Holiday Part Deux

Well it's been a hectic week. We've been to Tesco - again! I know, it's astounding. We even had lunch there. Which was pretty shit if I'm honest.

There have been a couple of more interesting excursions though. Astute observers will have noticed that I bought a camera a few days ago, something I obviously didn't do in Singleton. I can now exclusively reveal that we went to Chichester for the day. It was nice. After a bit of aimless wandering we had lunch in a Weatherspoons where Phoebe discovered that she is very fond of chips! She gets that from her mother.

The next day we took Phoebe on her first swimming trip. Not entirely sure what she made of the experience, she didn't look sad or happy. The entire thing seemed to be a total non-event as far as she was concerned. Unlike showering and getting dressed again afterwards which was a bit fraught. Even with two of us to juggle her it was still really difficult and she got very hot and miserable.

Today we went to sculpture and insect world where I got plenty of opportunities to use my new camera. Unfortunately we'd been out for lunch and then kept Phoebe up instead of sensibly going back to the cottage and putting her to bed (which would have meant not going to SAIW of course) and she was really tired and upset. I ended up (literally) running round the forest on my own (it's 24 acres) taking pictures of as many of the sculptures as I could while Hayley sat and waited in the car with her. It was a bit of shame for Hayley, I think she'd have really enjoyed it if she'd had the chance. It was also a bit of shame for my wallet as it costs £10 to get in and I can't really say she got her money's worth. Anyway, if I ever get around to it, you will be able to see the fruits of my photographic labour here at some point.

Digital Photography Adventures

Just upgraded my photography equipment to a DSLR with the purchase of a Sony a350. Bit of a step into the unknown as I know nothing about 'proper' photography, fortunately one of my birthday presents was an Amazon voucher so I can see a few Idiots Guide to DSLRs coming my way fairly soon. Luckily the quick start guide only has four steps - set the dial to auto, view through the screen, half press the shutter button to focus, fully depress to shoot. I think I can cope with that!

Holiday Part Un

Well it's the end of an action packed day, yes, days end pretty early at the moment. We went to... Tesco! I know, unbelievable. We did almost manage a full-on Wray family expedition when the the Sat Nav sent us off a on a 15 mile detour down a dual carriage way just to get us to the next exit further along on the roundabout we had been on in the first place. Personally I'd have preferred to just go round a few more yards, but Nora knows best. By the time we realised what had happened we were stuck and had to take the entire detour. Our day would have been complete if had been shut when we got there but sadly it wasn't.

Phoebs is a bit reluctant to go to bed, we're not sure why, could be teeth, could be that it's a strange place. Fingers crossed she gets used to it.

Teeth Teeth We Want More Teeth

All the girls are cheering
Get the effing teeth in

Phoebe's round is it? I'll have two upper lateral incisors thanks.

The Breakfast Song

In keeping with family tradition, I have composed a song to be sung at breakfast to Phoebe. Traditionalists will no doubt complain that it actually rhymes and the words fit with the tune. But sod 'em.



The Breakfast Song (you can guess the tune for yourself)

Phoebe, Phoebe come for your breakfast do
I'm half crazy picking up toast for you
I won't think that you're a nutter
When you smear your face with butter
But you'll be there
In your highchair
With your toothy smile shining through

Another Decade Exits Stage Left

So my thirties have made a graceful, if inevitable, exit stage left and my forties have shuffled in from the right. Got some good presents though, I'm especially looking forward to charging round Thruxton in a Ferrari F-430. Hope I don't crash it. My groovy book reader is doing sterling work already, I've read the latest China Mieville and really enjoyed it, I'm currently working on Harry Ramsden 10, with 11 waiting in the wings.

I was wondering if I'd feel any different now I'm, gulp, forty. And the answer of course is not in the slightest. After all I'm only a day older than I was when I was thirty nine. If anything I feel better now than I did when I was thirty, I'm certainly a lot fitter and stronger (thanks CrossFit and Kettlebells, with an honourable mention to Ross Enamait) so that's not an issue. I suppose the future is a lot more uncertain and of course I have a daughter to worry about too, but that would be the case whatever age I happened to be, so I can't blame that on being forty either.

So, that's about it really, with the stage makeup on my forties look very like my thirties...

Holiday Time

Last day of slogging round the M25 for a whole week. Hurrah!

Have been given a laptop and a 3G card by work so I should be able to blog about all the exciting things we get up to over the next few days in Sunny Singleton, like... Well... Anyway, I'm sure there will be something. Phoebe's teething again so if nothing else that should add some spice to the week.

And The Lesson Of The Day

Is...

No, not how to die. Don't try and load 17,000 books all at once onto your Sony Reader. Firstly Vista will crash halfway through, secondly it will take hours and hours (around six to get the first 9,500 I managed before Vista crashed) and thirdly after you turn it on it will sit there "loading" for some indeterminate amount of time. So far about an hour. It is still working on something because the icon in the middle is slowly spinning round but while it is in this state I can't read any books. Grr!

Beer, Beer, We Want More Beer...

...the residents of Chobham must be chanting, because they were restocking the Sun again. Blocking the road, again. Delaying me for ages, again. Can't they at least do it after 9:00? Surely that isn't too much to ask.

Feckers.

The Joy Of Text

No not text messages, I mean just plain, ordinary, old fashioned words. Well, sort of old fashioned. Perhaps I should say plain, ordinary, old fashioned words repackaged in a fancy high-tech wrapping. I am of course talking about the new Sony Reader which my lovely family got me for my tieth birthday. Even though it's not my actual birthday until next week, like a naughty boy I loaded up some of my ebooks and got stuck in.

It's so good, I'm already wondering if I'll ever read a paper book ever again. Of course I will, that's a silly thing to suggest. Even so, I do think it could easily be to books what iPods are to music. I always thought it would be a good gadget but held off getting one for a while as I wasn't able to find any ebooks that I actually wanted to read. All that changed though last month and I'm now the proud owner of enough ones and zeros to keep me going for quite likely the rest of my life. I'm in heaven. I'll probably stay there as long as I can keep getting hold of up to date books, fingers crossed my current source keeps delivering. Mind you, even if I can't, it's not as if I'll be short on things to read.

Plague Maths: Plague A + Plague B = Plague A?

It's also just occurred to me that we could have effectively cancelled out our plague of flies by using the plague of spiders to eat them, although that may have entailed chasing the flies upstairs into the bedroom which is where the spiders mainly hang out. Which got me to thinking about plague maths and if other plagues would cancel out or if they'd reinforce each other. Now as previously discussed we could cancel out a plague of birds with a plague of cats, cats with dogs, dogs with cows and so on.

You could argue that although the plague of spiders would eat the plague of flies, it would become much larger as a result and you'd just end up with twice as many spiders, but I'm not sure that would matter much. After all, once you've got to the point where it's a plague how much more plaguey can it get? The answer is none. None more plaguey. Plagues are like infinities in that respect.

Looking at the ten classic plagues you could for example cancel the plague of blood with a plague of vampires. That's probably not a very good example. Let's see... No, I'm not getting much inspiration. I suppose a plague of darkness could be cancelled out by a plague of street lamps.

Yeah, OK, I didn't really think this whole plague maths thing through.

The Second Plague

Or - Arrrgh! Maggots!

This is quite literally yucktastic. Whilst I was upstairs removing the 13 spiders that had taken up residence overnight, the Lovely Hayley spotted a maggot in the kitchen which was unpleasant but seemed fairly innocuous. Then a bit later on she found another, and then another, and... Well you get the idea. Further investigation uncovered around 50 or so all round the utility room, under the doormat and even in the doormat buried deep into the fibres. So that went straight in the bin - wrapped up in a plastic bag of course.

We must have had some flies get into the kitchen bin, which is where they seemed to be coming from. I shudder to think how many were still in there! We are now having to reconsider what we do with the food waste from Phoebe's meals, there's quite a lot of it. Current thinking is to pop it in an ice-cream tub and empty it into the main bin in the evening. We'll have to see how that goes.

I also can't help noticing that we seem to be experiencing our second plague although I'm not sure if it was meant to be a plague of maggots or if it's the start of a plague of flies, I suppose it could even be both if we'd left it. So I have to wonder what's coming next, after all plagues come in packs of ten as everyone knows. Unfortunately our plagues aren't following the normal pattern or flies would be quite a bit later on. I doubt it's going to be a river of blood either although that would certainly be interesting to see. I'm not sure if a canal of blood counts but that's probably the closest we could get. I'd think I'd quite like a plague of frogs so fingers crossed for that one.

The lovely Hayley points out we should hope we don't get the death of the first born after all the trouble we went to to get her. I have to agree.

Normal Service Has Been Resumed

Thanks to the neighbour's cats yowling and caterwauling during the small hours of the morning I woke in a fine grump this morning and my blogging fire is burning brightly.

For some reason while cleaning my teeth this morning I found myself thinking about the theory that we are living inside a giant computer simulation - what's become known as the "Matrix Hypothesis" (at least by me.) I'm not really sure what to make of it. Having read the original paper I'm now even less sure. In many ways the entire argument can be considered in the same manner as the arguments made by the Intelligent Design (it's not science) crowd. If the entire observable universe is a simulation, right down to the sub-atomic level, we have no way of telling. Everything in the universe looks the way it does because the implementors of the simulation made it look that way, including the apparent appearance of it not being a simulation.

This is the same rather weak argument that ID (i.n.s) proponents use to reconcile the observed state of the universe - many billions of years old, evidence for evolutionary history and so forth with their belief that it isn't really like that at all. It obviously looks that way because God made it look that way for some unfathomable reason of his (or her let's not make any assumptions) own. Of course there is no way of disproving this because any experiment you could devise would just show that the universe is the way it is as a consequence of some relatively simple natural laws just as God intended.

You can, however, apply some simple logic to try and work out the truth. If the universe appears to be very old and all the experiments we do show that and the mechanisms for life to evolve on it's own and develop into new forms seem to be present and have even been observed happening at least on a microscopic level (antibiotic resistance anyone?) then the simplest explanation is that's how the universe really is. You don't need to postulate the more unlikely scenario that the universe was created a week last Wednesday with all of it's prehistory fully formed and ready to go. It could have happened, and as mentioned, we of course wouldn't be able to tell, but the most likely explanation is that the observed state of the universe is the real state of the universe. The universe appears to be billions of years old because it is, life appears to evolve because it does and so on.

Now, here's the interesting thought that occurred to me in the bathroom. If I set up a giant simulation of the entire universe there's no way I'd make it so perfect that it was totally indistinguishable from reality. I'd make sure to leave small clues, some little anomalies that the inhabitants of the simuverse would be able to use to deduce the truth about their situation. Perhaps it's just me, but I think that would be pretty funny. I'd probably even have some sort of mechanism in place so people who are able to part the veil of reality so to speak could subvert the logic of the entire system to get some sort of reward for doing so. Wouldn't you? Let's face it, it would just make the whole thing a lot more interesting. And if I think I'd build my simulation(s) that way, you can bet that if there are uncounted billions of them as has been proposed then other people would do the same thing too.

Now, you can argue that a posthuman civilisation would be more mature and responsible than ours and therefore wouldn't do such a thing. It undoubtedly has the potential to cause unnecessary stress and suffering to any of the simulated inhabitants that manage to work it out, but come on, that's just bollocks. There's no reason to suppose that evolved humans would be any more saintly than the current crop of (less-evolved) humans. Even if they are let's not forget that we wouldn't actually be real so there's equally no reason to suppose that the same moral rules would have to apply to their treatment of us. You don't see me agonising about the fate of the zombies in Quake III. And, yes, I know that's not a completely valid argument as our all powerful descendents would be making conscious beings in their computers and not mindless, well, zombies but even if the majority of people would never dream of doing such a thing it would still happen sometimes. After all, the majority of people would never dream of committing murder but murder still happens and slightly messing with the heads of simulated people is nothing like as bad as murder.

Besides, is that any more morally ambiguous than creating an entire simulated universe full of conscious beings in the first place? If we are living in a simuverse they've made it pretty unpleasant for a lot of the people a lot of the time. I'd argue that deliberately giving the inhabitants the chance to work it out and maybe even escape from it is kinder.

Maybe that's all the evidence we need that we're not living in a simulation after all.

Sudden Excitement!

Brought on by the appearance of a hedgehog in the garden. Bless. Hayley has already started planning some sort of multi-storey hedgehog house extension to the shed. Still, it's made my day, I do like hedgehogs.

All Fun And No Grump Makes Jack A Dull Blog(ger)

Or No News Is Dull News.

Yes, it's been pretty quiet on the things worth blogging about front this week. Phoebes has been sprouting teeth like she's part shark (another two have appeared, making six this month) which is causing a few ripples in the normally tranquil pond of fatherhood.

Meditation class has been postponed this week again, so I can't even mutter under my breath about mystical energy forces. Well, OK, I can - but not without repeating myself.

Summer holidays are in full swing so the traffic has been pretty good. I even managed to drive right round the roundabout, onto the slip road and all the way to the Dartford Tolls without stopping once which has never happened before. It'll probably never happen again either.

In many ways this is of course a good thing, but it's pretty clear that my urge to blog is almost entirely fuelled by grumpiness. I could have blogged about the inconsiderate feckers who parked their beer lorry outside the pub in Chobham High St, totally blocking one side of that very busy road which added an extra fifteen minutes onto my journey. I realise they need to deliver beer and all that, that's not what annoyed me. What annoyed me was there's a car park right next to the place they stopped. They could have parked in there and avoided all that chaos. At the most it would mean lugging the barrels a couple more feet, surely not too onerous? Thoughtless gits.

Hey! I just realised, while describing the blog entry I didn't make I got a bit grumpy and ended up doing the post after all. Has normal service has been resumed?

Of Dreams and Demons

I was listening to the sceptical podcast by the NESS again today. They discussed something called Waking Dreams or Hypnagogia which they said was responsible for the majority of UFO abduction claims as well as historic claims of demonic presences like succubi. It's the result of certain physical changes that happen in the brain when you fall asleep - parts of it deactivate leaving you unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, which incidentally, is why even the weirdest dreams don't seem odd at the time. They also leave you paralysed or you'd act out your dreams - which a best would be silly and at worst would probably kill you if you leap out of a window or fell downstairs. It's possible to partially wake into a strange in between state where you are conscious but still under the influence of these sleep induced changes.


So why am I commenting about this? Well, I realised that it's actually happened to me. I had a very strange experience a few months back where I woke to see a huge (several feet wide) jewelled spider dangling down in front of me. As I looked it it, it retreated up it's web towards the ceiling. I stared at it for a while not knowing what to do and eventually went back to sleep. Some time later I woke again and still saw it dangling down over my head.

Now, at the time I had no idea what was going on and I remember it very vividly. Looking back with my newly acquired knowledge I can see that I was clearly having one of these waking dream experiences. The first red flag is that upon waking and seeing a giant spider dangling in front of my face I just went back to sleep. I mean, come on I know I'm fairly laid back but that is ridiculous even for me. The second is that there was a giant spider there at all, let's face it, I live in the UK and unless I'm very much mistaken we don't have giant spiders. I hope that nowhere has spiders that big! And finally let's not forget it was covered in sparking blue jewels. Not the most common look for a spider as far as I know.

In some ways it's a bit of a shame to have an interesting and mysterious experience explained so prosaically, but I think it's always better to have a genuine explanation even if it makes life a little more mundane.

Size Isn't Everything

OK, so I'm obviously rambling a bit, I'll try and keep the length a bit more reasonable in future.

Meditation Time Part II

After an unfortunate hiatus while the instructor looked after his sick daughter we're off again. This week was "Fire". I got on with this a lot better than the previous week(s) focus of water which to be honest didn't do much for me at all, no doubt my chakras are out of balance or something. This time we did a new breathing exercise which made me feel very hot and sweaty. Fortunately this is what's supposed to happen, I suppose the fire theme should have given me a clue.

Again though, my sceptical brain kicked in. While there's no denying the meditation had a definite physical effect I found it pretty hard to swallow the explanation about purifying Chi or whatever it was that was supposed to be happening. The breathing involved slowly taking a breath, compressing the lungful of air using your stomach muscles and holding it then breathing out slowly while maintaining the compression. It's a fairly hard isometric stomach exercise. Could the apparent heat generation be simply due to the effort involved in intensely contracting my muscles? In addition I have a vague recollection that breathing is one of the major ways heat is expelled from your body. Clearly if I'm right about that then taking around two breaths per minute rather than the more usual 10-12(ish) would have a significant impact on body temperature too.

Again, I'm not being overly critical about the course itself, you unfortunately have to expect that sort of thing on a meditation course. I'm also not trying to second guess and sneer at the instructor all the time. I'd just be more even more interested in it than I already am if there was an explanation of the genuine physical processes underlying what you can clearly feel going on in your body rather than some vaguely mystical almost certain nonsense.

Hmmm, there could be a book in that, "The Sceptical Meditator." Although the audience comprising the intersection of people who are both sceptical of new agey explanations and still interested in what, let's face it, are new agey practices is probably fairly small! I should probably point out I do draw the line there, meditation is pretty much my limit, it's relaxing, it makes you feel good and you can definitely feel "something". I put something in quotes because what you can actually feel isn't certain. You won't find me taking any courses in crystal healing or dowsing or any other blatant nonsense.

It's certainly interesting to me that I can make myself hot when I want to, it'll come in handy at the office since my desk is under an air conditioning vent. I suppose I'm just puzzled that firstly these clearly flimsy explanations get created and secondly that they get absorbed uncritically and then passed on as truths when even a modicum of thought would indicate there may be a more rational explanation. Presumably this is how religions start.

Now that I think about it it's not too different from some of the martial arts experiences I've had. In particular the Go (5th) Dan test I took in Japan. The test is very simple and has a digital pass/fail result. It comprises of you kneeling on the floor with your eyes closed while someone stands behind you with a shinai (bamboo training sword) at the ready. After a time (it seems like forever) and without warning the person attempts to smack you on the head with it. The test is that you have to move out of the way of the unseen strike. If you do, you pass, if you don't you fail and presumably you get a sore head into the bargain. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I think about it fairly regularly to this day. The official explanation is you are sensing and reacting to "the killer intention." The person administering the test is supposed to emit the feeling that they are really trying to kill you and apparently it won't work if this doesn't happen.

So, fair enough I moved at the appropriate time and passed the test, hooray for me. I certainly felt something - I heard a loud roaring sound and it felt as if someone had hosed me out of the way with a high pressure jet of hot water. I felt decidedly peculiar for the rest of the day. But what really happened? I have no idea sadly. As a senior (and presumably also slightly sceptical) student remarked at the time, "It's certainly a test, but a test of what?" I don't have a better explanation unfortunately but that doesn't mean I don't think there is one. I suppose I can vaguely consider that I heard it coming at a subconscious level or something similar. Who knows, perhaps I really did sense the killer intention. I'd love to do some proper testing but it's not something I'm in a position to do. Shame. So until then the best explanation I have is the one I was given. It doesn't mean I have to believe it unconditionally though.