many a time I should be glad for him to vanish from the face of the earth, but I know that, if that were to happen, my sorrow would far outweigh my relief.” - Socrates

“Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to hide!”

Amor fati
“I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud that I do.”

On marriage
“Men with unruly humours like me, who hate any sort of bond or obligation, are not so fit for it. Of my own choice, I would have avoided marrying Wisdom herself if she had wanted me. But say what we will, the custom and practice of ordinary life bears us along.”

Voluntary Servitude
“The subject of Voluntary Servitude is the ease with which, throughout history, tyrants had dominated the masses, even though their power would evaporate instantly if those masses simply withdrew their support. There is no need for a revolution; the people need only stop co-operating and supplying armies of slaves and sycophants to prop up the tyrants. Yet this almost never happens, even to those who maltreat their subjects monstrously.” - Sarah Bakewell

// Snap Induction // 24.10.11
“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.”

“A ship is safe in harbour, but that is not what ships are for.” - William Shedd

// Shakey // 10.10.11
"Shakespeare was the first great writer of secular literature and has influenced all secular literature after him. Tonight, you could go to see a Shakespeare performance in any major city in the world, and most of the minor ones. Shakespeare is an English writer only in the sense that soccer is an English sport." – Stephen Marche

The Tempest
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Hamlet
"I have of late, but wherefore
I know not, lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercise;
and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition
that this goodly frame the Earth, seems to me a sterile
Promontory; this most excellent canopy the air,
why, it appears no other thing to me then a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason,
How infinite in faculties,
In form and moving, how express and admirable,
In action how like an Angel,
In apprehension how like a God!
The beauty of the world,
The paragon of animals,
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me;
No, nor Woman neither."

// Anyone for Dennis? // 10.10.11
“‘It depends' is the accurate answer to most questions.” – Stephen Marche

// What a difference a century makes // 05.10.11
In 1800 England the majority of people lived in rural cottages or hovels They lived off the land or from produce sold in market towns. They lacked running water or sewerage, public educations, health, a postal service or rapid transport. Heat came from open fires and light from candles. The largest settlements were still the old cathedral cities. Life in England would have seemed little changed to a time traveller from 1700, or even 1600.

By 1900 that England had been replaced by a new one that would, to a surprising extent, be recognisable today. Houses, other than for the poorest, were built of bricks and stone, attached to a modern infrastructure of paved streets, water mains and sewers. Those occupied by the middle and more prosperous working class had gas and some even had electricity. On the table were daily newspapers and food from all over the world. Roads were surfaced with tarmac and cars were appearing on them (there speed restricted to 12mph, but no longer requiring a red flag to be carried in front of them).

In 1900 the traffic on the London to Brighton road was estimated at 1,200 vehicles an hour. Trains ran everywhere, even underground in London on electrified rails, with journey times that would compete with today's. Most communities had access to free or cheap schools and hospitals. The dark, satanic mills of the early Victorian age were giving way to cleaner factories. This England was a land of optimism and novelty, and unmistakably what we would term modern." - Simon Jenkins

// Walpole's Peace, Pitt's Terror // 05.10.11
“A face upon which a man might gaze 1000 times and still feel drawn to gaze again.” (Originally said of Henry II, 1133-1189)

“Ye sordid prostitutes... Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. The Lord hath done with you... Go, get out, make haste ye venal slaves. I will put an end to your prating.” Oliver Cromwell to the House of Commons' MPs, 1653

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” – Gary's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inactions.” John Stuart Mill stressed the need for active participation in democracy but warned against, “The tyranny of the majority”.

// Walk the Pennine Way // 05.10.11
“The less experience one has of a country, the more the slightest event assumes significance: a short dialogue with stewardess; a nation is friendly.”- Alain de Botton

// Band name: The Naked Apes // 16.09.11
“Population growth depends on when people have children as well as how may they have. Since population tends to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate. Banners that read ‘Stop at Two' could equally well read, ‘Start at Thirty”. In any case, accelerating population growth spells serious trouble. If the population continued to increase at its present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where people, packed in a standing position, would form a solid human carpet over the whole land. This is so even if we assume them to be very skinny - a not unrealistic assumption! In 1000 years from now they would be standing on each other's shoulders, more than a million deep. By 2000 years the mountain of people would have reached the edge of the known universe.

Of course this will not happen for some very good practical reasons; like famine, plague, war, or (if we are lucky) birth control. It is no use appealing to advances in agricultural science. Increases in food production may temporarily alleviate the problem but it is mathematically certain that they cannot be a long-term solution. Indeed, like the medical advances that have precipitated the crisis, they may well make the problem worse by speeding up the rate of population expansion. It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass migration into space (with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second!) uncontrolled birth rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraception methods. They express a preference for ‘natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Contraception is sometimes attacked as unnatural. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think most of us believe that the welfare state is highly desirable, but you cannot have an unnatural welfare state unless you have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be misery for all.

The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known, but any altruistic system is inherently unstable because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals who are ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children then they are capably of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation, but powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem less free from suspicion.” - Richard Dawkins

// Tit for Tat // 16.09.11
“When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We are built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes, but that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair, but as each generation passes the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long for them to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us will quickly disappear. Elizabeth II is a direct descendent of William the Conqueror, yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king's genes.

We should not seek immortality in reproduction, but if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea, compose a memorable tune, invent a sparking plug or write a poem etc., it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, but the meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.”

"We can't even disagree anymore without being disagreeable." - George A Romero
“In birds and mammals (although often not in fish, who reproduce differently) males are more ready to abscond from parental responsibility than females. This is because, unlike with fish, they have less invested in the gestation of offspring.” - Richard Dawkins

// What would I look like as a girl? // 16.09.11
“Human suffering has been exasperated because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.”

// Test Card // 16.09.11
Amateurs search for inspiration, professionals get up and go to work.

A fixed Sabbath does not jibe with the reality of the human brain. It rests effectively only when it is satisfied with what it has done.

// The Swede // 31.08.11
"Once the inexplicable had begun, the torment of self-examination never ended. However lame the answers, he never ran out of the questions, he who before had nothing of consequence really to ask himself. After the bomb, he could never again take life as it came, or trust that his life wasn't something very different from what he perceived. He saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to or less than you wanted it to do. What you said and did made a difference all right, but not the difference you intended."

// Mutton dressed as mutton // 31.08.11
"You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else. As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional - and enviable, and hateable - to accept your beauty, to accept its effect in others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you're well advised to develop a sense of humour."

"I want to own the things that money can't buy." - Philip Roth

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." - Shakespeare

"Patrice wanted Lacey's take on everything." - Steve Martin

// Asleep With My Hand On Your Waist // 15.08.11
“The man's desire is for the woman. The woman's desire is for the desire of the man.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Sex is as important as eating or drinking, and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.” - Marquis de Sade

How to be Alone
“The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior predict, it is an ‘antithetical' (directly opposed or contrasted; mutually incompatible) product.” - Jonathan Franzen

// The Suspicions of Mr Whicher // 15.08.11
Waiting for a big plot twist that never came.

“For centuries, ink in the form of the printed novel has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives.” (or... readers have long found themselves in fictional characters.)

“What is it they want from the man that they don't get from the work? What did they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shamble that follows it around?” - William Gaddis

// Mature and immature love // 21.07.11
"Love can be grouped into categories of mature love and immature love.

Mature love
Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known wilder shores of desire would refuse it's plainness the title of ‘love').

Immature love
Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude* (supreme blessedness or happiness) combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost.

The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, remote-controlled appliances). The logical climax of immature love comes in death, symbolic or real. For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse to compromise we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm."

“Refined debauchery” - James Boswell
"Wisdom teaches us that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs." - Alain De Botton

// Vassalage // 14.07.11
“Before you know it, the drugs and booze have muscled their way in and replace any natural buzz, making it impossible to enjoy any kind of natural joy at all. If kids could maintain a knack for capturing the natural highs in life they wouldn't take drugs. Drugs would just bore them shitless compared to a natural high.” – Steven Adler

// We don't give a frig about what them fools think // 07.07.11
"She had no notion of wholeness. She was all depth and no breadth."

"Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head."

"It's a perfect world, except for every species other than human beings."

"However little he'd even known how to live, he'd never known less than he knew now." - Jonathan Franzen

Neurosis
Neurosis is the failure of the conscious ego to deal with the events of the moment in terms appropriate to the moment. Instead of dealing with what is happening now, the neurotic person deals with events in terms of repressed feelings and hidden memories for the past which are totally irrelevant to what is happening at the present time.

// Sober, but not clean // 28.06.11
“I've had some great sessions on the grog. Those sessions where you wake up laughing!” - Tommy Tiernan

// “All science is either physics or stamp-collecting” - Ernest Rutherford // 28.06.11
Earth's diameter = 8000 Miles
Av. ocean depth = 4KM

“All things are made of atoms” - Richard Feynman
The basic working arrangement of an atom is the molecule (from the Latin for ‘Little Mass'). A molecule is simply two or more atoms working together in a more or less stable arrangement. Add two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen and you have a molecule of water.

If you wished to create another living object, whether a goldfish or a head of lettuce, or a human being, you would need really only four principle elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen – plus small amounts of a few others - principally sulphur, phosphorus, calcium and iron. Put these together in three dozen or so combinations to form some sugars, acids and other basic compounds and you can build anything that lives. A Darwin notes, ‘There is nothing special about the substances from which living things are made. Living things are collections of molecules, like everything else'.

Homo sapiens – man the thinker
As a species we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you care to name is stronger, faster and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages; we have a good bran with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creatures that can harm at a distance.

Because they can't flee from predators, plants have had to contrive elaborate chemical defences, and so are particularly rich in intriguing compounds. Even now, nearly a quarter of all prescribed medicines are dervied from just 40 plants.

All organisms are in some sense slaves to their genes. That's why salmon and spiders and countless other types of creature are prepared to die in the process of mating. The desire to breed, to disperse one's genes, is the most powerful impulse in nature. As Sherwin B. Nuland has put it, 'Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction'. From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.

Bipedal ape
"For the first 99.9999% of our history as organisms we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were, we were. Then, about 7 million years ago, something major happened. A group of new begins emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savannah. These were the australopithecines, and for the next five millions years they would be the world's dominant hominoid species. (Austral is the Latin for ‘southern' and has no connection in this context with Australia). They came in several variants, some slender and graceful, others more sturdy and robust, but all were capable of walking upright. Some of these species existed for well over a millions years, others a more modest few hundred thousand, but it is worth bearing in mind that even the least successful had histories many times longer than we have achieved. The most famous hominid remains in the world are those of Lucy – a 3.18 million year old australopithecine found in Ethiopia. She is our earliest ancestor, the missing link between ape and human. Lucy was tiny - just three and a half feet tall. She could walk (though how well is a matter of dispute) and was evidently a good climber too, though much else in unknown. Her skull was almost entirely missing, so little could be said with confidence about her brain size, but skull fragments suggest it was small." - Bill Bryson

// Digital footprint // 01.06.11
It was easy to give Pop Art critical status – there were lots of sophisticated things to say about it – but it was tougher to justify the idea that repetitive silk screens were rivals of great masters. If Cubism was speaking for the intellect, and Abstract Expressionism was speaking for the psyche, then Pop was speaking for unbrain, and just to drive home the point, its leader Warhol closely resembled a Zombie.

If you were older and believed in the philosophy of art as rapture, and didn't expect the next great development in art to be a retreat from beauty and an exploration of ordinariness, then you couldn't endorse Warhol as the next great master. But if you were young, with essentially no stake in art's past, not caring about the difficulty of paint versus the ease of silk screen, you saw the images unencumbered, as bright and funny, but most of all ironic. This new art started with the implied tag, “This is ironic, so I'm just kidding”, but shortly the tag changed to, “This is ironic and I'm not kidding”.

"Since the 1970s art schools had shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought."

"Art as an artistic principle is supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity is held up by air." - Steve Martin

// Hume enquiries // 20.05.11
"I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion." - David Hume

// Fuck the Format // 18.05.11
“Pussy costs money, dick is free.” - Chris Rock

// Muscle memory // 18.05.11
Important truths about the universe must always be based on solid foundations.

// Be Kind // 18.05.11
"It is a far richer project than may first be obvious. For example, it can involve stepping out of what is emotionally immediate and realising in moments of everyday conflict that those with whom we are arguing are most likely taking a stand-point equally as justifiable (to themselves) as ours. Kindness may involve preferring to understand another's one-sided view in such situations rather than blindly pushing out own. If we are prepared to not concern ourselves with the immediate blow to our pride that comes from conceding in this way, we can enjoy the warm glow later when we feel like the greater man, rather than laying awake in bed fuming with rage, replaying arguments and running imaginary conversations with ourselves, that make us even more livid!"

Seneca via Derren
"If you have high expectations of how smoothly life will glide forward everyday, you will be routinely disappointed and therefore prone to anger. Lower those expectations and the world becomes a less frustrating, and therefore more delightful place.

Time passes and the concerns of the moment make us smile further down the road." - Derren Brown

// Fuck to Effort ratio // 11.05.11
A graph showing the amount of effort one is prepared to invest to get laid. The bottom end of the scale is for ladies you would shag if it was on a plate, the top for ladies you are prepared to make a lot of effort to shag.

// First Lady // 11.05.11
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

// Columbian Exchange * // 09.05.11
"Out of the 30,000 types of edible plant thought to exist on earth, just 11 - corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats - account for 93% of all that humans eat, and everyone of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. The same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are not eaten because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the stone age. We are, in the most fundamental way, stone age people ourselves."

"A standard textbook definition of a vitamin is, 'An organic molecule not made in the human body which is required in small amounts to sustain normal metabolism', but in fact vitamin K is made in the body, by bacteria in the gut. Vitamin D, one of the most vital substances of all, is actually a hormone, and most of it comes to us, not through diet, but through the magical action of sunlight on skin." - Bill Bryson

* The transfer of foods and other materials from the New World to the old and vice versa.

// Absurdistan // 06.04.11
“The summer is there to be slurped up. We know summer is the height of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better than the last.” - Gary Shteyngart

Unbelief is a move in a game whose rules are set by believers. To deny the existence of God is to accept the categories of monotheism. Atheists say they want a secular world, but the world defined but the absence of the Christian's god is still a Christian world. Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies.

// A la Recherchér du Temps Perdu // 29.03.11
Proust's writing is long-winded and never rushed. He is amused by, “The self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy' men - however idiotic their business - at ‘not having time' to do what you are doing."

"A sincere book demands not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations can emerge and be disentangled.” - Alain DB

The benefits and limitations of reading
“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.” – Proust

“There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effect it is our thoughts that we bring out into the light, together with theirs.” – Proust

“There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone.” – Alain DB

Speaking vs writing
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last, rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental in so far as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation, while in fact merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we experience it.

Why would one be unable to chat with the level of thought contained in written words? In part, because of the mind's functioning, it's conditioning as an intermittent organ, forever liable to loose the thread or to be distracted, generating vital thoughts only between stretches of inactive mediocrity, stretches in which we are not really ‘ourselves', during which it may not be an exaggeration to say that we are ‘not quite all there', as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant childlike expression. Because the period of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. By contrast, a book provides a distillation of our sporadic minds, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years, and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are saying until we have had at least one go at saying it; whereas writing accommodates, and is largely made up of, rewriting, during which original thoughts – bare inarticulate strands – are enriched and nuanced over time.

Beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered
Great painters posses the power to open our eyes, because of the unusual receptivity of their own eyes to aspects of visual experience. We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements worthy of our attention, a succession of painters using their intense technical mastery to say what amounts to, ‘Aren't those back streets in Delft pretty?' or ‘Isn't the Seine nice outside Paris?'. And in Chardin's case, to say, ‘Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice and the proud expressions of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen and the crusty bread in the hall.'

Bad painters may be excellent draughtsman, good on clouds, clever on budding leaves, dutiful on roots, and yet still lack a command of those elusive elements in which the particular charms of spring are lodged. They can not, for instance, depict, and hence make us notice, the pinkish border on the edge of the blossom of a tree, the contrast between storm and sunshine in the light across a field, the gnarled quality of bark or the venerable, tentative appearance of flowers on the side of a country track – small details no doubt, but in the end the only things on which our sense of, and enthusiasm for, springtime can be based.

“Proust said, ‘Classically beautiful women should be left men without imagination'. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what happens when the beholder looks elsewhere? A subjective view of beauty makes the observer indispensible.”– Alain DB

How quickly we take things for granted
"We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale facsimiles.” – Proust
(Proust was a huge fan of the telephone, which was invented during his lifetime, and was shocked by how, after only 30 years of its existence, users complained about any faults in it's service!).

"Having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it. Depravation quickly drives us to appreciation.” – Alain DB

"When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. Afraid of losing her, we forget all others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her to those others whom at once we prefer to her.” – Proust

// Fake disinterestedness // 29.03.11
“I do my intellectual work within myself and once with other people it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.” - Proust

// Functioning addicts // 20.03.11
“Addiction is hell, but partying is a fucking blast!” - Bret Easton Ellis

// Glamorous Grannies // 20.02.11
“Comedy is an intellectual pursuit.” - Ricky Gervais

// "Even the butterflies are free!" - Dickens // 20.02.11
“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have fail at trying to write them either. Maybe he could never write them, and that was why he put them off and delayed the starting. Well, he would never know now.”

“It was never what he had done, but what he could do.” (People admired this guy cos he was full of promise and he traded on that, but he'd never actually done anything.) - Ernesto Hemingway

// Carl Jung // 14.02.11
“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answer to the questions of life. The seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they are seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that reason the idea of development was always of the highest importance to me.”

“Dreams are compensations for the the conscious attitude.”

“As my life entered it's second half, I was already embarked on the confrontation with the contents of the unconscious.”

// International Space Station // 11.12.10
“We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.” - Alain De Botton

// ARTchitecture // 11.12.10
John Ruskin proposed that architecture should be the work of "one school, so that from the cottage to the palace, from the chapel to the basilica, every feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current as its language or its coin."

“The best form is there already and no one should be afraid of using it, even if the basic idea for it comes from somewhere else. Enough of our geniuses and their originality. Let us keep repeating ourselves. Let one building be like another. We won't be published in Deustche Kunst und Dekoration and we won't be made professors of applied art, but we will have served ourselves, our times, our nation and mankind to the best of our ability.” - Albert Loos

“We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity.”

“Beauty is the promise of happiness and there as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.” - Stendhal

// "All outdoors may be bedlam provided there is no disturbance within" - Seneca // 26.11.10
“I have for a long time been of the opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to his mental powers. The man who habitually slams doors instead of shutting them with the hand is not merely ill-mannered, but also course and narrow-minded. We shall be quite civilized only when it is no longer anyone's right to cut through the conscious of every thinking being by means of whistling, howling, bellowing, hammering, whip-cracking and so on.”

“If life and existence were an enjoyable state, then everyone would reluctantly approach the unconscious state of sleep and would gladly rise from it again. But the very opposite is the case, for everyone willingly goes to sleep and unwillingly gets up again.” - Schopenhauer

“How can anyone be a thinker if he doesn't spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (moustache)

The will-to-life
“The will-to-life's ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may be sensed with particular clarity in the lassitude and tristesse that frequently befall couples immediately after love-making.” - Alain De Botton

// The mask, if worn long enough, becomes the face // 03.11.10
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven." - William Wordsworth

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” - Marc Antony in Julius Caesar

// Wisdom and self control // 03.11.10
"There are men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don't have an academic turn of mind or a good memory, yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information and about footballers, cars and celebrities. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same.

Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious and incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is."

"Education is the sum of what students teach each other between classes."

"You might think that the really smart jailbird would be a non-smoker, or at least have the good sense to become one. There are almost none that smart of course. They are plenty of clever jailbirds, but very few clever in that way. You can almost define a convict as one who precisely lacks the kind of wisdom and self control necessary to derive long-term advantage from short-term discomfort. This deficiency is what will have turned them to crime in the first place." - Stephen Fry

// The reward is more cheese // 25.10.10
"It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious." - Bill Hicks

// Boris Becker in the club tonight // 25.10.10
"The famous are used like fictional characters to tell stories, to give us warnings of the perils of success, or to be held aloft as examples of cotemporary ideals. One figure can be used to represent either extremes, depending on the cultural mood. David Beckham or Lady Diana can be an example of domestic excellence or individual indulgence depending on the day."

"I'm not in it for the money. I'm in it for the laughs and the glory."

"As a breadline junkie morals were ballast to be dispensed with as they interfered with survival. Now the skills and attitudes evolved to cope in an unforgiving environment peopled by ner-do-wells, dealers and chancers were coming in useful." - Russell Brand

// 7% Solution // 13.10.10
"Answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words." - Arthur Conan Doyle

"Don't believe everything Henry (Wooton) says. He doesn't." - Oscar Wilde

// Our completist paradise is not going to happen // 21.09.10
The immediacy of 24-hour 'breaking news' makes it impossible to take the long view. Stories disappear after a short period and important issues are forgotten.

// Choice Fatigue // 19.09.10
"Psychologist Barry Swatch identified choice fatigue, namely the brain beginning to seize up under the number of options laid before it. Schwartz cites the example of shoppers who are ten times more likely to buy jam when there are only six choices of item on display as when there are twenty-four. The conclusion is inescapable; less choice makes us perform better and consequently happier. The cultural equivalent is, for example, the strange feeling of depression that is said to overcome iPod users. Having all music in their pocket, they find it more difficult to be entirely satisfied with the track they've chosen to listen to.The urge to flick is greater across multi-channel TV, not necessarily because the programmes are bad, but because logic dictates that there has to be something better on."

Repetition is a form of comedy
"Any cultural activity that seems like hard work or that requires the application of the brain is probably a useful reminder that experiencing art isn't as easy as experiencing entertainment. Unfortunately, we're so scared that anyone will be put off culture if it seems like a bother that we now tend to conflate the two. So Shakespeare's words are thrown out and his stories are turned into cartoon strips, or Beethoven's music is heard only as a background score to the dramatisation of his life." - Armando Iannucci

// For the novel: Don of Dons // 18.09.10
When describing those unresponded-to, buzzed remarks in Ad's flyer-coated room; 'It was left to hang in the air, to buzz in the speaker's ear'.

Feeling an impatient lassitude, weariness, fatigue, languor, tiredness, exhaustion

// Francis Scott Key // 18.09.10
"Dick made the group into so bright a unit that Rosemary felt an impatient disregard for all who were not at their table."

"Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do - they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval."

"The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged."

"They knew it was still last night while the people in the streets thought it was morning."

"Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child."

"When you're sober you don't want see anyone and when you're tight no one wants to see you."

"It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything."

"New friends can often have a better time together than old friends." - F Scott Fitzgerald

// Reasons to be sensible (and legalise drugs) // 15.09.10
Hundreds of murderous international criminal cartels would disintegrate
Money laundering and other associated crime would decline massively
Billions would be saved on law enforcement, the courts and prisons
Massive reduction in the over-crowded prison population
Licensing laws would make it much harder for under 18s (for whom it is currently easier to buy drugs then to buy alcohol) to get hold of drugs
The purity of the drugs could be guaranteed, avoiding deaths though contamination
Taking drug supply off the black market would mean the cessation of the revenue that the Taliban and other terrorist organisations currently generate from drug trafficking
A reasonable fair trade agreement for opium and coco framers would reduce poverty in those countries and bring about a new understanding between nations

Not to mention the tax revenue.

// Chasing bars // 15.09.10
Gonna gravitate my way home,
I wanna be alone.

Skip across to Mexico, to get away from all you know.

// In each shave lies a philosophy // 06.09.10
"No matter how mundane some actions might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act." - Somerset Maugham

// Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional // 06.09.10
"I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone. I find spending time by myself neither difficult nor boring. I can always think of things to do."

"From schooldays I was never interested in things I was forced to study. I told myself that it was something that had to be done, so I wasn't a total slacker, but never once did I find studying exciting. As result, though my grades weren't the kind you had to hide from people, I don't have any memories of being praised for getting a good grade or being the best in anything. I only began to enjoy studying after I got through the educational system. If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace and approach it the way I liked, I was pretty efficient at acquiring knowledge and skills. It takes a lot of time to acquire a skill this way, and you go through a lot of trail and error, but what you learn sticks with you." - Haruki Murakami

// Bravery is by far the kindest word for stupidity // 27.08.10
"The inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of humans' enduring tragedies." - Nick Hornby

// Scarcity principle (or consistent parenting) // 07.08.10
"It is more dangerous to have given for a while than never to have given at all. Freedoms once granted will not be relinquished without a fight."

// Tricks of the Trade // 06.08.10
Reciprocation, Consistency, Social proof, Liking, Authority, Scarcity

"It can be harder to sell something for sale than something that isn't."

"We experience our feelings towards something a split second before we intellectualise it."

"Because the association principle works so well - and so unconsciously - manufactures rush to connect their products with the current cultural rage. During the days of the first moon shot, everything was sold with allusions to the space program. In Olympiad years, were are told precisely what is the "official" hair spray and facial tissue of our Olympic teams. When the magic cultural concept appears to be naturalness, the natural bandwagon was crowded to capacity. Sometimes the connection to naturalness didn't even make sense: 'Change your hair colour naturally', urged one TV commercial!" - Robert B Cialdini

"Foolish consistency is the hob goblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

// Let's see Paul Allen's card // 06.08.10
"I am no longer sweating the small stuff."

"I was already stricken and exhausted."

"I felt a prang of lust, followed by disappointment. The usual combo."

"Couples counselling always reminded me what a terrible thing optimism is." - B.E Ellis

// There were too many people, with people to spare, people to waste. // 06.08.10
World population has been growing continuously since the end of the Black Death, around 1400. At the beginning of the 19th century it had reached roughly 1 billion people. Increases in life expectancy and resource availability during the industrial revolution led to rapid population growth on a worldwide level. By 1960, the world population had reached 3 billion and doubled to 6 billion over the next four decades. As of 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.10%, down from a peak of 2.2% in 1963, and the world population stood at roughly 6.7 billion. Current projections show a steady decline in the population growth rate, with the population expected to reach between 8 and 10.5 billion between the year 2040 and 2050.

// Denizens of Lunar Park // 22.07.10
"Honey look, drugs may have been done, but I'm sure they were consumed quietly and with discretion."

// Superficial profundity // 19.07.10
"A man's character is partly of his own making, and what at first requires effort and self-control eventually becomes a disposition."

"Public adherence to moral cliché has become the mark of a good man." - Anthony Daniels

"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." - Joe Stalin

// Syntax // 14.07.10
Venus rotates so slowly that a Venetian day is longer than its year.

// Her addiction to energy kept her pushing on // 08.07.10
Robert Maynard Hutchins once famously remarked that whenever he felt the urge to exercise, he immediately lay down.

The relaxation that comes from strenuous exercise most likely reflects the physical-stress-mediated release of B-endorphins, the opiate-like human molecules whose expression is evolution's way of ensuring that humans engage in tasks that promote our long-term well-being.

// Sound levels // 18.06.10
15dB: Whisper softly
60dB: Common dialogue
70dB: Urban roads
120dB: Train whistle
130dB: Drill sound
140db: Jet taking off

A decibel is 1/10 of a bel.

// All currently living things had a common bacterial ancestor // 27.05.10
"The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education (third stage, third level) has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who are educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought." - Peter Medawar

"In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term 'man' ought to be used." - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

"When you are cold, or badly frightened, or haunted by the peerless craftsmanship of a Shakespeare sonnet, you get goosebumps. Why? Because your ancestors were mammals with hairs all over. In later evolution, the hair-erection system was hijacked for social communication purposes."

"'Cold-blooded' animals are not necessarily cold. A lizard has warmer blood than a mammal if they are out in the sun. The mammal has the same temperature all the time. Lizards use external means to regulate their temperature, moving into the sun when they need to warm-up, and the shade when they need to cool down."

"In any flying machine there is a trade-off between stability and manoeuvrability. Flying animals can move, in evolutionary time, back and forth along the spectrum of this trade-off, sometimes losing stability in the interests of manoeuvrability, but paying for it in the form of increased instrumentation and computation capability, or brain power."

"The human body abounds with what, in one sense, we would call imperfections, but in another sense, should be seen as inescapable compromises resulting from our long ancestral history of descent from other kinds of animal. Imperfections are inevitable when 'back to the drawing board' is not an option - when improvements can only be achieved by making ad hoc modifications to what is already there.

Imagine what a mess a jet engine would be if Sir Frank Whittle and Dr Hans von Ohain had been forced to abide by a rule that said; "You are not allowed to start with a clean sheet on your drawing board. You have to start with a propeller engine and change it, one piece at a time, from the 'ancestral' propeller engine into a 'descendent' jet engine". Even worse, "All the intermediaries have to fly and each one has got to be at least a slight improvement on its predecessor". You can see that the resulting jet engine would be burdened with all kinds of historical relics and anomalies and imperfections.

An important innovation (the jet engine in this example) is likely not to evolve from the old organ that did the same job (the propeller engine) but from something completely different. As a nice example, when our fish ancestors took to breathing air, they didn't modify their gills to make a lung. Instead they modified a pouch in the gut. And later, by the way, the teleosts modified the lung (which had previously evolved in their ancestors that occasional breathed air) to become yet another vital organ, which has nothing to do with breathing - the swim bladder." - Richard Dawkins

// Counterfeit art // 24.05.10
Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost.

“Art is in the viewer, not the object.” - Jeff Koons

”Damian Hirst; blurring the boundaries between the gallery and the gift shop.” – Will Self

“If it is art it is not for all. If it is for all it is not art.” - Arnold Schoenberg

// Arthur C Clark's 3rd Law // 17.04.10
"Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Ordinal numbers
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." - logical test set out by Scottish philosopher David Hume

Think starlings
Local units obeying local rules.

Information caterpillar
The genius of the human child - mental caterpillar extraordinaire - is for soaking up information and ideas, but not for criticizing them.

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and ancestors. An active readiness to be deceived can be called 'childish' because it is common - and defensible - among children.

But growing up, in the fullest sense of the word, should include the cultivation of a healthy scepticism. If we don't grow up in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature make us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks.

The point was well put by Isaac Asimov: "Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold", and the contention is that a trusting credulity may be normal and healthy in a child, but it can become an unhealthy and reprehensible gullibility in an adult.

// So fucking gangster // 31.03.10
"I like my whiskey wild, I like Saturday night in the shack to be crazy, I like the tenor to be woman-mad, I like things to go and to rock and be flipped. I like to be gassed by a back-alley music." - Sal Paradise

// Fresh Breath Sex // 05.02.10
L1: What is he like?
L2: You know how some men are animals in bed?
L1: Yes.
L2: Well I don't!
(From Fresh Prince of Bel Air)

// Shudder // 17.01.10
"Men wno are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact." - Bertrand Russell

// The Future Will Remember // 27.12.09
(We are) hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing, buried fibres and warm filaments with their invisible glow of consciousness.

The trick of dark imagining is one legacy of natural selection in a dangerous world.

Showers
When this civilisation falls and the new dark ages begin, showers will be one of the fist luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by peat fires will tell their disbelieving children of standing naked, in midwinter, under jets of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soap and viscous amber and vermillion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous then it really was, and thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks. - Ian McEwan

// Who else loves pouring tea from a teapot? // 24.11.09
"An unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates

// The conclusion in which nothing is concluded // 13.11.09
"Greedy for pleasure, haunted by guilt, torn between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between the need for contemplative solitude and the frustrated urge for gregariousness."

"By imputing none of his miseries to himself, he continued to act upon the same principles and to follow the same path; was never made wiser by his sufferings, nor preserved by one misfortune from falling into another."

"He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself." - Dr Johnson.

// In other words // 23.10.09
Sienna Miller says, "I just try to put myself emotionally in a very dark place. After that, I trust a lot in the writing". In other words, she pretends to be the character, then recites the script.

// The Nu-Puritans // 23.10.09
"People only marry when they do not know what they are doing, or when they do not know what else to do."

"Sins committed in private are not sins at all" (Moliére's Tartuffe)
"We should be sparing with our accusations for they are often the result of our own pride. We rush to find evil in others so that we may be justified in feeling that we are better than they. But when the mater is probably considered, is it not preferable that a secret fault were never revealed at all then we should proceed at an unpardonable gallop and assume the existence of non-existent sins, and in doing so sully - groundlessly but to our satisfaction - the good name of people who have committed no crimes other than those imputed to them by our pride?"

"Is it not infinitely less important to punish a crime than to prevent that crime from spreading? If it is allowed to remain in the shadows, is it not as good as cancelled? If it is made public, scandal will surely follow and talk of it will awake the passions of others who may be inclined to the same kind of transgression and gives comfort to them who will hope that they will be more fortunate than the sinner who has been found out. It is not a lesson they have been taught, but a practical piece of advice that they have been given, and they proceed to commit excesses they would doubtless never have dared dream of had it not been for the scandal which, wrongly construed as justice, is nothing more than misconceived moral strictness or a cloak for our vanity." "Is it not better to say nothing than to speak and plunge those we love into the deepest despair? How can you expect me not to shrink from removing the scales from your eyes?" - Marquis de Sade

For 'happiness' here, read 'sated desire'
"Happiness is an abstraction, a product of the imagination. It is one manner of being moved and depends exclusively on our way of seeing and feeling. Apart from the satisfaction of our needs, there is no single thing which makes all men happy. Every day we observe one man made happy by the very circumstance which makes his neighbour supremely miserable. There is therefore nothing which guarantees happiness. It can only exist for us in the form given to it by our physical constitution and our philosophical principles."

de Sade's villains follow their 'happiness' at the cost of others. The Sadean hero can only operate in a climate from which all human feeling has been eliminated. When other people have feelings too, they lose the ability to be cruel and see the enormity of their crimes. Even Sade acknowledges that virtue soon returns to those who are wronged by the virtue-less. As jealously has returned love to so many hearts, virtue is valued once it's shortcomings are felt.

// More Mitchell // 20.10.09
"We only went into Iraq because of oil, you know." "We only appease Saudi Arabia because of oil, you know." To hear people talk sometimes, you'd think they'd never used oil. Oil is vital and Britain hasn't got much of it. I hope it won't be vital forever but it certainly still is and there are worse reasons to fight or appease than the procurement of a necessity. If we went to war for food, I doubt anyone would blame us.

Oil, trade, employment and money are important to us – and, by us, I mean we the people, not just they the politicians or business interests. I completely agree that this sort of cynicism is immoral, what I don't like is people claiming it's all the work of a few malevolent patricians rather than a political community responding obediently to our loudly expressed democratic will.

What are the issues over which we citizens of a great liberal democracy have become really, seriously, exercised in the last decade? The environment? Zimbabwe? North Korea? No, the price of petrol, the recession, the money in our pockets, our jobs. That's what we care about and the politicians know it. When there's a controversial war, some nice, middle-class people go on an organised weekend stroll. When petrol is too expensive, lorry drivers blockade the major roads and the country grinds to a halt. Our leaders would have to be fools to take the former more seriously than the latter.

But they're so craven, so much the creatures of our favour, that they'll let us hide from our own self-interest. They've become the sin-eaters of the global village, the despised receptacle of wrongs of which we are all complicit. They indulge us in our belief that they're hypocrites, when in fact it's us. They allow us (to paraphrase the words of Colonel Jessep in A Few Good Men) to sleep under the blanket of the prosperity that they provide and then question the manner in which they provide it. We live in comparative luxury, then squeal like a stuck pig at the first sign of its diminution and blame the world's problems on politicians.

I know that's a generalisation and it ignores the many who do make serious sacrifices for their principles and the others who, equally unhypocritically, have never given a damn about geopolitics. But there are millions of us in between being told we can have it both ways – reduced carbon emissions and cheap air travel, an enlightened policy towards the Middle East and affordable petrol, cuts in spending but not services – because we won't vote for anyone who doesn't. - David Mitchell, The Observer, Sunday 18 October 2009

// 10%-ters // 13.10.09
"Technology is always subservient to talent." - Stephen Fry

// The House Always Wins // 10.10.09
"If voting actually changed anything they'd make it illegal." - Michael Mansfield Q.C

// Sophistry - subtle, superficially plausible, but actually erroneous reasoning // 08.10.09
"A Kafkaesque world where nothing is called by it's real name and language tends more to conceal meaning rather than convey it."

"The tendency of liberal intellectuals is to not mean quite what they say, and to express themselves more to flaunt the magnanimity of their intentions that to propagate truth." - Theodore Dalrymple

// Marquis de Sade // 01.10.09
"Closed to affection and tenderness, the Sadean hero has no free will, only urges, nor do they know desire, but only cravings which must be placated through a constantly repeated mechanical process of stimulation and sensation. There is temporary relief but no peace, for appetite is insatiable. There is no happiness, only fleeting exultation, perpetual dissatisfaction and urgent need to begin again and the compulsion to increase the dose. The true condition of the Sadean hero is not freedom at all, but the rage born of permanent frustration." David Coward on The Marquis de Sade - 'whose notoriety goes on being greater than his readership'.

"We shall not report the tender words which Williams spoke to express his affection. The reader who has a heart like his will know what they were and does not need them to be spelled out, while no number of words would explain his feelings to those whose souls are frigid."

"No situation is without it's danger. The wise man sets it against what may be gained and makes up his mind accordingly."

"Vary your pleasures for as long as your youth and looks permit, and jettison your illusion of constancy; a tedious, unassertive virtue, which is unsatisfying to oneself and never deceives others.

"People who have no vices need neither laws nor kings."

"Although one knows nothing, we must at least appear to know more than our predecessors." - Marquis de Sade

// Previous Administration // 01.10.09
"I would probably rather be anywhere in the world right now rather than here, but if I was anywhere else in the world I would just want to be back here." CPT Patrick Hennessey

"They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm." - Dorothy Parker

// The American Dream circa 2009 // 16.09.09
Live now, pay never. Have what you want, there are no consequences.

// Life in cold blood // 14.09.09
Some people (neo-cons spring to mind) are so certain of their convictions that they represented a certain reality for them. They are so desperate to believe that they brain-wash themselves.

// Italy // 14.09.09
There were advantages to living in the country which contained the greatest sum of beauty. Certain impressions you could only get there. Others, favourable to life, you never got, and you got some that were very bad. But from time to time you got one of a quality that made up for everything. Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; Gilbert Osmond was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there. It made one idle and dilettantish and second rate; it had no discipline for the character. - Henry James

// The metaphysical Madame Merle // 14.09.09
The other rooms meanwhile had become conscious of the arrival of Madame Merle, who, wherever she went, produced an impression when she entered. How she did it the most attentive spectator could not have told you, for she neither spoke loud nor laughed profusely, nor moved rapidly nor dressed with splendour, nor appealed in any appreciable manner to the audience. Large, fair, smiling, serene, there was smoothing in her very tranquillity that diffused itself, and when people looked around it was because of a sudden quiet. "My dear child, I'm never later than I intend to be."

"When you have lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman, we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self'? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive."

Isabel: "I don't agree with you. I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier and a perfectly arbitrary one." - Henry James

// Portrait of a Lady: // 14.09.09
"I call people rich when they are able to meet the requirements of their imagination."

"It's one's own fault if one isn't happy."

"It's as arduous to converse with the very meek as it is with the very mighty."

"She had only seen half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it is partly masked by the shadow of the Earth."

"The aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment."

"At first humorously, ironically, tenderly, then as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly."

"Osmond, by his own admission, had been to England just once; which was an absurd state of things for a man of his leisure and intelligence."

"Her mind moved in a narrower circle than she had imagined."

"There should be no scandal about Caesar's wife, and as I say, she always hoped to marry Caser."

Greenwich Love Tunnel
"He surveyed the edifice from outside and admired it greatly: he looked in at the windows and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and though he had keys in his pocket, he had a conviction that none of them would fit. She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave the impression of having intentions of her own." - Henry James

// Historically bad television // 12.09.09
"It's a good general rule of impersonations that if you have to introduce them, you're already struggling. Katy Brand knows this, which is why "It's Me! Lily Allen!" precedes her superhumanly bad Lily Allen turn, shoehorning in the running joke that Lily Allen likes to use Twitter, a fact you're probably aware of if you've picked up a newspaper or laptop in the past two years. Katy Brand's Big Ass Show is back for a third series and still no one can tell me why.

Because - good mother of God! - this is poor. There seems to be a deliberate ethic of choosing the most obvious angle possible each time. Witness the sketch with Britney Spears lip-syncing her way through an interview. I liked this idea when I first saw it, 20 years ago when Fry and Laurie did it with Michael Jackson. Watch out Milli Vanilli, she's coming for you.

Then there's "the Queen being common and swearing" thread, a gossamer thin premise she intends to spin out for the entire series. Never mind that Spitting Image wrote, then closed, the book on royals behaving badly a generation ago - Katy will ride this one for all it's worth. That's why she has Me! Princess Beatrice and Me! Princess Eugenie, in a note-for-note rip-off of Spitting Image's portrayal of their mother. That Katy Brand, she doesn't care who she upsets.

She'll even take on the pathologically inoffensive Jennifer Aniston, who surfaces saying "I'm fine!" repeatedly when she's really not because of the whole Brangelina thing. Dude, Jennifer Aniston filed for divorce from Brad Pitt in March 2005. There's nothing like topical comedy.

Just ask Me! Gwyneth Paltrow, who is skewered in a series of sketches where the joke seems to be that Paltrow (who may as well be Cuba Gooding Jr for all it looks or sounds like her) is a bad wife and mother because she does Pilates, hires household staff and other wacky Hollywood stuff that didn't make it into the Jennifer Aniston sketches. Yeah! eat shit, Paltrow!

But that's the advantage of doing celebrity-based material; you appeal to the existing prejudices about your target. Celebrities are walking punchlines - they occupy a space where a joke should be.

The feeble minded will laugh at the very mention of Amy Winehouse and, of course Katy was all over that action a couple of years back with musical parodies implying that Winehouse had some kind of substance abuse problem (colour me stunned). On to the internet they went and all of a sudden you couldn't move for LOLs and ROFLs from worthless YouTube comment scum.

This is how we debase the currency of comedy; the functionally illiterate are the arbiters of taste.

That laziness is what irks the most: there's a palpable contempt for the viewer and a poverty of aspiration to what comedy can achieve. Most of these sketches wouldn't get past the Little And Large script editor so, without snappy writing, the dubious talent and charm of Ms Brand are left to carry the show unaided.

A comedian getting their own show with nothing like the talent needed to support it - it's a very modern phenomenon. The Kevin Bishop Show was jaw-droppingly bad, his borderline homophobic comic thuggery mystifyingly getting a second season from Channel 4 when common decency demanded its end. Like Bishop, Brand offers no critique of or insight into celebrity, just a servile, cretinous infatuation with it.

They should not get away with this. TV illuminati like to talk about "event television"; moments where everything comes together, things everyone will be discussing the following day. Katy Brand's Big Ass Show may just qualify. Certain shows crystallise discontent, offer a focal point for anger, provoke a final "enough is enough" from the masses.

This show is comedy's Pearl Harbor. This is historically bad television." - James Donaghy, The Guardian, Saturday 12 September 2009

// On Liberty // 11.09.09
"The only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Of course Mill's simple philosophy appears perfect at first glance, but we must accept it requires a high level of intelligence and sophistication in a, probably smaller, community to carry it off. Mill's himself recognised, "It is better to be Socrates discontented than a fool satisfied."

// Captain Corioli's Mandolin // 09.09.09
Have you seen Bridget Jones' Diary? She was in here earlier looking for it.

// Puts the 'B' in subtle // 08.09.09
Sex, one of life's untaxable pleasures.

// Full Disclosure // 06.09.09
I imagine the British political leaders agree with the Argentine supreme court [in the matter of drug law reform], but they are too frighten to say so, let alone promise reform. In all they do they are guided by fear. I realise sometimes that if Britain still had the death penalty, no current political leader would have the guts to abolish it! - Simon Jenkins, The Guardian

// But with a whimper // 05.09.09
"This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but with a whimper." - The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot (1925)

At times it was tough, having challenged so many of the 'liberal intelligentsia' principles, so hated by Mr Daniels and that I (perhaps unquestionably) hold dear, but it was always worthwhile having them examined by such thoughtful and well-reasoned argument. It took me a long time to read because every time I finished a chapter I felt like I had been sent away with my tail between my legs!

An intelligent man who can make no constructive use of his intelligence is likely to make a destructive, and self-destructive, use of it.

It is often, perhaps usually, more important to remind people of old truths rather than introduce them to new ones.

We all value freedom and we all value order. Sometimes we have to sacrifice freedom for order and sometimes order for freedom. We even recognise the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall. The freest man is not the one who slavishly follows his appetites and desires throughout his life.

'Justice' - in the minds of many criminologists - does not refer to the means by which an individual is either rewarded or punished for his conduct in life, but to 'social justice' or unfairness, which exists in every society.

"The law is an ass" - Mr. Bumble, Oliver Twist
The British state is either utterly indifferent to, or incapable of the one task that inescapably belongs to it: preserving the peace and ensuring that it's citizens may go about their business in safety. It does not know how to deter, prevent or punish serious criminality or anti-social behaviour, yet feels it appropriate to insinuate itself into the nooks and crannies of everyday life on the pretext of 'public safety' or 'on compassion grounds', while more usually it is a deliberate intrusion into one's civil liberties or the result of a misguided moral philosophy of an under-employed politician.

Living abroad
Returning to England from France, I bought three of the major dailies to catch up on the latest developments in my native land. The impression they gave me was of a country in the grip of a moral frivolity. In a strange inversion of proper priorities, important matters are taken lightly and trivial ones seriously. The newspapers portrayed frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness - a most unattractive combination.

One does not feel the defects of a foreign country in quite the same lacerating way as the defects of one's native land; they are more an object of amused, detached interest than of personal despair.

Income tax = unemployment insurance
'A man is compelled by law to put aide sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums should be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a Government official. "Here is work offered to you at 25 shillings a week. If you do not take it you shall certainly not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you take it the sum shall stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance or refusal to labour, I will permit you to have some of your money, not otherwise."' - Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, 1912

The British have changed in character; their sturdy independence replaced with a passivity, a querulousness, or even a sullen resentment that not enough is being done for them. For those on benefits, such money as they receive is in effect pocket money, like the money children get from their parents, reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result they are infantilised. If they behave irresponsibly, by abounding their children wherever they father them for example, it is because both the rewards for behaving responsibly and the penalties for behaving irresponsibly have vanished. Such people come to live in a limbo where they is nothing much to hope or strive for and nothing much to fear or lose. Freedom for many people now means little more than choice among goods.

One personality fits all
The British tolerance of eccentricity has evaporated. Uniformity is what we want now and are prepared to resort to ridicule, bullying and even physical attack to impose it. It is as if people believe that uniformity of taste, appearance and behaviour are a justification of their own lives, and any deviation from that is an implied reproach, even a open declaration of hostility.

The pressure to conform to the canons of common taste (or rather lack of taste) has never been stronger. Those without an interest in football hardly dare mention it in public for fear of being considered 'an enemy of the people'. A deeply dispiriting uniformity of character has settled over a land, once richer in eccentrics than any other. We prefer notoriety to oddity now.

The Gift of Language
Everyone learns to run without being taught, but no-one runs the 100 meters in 10, or even 15 seconds, without training. It is fatuous to expect that the most complex of human faculties - language - requires no special training to develop it to it's highest potential.

Under-developed speech, tethered closely as it is to the here and now, lacks the aspects of English necessary to place personal experience in temporal, or any other perspectives. With a limited vocabulary it is impossible to express distinctions or examine questions with sufficient care.

[Language does not simple allow us to communicate with others, it also allows us to communicate with ourselves. Lacking the sufficient language needed to analyse our experiences in relation to temporal concretes or abstractions will leave us confused and our experiences misunderstood. - T]

My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way; with expostulations, exclamations and physical displays. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, but rarely or never reached the stage of verbal expression. Any complex abstractions that enter their minds remains inchoate, almost a nuisance, like a fly bussing in a bottle that it can not escape. Their experience is opaque, even to themselves, a mere jumble from which it will be difficult or impossible to learn because, for linguistic reasons, they can not put it into any kind of perspective or coherent order.

In their dealings with authority this left them at a huge disadvantage, and since so many of them depend upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs - from their housing to their health care to their income to their children - I would find myself dealing with these, often simultaneously bullying and incompetent bureaucracies, on their behalf. What officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible, on my intervention, become possible within a week. Of course it was not my mastery of language alone that produced this result but rather that my mastery of language signalled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do what I asked.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies are increasingly installing security barriers against physical attacks on the staff by dependents enraged by their lack of articulation.

Description of a Fool
It is true that man, being a creature in a permanent and unavoidable state of dissatisfaction, is perennially tempted to alter this state of mind by extraneous substances. Even change for the worse is often welcomed in preference to the boredom of stasis.

Drug addiction is fundamentally a problem of the soul. It is a problem of the meaning of life and the meaning in life. The vast majority of young addicts in Britain come from disastrous home backgrounds that our social and fiscal polices have so assiduously fostered and encouraged;

they are without religious or political belief;
they have no culture other than the most debased popular culture, of which they are largely passive consumers;
their economic prospects are poor;
they live surrounded by the most hideous psychical ugliness;
their social world is Hobbesian;
the households in which they live are unstable and of kaleidoscopically-changing membership;
their level of education is a tribute to the wilful and sadistic incompetence of educators of the past half century.

Yet they have a choice and they know it full well, for when I ask them why they tried heroin they often reply that they, 'fell in with the wrong crowd'. They understand immediately and without difficulty the import of my reply, when I say to them, 'Is it not strange that while I meet many people who fell in with the wrong crowd, I never seem to meet any members of the wrong crowd itself?' Their laughter proves that they are by no means as stupid or incapable of reflection as the condescending professional saviours of the so-called 'socially excluded' would have us believe.

// R Kelly // 04.09.09
To be delivered in a Scouse accent: "You know who my favourite singer is? Our Kelly. She's got a really great voice her."

// The youth of today (and yesterday) // 04.09.09
The King George's Jubilee Trust report of 1939 - 'The Needs of Youth' - summed up a catalogue of complaints that sound uncannily familiar: "Relaxation of parental control, decay of religious influence and the transplantation of masses of young persons to housing estates where there is little scope for recreation and plenty for mischief ..... is a serious challenge, the difficulty of which is intensified by the extension of freedom which, for better or worse, has been given to youth in the last generation."

// Cops // 03.09.09
"We fed you, we were proud of you."

// Something to write on, something to write with (not just pen and paper) // 03.09.09
"Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost." - Henry James (a prescription on writers. I'm overly perceptive, which makes me overly perceptible)

"Writers are engineers of the soul." - Stalin.

// Don't suspend judgment // 30.08.09
"Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that non-judgementalism is, at best, indifference to the suffering of others, and at worst, a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness?

However inviting it is for human beings to avoid judgement because it is impossible to judge of everything correctly, it is inescapably necessary to make judgements." - Theo D

// Art is long, life is short, the occasion fleeting and judgement difficult // 30.08.09
"His mind resembled a vast amphitheatre. In the centre stood his judgement, which like a mighty gladiator combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beats of the arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him." - Boswell on Johnson

// Livin' real civilised // 29.08.09
"A mad, conceited, ridiculous woman." - Samuel Pepys

// Drinking in London // 24.08.09
"Above all things beware of beastly drunkenness. Some are found sometimes so drunk, who, being fallen upon the ground or, which is worse, in the kennel, are not able to stir or move again. Drinking begets challenges and quarrels, and occasioneth the death of many, as is known by almost daily experience. Drunken men are apt to lose their hats, cloaks, or rapiers, nor to know what they have spent." - Henry Peacham, The Art of Living in London, 1642

"I've been walking about London for the last 30 years, and I find something fresh in it every day." - Sir Walter Besant

Henry James, in 1877, was scathing about London restaurants 'whose badness is literally fabulous'. And yet they flourished. The St. James Hotel was reputed to be the one in which 'separate tables for dining were first introduced', but it was M. Ritz who capitalized on the idea; the advent of his hotel restaurant effectively ended the old London fashion 'of people dining together at large tables'. Walter Besant wrote in the early 20th century that, 'Ladies can, and do, go to these restaurants without reproach and their presence has made a great alteration; there is always an atmosphere of cheerfulness, if not of exhilaration'.

Cut and cover
The first tube train ran in 1863.

// Pale Blue Dot // 24.08.09
"Humans experience weightlessness as joy." - Carl Sagan

// As your attorney... // 24.08.09
Fear of crime is a social problem in itself.

// The Daily Star // 18.08.09
"Nobody has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public." - HL Mencken

// The Second Law // 18.08.09
"The deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction." - Peter Atkins

// Full Frequency Spectrum // 18.08.09
"White light (like white noise in the sound spectrum) is a mixture of different colours; a scrambled mixture of wavelengths; a visual cacophony.

White objects reflect light of all wavelengths but, unlike mirrors, they scatter it into incoherence as they do so. This is why you see light, but not your face, reflected off a white wall. Black absorbs light of all wavelengths. Coloured objects, by reason of the atomic structures of their pigments or surface layers, absorb light of some wavelengths and reflect light of other wavelengths. Plain glass allows light of all wavelengths to pass through it. Coloured glass transmits light of some wavelengths while absorbing light of others.

Visible light spans the wavelengths from 0.4 millionths of a meter (violet) to 0.7 millionths of a metre (deep red). A little longer than red are infrared rays, which we perceive as invisible heat radiation and which some snakes and guided missiles use to home in on their targets. A little shorter than violet are ultraviolet rays, which burn our skin and give us cancer. Radio waves are much longer than red light. Their wavelengths are measured in centimetres, meters or even 1000s of meters. Between them and infrared waves on the spectrum lie microwaves, which we use for radar and high-speed cooking. Shorter than ultra-violet rays are X-rays, which we use for seeing through bone and flesh. Shortest of all are gamma rays, with a wavelength measured in the trillionths of a meter. There is nothing special about the narrow band of wavelengths that we call light, apart from the fact that we can see it. For insects, visible light is shifted bodily along the spectrum. Ultra violet for them is a visible colour (bee purple) and they are blind to red (which they might call 'infra yellow'). The colours that we actually experience, the subjective sensations of redness and blueness, are arbitrary labels that our brains tie to light of different wavelengths. There is nothing intrinsically 'long' about redness. Knowing how red and blue look doesn't help us remember which wavelength is longer. I often have on look it up, whereas I never for get that soprano sounds have a shorter wavelength than bass sounds."

“Insects have good colour vision, but their whole spectrum is shifted toward to the ultraviolet and away for the red. Like us they see green, yellow, blue and ultraviolet. Unlike us however, they also see well into ultraviolet range, but don't see red at ‘our‘ end of the spectrum. If you have a red tubular flower in your garden it is a good bet that in the wild it is pollinated not by insects but by birds, who see well at the red end of the spectrum. Flowers that look plain to us may actually be lavishly decorated with spots or stripes for the benefit of insects, ornamentation that we can't see because we are blind to ultraviolet. Many flowers guide bees into land by little runway markings, painted on the flowers in ultraviolet pigments which the human eye can't see.” - Richard Dawkins

// Strong Anthropic Principle // 18.08.09
"Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on ONLY in the kind of universe that what you see is stars."

"How is it that we find ourselves not merely existing, but surrounded by such complexity, such elegance, such endless forms? The answer is that it could not have been otherwise. It is no accident that we see stars in our sky. There may be universes without stars, where hydrogen remains evenly spread and not concentrated into stars, but nobody is observing those universes because entities capable of observing anything cannot evolve without stars.

Not only does life need at least one star to provide energy, but stars are also the furnaces in which the majority of the chemical elements are forged, and you can't have life without a rich chemistry.

The same is true of biology. It is no accident that we see green almost everywhere we look. Without green plants outnumbering us at least 10 to 1 there would be no energy to power us. That we are surrounded by endless forms of life is no accident, but the direct consequence of non-random natural selection." - Richard Dawkins

// Planet of the Idiots // 18.08.09
"Science allows mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond wild imagining, but no spells or witchery, no cheap and easy miracles." - Richard Dawkins

// In London, silence sounds like an alarm // 18.08.09
"An inhabitant of Cheapside was asked by a London reporter how he knew it was past two in the morning. He will tell you as he told us, that the silence of the city sometimes wakes him at that hour'."

// How much can he bench press though? // 09.08.09
"It is a terrible thing to desire and not to possess, and it is a terrible thing to possess and not to desire." - William Butler Yeats

"If you really want to make a million... the quickest way is to start your own religion." - L Ron Hubbard

// Is this true? // 09.08.09
The earth's distance from the sun is approximately 400 times the moon's distance from the earth. In a remarkable coincidence, the diameter of the sun happens to be approximately 400 times the diameter of the moon. This is why the area of the moon and the sun's photosphere (it's bright disk) appear roughly the same size from the perspective of the earth.

// Dead Yard // 06.08.09
'Life ain't nothing but bitches and money' harangued NWA, in a neat reversal of Marcus Gravey's vision of black improvement.

Rap music in the 21st century seems to present black people to the world in terms the Ku Klux Klan would use: illiterate, gold chain wearing, sullen, combative buffoons. It seems to have lost its moral bearings and declined to the deranged soundtrack of banality, with scarcely any ideology left in it.

"People with white skins generally enjoy the liberty of not having to define themselves in terms of race." - Ian Thompson

// I'll be gone, you'll be gone // 06.08.09
That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a day-to-day, self-centred perspective.

Out of the millions people we live among, most of who we habitually ignore and are ignored by in return, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness.

Unconcerned about tomorrow, forgetful that he who pays in advance always ends up badly served
Individuals who write their stories in a sub genre of contemporary fiction - the business plan - and populate them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, might eventually be punished, not by a scathing review in the London Review of Books, but by a complete lack of custom and prompt foreclosure.

Sex sells
I had believed until then that the vendor's frequent and deliberate reliance on feminine appeal was merely a vulgar stratagem intended to win over customers, through an implicit suggestion that a purchase might bring them closer to intimacy with a sales agent. Now I began to see the matter differently: it seemed obvious that no order, however lucrative, would render these women avaliable to buyers, so their presence on stands took on a more poignant and commercially effective dimension. Their real function was to serve as a reminder of the unavalability of beauty to an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and harried-looking consumer base. The women were goading the man to lay aside all romantic ambitions and to focus instead on their business and technical agendas. Rather than seductresses, they were in truth, spurs to stimulation, and symbols of everything that the buyer would be better off it they forgot about in order to concentrate on the 1000s of pieces of precisely-engineered equipment for sale around them. - Alain De Botton

// Consumption dysfunction // 30.07.09
For 1000s of years it had been nature - and her supposed creator - that had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which philosophers had termed 'the sublime'.

But then came a transformation to which we are still the heirs. Since the 19th centaury the dominate catalyst for the feeling of the sublime has ceased to be nature. We are now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe can most powerfully be invoked, not by forests or icebergs, but by supercomputers, rockets or particle accelerators. We are now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

Nature meanwhile, has become an object of concern or pity. No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpasses us, the natural landscape instead bears the scares of our quixotic powers. - Alain De Botton

// Why work? // 30.07.09
All societies have had work at their centre, but ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative. Our choice of occupation is held to define our identity to the extent that the most insistent question that we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were but what they do, the assumption being that the route to a meaningful existence must invariably pass through the gate of remunerative employment.

It was not always this way. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle defined an attitude that was to last more than two millennia when he referred to an incompatibility between satisfaction and a paid position. For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals. The labour of the hands, as much as of the mercantile sides of the mind, would lead to a psychological deformation. Only a private income and a life of leisure could afford citizens adequate opportunity to enjoy the pleasures gifted by music and philosophy.

Early Christianity appended to Aristotle's notion the still darker doctrine that the miseries of work were an appropriate and immovable means of expiating the sins of Adam. It was not until the renaissance that new notes began to be heard. In the biographies of great artists, men like Leonardo and Michelangelo, we hear the first references to the glories of practical activity. While this re-evaluation was at first limited to artistic work and even then only to its most exalted examples, in time it came to encompass almost all know occupations.

The bourgeois thinkers of the 18th century turned Aristotle's formula on it head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it has once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

Aspects of this evolution in attitude towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere too, the 18th century bourgeoisies yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage, just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job. Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work, the pleasure hitherto pessimistically (or perhaps realistically) confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.

We have become, after several 1000s of years of effort, the only animals to have wrested ourselves from an anxious search for the source of the next meal and therefore have opened-up new stretches of time in which we can learn Swedish, master calculus and worry and the authenticity of our relationships, avoiding the compulsive and all-consuming dietary priorities under which still labour the emperor penguin and Arabian Oryx. Yet our world of abundance has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors. Many of the brightest minds still spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. - Alain De Botton

A Paretan utopia
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto theorised that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Partean economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers.

Frontline infantry
"Once the alarm has rung, we have little choice but to head to the bathroom without doing justice to our dreams. Sentimental associations and impossible longings are shut down, and the self is reassembled as an apparently coherent entity, with stable commitments and a prescribed future. With time, the drawbridge to the night is pulled up.

The start of work means the end of freedom, but also of doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The worker's 10,000 possibilities have been reduced to a manageable handful. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy, it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action." - Alain De Botton

// Strangers on a train // 30.07.09
Entering the busy train carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have began far up the line. The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of having taken notice, but they betray their awareness of a new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow her to struggle past. There is something improbable about the silence in the carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder is it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, but if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage?

Newspapers are being read all around. Today there is a story of a man who fell asleep at the wheel of his car after staying up late into the night committing adultery on the internet - and drove off an overpass killing a family of five in a caravan below. Another item speaks of a university student, beautiful and promising, who went missing after a party and was found in pieces in the back of a minicab five days later. A third relates the particulars of a love affair between a tennis coach and her 13 year-old pupil. The accounts, so obviously demented and catastrophic, are paradoxically consoling, for they help us to feel sane and blessed by comparison. We can turn away from them and experience a new sense of relief at our predictable routines. We can be grateful for how tightly bound we have kept out desires and grateful for the restraint we have shown.

NB: - The intricacy of some stories which, while they concern the livelihood of many, often go unreported as readers cannot be expected to follow in detail any of the real developments which unfold obscurely in the realm of science and economics. This serves to underline the marginality of that normally found in the daily papers, which have no option but to focus on murder, divorce and films. - Alain De Botton

// Demography (the statistical study of all populations) // 21.07.09
Malthus is famous for his prediction that societal improvements would result in population growth which, sooner or later, would be checked by famine and widespread mortality.

"Famine seems to be the last, most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce sustenance for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction and often finish the dreadful work themselves, but should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array and sweep off their thousands and ten-thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world." - Thomas Robert Malthus (An essay on the principle of population, 1798)

Why, if Westerners find one another's company grotesque, would they choose to live in NYC? Density is in the interest of the species. It promotes competition, which begets invention. The more if us there are, the cleverer we get. And if crowding does become as desperate as the Cassandras predict, you can bet the solutions will be nothing short of spectacular. We are magnificent creatures. The rise of population and urbanisation in Europe sparked the Industrial Revolution. How can you proceed from a history like that to claiming that population growth is economically oppressive?

Riddled with homosexuality, over-indulgence and spiritual poverty, the West has lost its love of its own children and so of humanity itself. The very myth of 'over-population' is a symptom of our disease. It is a sign of universal self-correction that a people grown so selfish that they will no longer bear children because they want Bermuda vacations, will naturally die out. The sallow empire is falling. In its place will rise a new people. A hundred years hence the planet will be lushly populated by richer colours of skin, the hoary (very old and familiar and therefore not interesting or amusing) order long before withered and blown to ash.

// Geothermal // 17.07.09
Geothermal power (from the Greek roots geo, meaning earth, and thermos, meaning heat) is power extracted from heat stored in the earth. This geothermal energy originates from the original formation of the planet, from radioactive decay of minerals and from solar energy absorbed at the surface.

// Podcast Tool // 15.07.09
There is such a wealth of podcasts out there that even prolific podcasters are bound to miss some that would have been of interest. I would like to see a tool made available that searches and downloads podcasts appropriate to one's taste. The app would trawl the 'podosphere' and download any podcasts that are similar to those you have shown interest in before.

For example, if you have downloaded a Stephen Fry podgram and Stephen Fry then appears say, being interviewed on a Five Live podcast, your app would download it and let you know it has done so. Surely it would be as useful as spell checker! OK perhaps not, but useful none the less.

// Ethnotat // 13.07.09
"The place is stuffed to the gills with arts and crafts crap. Or as we like to call it in our house - ethnotat." - Mark Thomas

// Sensual // 07.07.09
"Some girls are sensual, others like you to pull their hair." - Styles Infinite, Easy on the Ear

Musiq, Caught Up
"She got book intelligence, street common sense;
She can switch her mode from corporate to ghetto."

// Good prediction? // 01.07.09
Strong words from Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning Princeton economist, in his column for the New York Times this week. After watching the debate in the House of Representatives last week before the vote on the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill, Krugman said he was appalled by the claims made by some of the climate change deniers who reside within the Grand Old Party.

"As I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason – treason against the planet." If you watched the debate on Friday, you didn't see people who've thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don't like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they've decided not to believe in it – and they'll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

One sight in particular seemed to rile Krugman: representative Paul Broun of Georgia standing before the floor and grandly stating that the climate change "hoax" has been "perpetrated out of the scientific community". What's more, his statement generated a somewhat stilted ripple of applause. Broun's views on climate change have been aired before – he has renamed the Waxman-Markey bill on his Twitter feed as the "Wacky-Marxist Tax and Cap Bill" – but to find this sort of crackpot denial being aired in the House ahead of a pivotal vote, as opposed to in some dark corner of the internet, left Krugman angry:

"Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual? Yes, it is – and that's why it's unforgivable. Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an "existential threat" to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole – but the existential threat from climate change is all too real. Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is. "

Krugman is not the first person to raise the spectre of climate change denial being an actionable crime. Mark Lynas, for example, has speculated in the past about "what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead". James Hansen has also argued that the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies that actively spread doubt about climate change should be put on trial for "crimes against humanity and nature".

The deniers love this sort of attack, of course. It steels them to hear accusations that they are committing "thought crimes", or "treason" no less. They love to see themselves as brave, "truth"-wielding Galileos standing up against a wave of pseudo-scientific indoctrination. They trot out the predictable comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. It all helps to feed into their grand conspiracy theory that climate change is, indeed, a big lefty hoax dreamt up solely to squeeze more taxes out of us all.

You can't help conclude that we're heading for one hell of a day of reckoning with all this. Someone's going to lose spectacularly big in this particular culture war. I certainly know where my money is, but the sad thing is the bragging rights will be irrelevant given the reality of what will be going on outside our windows. If only it were true that all that was at stake was a debating society trophy. - Leo Hickman, The Guardian, Wednesday 1 July 2009

// Mi Otro Yo // 29.06.09
"The true profession of man is to find his way to himself." - Hermann Hesse

// Shiny Shoes // 23.06.09
Conventions between people are established overnight. Furtive presumptions become unabashed presumptions in no time. Privileges advance to rights.

Overly-edited discourse draws attention to what's been left out.

At best, when you're telling someone something they don't want to hear, you'll get through on delay.

I had always been suspicious of being happy for other people. I wasn't sure there was any substitute for being happy on your own account. The prospect of 'being happy for others' is charming. I would have liked it to be possible but deep, deep inside I was afraid that what we wished for each other was, if not ill, then at least less, and I prayed that this was what all siblings were like. Oh, we would commend each other on trifles, and yes we presented brilliant shoulders to cry on when the chips were down, because secretly we rather liked it when the competition was gaming with slightly fewer chips.

If the upside of families is that we mean something to each other, the downside is that we mean too much.

Beauty was deception and you had to have the shyster's smooth sleight of hand to pull it off. This one thought of herself as ordinary, and consequently she was.

Once you have let information into your life, you can not let it go.

Intellectual positions reliably arise from less rational, emotional well springs, and generally front self-interest.

Only the comfortable revere discomfort, only whisky sippers in over-stuffed armchairs can exalt suffering; only the free can construct elaborate and patently silly metaphors about prison life and it's endearing capacity to keep your feet on the ground with chains. - Lionel Shriver

// Mitchell // 15.06.09
"Sir Alan Sugar is perfectly suited to the job of "enterprise tsar" because it's not a job - it's an exercise in presentation, just like his role on the BBC. In less bewildered times, an ambitious opposition would have welcomed the opportunity to ridicule such a disastrously craven government appointment. Instead, they're meanly trying to block it because they're annoyed they didn't think of it themselves. No, the Tories are just desperate to rob Labour of its little publicity coup because Sir Alan Sugar comes across on TV as exactly the sort of cock who Tory voters like, with his brand of "no-nonsense" nonsense and second-hand rhetoric, and his public affirmation that wealth makes what you say more important.

The real problem with Sugar's new appointment is that it's such an obvious and grim attempt at populism. Gordon Brown is so short of ideas that he thinks the best way to demonstrate that the government is coping with the biggest business crisis in a century is to make it the responsibility of a man whose day job is telling self-regarding mediocrities that they should take off their Mexican hats before trying to put on their jumpers. A man who has made himself rich, but whose career as a tycoon has gone sufficiently quiet that he's got time to do TV. Top-end billionaires are too busy for that; Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson don't have their own programmes, they have their own channels. Alan Sugar is no longer primarily a businessman, he just portrays one on TV. Brown might as well have given the new tsardom to the bloke who played Boycie in Only Fools and Horses." - David Mitchell

// Zion Train // 12.06.09
"Wisdom is better than silver and gold." - Bob Marley

// Aquatic // 06.06.09
Why did fish first leave the water? Perhaps their ponds dried out and they were trying to get back to water elsewhere.

// Discontinuous mind // 06.06.09
Race is one of the many cases where we don't need discontinuous categories. Others include obesity (the discontinuous mind insists on separating people out into the obese on one side and the non-obsess on another) and poverty (all those official figures detailing the number of people living below the poverty line).

// The brain is hand-heavy // 06.06.09
"An animal is the way it is because it needs to be." - Professor Arthur Cain

Pangaea was the supercontinent that is theorized to have existed about 250 million years ago, before the component continents were separated into their current configuration

Geological time is large not only in comparison to the familiar timescale of human life and human history, it is large in the timescale of evolution itself. This would surprise those who have complained of insufficient time for natural selection to make the changes the theory requires of it. We now realise that the problem is, if anything, the opposite - there has been too much time. If we measure evolutionary rates over a short time and then extrapolate, say, over a million years, the potential amount of evolutionary change turns out to be hugely greater than the actual amount. To see this, we can cash in on the lucky fact that our forebears, whether they fully understood what they were doing or not, have for centuries been selectively breeding domestic animals and plants. In all cases spectacular evolutionary changes have been achieved in no more than a few centuries or, at most, millennia; far faster than even the fastest evolutionary changes that we can measure in the fossil record. No wonder Charles Darwin made much of domestication in his books.

Fruit files and mice are used for genetic experiments because their life cycle is faster than ours, therefore changes can be seen quicker.

Squat feeding is perhaps one reason for bipedalism.

Displaying one's lack of lice (and therefore health) could be as a reason for nakedness (in the Desmond Morris sense). Male appearance and female taste evolve together.

From a plant's point of view, a square centimetre of the earth's surface that is anything but green amounts to a negligently wasted opportunity to sweep up photons. Leaves are solar panels, as flat as possible to maximise photons caught per unit expenditure. There is a premium to placing your leaves in such a position that are not overshadowed by other leaves, especially somebody's else's leaves. This is why forest trees grow so tall. Tall tress that are not in a forest are out of place, probably because of human interference. It is a complete waste of effort to grow tall if you are the only tree around. It is much better to spread out sideways, like grasses, because that way you trap more photons per unit of effort put into growing. It is no accident that forests are so dark. Every photon that makes it to the ground represents failure on the part of the leaves above.

// TV is covert propaganda // 05.06.09
"We are deceived by the very machines we made to enlarge our vision." - Daniel Boorstin

// Flat Earth News // 21.05.09
Contrary to popular belief, pure heroin - if properly handled - is a benign drug. The gap between a therapeutic dose and a fatal dose is far wider than it is with paracetamol. It's most notable side effect is constipation. All of the misery, illness and death associated with heroin are the effects, not of the drug, but of the black market on which the drugs are sold. Black market heroin becomes poisonous because dealers cut it; addicts contract diseases because they use dirty equipment; users overdose as they have no idea of purity; addicts commit crime, not because they are intrinsically immoral, but because they have no other way of funding their habit. For every pound that the British government spends on prohibition, it spends four pounds on the results of prohibition. If, on occasion, it temporarily succeeds in cutting the supply of heroin, it pushes up the price of the drug, stimulating more crime by users who need to fund their habit.

"The newspaper that drops on your floor is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours, distorted by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the product accurately, we could add, 'But it's the best we could do under the circumstance and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected and updated version'." David Broder, American political reporter, 1979

The criminal justice system is an effective way of regulating the behaviour of law-abiding citizens, who pick up the deterrent signal and react, but a strikingly ineffective way of controlling offenders.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of the country. In almost every aspect of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in or social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated but the relatively small number of persons who pull the wires which control the public mind." - Edward Bernays, the founding father of PR and a nephew of Freud.

There are something like 200 countries in the world. (The precise number is a matter of endless political dispute.)

// Sex ratio // 21.05.09
The sex ratio of most species is approximately 1:1. W. Hamilton gave the following explanation for this in his 1967 paper Extraordinary Sex Ratios:

- Suppose male births are less common than female.
- A newborn male then has better mating prospects than a newborn female and therefore can expect to have more offspring.
- Therefore parents genetically disposed to produce males tend to have more than average numbers of grandchildren born to them.
- Therefore the genes for male-producing tendencies spread and male births become more common place.
- As the 1:1 sex ratio is approached, the advantage associated with producing males dies away.

The same reasoning holds if females are substituted for males through-out. Therefore 1:1 is the equilibrium ratio.

Fibonacci sequence
Nature is full of maths, like the Fibonacci sequence (the first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each remaining number is the sum of the previous two, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, 8+13=21etc.). Perhaps the idea of looking at things like we see in the Matrix (in long strings of code) is closer to the truth than we might think.

// A Midsummer Night's Dream // 21.05.09
"The course of true love never did run smooth."

// Je ne sais pas et je ne soigne pas // 21.05.09
"Music is like a time machine. It is the fuel that powers your day dreams." - Simon Armitage

// Variety for variety's sake // 05.05.09
"The Agricultural Revolution began at the wane of the last Ice Age, about 10.000 years ago, in the so called Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates." - Richard Dawkins

The Isthmus of Panama is the narrow strip of land that lies between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, linking North and South America. It was formed some 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch. It contains the nation of Panama and the Panama Canal. Like many isthmuses, it is a location of great strategic value.

Orang Utan means "Man of the Woods" in Malay. A tree-dwelling animal, it shares a common ancestor with humans dating from around 14 million years ago.

Gibbons, unlike the great apes which are our closer relatives, are monogamous.

Neanderthal
Fossils were found in 1856 near Düsseldorf, Germany in the Neander Valley. Workers were mining for limestone when they found a skull and other bones. Thal (or in modern German, Tal) means 'valley'.

Cat's eyes
Nocturnal animals have a tapetum - a layer of tissue that lies immediately behind or sometimes within the retina - that reflects light back to their eyes so they get a chance to see the light twice and absorb as much as possible. Shine a torch into their eyes and they will reflect the light.

Marsupial means 'pouch' in Latin. Marsupials are born as tiny embryos equipped only to crawl, crawl for their tiny lives through the forest of their mother's fur, into pouch where they clamp their mouths to a teat. The other group of mammals are called placental because they nourish their embryos with various versions of a placenta; a large organ though which miles of capillary blood vessels belonging to the baby are brought into close contact with miles of blood vessels belonging to the mother. This excellent exchange system (for it serves to remove waste from the foetus as well as feed it) enables the baby to be born very late into its career. It enjoys the protection of its mother's body until it is capable of keeping up with its own herd. Marsupials do it differently. The pouch is like an external womb, and the large teat to which the baby becomes attached works a bit like an umbilical cord. It emerges from the pouch as if in second birth. It happens that Australia, for much of its history since it split from Gondwana (a southern precursor-super continent), had no placental mammals.

Merchant's Tale
If nuclear war destroy humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term is rats. I have a post Armageddon vision - we and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. The gnaw their way through London, New York and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses, turning them into a new generation of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the city and into the countryside. When all the relics of human proflicy are eaten, populations crash again and the rodents turn on each other. In a period of intense competition, short generations with perhaps radioactively-enhanced mutation rates, boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with populations isolated save for occasional lucky rafting; ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence. Within 5 million years a whole new range of species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rates are stalked by sabre toothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists eventually organise careful archaeological digs (gnaws) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporally tragic circumstances that gave the rat it's big break?

Toolbox routines
As of 2009, the mouse is one of the few mammals apart from ourselves whose genome has been completly sequenced. Two things about this have sparked unwarranted surprise. The first is that mammal genomes seem rather small; of the order of 30,000 genes or less. The second is that they are so similar to each other. Human dignity seemed to demand that our genome should be much larger than that of a tiny mouse. But by what standard do we decide how many genes are needed to specify a body? The assumption is that the genome is a kind of blueprint, with each gene specifying its own little piece of body. But it is not like a blueprint, it is more like a recipe, a computer program or a manual of instructions for assembly. If you think of a genome as a blueprint you may expect a big, complicated animal like yourself to have more genes than a little mouse, but that isn't the way genes work.

Curl Your Tongue into a Tube
"Suppose there are two blood types called A and B, which confer immunity to different diseases. Each blood type is susceptible to the disease against which the other has immunity. Diseases flourish when the blood type that they can attack is abundant, because an epidemic can get going. So if B people, say, happen to be common in the population, the disease that hurts them will enjoy an epidemic. Consequently, B people will die until they cease to be common and the A people will increase and vice versa. Whenever we have two types, the rarer of which is favoured because it is rare, it is a recipe for polymorphism; the positive maintenance of variety for variety's sake. The ABO blood group system is a famous polymorphism which has probably been maintained for this kind of reason.

Astonishingly, our ABO blood type polymorphism is present in chimpanzees. It could be that we and chimps have independently 'invented' the polymorphism, and for the same reason. But it is more plausible that we have both inherited it from our shared ancestor and independently kept it going during our six million years of separate descent." - Richard Dawkins

// Two nations divided // 24.04.09
"What a pretty smile this morning." - Houston, Monday 20th April. It's the kind of shit you can get away with in the States, but would just sound creepy in the UK.

// Reductio ad Absurdum // 13.04.09
"Truth is like a woman, and we have failed to understand her." - Nietzsche

// Death mask // 13.04.09
People always remember Marilyn Monroe as young because she died young. The lasting image people have of you is how you looked at the time of your death.

Life with a movie star is not as glamorous as it seems from the outside. When you get to see them without make-up you find that they are exactly like you and me, with the same anxieties and insecurities. The only difference is that we are mainly concerned with money and the lack of it while they are mainly concerned with fame. Or the lack of it.

// A Simple Idea // 13.04.09
“More cooperation and less competition, more sharing and less greed, a respect for all life.”

"To those who have travelled at all widely, what is clear are not our exotic differences, but that we are all the same."

"In order to improve all societies, ours as well as others, cultural exchange is the key. Mixing people up. Separating us all from our one-sided views."

But Bruce...
"Right now, we are heading towards a homogenized world. Not one of cultural exchange but rather of cultural takeover. If this continues, there may be no litmus test to see where we've gone wrong or right, no way to tell whether our so-called 'development' is really meeting our physical, emotional and social needs. Without indigenous communities there are no 'control' elements to the human experiment from which to learn or remember the different ways of living in the natural world."

"Our global systems are in dire need of reassessment. Politicians, craving re-election, act only in short term. Their sponsoring corporations transcend nation states and pander primarily to the interests of their collectively greedy shareholders, while operating within an economic system which accentuates the disparity of wealth and where natural resources are only worth anything when they've been plundered and destroyed."

“Ivan said that some people lamented the old days under the Soviet Union; there was a certain comfort in knowing that you were being looked after in some way, no matter what – or seemingly no matter what – and even though life was tough and the work was hard, you knew you could survive. All feel the insecurity of life today, all feel a real fear of the future and one's place in it.” - Bruce Parry

// Bling H20 // 20.03.09
"More than 90% of the environmental impacts of a plastic bottle happen before the consumer opens it - oil for plastic, oil for shipping, oil for refrigeration." - Dr. Allen Hershkowitz

// Frankenstien // 20.03.09
"Invention does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg*. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it." - Mary Shelly on writing Frankenstien

* When Columbus (Colon) returned from discovering much of the free world, many of his peers claimed to have been able to have done the same. To this Columbus responded, "Can you balance an egg on it's sharp end?" All tried and failed until Columbus smashed his egg down so the sharp end flattened and supported the egg. After which he exclaimed, "Easy when you know how, eh?"

"A mind of even moderate capacity, which closely pursues one study, must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study." - Frankenstien

// Ephebiphobia - fear of young people // 18.03.09
"We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self-control." These words - expressing the all-too-familiar contemporary condemnation of young people - were actually inscribed on a 6,000-year-old Egyptian tomb.

Later, in the fourth century BC, Plato was heard to remark: "What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

A few hundred years later, in 1274, Peter the Hermit joined the chorus. "The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint ... As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress."

// Verbal inflation // 04.03.09
The speed of verbal inflation is staggering. Most of us still use the word 'millionaire' to describe someone of enormous wealth. It is not long ago that the word 'billion' began creeping into the lexicon of everyday politics. In the past it was generally used as a loose, non-specific way of conveying a sense of scale, bordering on the fantastical (as in "a billion stars in the heavens"). But hardly have we grown used to the idea of the billionaire when the word 'billion', relatively speaking, has begun to lose some of its power, displaced by the word 'trillion'.

One billion is equal to 1000 million; One trillion is equal to 1000 billion
A million seconds is 11 days.
A billion seconds is around 32 years.
And a trillion is 32,000 years.

// Movie clichés // 01.03.09
1, Someone being tucked in while sleeping on the sofa.
2, Playing chess in the park.
3, Running through a crowded train/bus station/airport.
4, Walking through a busy night club (often one character leadeing another at gun point). People are dancing wildly everywhere. The music is often inappropriately hardcore to the dancing and tone of the venue and clearly meant to be really loud, yet when people talk they don't have to raise their voices to be heard. Often followed by a scene upstairs, where gunfire/screaming is muffled by this 'loud' music.
5, Opening on a moving landscape shot, often a moving road, with or without central lines.
6, "I'm Spartacus", (i.e: if him than me too.)
7, Shoes stepping out of cars.
8, Shoes stamping out cigarettes.
9, Nobody goes to work in the movies.
10, Shocking car crash impact.
Why not start a movie with the Paramount rock (as usual), but we pull back to reveal our lead watching one of their movies on a screen? (There is something similar to this in 'For Your Consideration'.)

// Brand New Cadillac // 26.02.09
"If men could go down on themselves, it would just be women in this room now. Staring at an empty stage." - Bill Hicks

// Speak to us of... // 22.02.09
What is fear of need but need itself?
Is not dread of thirst when your well is full,
the thirst that is unquenchable? - Kahlil Gibran

// The tourist: a detuned radio // 19.02.09
Walking down a busy street in a foreign country, where you understand some of the language but not fluently, can be like listening to a detuned radio. The background noise of building work, traffic jams and music serves as the interference, while you tune in and out of various conversations, picking up individual words, phrases and snippets of dialogue along the way. Depending on your level of fluency, it's rare to comprehend complete sentences, but edited sentiments can inspire vivid pictures of that conversation's content.

// The Wheel // 12.02.09
It is generally accepted that the wheel was invented in 4th Century BC.

"We think of the stone age as an era of poverty and the Neolithic as a great leap forward. In fact the move from hunter-gathering to farming brought no overall gain to human well-being, it simply enabled larger numbers to live poorer lives. Almost certainly, Palaeolithic humanity was better off.

Intensive plant gathering may have begun some 20,000 years ago, cultivation of the land around 15,000 years ago, but the turn to farming was not a clear cut event. In some parts of the world it seems to have followed climate change. In the Middle East, rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age seem to have driven hunter-gathers into the uplands where they tuned to agriculture to survive. In other areas, the hunter-gathers destroyed their environment themselves.

There was never a golden age of harmony with the Earth. Most hunter-gathers were fully as rapacious as later humans. Only after the first Polynesian settlers had wiped out moas (flightless birds endemic to New Zealand) and ravaged the seal population of New Zealand did they turn to more intensive methods of food production. By exterminating the animals on which they depended, these hunter-gathers condemned their own way of life to extinction.

The move from hunter-gathering to farming has often been seen as a change like the industrial revolution of modern times. If this is so, it is because they both increased the power of humans, without enhancing their freedom. In the eyes of those for whom wealth means having an abundance of objects, the hunter-gather life must look like poverty. From another angle it can be seen as freedom." - John Gray

At first glance this may seem like a contradiction, but it is possible to deduce that he means that humans are no better off today than they ever were. What we look back on as 'human progress', has not improved our standard of living, in fact in some parts of the world standards of living have dropped. Nor was this 'progress' the result of our drive for advancement, rather it was forced upon us by rising population levels and as a result of the abuse of our environment. As Gray says, "It simply enabled larger numbers to live poorer lives."

However, it's worth noting that Bruce Parry (as well as agreeing that hunter-gatherers were and indeed still are often guilty of over-hunting) does deduce that modernity can result in more free time:

"Taman Tamak told me that his traditional leaf roof would need changing again this year and he was considering using corrugated iron instead. Down in the valley it was all the rage. When I told him I thought that was a terrible shame, he said that the traditional style might be better to live under, but it had to be frequently renewed. To do that he needed five or six neighbours to help him, which then put him under an obligation to help them when they needed their houses renovating. However nice looking the thatched roofs might seem to an outsider like me, the fact was that he spent half his time helping to build houses for other people, whereas he could do the corrugated iron himslef and it would last three times as long.

I often use this as a good example of the change coming to traditional life. As in so many places, modernity here represents a perceived easier life. Although a tin roof was nosier in the rain, hotter in the sun and less picturesque generally, he'd rather have the easier new version because it gave him more free time." - Bruce Parry

// Circadian rhythms // 09.02.09
A circadian rhythm is an approximate daily periodicity, a roughly-24-hour cycle in the biochemical, physiological or behavioural processes of living beings. The term "circadian" comes from the Latin circa, "around", and diem "day", meaning literally "approximately one day". Circadian rhythms can be entrained by external cues, the primary one being daylight. These rhythms allow organisms to anticipate and prepare for precise and regular environmental changes. We fall into sleep in obedience to a primordial circadian rhythm, where we nightly inhabit the virtual world of dreams.

// Straw Dogs: the knowing I // 09.02.09
Living systems are cognitive systems and living is an ongoing process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system. Even in living things in which awareness is highly developed, perception and thought normally go on without consciousness. Nowhere is this more true than in humans. Conscious perception counts for less in the scheme of things than we have been taught. It is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we receive through subliminal perception.

Subliminal perception - perception that occurs without conscious awareness - is not an anomaly but the norm. So much of what we perceive of the world comes not from conscious observation, but from a continuous process of objective scanning. Anton Ehrenzweig tells us, "Unconscious vision has proven to be capable of gathering more information than a conscious scrutiny lasting a hundred times longer. The undifferentiated structure of unconscious vision displays scanning powers that are superior to conscious vision."

Science tells the same story. Otto Potzl proved that images shown to waking people too briefly to be noticed or consciously remembered, resurfaced in their dreams. Companies were formed to influence consumer behaviour by the use of messages too brief to be registered in our conscious awareness, and subliminal advertising, as it became know, works - which is why it was effectively banned in so many countries forty years ago. Subliminal perception is not something that occurs on the margins of our lives, it is continuous and all pervasive.

"It is true that in consequence to our relation to the external world, we are accustomed to regard the subject of knowing - the knowing I - as our real self. This however, is a mere function of the brain and is not our real self." - Schopenhauer

Nearly all our daily goings on occur without conscious awareness. Much of our mental life takes place unknown to us. The most creative acts in the life of the mind come to pass unawares and our deepest motivations are shut away from scrutiny. Very little that is of consequence in our lives requires consciousness. Much that is vitally important comes about only in its place.

It has been an axiom since Descartes ("Cogito, ergo sum") that knowledge presupposes conscious awareness, but sensation and perception do not depend on consciousness, still less on self-awareness. There is nothing uniquely human in conscious awareness. Where other animals differ for humans is in lacking the sensation of selfhood. In this they are not altogether unfortunate. Self-awareness is as much a disability as a power.

The most accomplished pianist is not the one most aware of her movements when she plays. The best craftsman may not know how he works. Very often we are at our most skilful when we are least self-aware. That may be why some cultures have sought to disrupt or diminish self-awareness. The meditative states that have long been practiced in Eastern traditions are described as techniques for heightening consciousness. In fact they are ways of bypassing it. Drugs, fasting, divination and dance are other familiar examples. In earlier times, architecture was used to produce a systematic derangement of the senses.

The world which we see through the filter of conscious awareness is a fragment of that given to us by our subliminal vision. Our senses have to be censored so that our lives can flow more easily, yet we rely on our preconscious view of the world in everything we do. To equate what we know with what we learn through conscious awareness only is a cardinal error. The life of the mind is the life of the body. If it depended solely on conscious awareness to control it, it would fail entirely.

More Straw Dogs
The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendents of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.

So long as our population grows, progress will consist in labouring to keep up with it. There is only one way that humanity can limit its labours and that is to limits its numbers. But limiting its numbers clashes with powerful human needs. Zero population growth could only be enforced by a global authority with draconian powers and unwavering determination. There has never been such a power, and there never will be.

"The certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation" - E.M Cioran

Why (not) lie?
"Darwinian theory tells us that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction. More than that it is a disadvantage. Among humans, the best deceivers are those who deceive themselves: 'we deceive ourselves in order to better deceive others', says Robert Wright. A lover who promises eternal fieldielty is more likely to be believed if he believes himself, although he is no more likely to keep the promise. In competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that deceit is pervasive in animal communication."

// DeephausGrüv // 01.02.09
"If a lion cold talk, we could not understand him." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

// Necromancer // 08.01.09
"When we dream we do not know we are dreaming. Not until we wake do we realise. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream." - Change-Tzu

"Our human perceptual habits are remarkably stupid. We tune out 99% of the actual sensory stimuli we receive, and we solidify the remainder into discrete mental objects. Then we react to those objects in programmed habitual ways." - Buddhist meditation teacher Gunaratana

// Infantile // 08.01.09
"Every reproach can hurt only to the extent that it hits the mark. Whoever actually knows that he does not deserve a reproach, can and will confidently treat it with contempt."

"We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their errors. We shall see then that whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others, pays them too much honour." - Arthur Schopenhauer

// Show your workings // 10.12.08
The more generous among us must assume that policy makers have informed discussions with experts in their specific field, behind closed doors. The problem for those of us not party to those discussions is we only hear the results, which more often then not don't make as much sense without the background details. If policy makers showed their working, we may be more inclined to trust in their conclusions.

// Perfume idea // 09.12.08
Your Own Farts (YOF) for men

// Matter of opinion // 03.12.08
"No one is more concerned with the practicalities of action than those who never do anything." - Robert Newman

// Photographic surrealism // 28.11.08
"A few rare pieces of art turn the bleakest negatives into radiant positives, telling you life is not worth living in terms which reassure you that it is." - Philip Norman

"The English are a people who have no interest in a work of art until they are told it's immoral." - Oscar Wilde

This is context
Point to an object by putting a clear space around it. A picture hung in a gallery looks more special than the same picture propped or hung near other objects that interfere with is sacred periphery. The blurriest and most ill-composed of our personal photographs looks quiet passable in an album. Indeed any of these incompetent images could look like art if given centre stage on an otherwise empty page.

// The sporting divide // 08.11.08
"For the spectator, there are two kinds of sportsmen; those who you trust and those who you don't. It is likely that the divide correlates with whether the sportsman trusts himself or not, but in any event, watching a player in whom you have imperfect faith fosters anxiety. Watching the kind who has it, whatever it is, and knows he has it, is relaxing. Indeed, certain characters so consistently engender an unswerving confidence in their audience that all the tension leaves the game and they get a reputation as dull." - Shriver

// How to run a day // 08.11.08
"Although fucking doesn't take very long, something about the diversion benefits the rest of the day." - Shriver

// The Escapist // 08.11.08
"History lends itself to the conclusion that pause is rare. Any respite is as merciful as it's bound to be brief." - Shriver

// Misadventure // 03.11.08
"Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days." - Romeo and Juliet, Act I

// The architectural environment // 14.10.08
"A straight path between two points may be the most efficient solution, but that does not mean it is the best path from the point of view of satisfying human needs. The human animal requires a spatial territory in which to live that posses nice features, surprises, visual oddities, landmarks and architectural idiosyncrasies.

A neat symmetrical, geometric pattern may be useful for housing a lot of people, but it goes against the nature of the human animal. Huge tower blocks of repetitive, uniform apartments have proliferated as a response to the housing demands of a swelling population, but alternatives must be found. A genuine village seen from the air looks like an organic growth, not a piece of slide-rule geometry.

The architectural environment should make it's impact second by second and minute by minute as we travel along our territorial tracks. As we turn a corner, or open a door, the last thing our navigational sense wants to be faced with is a spatial configuration that drearily duplicates the one we have just left." - Desmond Morris

// Sky TV, KFC and football // 16.10.08
The Roman elite used bread and circuses to keep the plebeians in line. Now we have Sky TV, KFC and football. Why haven't the dispossessed got their shit together, realised all property is theft, and changed an unfair system that condemns them to live as second-class citizens?

The unity required for the masses to act is not present. Race and religion make dividing and ruling so easy for the elite. Our masters have successfully employed clever propaganda to feed our pathetic obsession with celebrities and distract us from unjustifiable wars and the hideous inequality in our socio-economic system.

The seething anger necessary for the revolution exists, but is not used to change the system. As William Cobbett said, 'I defy you to agitate a man on a full stomach'."

One stop past Dagenham
"Capitalist economies can only survive if they grow and that requires people to be dissatisfied. Only people desperate for material betterment will buy that flashier car or that smarter jacket.

To ensure success we have enlisted advertisers as our propagandists to spread the word. These scumbags will sell us the ice cream that makes us fat and then make sure we buy the diet pill to make us slim.

The trick is to make people as unhappy about themselves as possible so that they strive to spend cash in the false hope that it will make them happy. And sexy.

The last thing we want is for you to be content because then you will just stick with your beaten-up Ford and the whole system collapses." - Geraint Anderson

// Fight Club // 16.10.08
"Working in jobs you don't like to buy things you don't need." - Tyler Durden

// Super tribes: The Human Zoo // 14.10.08
When the pressures of modern life become heavy, the harassed city-dweller often refers to his teeming world as a concrete jungle, but anyone who has studied wild animals in their natural habitat will confirm that this is grossly inaccurate. Other animals do not feel stress, depression, commit murder, mutilate themselves or become fetishists, unless confined in unnatural conditions of captivity. Zoo animals exhibit all these peculiarities, and so the concrete jungle could more accurately described as the human zoo.

We had many thousands of years to evolve into tribes people, but only 2,500 to become super tribes people. The modern human animal is no longer living in conditions natural to his species. As a species we are not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as our tribe. As the crowds become denser, the frustration and stresses of city life become greater.

It was only when the tribes expanded into impersonal super tribes that the code of conduct began to break down and it became necessary to introduce artificial laws and codes of conduct to hold the bulging communities together. If a member of the super tribe is under pressure, and most people in his super tribe are strangers to him, the typical thief believes he is not stealing from one of his own companions so is not breaking the old, biological tribal code. To counteract this a super tribal law had to be imposed.

There is another type of law that attempts to bring cohesion to a super tribe - religion. Its value lies in the fact that it is shared by all members of one community, and indeed distinguishes them collectively from the members of another.

Although we marvel at the variety of social customs, traditions and ceremonies and their various patterns, we often overlook their fundamental similarities.

In addition to law, custom and religion, there is another cohesive force that helps bind the members of a super tribe, and that is war. Nothing helps a leader like a good war. He can introduce the most ruthless forms and controls and send thousands of his followers to their deaths and still be hailed as a great protector.

For the modern leader, going to war has many advantages that the stone age leader did not enjoy. To start with, he doesn't have to risk getting his own face bloody. Nor are the men he sends to their death personal acquaintances of his. They are specialists, trouble-makers spoiling for a fight (because of the super tribal pressure they have been subjected to) who can have one without directing it at the super tribe itself.

Nothing ties in-group bonds tighter than an out-group threat.

It is a marvel that the human co-operative urge reasserts itself so strongly and so repeatedly. If we did not carry within us the basic urge to co-operate with our fellow man we would never have survived as a species. If our hunting ancestors had been ruthless greedy tyrants, the human success story would have petered out long ago. Compassion, kindness, mutual assistance and a fundamental urge to co-operate within the tribe must have been the pattern for early groups to survive within their precarious environment.

In more recent times it has become the practice to allow the people to have their say in the election of a new leader. This political device has in itself been a cohesive force, giving the super tribes people a sense of belonging to their groups, and having some control over it. Once elected, it soon becomes clear that their influence is little more than slight, but at the time of election a sense of a social identity runs through the community." - Desmond Morris

// I was so much older then // 10.10.08
"When Bush and Blair bowed their heads to remember the slaughtered of New York I couldn't join in, because anyone who is deeply moved by one set of tragedies while ignoring, even justifying those on the other side, is in reality not genuinely touched by either." - Mark Steel

// Mindfulness // 26.09.08
I have the right to allow intrusive thoughts, doubt and images to pass through my mind, and assume they are safe without having to spend time and effort making sure.

Absolute control of one's thoughts is impossible and counterproductive. Being able to choose the thoughts that enter your mind would almost entirely put a stop to any originality or creativity.

Intrusive ideas are like passing traffic; just thoughts and images and part of the rich tapestry of human existence.

I have the right to place happiness and fulfilment as a high priority in my life, without feeling guilty that I'm not doing as much as I could to prevent harm.

// Lyrics // 24.09.08
Lucia wanted fame and fortune
As strange as that may seem
Life dissected in the tabloids
Face on the silver screen

Not beautiful but passionate
And driven from the start
To take the road most often travelled
And open up her heart

// In those days // 24.09.08
"Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds" - Socrates

// Friedrich Nietzsche // 24.09.08
"Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is a philosophical position which argues that existence is without objective meaning, purpose or intrinsic value. Nihilists generally assert that objective morality does not exist, and that no action is logically preferable to any other in regard to it's moral value."

// Bond's Vespa // 15.09.08
"Bond's favourite drink of the day was the one he had in his head before the first drink of the day" - Ian Fleming

// You're suspect // 07.09.08
"A girl phoned and said 'Come round, no one's in'. So I went round and no one was in." - Richard Prince

// Females drive evolution through sexual selection // 07.09.08
Lust is such a powerful physiological response, for obvious evolutionary reasons, it is bound to backfire, or overload now and again.

// Selective breeding, or Eugenics // 07.09.08
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. They must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment, lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive. Long-term unemployment should be grounds for sterilisation." - Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley and grandson of Thomas Huxley, a friend and supporter of Charles Darwin

// The Grass Arena // 19.07.08
One day while looking through a book dealing with the nature of consciousness I came across a passage that went something like this - "What matter if my beloved have kind and gentle ways, beautiful and loving, if she be not kind to me?" - John Healy

// Out of shape // 07.09.08
Life is but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more.

It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

// The world is what you think it is // 15.08.08
Stand up straight. Radiate positivity.

Try attracting someone's attention with just your eyes.

Forget about the outcome. The pain of regret is much deeper then anything a stranger can say to you.

Your voice is your identity. Chances are the voice in your head isn't what other people hear. Make sure it's not too quiet, too fast, too monotone, includes too many pauses or is inconclusive.

'Because' is a useful word.

People don't fail, they just stop trying. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." - Wayne Gretzky

// Fermi's paradox // 24.07.08
Fermi's paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi questioned why, if a multitude of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist in the Milky Way, evidence such as spacecraft or probes are not seen. Even if travel is hard, if life is common, why don't we detect their radio transmissions?

Mid Atlantic Ridge
"There might be life everywhere, but on another hand there might be very few or even no places where it made it past all the hurdles and got to the sentient stage. There's a million things that can wipe a planet out or destroy its top level. If that's the case, the human species might be it. We might be the only planet with an evolved eco-system and life. And if that is the case, not only does the cockroach you stopped on have much more importance, but so does this planet. The stuff here might be unique and too precious to confine to one planet in case we take a hit or something happens." - Rick Tumlinson

Fue Gas
"I think that the people who wrote The Bible, when they said The Garden of Eden, they thought it was the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. But really the whole earth is the Garden of Eden. We've been given paradise to live in. We've been looking out of telescopes for 300 years, we've been sending probes out into space, and we've never seen anything as beautiful as what we see when we walk out our front door." - Alan Bean (4th man to walk on the moon)

// How to Run a Day // 24.07.08
"Politicians look and behave more like celebrities, perhaps in an interest to revive our waning interest in their show." - Andrew Smith

// Beautiful, just beautiful // 23.07.08
"The Roman Empire controlled the world because it could build roads. Later the British Empire was dominate because it had ships. In the air age, we were powerful because we had airplanes. Now we must establish a foothold in outer space." - President Lyndon Johnson

// A Man For All Seasons // 19.07.08
"What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" - Mark 8:36

// The Republic // 08.07.08
"I was once present when someone was asking the poet Sophocles about sex, and whether he was still able to make love to a woman, to which he replied: "Don't talk about that; I have left it behind me and escaped from the madness and slavery of passion." - Plato

"Wrongness and injustice cannot pay and goodness brings its own reward." - Plato

// Last of the Savages // 01.07.08
"In the end, history may be better served by those of us who are able to see through our own convictions, than by the passionate believers."

"Beauty often affects us like deformity; we are afraid to notice." - Jay McInerney

// Unlimited space inside a small skull // 23.06.08
Horror challenges the soft complacencies of day-to-day life. Like a stranger stepping out of a crowd and punching someone in the face. Sitting on the ground with a bloodied mouth, one realises that the world is more dangerous but, conceivably, more meaningful.

// Knobbly cheese // 16.06.08
What could entice me to this desolate country, except the wish to stay here?

// Lyrics // 21.05.08
I might like you better if we slept together. Never say never.

// Retain a puncher's chance // 21.05.08
If you ever find yourself committing a heroic act try to send one member of your party to safety so they'll live to tell your impressive story.

// About the book // 07.05.08
The truth is that the book, as invented in the 15th century, has not been bettered as a compact, transportable and sustainable receptacle for almost all the human imagination can devise.

“I am looking for the sort of book in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, unsaid things that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”

// Modern Art Is Rubbish // 29.04.08
Idea for a piece of modern art: 6 see-thru, cylindrical rubbish bins in 2 straight lines of three, parallel to each other and evenly spaced. The contents of each bin would be everyday household rubbish, all clearly visible.

Make it by having six such bins, used normally but covered until they are full. Then remove the covers and change nothing inside.

Photo of an old vacum spilling it's dusty contents, con el titulo "This Sux". As the hoover is old, that sux too. Tantos niveles!

// Return To Brenda // 22.04.08
"The reason most societies are patriarchal is that it has proven superior to the feminist model. Far from perfect, it is at least easier to follow laws defined by what is important to men then to interact with the variances of the feminist."

// Antipathy // 27.03.08
Oleaginous - "oli-ahg-er-nos" - extremely polite, kind or helpful in a false way that is intended to benefit yourself.

Supine - weak of character, willingly accept the control of others.

// Shift in acceptability // 20.03.08
"Why would you want somebody to take their clothes off for you when you know that they don't really fancy you, when you know it isn't what they really want to do?" - Former lap-dancer

// Algo rhythm // 06.03.08
Supermarkets circulate the smell of freshly baked bread, and other things, like BBQs in the summer.

// The Art of Skullduggery // 28.02.08
When Brutus spoke the crowd roared approval and said 'What a great speech'. When Mark Anthony spoke the crowd marched.

// You Know Polonius Knows // 20.02.08
"Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.
Beware of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy;
rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all:
To thine own self be true,
And it must follow,
as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
- William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

// Mesmerised by your legs // 17.02.08
"Baby girl you the shit. That makes you my equivalent."

// I don't wanna meet your friends // 15.02.08
"An orgasm is nature's own heroin. Life is finite and orgamsms are a wonderful distraction." - Russell Brand

Whoever said a way to man's heart is through his stomach knows nothing about men. Women who even suggest they give a good blow job don't have to worry about guys calling back.

// 3-D Trampoline // 15.02.08
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Albert Einstien

// Party End // 08.02.08
"The empty mugs and glasses become ashtrays. Guests become DJs, sifting through the library of recodes and tapes. The stereo becomes a time machine, stuck in reverse." - Jay Mcinerney

// A Very Public Affair // 25.09.07
"The expense damnable, the pleasure momentary and the position ridiculous." - Lord Chesterfield on having a mistress

// All property is theft // 10.07.07
"All art is luxury." - Georges Bataille

// New Grub Street // 10.07.07
"Oh, to go forth and labour with one's hands, to do the poorest, commonest work of which the world has truly need! It was ignoble to sit here and support the paltry presence of intellectual dignity." - George Gissing

// Not Buying It // 10.07.07
"We are grateful to president Bush', crows Mr. Rich. 'Never before has one man done so much, for so few, at the expense of so many!" - Judith Levine

The glance
"To look at others on the street is to know (or attempt to know) them. But that communication, like conversation between foreigners, is aided by interpreters: what the other person is eating, watching, reading and most importantly, wearing."

Voluntary Simplicity
"Needing the stimulation of contemporary culture is one reason I could not live in Vermont full time. I don't say I want it. I Always say I need it. An informed person like me needs to see new art, new films. It's not so different from the person who needs to wear this year's skirt. Or a teenager who needs to download this minute's music." - Judith Levine

// Seven Hours in Tibet // 07.12.06
"My religion is to live, and die, without regret." - Milarepa (Tibetan poet)

// Richard II // 07.12.06
"Play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
... but whate'er I be,
... I nor any man ...
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing." - William Shakespeare

// Most celebrated gangster // 07.12.06
"I will never have smooth, instant answers. I now accept that I don't have to fight my stutters or my inability to leap to a perfect answer. Instead I try to give truthful answers. If it takes a little time to work out I hope that people will trust slow, hesitant answers more than rapid, glib ones." - Richard Branson

// Parallel Slicing // 07.12.06
The theory here is that there are as many parallel universes as there are perspectives in an interaction. Imagine a conversation paused, and everyone's perspective is a different slice. Each slice can be separated to form a separate dimension so it's like looking through several thin slices of glass. Everyone's perspective is distorted by the others slightly, but remains separate.

In this sense, life is a simulation in one's mind. How the situation plays out in your mind is how it actually happens to you. More so, how you remember the interaction is how it happened forever. It may well have happened and be remembered entirely differently by another party involved. Two people can be telling the truth, even though they are telling different stories. To this end, we can control life simply by seeing things with the right perspective.

// Edge of Infinity // 21.11.06
Climate change is the atheist's religion, the ultimate showdown of religion vs science. Can so many scientists be wrong? Would God let us perish?

// Correlation or causality? // 31.10.06
If you're recognizable, you appear in the media for doing the most insignificant things. If you're unrecognizable, you have to do something pretty significant to get in.

// Escape from Planet Monday // 02.10.06
For an abode to be a true party house it must have a gas stove. Lighters can be unreliable.

// Five People You Meet in Heaven // 02.10.06
"Courage is often confused with picking up arms, and cowardice with lying them down." - Mitch Albom

// Homo Erectus, 1.5 million years ago // 02.10.06
Is there an optimum temperature range for life that gives each planet in our (and every) solar system an oppurtunity to harbour life? As the sun cools, the planets closer to the sun reach an appropriate temperature to harvest life, while those who harboured it last become too cold, and turn to rock and eventually dust and cease to exists, while the closer fiery balls cool until they reach the optimum temperature?

// The Great Disconnect // 06.09.06
A deep depression smothers me like an itchy blanket, making sleep impossible.

// This is the Last Century // 27.07.06
What will be signaled out as the salient event of our time by future historians, centauries hence, looking back on the first half of the twentieth century? Not I fancy, any of those sensational or tragic or catastrophic political or economic events which occupy the headlines of our newspapers and the foregrounds of our minds, but something of which we are only half conscious, and out of which it would be difficult to make a headline... Future historians will say, I think, the greatest event of the twentieth centaury was the impact of the Western civilizations on all the other living societies of the world of that day." - Arnold J Tonybee, Civilization on Trail (1948).

The Human Situation - Aldous Huxley
"We live on this particular planet, and whether we like it or not, we have to get on with it indefinitely. Unfortunately, all the stuff about going to Mars and so on seems pretty good nonsense. It is very much more important to see what we can do with Earth, and unfortunately what we are doing with Earth is disastrously bad."

When any animal population exceeds the resources available to it, the population tends to (a) starve and (b) suffer from severe epidemics and epizootic disease. In the human population, we can envisage that the natural check on this unlimited growth of population will be precisely this: there will be pestilence, famine, and since we are human begins and not animals, organised warfare, which will being the numbers down to that which the Earth can carry.

If we believe the end and purpose of human life is to foster power politics and nationalism, then we shall probably need a great deal of cannon fodder, even though this predisposition becomes a bit dubious in the light of nuclear warfare. But if, as I think most of us would agree, the end of human life is to realise individual potentialities to their limits and in the best way possible, and to create a society which makes possible such a realisation, then we find ourselves equipped to think in a rational and philosophical way about the population problem. We see that in very many cases the effort to raise human quality is being thwarted by the mere increase in human quantity, and that quality is very often incompatible with quality.

"We now know enough to repair a good deal of damage which has already been done to our planet and to prevent further damage from occurring. The necessary information and knowledge exist. But as usual there is a great gap between the ability to do a thing and the likelihood of its begin done.

First of all, we have to communicate with immense numbers of human begins. And once relations have been established, there is the problem of persuading them to give up old traditional methods in favour of better modern methods. It is extremely difficult for human begins to follow a course which, though it may be manifestly helpful in the long run, in the short run imposes hardships upon them.

The only alternative to coercion is persuasion and education. Unfortunately these democratic methods take time, and because of the rapidity of the increase in population there is exceedingly little time."

Philosophy of History
"What experience and history teach us is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on the principles deduced by it." - George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

// T-Boy's Words to the Wise (2002) // 21.11.05
"Everybody has a great idea, but very few are successful without true focus. There's going to be a time in any business when you have some doubts. Certainly people around you are gong to doubt you. But you have to stay focused and not start over in some other field. You have to stick with what you start. That's the most basic thing: stick with your vision. Don't let other people dissuade you because you don't have instant success. Every business I've started - including clothing, advertising, film, television and records - took years to develop." - Russell Simmons

"As spirit souls, we do not take birth, nor do we die. We are not finished with the destruction of the material body. The destruction of that body has already begun. Our childhood body is now destroyed. Our youthful body is also destroyed and in the same way our present body will be destroyed. When the soul transmigrates, the gross body is lost. The gross body is made of matter and anything material will eventually be finished. That is the nature of matter. But the spirit soul is never finished." - A. C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

"The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking, so the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage: he has little competition." - Dale Carnegie

"Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself." - Anthony Trollope

"I simply can't understand anybody do anything but write, paint, compose music. I can understand their doing things as a means to those ends, but I can't see what a man is up to who is satisfied to follow a profession in the normal way." - Philip Larkin

"The problem, basically, was that I had taken too many pills. The ups now periodically mixed with the downs, because, though the later had ceased to put me effectively to sleep; they hung over me in the daytime, so that I wandered in a perpetual twilight. Un-medicated sleep was impossible, a fairy tale, some remote childhood dream. But I was running low on the downs; and though I knew I could get some more, I'd decided to cut them out for a couple of days - a good idea, in the abstract, but it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light." - Donna Tartt

// Code 0831 // 21.11.05
"Morality is of the highest importance, but for us, not God. I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern, with no superhuman authority behind it." - Albert Einstein

"Energy and mass can change into each other. The mass of an object increases the faster it moves. Its mass would become infinite if it hit the speed of light, which is impossible and therefore proves the unattainability of the speed of light. If you calculate how much energy is converted into mass, in a few simple lines you can prove that E=MC2. Since the speed of light is a fantastically large number, and its square is larger still, even a tiny amount of matter can release an amazing amount of energy." - Michio Kaku

// Think Long Term // 20.10.05
"There are 6 billion people in the world. There will be five more by the time you finish reading this sentence. 3500 babies are born every 20 minutes. The population is gowning by 76 million people a year (approximately the population of Germany).

Meanwhile, swatches of rainforest are cut down every second. More than one plant or animal species is lost forever every 20 minutes. Water tables are falling; coral reefs are dying; the ozone layer is thinning and the seas are big over fished. In the 30 years between 1970 and 2000, the number of vehicles on the worlds roads rose from 246 million to 730 million and air traffic multiplied six fold. - World Population Awareness

// Drug of the Nation // 21.06.05
You are more relaxed when you are watching television than when you are doing nothing at all.

"Television is the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, and repeatability make it an inevitable tool of coercion, brainwashing and manipulation." - Jerry Mander

"The nearest analogy to the power of television and the transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy user is probably heroin. Heroin flattens the image; with heroin, things are neither hot nor cold; the junkie looks out at the world certain that whatever it is, it does not matter." - Terence McKenna

// Focus on the pageantry // 08.05.05
What do you look for when you look at a piece of art? The feeling it inspires in you? The craftsmanship? The image it portraits? Is it the personality behind it? Should a masterpiece have all these things?

Sometimes I'll see a poster on the tube wall, advertising a film or a newspaper's colour supplement, and it's art to me just because it puts me in that frame of mind.

"I don't think rock n' roll songwriters should worry about art. I don't think it comes into it. As far as I'm concerned, art is just short for Arthur." - Keith Richards

// Life, I Guess // 04.04.05
Most musings being with a quote, but I'm not going down that route at this early stage. This diary (online journal, blog, whatever) will eventually be full of quotes from the great and the good. Really that it's purpose; to record things that, to me at least, offered some sort of meaning at the time of reading. In combining them there's a hope they will provide me with an explanation of sorts. Of what? Life, I guess.