Bloggin' 'bout Belonging, Backbone, Brexit and Bob.

It's been a long time since putting blogging fingers to keyboard, again. There's always so much on and not enough inclination to put in the effort to write a post. I tend to need to be inspired enough to put in that effort and tonight I have been. It's actually something I have been wanting to write about for a few weeks and some other elements have fitted into place to create enough of an impetus to get it down.


-- Belonging --

The main inspiration comes from listening to the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. A friend from work lent it to me over a year ago and right from the first listen I thought it was brilliant. It's an amazing album, full of great songs, but the kicker for me is the reflection on suburban life. It has an almost melancholic, sad perspective on the whole idea of what the suburbs are and how being brought up in that environment affects people. It certainly resonated with me.

I think what I love most about it is that it's so easy to remember and identify with how children understand their world. I grew up in a couple of suburban towns and I remember very well the interactions with other children on the streets. Gangs were formed and battles, retreats and stand-offs were regularities. Being called in from the street for tea was a daily occurrence. Tears and emotions were always in the air, but kids are tough (and cruel) and this resonates with me deeply.

The first song (The Suburbs) sets the scene - warring gangs of kids ("your part of town against mine") against the backdrop of settling for second-best ("and all the houses they built in the seventies finally fall"). There was something more though. The song that really brought on this recent interest is Sprawl 1 Flatlands. This goes to a much deeper level. It hints at and draws on the expectation and belonging that young people have. This feeling has recently returned to me in a very nostalgic, redolent way. I can be very moved by the idea of young peoples' expectations and considering how life pans out and the frequent disappointment that occurs across the entire planet, not just in suburban first world homes. The song says "it's the first time I've felt like something is mine.. like I have something to give". It ties in with my own life of course. As I get older I have more to look back on than I do going forward. I look at my own children and think about their lives and how mine has turned out. I am not unhappy with things in general. I am lucky in that I think I had a sense my whole life that disappointment would be a very easy thing to find. I knew that I had to stay focussed on the things that matter most to me - my desire to answer the big questions for example. I have actually lost focus quite a few times, but I have always done it in full knowledge that I am doing so and I accept that. I traded my focus on precious goals for living in the now and that can't be bad when I consider all the memories I have and the fun things I have done. I think that my character is quite dualist. I do have a life purpose, and yet I easily shift that to one side because I have another part of me which is quite hedonistic and lacks that same kind of focus. Basically there are just too many ways to live and view the world and yet I want all of them. That's not possible for anyone, obviously.

I get a feeling from the song that the singer is sad about looking back on their life in the suburbs. Not necessarily because it was an unhappy time, but just because it's gone ("Took a drive into the sprawl... to find the places we used to play... it was the loneliest day of my life"). I feel the same. I want to live everything again and I can't. It's a very common feeling in humans and the subject of so much art and drama. It gets to me sometimes and this song, and album capture it brilliantly.

The ideas of belonging and what makes something Home have started to play into my thinking in relation to my latest project - MMOUKI, the Man-Made Ontology of Universal Knowledge and Intelligence. This project seeks to encode as much of the detail about the concepts and relationships that underpin what intelligence or cognition is or entails. It's an almost ridiculously bold ambition to take this on, but I am phasing the approach and seeing how it goes so I have a realistic expectation - at least at the moment. Belonging and the idea of "home" are crucial factors in the way that we conceive of, and behave in, the world. Only today, I took my boys and some of their friends to see the movie Finding Dory. In this film the idea of "home" plays a big part - a fish is separated from its parents while young and strives to return home. It's a common theme in drama and literature and derives, I'm sure, from myth and early human concepts. It's connected to our upbringing and sense of safety, but with a sort of inevitable finality that I think we all shy away from to a large extent. It's something I will have to think much more deeply on...


-- Backbone --

Something that I think Arcade Fire also bring out is a sense that suburbanism is an experiment that didn't quite work. I don't necessarily agree that it didn't work, but it does feel like a phase from the 1970s (just post-war enough for baby-boomers to have had their own children) where the socio-economic situation in the US and UK was tied together with this extension into new-build urbanisation. The 1960s vibe was fading and societies were struggling. The governments were doing the bare minimum (as they always do) to keep things moving without total collapse and it's no wonder at all that there is resentment and a sense that things weren't quite right.

Having said that, I wouldn't want it any other way. I am so pleased to say that I was born in the seventies and to have experienced some deprivation - extremely minor in my case, I recognise, although there was social upheaval and misery on a scale that I think outstrips subsequent decades if only because the shiny distractions of the 1980s (MTV etc) and 1990s (Internet etc) were not present. It feels to me that living in the suburbs in the 1970s could be quite grim. There is a side to the songs that make me happy though - the sense that children will always try to play games and have fun and push the boundaries.

I used the word backbone here (mostly for the alliteration - it's not really the right word to describe what I'm on about), but really you could also say that stoicism or grit are good alternatives. To have been brought up in an environment where one had to struggle is preferable to one in which privilege and easy supply were to hand. I didn't have much struggle to be fair, although I worked part-time from the age of 16. My parents worked hard and are smart and we always had enough. There were times when things weren't great though - I went to state school (and fairly rough too) - and we were normal and down to earth. Psychologically I would probably say that the act of striving and struggle makes one stronger - it's just a form of learning and habituation. It's probably hard to argue with that and it makes sense.

For me it's more than that though. There's also a sense that privilege is always at the expense of someone else. Rich people don't create their own wealth (and thereby tell themselves that they can feel good even though others have much less). They actually obtain wealth at the expense of other people. Their wealth and privilege is propped up by the less well off. It's economics. It's the main reason that I wouldn't want my children to attend private school even if I had the money. If I did have the money, I would have to say that I should give it away. I don't think I could live with myself if I was wealthy because I must at the same time understand that it comes at the cost of other people's livelihoods. If I ever won lots of money I should have to give large sums away.

It's about fairness. How can it be fair for someone to be preferred on the basis of things which are not of their making, such as the school they attended? In our society, it seems that those who come from humble backgrounds to success are respected more. Their abilities must be greater than those who reached their pinnacles through preference and extra help. In a way, and conversely, this undermines the success of the rich and the privileged enough to ensure that I want nothing to do with them or their circles.

This is a bit simplistic, of course, but it does play on my mind. Those that have versus those that do not is a meme as old as the hills and it hasn't altered. It's still being pushed on the unrepresented - see the Tory government's plans for new grammar schools in the UK, which is ultimately a covert attempt to separate society even further into the rich on one side and the poor on the other. I always want to be with the underprivileged. I feel safer there. It's not about belonging, but about sticking up for what's right. It's Backbone and something I will always support.

-- Brexit --

I don't really know where to start about Brexit. I, and many others I know well, have been tremendously moved and upset by the recent vote by the British to leave the European Union. No matter how you look at it it's a crazy result. The funny thing is that all of my elder relations voted to leave the EU. My parents and my in-laws all saw it as a good thing to leave. They don't all think that way after they saw the outcome, however. I see myself as a Europoean. For as long as I can remember I have looked over La Manche to the rest of Europe and considered it to be a continuation of my home. Obviously I haven't lived there for any significant length of time, but it has felt accessible to me as a British/Irish citizen.

I feel different since the referendum vote. I now don't associate myself as British. I don't associate myself with the 52% of those people who bothered to vote, and voted to leave. They are either misinformed, bigotedly inclined against immigration or, of course, genuinely racist. Either way I can't understand the thinking and it has made me determined to leave the country. It's probably no bad thing to think bigger than the small isles off the coast of Europe and I feel good to be considering all the incredible options around the world, both for me and for my boys. There are some years yet before I ought to consider this, but a university place in a foreign country would be a great idea for me as an academic and for my boys as undergraduates. I will be aspiring to this in any event and the adventure that could ensue might be a life-changing, re-vitalising excursion to change everything.


-- Bob --

I took a trip to Canada in August to present some ideas at an academic workshop. The weekend I spent in Waterloo was wonderful. Lovely, welcoming people and lots of fun and interesting events really made it a truly memorable time and I am hoping to maintain a collaboration with the great people I met there.

While staying in the Waterloo Hotel, which was a fine renovated place with great rooms and fantastic location in the centre of Waterloo, I happened to be taking a walk on the Friday, during a bit of a heatwave. I don't remember what it was that drew me to the poster, but I happened to see that Bob Log III was playing a concert on the Saturday just a few doors down from the hotel. I only really knew Bob Log by name and therefore I didn't think too much of it except that it would be fun to go to something like that while doing some academic work.

The next day I delivered my talk, for which I had been quite anxious. I was hugely relieved to complete my work. In the evening we had a nice evening meal as a group and, one super Old Fashioned and a couple of beers later, I took it to try to get into the Bob Log gig. Daniel (who didn't know Bob Log at all) and I took a walk up the street and paid $20 each to get into the Jane Bond bar. This was a bit of a risk seeing as neither of us knew the guy well enough, but I was determined to take a risk and I had a good feeling (perhaps from the beer).

Well I was not disappointed. Bob Log was sensational! More beer was downed and I just couldn't believe that the small bar (packed with locals out for fun) was the venue where he could get away with seriously groovy and clever music. Best of all though were the hilarity and shenanigans. I just loved the attitude and the vibe and it was, in the end, such a great night that I put it into second place in my best gig ever list.

I am, of course, seeking to see him play live again, but I know it won't be the same as that relieved, hot, sticky, boozy, hilarious night in Ontario.

Vroom vroom

As societies, we should redefine our constraints on speed limits.

When I drive a car over the country, I'm bound by laws that restrict how fast I can drive. This makes sense, however I think we should redefine this to be a limit on momentum rather than speed. (I'm using the word speed here rather than velocity, but they're fairly interchangeable in the sense I intend).

A large lorry, weighing several tonnes, is restricted to the same speed as a small car. This doesn't make much sense since the energy required to propel a large lorry is much greater than a small car, and the energy exerted on the world by the lorry is, similarly, much greater than the car.

Where did the idea that speed was the factor by which we should measure vehicular movements come from? I imagine that in the early 1900s there was significant fear over the new mechanical vehicles that were becoming popular at the time. I don't know when these cars were fitted with speedometers, but was it simply a case of choosing the simplest calculator of danger (e.g. distance divided by time) rather than the more complex, but more accurate measure in terms of potential danger - the measure of linear momentum?

It makes sense to equate speed with danger, but there is a more complex factor, which is the mass of the vehicle involved. We are not oblivious to this so how did it get ignored even to the current day?

If I had the time, I would like to lobby for a change to the law. Every vehicle should be fitted with a momemtumometer instead of a speedometer. This new meter would measure the mass (or weight in real terms) and multiply this by the speed, resulting in a number that was much more related to the potential danger of driving at speed.

Apart from the benefits to road safety (lorries should drive slowly if carrying a large load - it's just obvious!), the benefits should carry over into environmental benefits. For example, if the government created multiple speed limits based on the momentum rating of the vehicle, then it would become beneficial for drivers who wanted to move quickly from A to B, to drive a light-weight car. This would transform into a reduction in nasty emissions over time (the assumption I make here is that, overall, these drivers wouldn't be able to drive at the top speeds all the time and would therefore reduce their carbon emissions, based on numerous fuel-related assumptions).

I like this idea because it's practical - it would make a difference to the planet in terms of road safety and climate change. However, I like it more than that, because it highlights the assumptions we take on from previous generations that were based on a more limited understanding of the world.

Conservatism isn't good when it comes to the practical benefits that are out there! We should be able to think more objectively about these kinds of things.

I don't hold much hope of that happening though.

Cracked it!

The last year has been a very interesting one. I can't decide if the increasing sense of insanity and surreality are by-products or foundational to the new ideas that have developed in me during 2013.

My hopes and aspirations have changed dramatically. Previously I wanted to study for a PhD and take a role in computer science research. I may still do this, but the drive to move in this direction has waned. I now want to write a book of the insights gained this year. In essence the theory goes like this:

1. Consciousness is illusory. We have brains, evolved to succeed in the world, that construct a sense of the world for our benefit. The idea that we are somehow "fit" for the current world is nonsense and is a complete arrogance (hence the title for the book - The Arrogant Ape).
2. Ego drives our actions.
3. The very structure of our perceptions and thoughts are overlaid upon our more primitive brains. For example our idea of Mathematics being somehow the intrinsic nature of reality is wrong. When we add one to one (and hopefully make two) our mind is simply aware of, and interpreting, the underlying primitive structures' work. This primitive brain doesn't actually use numbers, but a pre-existing set of structures evolved for the world. Maths is not a useful skill for us to have evolved the understanding of; we are able to use this because our Cortex is a set of structures that interpret the primitive aspects of cognition into something that makes sense. This is, of course, not to say that maths isn't useful and that it doesn't work. It does! What I'm saying is that it's a co-incidence that we have understanding of it and that we think it's a true reflection of reality. It isn't.
4. We have to consider ourselves much more similar to other animals than we currently do. Humans have a habit of thinking of themselves as better than everything else in the universe (that arrogance again!), when the truth is that we are simply slightly more thinky than other creatures. Our brains are bigger, but that part that's bigger has a function of giving us sets of awarenesses of our primitive brains. The Neo-Cortex does a lot more than that, however it seems that everything is ultimately filtered through the primitive brain since that's the connection to the world in which we live and thereby the imperative element in our existence.
5. Intelligence is not confined to humans (despite what we may arrogantly think). Intelligence is more accurately defined as a predictable reaction to an input. When we talk about intelligence we need to be more specific about what we mean. Trees are intelligent, atoms are intelligent. Humans, however, can build aeroplanes (trees can't do that yet).
6. The idea that we have now reached the end of an intellectual journey from amoeba to human is a false, but pervasive one - yet again linked to arrogance. In the same way that a field mouse probably cannot understand complex physics, there is a whole heap of understanding out there that is out of our reach - simply because we don't have the brain capacity to be able to comprehend it. The work of particle and quantum physicists shows this. When humans peer into the detail of how the universe works they end up with a theory that's completely crazy to us! Quantum physicist say that if you think you understand it then you probably don't. This is precisely because of the fact that we can't understand it - yet we believe that we should be able to - more arrogance!

It's still early days for the book and I have lots of work to do simply to understand. It feels to me like I'm probing that boundary at which humans can understand - a very difficult and, by definition, impossible task.

My hope is now to write the book that I've been working towards my whole life. Wish me luck!

Three reasons why I used to wear a moustache.

Movember is a fine modern experience for a fella to attempt to grow a moustache on their face whilst bringing more awareness of various male illnesses. It's not something that people of a certain generation do anymore. This is very interesting to me. I think I've talked about fashion and trends before (perhaps even the moustache phenomenon), but it's worth mentioning again briefly.

About one hundred years ago it would be very common for a man to wear facial hair of some description; probably a moustache. About one hundred and fifty years ago a full beard or sideburns would be very common. Up until the 1980s moustaches were fairly common, but there was certainly a trend against them during the last century. Why did these fashions disappear in the later part of the 20th century? There's certainly an inverse correlation between the extent of facial hair in society and scientific progress, but I don't think it's a valid one.

It's confusing to me why this happened, but not a huge problem. Similar things have happened for millennia - in ancient Rome facial hair was less common than in ancient Greece, but occasionally it would see a resurgence (e.g. Marcus Aurelius). Do I expect to see more moustaches and beards in the future? Well there's certainly a bit of a trend in that direction it seems. The fads of Hipsters to wear full beards with short head hair is a good one in my view, but ultimately is facial hair uncivilised? They are generally unclean things - being wiry and difficult to clean etc - and perhaps that's a factor too - men trying to reclaim their masculinity in face of overwhelming feminisation in society? As men learn to come to terms with their feelings do they feel imasculated and hence the need to grow a smelly, ginger beard and pretend like they're Grisly Adams?!

Anyway the psycho-social implications are interesting, but this post is mostly about why I chose to keep my moustache longer than the month prescribed by the Movember movement.

1. I'm a Britain. I mean that in the sense of someone from the British Isles - which includes Ireland and Great Britain. All my genetics (apart from some distant Scandinavian and Iberian connections) seem to be derived from these islands. That makes me a Northern European and whilst this might seem constrictive and I feel that I'm a human being and an inhabitant of Earth first and foremost, it does give me a sense of belonging. This sense is sometimes transient (I would very much like to emigrate to a hot country one day for some time), however I suspect that the ties run deep!

Prone to consider the history of things I wonder about the fashions of my ancestors and when trying to be objective do I wish to maintain their traditions? The British Isles were populated by a loose band of Celts for a long time and the most recent bunch of pre-Romans. The Celts are known for their particular fashions including facial hair in the form of the moustache! Part of why I wore a moustache is because of the connection to the Celtic peoples and history of that fashion. It would be a shame if no-one ever had a moustache again and so I feel that by wearing one it keeps that minor part of history alive (I draw the line at blue body paint though ..).

2. My father had a moustache for significant lengths of time during my childhood. For many periods during the 1970s and 1980s my dad wore one. Not only that, but growing up in a mining village in Yorkshire it must have been very common to see men with 'taches. I think this must have had an influence, although it's not a conscious one. It's still a stereotype of northern men (and a funny one), but there is something about it that appeals...

3. Confounding expectation is something I like to do. I don't want to upset anyone, but if, by sporting some unusual facial hair, I can change perceptions then it would be worthwhile. So many humans spend their lives in a daze - a sort of day-dreaming state where they question nothing and seek only pleasure and entertainment. It is a bad way to behave and by shaking things up a little it may be some remedy for this social malaise.

So there are three reasons. I'm not growing a moustache this year, even though I would like to. The social stigma is actually too great for me to take with the things I'm working on at the moment. In future I think I will, however, and these reasons will definitely form a part of the decision to do so.

The Search For Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

I love SETI. I was one of the first wave of internet peeps to download the data analyser software that ran when one's computer was idling. A brilliant idea and very practical. It was an early example of crowd/cloud computing.

What motivated me, as well as all the other contributors, is a fascination with the idea that there are other intelligent creatures out there ... somewhere.

The thought struck me tonight that we're on to a hiding to nothing. The reason that we haven't found anything out there is not that we don't have the technology, nor that we don't have the right ethos. It's just that those civilisations we're searching for have died out.

The obvious answer to this question was posed many years ago - any civilisation able to develop nuclear power would be able to develop weapons of sufficient power to annihilate themselves entirely! It's plausible, but hasn't happened (thankfully) on Earth (yet). But the argument goes that all those planets out there must have blown themselves up. That's why we can't see them!

My thinking on this is different. The research/thinking that I've been doing in the last year has led me to a profound place that I'm still exploring, however one thing that occurred to me tonight is this: any civilisation able to develop sufficient cognitive power will realise the futility of existence and therefore die out through choice. I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but in the current context of what's flying around my head it makes some sense.

I imagine that the first impression upon reading this would be to think that the individual is simply bored of existing, and that this is comparable with the apathy and lethargy we currently feel in the West with the corporate, capitalist treadmill many of us have to deal with every day ... until we die. This is not the point.

I'm thinking of something different. Once we have, as a species, developed enough cognitive power that we can conceive of far more than currently imagined, it may be such that any individual will start to wonder what the point is. It will be apparent to them that their conceptions and perceptions are futile and irrelevant, but, more than this, they are false. They do not reflect "reality"; there is no such thing as "reality" - only conception and perception.

It's a bleak outlook in our current age, however if I imagine a civilisation a thousand years in advance of ours then it must seem very dark and depressing. Surely the only thing to live for is to enjoy life?

This is the prevailing mantra in the West. "Enjoy your life" (usually at the expense of many others).

Once, however, a species realises that enjoyment is, too, part of the conception and perception mechanism, and is equitable to all other emotions - as transitory and flaky as they can be - then I might argue that the species would simply do the sensible thing and end it all. There is no point and there is ACTUALLY NO POINT! It's not that the point simply isn't relevant - it's that any POINT that can be thought of is actually non existent in any extrinsic sense that would, presumably be the focus for an intelligent species.

This is a heavily biased text. It's very possible that many other species would develop methods of thinking and perceiving that weren't like ours. Perhaps they wouldn't have any sense whatever of  purpose or existence like ours.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day. There are no SETI signals because all other species with sufficient technology simply realised that existence is futile. That doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy our lives though, does it?

Hmmm.

Sad face.

Had a 40th birthday! It's completely just another day. It feels different, but not much and most noticeably when filling out forms - I now might find myself in the 40-49 bracket rather than the 30-39 ... Sad face.

I noticed recently that Max sometimes says the words "sad face" after a sentence. I asked him about it and he says it's a sort of verbal version of the emoticon representing sadness. It's a complex linguistic form that I'm not sure has been written about very much. If I have time I should investigate, but the essence of it is that its a deliberate transferral of the same meaning from text to spoken word. Language often works the other way around, but it seems unusual in this order.
The way it's used is definitely humourously, similar to the emoticon in text, but there's an underlying realisation that it has some deeper meaning and I think the fact that the verbal manifestation has more intrinsic meaning is very interesting to me (but not surprising when I consider it).
I hope to come back to this theme: language evolution. It's fascinating to me how language changes and I'm listening intently to my boys to see what they'll come up with next. I'm definitely not one of those morons who thinks that language needs to be fixed (it never is!) and that grammar, syntax or spellings etc are even remotely important. Cognition is where it's at, baby! The revolution in the next 100 years will be cognitive and language will be shown up for it's shallowness. The link between cognition and language is little known to individuals - mostly because we happen to be innately shielded from it!

Perpetuity, Prometheus and Pragmatics

I've written about this before, but the idea of storing human-made data for longer than the lifetime of the individual is quite interesting and it's been mulling around my head for many years now. Of course it's extremely egotistic to want one's information to perpetuate after one's death, but this isn't a new phenomenon - the Great Pyramid at Giza is a fine example of this. I can't get away from the idea, though, that I'd like information about me to be available after I die. It's a kind of foresight that many people don't seem interested in. I've said before that I'd like my great-grandchildren to be able to read my blog or see pictures of me. I imagine this will happen whether I like it or not, but if I can somehow control the storage of my data for perpetuity it would be pleasing.

This is very difficult to achieve due to the requirements of data storage as we know it. Imagine I wanted to keep electronic information safe. It would need some kind of device that takes electrical power. Any storage mechanisms we know that are non-power based don't last very long.

So where is the electricity going to come from in 100 years to power this computer? Can I leave an amount of money in the bank that will earn interest to keep it going? What happens if, at some point, humanity develops free energy or wipes itself out in a viral pandemic? How will the computer survive?

Why would I want it to survive? What's special about me? Well not much except that I'm conceiving the idea so perhaps I warrant the idea to be saved. Or similar ones.

What about other people's ideas? What if our society does die out in the next few hundred years. Would we want our species' ideas to be saved for future ET wandering the galaxy in search of the best ideas from creatures around the universe. In the galactic museum of the future would we want the best of humanity to sit next to other beings' exemplars? I think we would.

How, then, do we preserve data over much longer spans of time? We could put a solar powered device on the moon and upload via lasers from Earth. It's out of reach of pesky humans at the moment, but for how long? How about Mars (newly being explored as I write)? We could blast hard disks out into the void, but in reality it's quite hard to make things that can escape the sun let alone Jupiter or any of the other local solar systems.

These aren't really long-term solutions. Instead of thinking in human limits we could start to think outside the constraints of our planet and homely corner of the galaxy.

I was looking forward very much to the recent movie Prometheus. I haven't been to the cinema for about 10 years since acquiring an aversion to the ghastly experience people seem to love these days: crappy food seems more important that the experience of seeing the film; people's individual right to crinkle packets through the movie outweighs the cinematic experience that I relished when I was young. It's a shame and thankfully I'm not the only one to notice this (Mark Kermode recently started a campaign).

Anyway the point is that I wanted to see this movie so much I actually booked tickets to the local flicks! It was a slightly disappointing film although still very enjoyable. My favourite scene is the very first one - the humanoid destroying himself to spill the DNA-seed onto the planet and thereby create the Earth we know today - teeming with life. This is, in particular, a highly implausible concept since it does away with the idea of evolution and doesn't quite work scientifically, however the idea is wonderful and not new at all. Scott Adams had a lovely theory about a distant alien child's science project being the creation of a molecule that could replicate and evolve; this therefore being the origins of our species and an interesting take on the God idea. To take it further why couldn't the child's project be the creation of an entire universe populated with particularly weird particles and energy that interacts in a certain way that ends up creating the features of matter than would allow coagulation and interaction thereby ultimately leading to our planet and ourselves?

Again as an alternative why couldn't the over-arching container created by this distant and unfathomably complex creature be a computer simulation? I've blogged about this before too and it's one of my favourites, but, at the moment, there's no way to prove that none of these theories are not true.

Combining some of these ideas I came to the conclusion that our species and all life that does exist and has ever existed on our planet is part of a data storage mechanism from some other being that may or not still pay attention to us. A million years ago a society with extremely advanced technological abilities compared with ours of today in a distant corner of the galaxy created a mechanism to store their data in perpetuity. They encoded all their information about them: their history, their ideas and dreams into a structure lying underneath what we perceive of as life on this planet.

You could take this idea further, as previously, and say that this race of beings encoded their data into the very structure of the universe as we perceive it. The atoms, quarks, bosons and the gravity and other forces we register with our senses and machines is their data. We perceive it as something else, but this is only because we haven't realised it yet.

The idea that we're just cogs in someone else's machine is certainly not new either and is both appealing and horrifying. Still, it's just an idea... right? Bit of a wacky one for sure, but if our species had the technology wouldn't we do the same? We already engineer molecules and we've only been at it for 50 years. What will we be able to do in 1,000? If non-human, supremely intelligent creatures exist in the universe then why wouldn't they do the same?

Of course this doesn't explain how you can save information across universes. There is the Cyclic Model of universe creation and destruction that says that our universe expands and contracts forever and each time it contracts all the energy becomes crushed into another big bang situation. How could data be maintained over successive cycles? We would need to encode data into the very energy itself or find some way to project information out of the universe. All mad ideas and bordering on religious, but certainly interesting.

Not wishing to jinx anything, but I hope to be accepted onto a MSc by Dissertation course at Essex University starting in a few weeks. I have found an excellent supervisor who is willing to help me with a year-long research project. This would be extremely exciting to me and would allow me to take some time from work to concentrate on the things that I care more about and want to pursue academically and as a "career" if possible. Computational Pragmatics is the field and not doubt I'll be writing about this in future to. Wish me luck!

What's goin' on.

Cripes - it's all happening!

There's just too much going on right now to put into a single blog post so I'll try to condense it. And keep it sensible: there are things afoot that shouldn't be published, but are having deep affects on me.

It's 12.30 on a Sunday night. We've had a nice day with the boys. Max has done his Mathletics homework and his piano practice. Max and I also had a game of Risk. He thrashed me! Finn has played in the playroom and generally hung out with us. Both boys enjoyed a trip to the playground near Sainsbury's. The weather was sunny and warm.

Max still fixates on Minecraft and YouTube movies about Minecraft. The subject matter is fine by us as long as it's suitable for his age, but his fascination and devotion sometimes makes us worry that he watches too much TV/Computer. Finn the same although he's younger.

I have a clear memory of being about 8-years-old and falling foul of a friend on the small green space opposite 38 Guildfords where I lived at the time. Whatever possessed me I'm not sure, but I played "dead" for probably at least 10 minutes. That feeling of being aware of people watching me and trying to help whilst I ignore them stays with me today. Obviously this is fairly normal for an 8-year-old and I don't worry too much about doing it.

From the same era I also have clear-ish memories of wondering over field and vale, miles from my house without a care from my parents. It's funny that it's taken me 30-odd years to realise it's not quite so simple. I drove down to Harlow yesterday and parked up in Guildfords. I managed to find a pathway through to the old river that I remembered being a focal point for me and my friends of the time. It's actually only about 50 yards from the house I lived in. I'm not disappointed by this revelation, but it's interesting how one's perceptions of youth remain until being challenged by the "reality" of adulthood.

I'm still working on MMOUKI. It's a fascinating project for me and if nothing else is stimulating and enjoyable. I regularly add notes to my phone so that I'll update the latest diagram to reflect new changes. I emailed an academic at the University of Essex yesterday to ask for help deciding whether to apply for an MSc By Dissertation. I had a reply saying that he's travelling and will reply in a week or two. I'm pleased to have something interesting to latch on to and hope to be able to study later this year with some help academically. It might be enjoyable to be able to extend my MMOUKI ideas in a more formal, academic direction.


It was also Father's Day today. Was lovely to have the two boys present me with chocolates and a great book - Sciencia - very informative and useful.

Still working at Virgin although they kindly allow me to be at home for two days per week.


Discussed Wittgenstein with Christina today. I professed a liking for the ascetic ideal of burying oneself away in Norway or Connemara. I think it must be a male thing.

Beyond all he problems a photo like this (link) that I have never seen before still makes me very happy!