Christmas is fast approaching….

I’m not a big fan, if I’m honest. I’m not Christian for a start, so the religious aspect is rather lost on me. I’m just about scraping by financially so the commercial aspect is not one I can indulge in, and even if I could, I don’t really have much of a family to speak of, not that I am on speaking terms with anyway, being a bit isolationist so I don’t really have anyone to buy things for, and the whole family coming together thing doesn’t really happen for me. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly grumpy about Christmas, it just isn’t that important to me. If other people want to decorate their houses from top to bottom, if they want to go out to lavish office parties, or spend time in contemplation and praise of the birth of their saviour, or if they just want to spend a few days devoted to having quality family time that is absolutely fine with me. In fact I applaud them for it, as I applaud anyone with the get up and go to engage with the wider World.

Of course what this does mean is that I get to have a quiet giggle about the whole commercialization of a religious festival arguments, which is always fun. Christians being labeled killjoys for wanting to keep consumerism out of the celebration of the birth of their Lord, fans of presents pointing out the Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh brought by the wise men, Christians retorting that these are allegorical presents denoting the life and more importantly the death of Jesus, thereby being prophetically integral to the biblical story. Ah, but what about the shepherds bringing their lambs? Those are allegorical too apparently, and so it goes on, often for many hours. For me it is just a bit of fun but they take it all rather seriously, as though it actually mattered. I can’t see the Christian God as I vaguely understand him giving two hoots what people get up to in terms of gift giving. Didn’t he give us free will to sort that out in our own heads? Still, makes it all a bit more jolly Ho Ho Ho!

And on that subject, we come to the hero, or villain of the piece depending on your point of view and bank balance, the Jolly fat man himself, Father Christmas or St. Nicholas or possibly Odin in drag or King Wenceslas from the carol or the Holly King of Celtic mythology or the Coca-Cola advertising campaign if you want to be really cynical, but whoever and whatever he is, this chap brings presents to all the good little boys and girls, and nothing to those who have been naughty, although I’m pretty certain a little naughtiness is usually acceptable. I mean we aren’t talking arson or manslaughter here right? Just a bit of petty thievery perhaps? So that’s fine. Now there are some who argue that the whole concept is just more pressure heaped onto already overburdened parents to buy yet more junk for their offspring in the hope that they won’t get bullied too much at school for having last seasons trainers or whatever it might be. There are others who say that allowing a little magic into childrens lives helps to spark creativity and allows the child to develop a sense of theatre and drama.

Whatever your personal take on Christmas, Yule, Hannuka, Saturnalia whatever you or your forefathers chose to call the time around the winter solstice, stay safe, stay as happy as you can, eat well and try not to stress too much. It is seldom worth it in the long run….

Your website is your shop window

There can be little doubt that the percentage of business done online is increasing year on year. In the US in since 2001 online transactions have increased from $249 Million to $49.8 Billion in 2009. A similar trend has been seem across the developed world. In addition to this the demographic of online consumers has changed even more dramatically. In 2001 the percentage of women regularly using the internet in the US was 2.1%, by 2009 this had risen to 52.8%, almost exactly matching the total population demographic.

Combined together, and taking into account the fact that these increases have an impact not just in B2C online transactions, but also in B2B transactions, it becomes clear that as a business, your web presence is only getting more important.

Think in terms of the  sociological reports on the effect of appearance on high street shopping. Studies have shown that if an area is visually unappealing, has shops that are closed down, has litter on the streets and is poorly lit at night, footfall in that area drops, and sales drop accordingly. Now translate that into your business website. If your site is cluttered, if things are hard for your customer to find, it your customer has to click through screen after screen, if the visual impact of your site is jarring, if buttons don’t work correctly, or send people away from your site, the same thing can happen. Visitor numbers fall, the amount of time people spend on your site falls, and the business your site generates falls.

The technology behind websites, and the design principles and trends in terms of appearance change over time. Typically websites go out of date in two years, and in order to maximize search engine friendliness really needs to have some work done every month, in just the same way that the street outside a shop in the real world needs to be swept and tidied regularly. Your online presence may, in some cases, be the only contact your customer has with you, it is increasingly becoming the first point of contact your customer has with you. Get it right, and success becomes easier to achieve, get it wrong, and you may never know how many customers never get as far as contacting you.

Working with a good web design company that will offer you content management, and ongoing maintenance can make a huge difference to your business, and when that is combined with a company that really understands how to analyse where your website is strong and where it needs work, you can, by partnering well create a unique and successful web brand that achieves your goals and ambitions.

Business basics 101 – Understand your business

Whether you have run businesses for years or you are starting out fresh having been working as an employee the first step in creating a new business venture is planning. The drafting of a complete business plan should be a very early priority after the initial idea phase. Coming up with a good idea for a business is actually not that difficult, and it tends to be in an area in which you already have some expertise. You may be a builder, electrician or plumber looking to start up on your own, or a website designer tired of the 9 to 5 grind, or a business manager looking to break into consultancy. It doesn’t really matter, chances are you are looking to utilize some of your existing skills but in the context of reaping the rewards yourself. Of course the potential downside of this is that you are also taking on the risks yourself.

Having formulated an idea of what you want in your new business, the crucial step as previously suggested is to develop a well worked out and thought through business plan. There are plenty of templates available for free online that will help with this process but essentially your business plan is an opportunity to explore in thought how you feel your new business will operate. It allows you to contemplate how you will generate business, what the risks are likely to be, what the costs will be, how much revenue you can generate, how long it will take you to turn a profit, how much investment you will need and even how you will drive the business forward, your mid to long term goals and an analysis of the marketplace you are entering into.

Bear in mind that this business plan, whether you end up showing it to anyone else or not forms the blueprint for your business and can easily be the difference between success and failure. It is by no means set in stone, but it is certainly something that you should regularly refer back to and modify as necessary. Of course, if you are looking for business funding, whether from the banks, or from private sources you are going to need a very carefully worked out business plan in order to demonstrate business viability. Whatever your reason for producing one, whether for personal use or for fund raising, your business plan must meet three criteria. It must be credible, in that figures must be realistic and achievable within the timeframes established. It must be as accurate as possible as it forms the basis of your business strategy moving forward, and finally it must be understandable. There is little point in filling your business plan with buzz words and acronyms if they are meaningless, or worse still irrelevant to anyone reading it.

It may sound like a long winded and onerous task, but you will have to trust me on this, a well structured, clear, concise and above all usable business plan is absolutely the best way to invest time in setting up a business. The very best advice I can give you, in summary, is : Keep it simple, keep it relevant, keep it usable and above all, keep it honest. If you follow these guidelines, you will find yourself in a much stronger position than the next guy who is starting up on a wing and a prayer with nothing but self belief and a half baked idea…..

Moments of madness…..business nightmares….

There is an old saying, American I believe, that goes something along the lines of “If you can’t learn you ain’t worth whipping”. It sounds vaguely Texan and refers I think to the image of a recalcitrant animal that resists training to the extent that it is better to give up on it and accept it as it is than continue trying to train it. I know a few people like that, and indeed I’ve met a few people in business like that as well, and one thing that they have in common is that they don’t seem able to learn from their mistakes. When things are going well, or when it is happening in a company that you have nothing to do with other than being an observer it doesn’t present a problem, but when it is a company that you work with, or worse still work for, that is far more of an issue.

Let me give you an example of a company I am familiar with. The owner of this company is great at coming up with ideas and plans and schemes, but is pretty much useless as seeing those schemes through to fruition. Now this per se is not a major issue, there are plenty of successful people who are ideas focused and find productive and efficient people to work with and for them who can organise those ideas and drive them forward to create a very nice business indeed. In business as in life we all have our roles to play. However, in this particular case it does present rather more of an issue because this particular business owner is not very good at discriminating between a good, solid completer/finisher and a complete chancer who has little if any idea of how to run a successful business.

Consequently this fellow has so far had an idea for a telecoms company that he left the running of to a twenty two year old lad who could barely manage himself let alone a telecom sales company. He then moved on to web design, having seen the telecoms company disappear in a cloud of debt, and handed the running of it to a sales guy who funnily enough was also twenty two, and could also talk the talk, but was functionally illiterate and struggled to manage himself let alone a web design business. Now letting this happen once is a mistake that anyone can make. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, letting it happen twice smacks of carelessness. But it gets worse. Having had the web design company disappear, funnily enough into a remarkably similar cloud of debt to the previous telecoms business he is now planning an online retail business, the running of which he is giving to…..yes you’ve guessed it, a twenty two year old sales type who can talk the talk, although not, it has to be said in English…..oh dear oh dear oh dear.

So, what does this tell us, other than that this guy is not someone on whom it would be good to rely? Well, it suggests a fundamental lack of insight, or the ability to analyse previous mistakes. What is interesting in this case is that the gentleman in question is very much in the habit of apportioning blame to the people that he puts in place to run things, rather than perhaps considering that it is his judgment that should be called into question for picking them so poorly in the first place. It seems, from an observers perspective that he invests complete confidence in these people without understanding or questioning whether that confidence is well placed or not. The consequence of this is that his plans invariably fail but he considers himself blameless.

I have begun to consider why this might be. His plans are not necessarily bad, his puts together business plans that have merit, and starts them well, but I wonder if there is at some level an aberrant psychology that is causing him to feel that the business may fail but that he must do all he can to avoid having to shoulder responsibility himself. I know from his history that he has been responsible for several businesses failing at significant cost to suppliers and employees, and I wonder if he is just not willing to face that possibility again, leading to him shifting responsibility onto these youngsters who are relatively easy to blame when things go wrong, as they inevitably do.

It seems an odd way to go about running a business, but each to their own I guess, and I’ve heard that denial is a very pleasant place to live…..

Pagan beliefs in a Christian World

Here in the UK our conversion to Christianity began more than fifteen hundred years ago with the Romans just before they left our shores. The process was a long one as our nation was invaded and colonized by non-Christians coming over from Europe. The Germanic and Scandinavian countries from which most of our invaders came remained at least in part non-Christian until the mid eight hundreds, and as a consequence Christianity was not established as the dominant religion until the defeat and conversion of the Danish leaders by the Christian King Alfred in the ninth Century. The process was completed as far as some historians are concerned by the invasion in 1066 by the Normans and the establishment of the Norman Church in Great Britain. So the process of Christianisation can be considered to have been an ongoing process over approximately five hundred years, and it should further be noted that there were additional discrepancies in that there were at least two rival versions of Christianity competing for influence, the Church of Rome coming up from the South and East and what has been loosely termed Celtic Christianity coming from the North and West, particularly Ireland.

It should perhaps be noted that there are some historians who consider that the Celtic Church was more or less influenced by the integration of Druidic teaching as a hold over from the Roman defeat of the Druids at Anglesey in the first century AD. There is evidence of a continuation of Druidic colleges in some form in Ireland and to a lesser extend in Scotland, but this evidence is not strong and exactly what influence, if any Druidic practices and teaching had is hotly debated. There has been, for the last three hundred years or so a movement to increase the perceived influence of Druidic thinking on early British Christianity that has clouded the question somewhat. Evidence of this can be seen in the attribution of chalk hill figures to ancient Druids when there is little evidence for any of them before 1700AD and it is likely that they are all at best recreations, and at worst complete fantasy. There have even been suggestions that Stonehenge was a Druid monument or temple when it has been dated to a period between 4000 and 2000BC which makes it firmly Mesolithic into early bronze age, and almost certainly pre-druidic.

When considering the spread and development of Christianity across Britain it should be considered that the majority of that spread was through Christian missionaries coming out of monastic orders that had been established as seats of power over several hundred years. They had developed strong links in the surrounding area and taken control of considerable farmland and resources. They had been destroyed and rebuilt several times in some case and they were largely intolerant of alternative faith views. Given this background it seems unlikely that there would be a place, even within small rural communities, for local non-Christian practices to continue, although this is not to suggest that practices such as herbal medicine, bone setting and the day to day practical solutions to practical problems that the church had little influence over didn’t continue. The role of cunning folk and wise men and women is likely to still have been prevalent, and this brings an interesting wrinkle to the story.

If we consider the role of healers and spiritual leaders in non-Christian societies we find similarities globally. There is a clear role of healing through medicinal plants as well as a role for integration of the spiritual wellbeing of the community, often linked to a veneration of, or at least a reference to, significant ancestors, particularly those within family groups. This family grouping is interesting because it appears anthropologically that in many non-Christian traditions, information such as the correct plants to use is passed down generationally within a family, rather than being passed around generally. This could be a consequence of the principle that knowledge is power, but it seems likely that there is also a possibility that there is a basic understanding of heritance and that if someone has an aptitude for a certain task within the group, then it is likely that their progeny may have that same aptitude.

It is also suggestive that the targets for the witch trials and accusations throughout the middle ages tended to be those who took a healing, and community leading role, the people who in other societies would probably be considered Shamanic. It could be suggested that there was a feeling of threat on the part of the Church from these people, as the aim of the Church is control, and these people challenged that control by offering alternatives. Certainly we see within the Roman Church an understanding that healing, weather, harvests and the like were at the divine providence of God and could not be influenced by man other than through the intercession of the priesthood. This belief persists today with sites such as Lourdes being incredibly popular as a site of healing and prayer. Thus the church appears to have considered that it could replace local healers within communities and excerpt greater influence and control over the populace.

It is interesting to note that there are regular debates and discussions about the way in which the Church may have taken over existing beliefs and customs and modified them to make the Church more acceptable to non-Christians, but this seem generally to be predicated on dates and locations, and is to my mind highly questionable given that the Church is not known for its tolerance of existing beliefs. If we look at the way missionaries within recent times have acted towards none Christian beliefs we see a tendency to obliterate rather than integrate. To use a recent example of Papua New Guinea we see a tribal society, largely functioning at a neolithic level of subsistence farming and hunter-gatherer communities, with a broad range of beliefs and local deities and spirits. The actions of Christian missionaries has been to eradicate existing idols and fetishes, to completely change, and in places ban traditional burial practices, and to effectively de-consecrate spiritual sites rather than integrate them.

Certainly it could be argued that this is the role of a Church secure in itself and it’s beliefs operating largely unchallenged, a position that is not equivalent to that faced by one of several Christian Churches attempting to develop early Britain into a Christian nation so parallels are not necessarily valid, but none-the-less it does make one wonder if the supposed integration of previously sacred sites, the use of pagan images in churches and so on are as relevant or indeed possible as is made out. A common reference to Pagan images in churches are the green men and the Sheila na gig carvings, but these are by no means exclusively pagan, and the image of natural generation shown in these carvings can certainly be traced through purely Christian iconography. Similarly, the discovery of sacred pagan sites supposedly under Christian churches almost certainly owes as much to the limited availability of suitably elevated and secure sites than to any overt move on the part of the Church to subvert existing beliefs. In general, and on principle the idea of Christianisation is to teach that the old ways were wrong and that any reference to them must be expunged by re-birth within the community of Christ rather than being integrated.

There is a lot of nonsense written about the history of “native” religions in Britain, but there is little if any direct evidence of any beliefs directly attributable to pre-Christians, the evidence that we do have coming from external sources, since the society before Roman occupation was pre-literate, and archaeological finds are subject to interpretation and speculation. Again a good example of this is the theories around deposits of broken metal artifacts in wetland areas, frequently categorized as votive offerings to the local water deity to alleviate flooding, rather than, lets say, the scrap waste from a bronze age metalworking site dumped in the river because it was convenient, and the idea of recycling hadn’t taken hold. Just a thought….

Striving for perfection…..

For years I kept trying to tell myself that I didn’t get the whole perfection thing. That for me perfection was a concept that didn’t make sense. Perfection, even in the smallest of things is impossible, I would say to myself, as there are always improvements that can be made, no matter how small. I even tried to convince myself mathematically, an interesting decision given my lack of mathematical knowledge or understanding, but I latched on to the old Mandelbrot stuff about coastlines. You know the one, however hard you try to measure a coastline you can never measure it exactly because the coastline is fractal in nature, meaning that as you look closer and closer at a coastline you see that the lines you thought were straight and easy to measure are in fact made up of ever smaller lines each of which have to be measured, and each of these is made up of lines and so on and so on ad infinitum.

I am finally coming to the acceptance that this may not be the case for me. That there is at least the possibility that for some things, small things, things like writing a short article, cooking a simple meal, enjoying a film, can reach a state of perfection. Not perhaps in the sense that they are impossible to improve, but that they are perfect enough. Ok so this may be starting to sound like a cop out, but let me try to explain. There is a principle in economics called the law of diminishing returns which states that there is a point in a system at which the value of the amount of effort to make an improvement exceeds the value of the improvement. To give an example, lets say that you manufacture cardboard boxes. You start out making ten boxes a week by hand, and you sell them all so you decide to invest in another staff member, and they produce ten boxes too, so now you and your employee are both producing ten boxes, twenty in total and you sell all of those. Great! You think, and indeed it is, so you take on another staff member who makes ten boxes, and another and another, and then you reach a point where the last worker you employed only makes five boxes, so you think, that’s a bit odd.

When you investigate the situation you find that the last worker doesn’t have enough room to work so they are less productive. In fact they are so unproductive that they are costing you more in wages than the extra boxes they are producing. This is the law of diminishing returns. The extra labour input has reached a point that it is not efficient, there is another limiting factor, in this case space. I think, for me, there is an argument that in some situation perfection works in a similar way. Lets suppose that I write one of these articles, and I’m pretty happy with the first draft, but as I read it back I think “hmmm that bit there could flow a little better, and that word there is a little clumsy” so I make those changes and I read it again and something else could do with refining, so I do that, and so on until I reach a point that I am becoming unhappy with the article because each change requires other changes and I am spending so much time and effort getting it right that I end up ruining the article.

Wouldn’t it be better to make a few changes until I am pretty much happy with it and then get it posted up and move on to the next one, which may be better still a I will have learned from the last one? I am beginning to think so. So perhaps not completely perfect, but as perfect as it can be without getting a bit silly really. I will be interested to know what you lot out there think of this as an idea. I think it needs a bit more work on my part to understand where the cut off points are, and how I know when something is approaching diminishing returns, and how I overcome the idea that maybe one more change won’t hurt, when it is quite obvious that it will. Maybe I need to combine this idea with working on my ability to accept things as being good enough? It’s a tricky one, but the core idea remains interesting. Maybe I am more of a perfectionist than I allowed myself to believe, just with a modified idea of perfection as something that isn’t an absolute in the mathematical sense…..

A beautiful early Winters day….

For those of you who are regular readers you may be developing the impression that I don’t have much time for pleasantness and niceness. I am aware that I do tend to rant a bit, or burble on about whatever random nonsense is in my head at the time, so just for a change I thought I would ramble on about something a bit lighter. From my office window I can see down the road to a beautiful Georgian church square still surrounded with the Georgian townhouses that were originally built with it. The low Winter sun is bright in a clear blue sky and is bathing the church in glory, highlighting the magnificent stained glass windows. I can only image the rainbow of colours within the church created by the sunlight streaming through those windows but I imagine it to be fabulous.

This is one of my favourite times of year for many reasons. I love the cold, crisp morning, the taste and smell of fresh snowfall, although we haven’t had that particular treat yet, the sounds of the hardier birds still flitting about the place but probably most of all the wonderful artistic quality of the light. On those days when the skies clear the low transit of the sun keeps the light streaming at an angle that lends a sharpness to everything it touches. The stonework of the building opposite gleams, and even the mundane red brickwork is lent a special aesthetic by the rays and the spectrum of the light as it is forced to arrive through more atmosphere than the summer sun.

I’m constantly surprised that I don’t see more people taking a moment to pause in their busy day to just enjoy the sights and sounds of a beautiful Winters day. For me there is something deeply special about it, but I guess it takes all sorts. I have never been one for the more obvious heat and light of Summer, finding it too close and hot, but this afternoon, sitting in the window, watching the World go by, seeing the light shift as the sun tracks across the sky I can easily believe that all is right with the World, even if only in this moment, and this mind. It gladdens my heart and lifts my spirits and for a short while the World becomes bearable.

For me, taking the time to really appreciate these moments is crucial as it gives me a high point to refer back to in the darker days. To know that I can feel and experience beauty reminds me that I am human, that I part of the great, complex, ever changing pattern of life on this planet, and that there is always something to savour, something to enjoy, even when it feels like there is nothing left that is worthwhile.

I love Winter, and I love that I can find beauty in something so simply complex as the play of light on the wall of a building and through the branches of a tree. Today it is good to be alive…..

War Metal – First forays of the new alliance

The rest of the first couple of days was spend integrating our people into Lord Alexanders camp and getting a feel for the organisational structure that was already in place. His Lordships camp was divided into combat groups and our own people slotted into the various groups according to their skills. What amazed us was the training facilities that the camp offered. Outside the walls were gun ranges for both small and heavy arms as well as test ranges for armoured and robotic units. Half a mile outside the camp there was a line of scrap armoured vehicles set up in convoy formation that had clearly been used to practice assault drills and raids, and it was as we were looking at this that we began to learn about just how valuable we could be.

“Right, I’ve already given you a rough outline of how our alliance is distributed across our territory, but the big problem that we have right now is logistics. You can see that we have a lot of equipment, ammunition and weapons here but when we try to distribute it to our outlying ally camps we have to devote so many support resources to defending it that it leaves us terribly vulnerable here. What we need to do is effectively disrupt the Red Maw supply lines so that they are less effective at hampering ours.”

Sirius looked thoughtful for a moment and replied “How well do you know the Red Maw setup? When we had our problems with them we found that they had an autonomous cell structure of small groups of five to ten operatives acting independently within a defined region and consequently their need for logistical support was far less than ours giving them an advantage. We overcame this by focusing on each cell rather than the links between.”

“It is a similar situation here, but we know that although each small group operates in isolation we also know that they have a series of major supply routes that allow the groups to meet with a delivery of supplies. The problem we have is that there are perhaps twenty routes that they can use and we can’t cover all of them well enough to give us time to intercept the convoy once they have chosen a specific route. Here let me show you what I mean”

Lord Alexander swept an area of wall top clear of obstructions and pulled from his backpack a rather tattered large scale map of the area. On the map were marks for approximate positions of enemy units as well as a complex network of lines showing the potential routes for supply deliveries. The problem became clear as we looked at the map. The area was just too large and by the time you had established with route was being used it would be too late to do anything about it.

I stared at the map and as I did so something began to nag at the back of my mind. It seemed so simple that I was amazed that no-one had spotted it. Surely they had?

“Look here” I started “If you look at the way that these routes traverse the region you can see that there is something wrong. You have the supply shipments starting from here” I pointed at a point on the map “and here, and here and here” pointing out the many start points of the convoys “but that can’t be right. These shipments must be coming from a limited number of stores, otherwise it makes no sense. Now look at how all of these routes to the East seem to intersect at a nexus point here, and the Western routes intersect here. Now if I’m right these routes are just too random to have any efficiency so these points must be where the convoys are picking up supplys before moving on. It’s a clever ruse but I reckon that if we could get a team into either this area in the East or this area in the West we would be able to monitor the traffic and establish a pattern that would give us the edge we need.”

The rest of the group looked at the map and the points I had highlighted and I could see them trying to find flaws with the logic. Slowly each face turned from cynicism to surprise, to a grim determination.

“Can you put together a team to get out to these locations and establish a secure forward camp? We can supply you with everything you will need in terms of equipment, but you will need to have complete faith in your team to operate this successfully.”

“I have a team in mind already, but I’m going to need a specialist tracker and I don’t have one from our people who understands your terrain well enough, can you recommend one of your own people?”

Lord Alexander didn’t even hesitate “I know just the person, come with me and I’ll introduce you…..”

Is there a place for magic in the modern world?

I wonder if there is anyone who isn’t aware of a concept of magic? It pervades almost every aspect of life from language through entertainment and sport to being woven into the fabric of existence depending on your point of view. Something nice happens and it is described in English as “Magic”, we see a glorious sunrise and it is magically beautiful, one of the most popular book and film series of all time is about magic and wizards, fairy stories, even the name suggests magic before you get to the stories themselves. It seems to be built in at a fundamental level, but just because the concept is almost ubiquitous does this equate to magic having a place in the way we live our lives? I guess this comes down to how you perceive magic. There is a vast range of beliefs around magic, ad it can be quite tricky to pin it down to a definition, as definitions tend to be limited by language, and to be fluid over time.

The modern wizard stories give us an idea of magic that is to an extent shared by what would be considered practical users of magic, modern equivalents to mediaeval alchemists and mystics. That idea is that magic is the ability to uses ones own will to effect a change in the real World. This idea is a concept that is linked to phenomena such as telekinesis, the old spoon bending tricks so popular in the 1970’s in the West. I would suggest that for many people magic of this type is considered in the same way as science fiction, or aliens. This, to me at least, is interesting and I raise it because it has been suggested to me by a number of people.

If we think about what is going on here, we see an idea that magic is considered as being on a par with science fiction. Now science fiction when done well takes hard scientific fact and explores possibilities around it, weaving stories and tales but maintaining some semblance of  scientific credibility. Even the alien stories have at least a core of credibility within them, tending in the main to be at least theoretically plausible. For magic to be considered in the same light suggests that underlying the stories of magic there is a belief that magic in some sense exists. However, we live in an age when science is leaving less and less room for non-scientific explanations.

Let us suppose that what we consider to be magic, for example the ability to heal remotely is scientifically verified and the mechanism by which it operates is understood. Would this make the ability any less magical? If you think of a great film, seen at the cinema, something that is beautifully shot with a fabulous story and visuals, that can be described as a magical experience even though we know that no magic is involved. We know the methods and principles behind making those images come to life on the screen yet we can become completely immersed in the pseudo-reality of the film. The same could be suggested to apply to more “magical” constructs I think, in the sense that understanding how and why something happens can be suspended in the mind to allow for simple enjoyment of the experience.

My own opinion is that the idea of magic enhances experience of life rather than acting as a barrier to progress. I am quite sure that scientists like Professor Dawkins would consider this to be heresy but non-the-less I see no obvious insurmountable conflict between understanding the nature of sub-atomic particles and believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden. I think I would be far more concerned on a personal level with a world that lacked any sense of wonder, where everything was fully understood and enjoyment was conditional on that understanding….

When common sense and science part ways….

The recent advances in scientific theory are interesting to a non-scientific observer with a passing interest in the subject. I pretty much get, in a very basic way how chemicals interact to form compounds, how genetics works at a basic level to explain variation and evolution, how physical systems work to create an atmosphere and the shape and position of continents, and the basics of thermo-dynamics and the laws of motion, that kind of thing, and I’m quite content with that position. I like to learn new things and to understand how the World works but it seems that most of the recent discoveries and theories are beyond the grasp of all but the most highly educated and knowledgable. Famously I recall hearing an interview with one of the top theoretical physicists in the World and he was asked if it was true that there were only five people in the World who understood his latest theory. His response was, after a period of silence, “I’m trying to think who the other four might be”.

This is, to me a bit of a nonsense. There used to be an idea in Mathematics that a solution to a problem, no matter how complex, would be elegant and refined, and that if it wasn’t then it probably wasn’t the correct answer. The opposite seems to be the case in physics with leading thinkers seeming to revel in their lack of comprehension or comprehensibility. Now there are plenty of people who will say that this is not a major problem because the areas that they are studying and theorizing about, multiverses, superstrings, chaos theory and the like are so rarified that they have little if any impact on our day to day life, but I can’t bring myself to agree with this, and there are two coer reasons why not.

The first is that there is a tendency in science for new discoveries to be made simply to increase understanding and knowledge, but once a discovery is made there is nothing to stop someone else taking that discovery and using it for destructive purposes. We only have to think of the splitting of the atom, or work on genetics and eugenics to see this in action. Once the genie is out of the bottle it is impossible to put back in. This becomes even more of an issue if the people making these discoveries are not certain themselves of what the implications of their actions are. Another comment that is often bandied about is “They were so keen to see if they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”. To give another example let us consider the controversy over genetically modified crops. Here we see a scientific idea, the ability to genetically modify food crops to increase yield and disease and pest resistance, and these crops are being grown around the World without a clear consensus on whether this is a safe thing to do or not.

The second issue is perhaps of even greater concern to me and it comes down to how the general public react to the apparent attitude of scientists. If scientists are presenting fairly radical theories it appears that a knock on effect is that pretty much anything becomes possible in the mind of the populous. This leads to the rise of crackpot ideas like free energy, anti-gravity, superfoods and the like and some of these can end up having significant consequences. There have already been cases of people being encouraged to pursue diet regimes that have a basis in pseudo-science resulting in malnourishment and serious damage to health. There have been numerous examples of people being scammed by intelligent sounding claims for scientific breakthroughs that were in fact nonsense. If we have a position where modern science has stopped making sense to people then it makes it far easier for old style snake oil salesmen to ply there trade, and that much harder for Joe Public to be intellectually discerning…..

Understanding business principles – Basic book keeping and accountancy

For many people going into business for the first time one of the biggest and most frightening challenges can be looking after the financial side of the business. From the day to day booking basics through to profit and loss accounts and balance sheets the whole field can look like a hugely complex jumble of mathematics and witchcraft to the uninitiated, and the situation isn’t helped by the tendency of some accountants to make it sound even more of a nightmare by bringing in horror stories of penalties for non-payment of tax, or non-disclosure of accounts. But is it really as complex as it appears? At root there are some fairly simple principles, and if these are maintained, the nightmare can become simply a chore, one of many chores that as a business owner you will face.

There are some very useful, and quite straightforward course both online and off-line that as part of the process of looking to set up a new business you would do well to investigate, but at root the purpose of basic business accounting is to understand and keep track of the money coming into and going out of the business. It should be pretty clear why this is important, but just in case, you should, as part of your business plan have put together a well reasoned expectation of both business costs and business revenue, and established that the business was going to at least cover its costs within a reasonable time frame. If you are not keeping track of the money coming in and going out how can you establish whether the reality of running a business is matching up to your planned expectations? It could be, and often is the case that at the planning stage, costs are underestimated and revenue is overestimated but this is not always the case.

By knowing what is coming in and going out it is possible at an early stage to modify your business practices. If you see that costs are significantly higher than budgeted for in the business plan you can analyse where those costs are higher and where you can make savings. If revenue is low you can again analyse why and make modifications to price or sales or whatever is needed. Without that knowledge you can quickly find yourself in a position of financial difficulty, and if the situation has built up over time, a position so severe that it can destroy the company. This may sound dramatic but it can be surprising how quickly things can get out of control.

There is a further benefit to gaining an understanding of business finance practices in that once you have established a routine for basic book keeping, the process of recording incomings and outgoing it is then possible to explore financial planning, and to look towards future growth of the business. All businesses, if they are to be successful in the mid to long term need to build a financial buffer against market conditions and to allow for future investment. Even if, as a business you don’t want to grow beyond your starting position there will be some months that are better than others, and there are always bills that still need to be paid. By taking the time to learn the basics of accountancy you will not only understand your business better, but when it comes to the more crucial and complex aspects of accountancy such as taxation planning and preparation of year end accounts you will be in a better position to understand what your accountant is talking about, and perhaps more importantly, whether your accountant is looking after you properly.

In business it is crucial that you are never overwhelmed by your own business. Many of us are not great with money and figures if we are honest, but the point is that you don’t have to be. You just have to get the simple basics right and keep on top of everything and you’ll be ok. Take advice and support wherever you can get it and listen to people who have already been successful, and above all, never forget that you are capable of anything if you go about it in the right way. With careful thought and attention to detail you can surprise yourself every day……

Creating an holistic approach to mental health care….

There has been a sharp rise in the last twenty years or so in the incidence of mental health issues in the UK. Recent figures suggest that one in two people in the UK will have mental health concerns at some point in their lives, and one in four will experience severe mental health issues requiring medical intervention. Certainly within my own social circle I know very few people who haven’t already required some form of support be that pharmacological or therapy based. The most common form of mental health issue is depression, accounting for some eighty percent of all mental health conditions seen by GP’s although some of these may well be symptomatic rather than the root cause. The whole issue of mental health is still considered something of a taboo subject and there is still a significant proportion of the population who feel uncomfortable discussing their mental health.

This would suggest that the figures for those with mental health concerns may actually be even higher. The current practice from initial GP consultation is to carry out a brief questionnaire based analysis of mental state and to prescribe a pharmacological course of treatment with an emphasis on restoring the brains neuro-chemical balance. This is generally done without recourse to neuro-chemical testing or brain function imaging and consequently it can be argued that it is being treated as a one size fits all solution in the first instance. This does not seem like a successful strategy, but seems more to be conditioned by availability of resources. There is a severe shortage of well qualified and trained therapists and counselors within the NHS and consequently appointments to get this additional treatment are limited.

It can also be argued that the current practice of employing “talking” therapies is of limited benefit. Techniques such as NLP and CBT, whilst extremely popular are as yet medically unproven and it is my opinion that they will be found wanting, being predicated as they are on the brain functioning in a “normal” manner and therefore being susceptible to therapies of this type. I suspect that this is often not the case in patients presenting to such therapists. Certainly, in my own experience, I have found that such therapies are of limited benefit unless they are combined with positive action to alleviate the root cause of the mental health condition. This issue of dealing with the cause rather than simply treating the symptoms is one that is an issue throughout the medical profession and is at the heart of my perceived need for an holistic approach.

A patient presenting with mental health concerns should be considered as a whole being interconnected with a network of factors externally any or all of which can have an influence on mental health. As an example, a patient with acute depression may be experiencing feelings of isolation, loss of self esteem, loss of appetite, sleep difficulties, feelings of anger and so on and each of these need to be understood as symptoms rather than causes. The role of the medical professional should be to establish what the root cause of the depression is. This can be a physical cause such as changes in brain chemistry brought about be physical damage to the brain, changes in diet, changes in metabolism and so on, or psychological causes such as stress. Establishing the underlying cause of the condition is, in my opinion crucial to successful treatment, and also to preventing a recurrence of the condition. Without an understanding of the deeper significance of the condition how can a medical professional possibly hope to resolve the problem in the long term.

Once the underlying causes are properly understood, a process that can take a significant amount of time and effort, an appropriate course of remedial action can be taken combining treatment of the underlying cause and simultaneously reduction of the effect of the symptoms. I would agree that there is an argument that in treating the symptoms initially it is possible that it becomes easier to find the root cause, as there is a case that can be made that the symptoms can mask the cause, however in my experience this is often not the case, and more often once the symptoms are even in part addressed the patient is considered to be healed as a whole. To my mind this is just not the case…..

War Metal – Meeting the hatchlings

“There is one more thing that I need to show you.” Lord Alexander said “And prepare yourselves, because this is going to come as something as a shock I think. Follow me”

He led the way round the shuttering around the Hyperion prototype to yet another heavy security door. Unlike the previous doors which had a numeric key pad to gain access, this one had an additional security feature in the form of a retinal scanner. Lord Alexander leaned in to the scanner and after a pause the door locks disengaged and the door slowly swung open. After the modified natural look of the cavern we had just left the area that we moved into was a complete contrast. Bright white painted walls and high powered lights, gleaming stainless steel worktops and cabinets, and around the pristine walls, clear plastic tubes filled with a pale green liquid that bubbled. The tubes were cloudy but we could see vague shapes within them and as we moved through the room, technicians moved around us purposefully.

We were led over to the tubes and as we got nearer we could see more clearly the shapes within. The first few tubes in the row contained human bodies, hooked up through a network of pipes to what we guessed were nutrient and oxygen tanks. We could see that some of the bodies showed the signs of battle damage and as we looked it became clear that the tanks were being used as healing tubes. This was confirmed by Lord Alexander as he explained that the tubes were filled with a nutrient gel containing antibiotics and nanobots and even the most battle damaged bodies could be repaired very quickly. Before we even had time to ask about the technology rediscoveries that had allowed the development of nanobots we were moving along the row and the biggest shock of the day came into view.

The last tube in the row contained something that definitely wasn’t human. We could see something that looked far more like a large tadpole. There was no movement in the tube, and none of the pipework running to external supplies but as we got closer and peered into the tank the shape twisted, the head end charging towards the wall of the tube making us recoil in horror as a slit opened revealing row after row of razor sharp teeth, small, almost vestigial appendages writhed just behind the head and the rest of the body thrashed and writhed driving the vicious head forward. We had never expected anything like this and the thought of thousands of these foul creatures emerging from their eggs and swarming inexorably across the landscape was terrifying.

“This is how they are when they emerge from the meteorites. The growth rate after that is incredible and they move tremendously quickly” Lord Alexander told us “The first time a camp was attacked they were overwhelmed by thirty thousand of these monstrosities and in the four hours that we estimate they had from hatching to attack they had grown to ten feet in length and those appendages you see were capable of tearing a man in half with minimal effort. They are devastating and without working together I’m not sure even our camp could withstand a sustained attack. You can see our position, and I’m sure you can image that it is only made worse by mistrust and treachery on the part of the Red Maw and the rival groups that are constantly looking for a way to reduce our defenses and over-run us.”

Sirius shook his head slowly and responded for us all

“We need to gain a proper understanding of exactly what we are facing. I presume that you have already carried out analysis on these creatures and have begun to work out their strengths and weaknesses, but I would suggest that you let Natasha study them as well. She has a knack of finding ways of combating lets call them unusual opponents and perhaps she will spot something that your people have missed.”

With that it was agreed. Natasha would work with Alexanders people to come up with a technique to effectively fight the Hatchlings, and the rest of us would work with Alexander himself to strengthen and refine the camps defenses and come up with a strategy to combat the multiple threats that the camp faced……

Understanding business principles – Customer care

At the heart of any business, if it is to succeed are it’s customers. It is impossible to overstate the importance of good customer service to any business. Sure, there are businesses out there who are only interested in a one off order from a customer and therefore have little if any interest in maintaining the customer after that initial order, but this is an extremely short term view and almost always relates to very short lived businesses. There is only so long that you can fail to service customers well before word spreads and orders dry up. For businesses that are looking to grow and become stable and eventually successful this is not a viable strategy. So what is involved in good customer service?

You almost certainly know the answer to this yourself. We are all consumers to a greater or lesser extent, and more importantly, we are all customers. All we need to do is honestly ask ourselves, what is it that makes me a happy customer. Which companies satisfy me when I buy from them. What is it that makes me choose one source for a product over another. Sure, price has an effect, but I’ll guarantee that at some level your decision making process comes down to three pretty simple things. The first is trust, do you trust the company you are dealing with, are they credible, do they give you a sense that they are dealing fairly and honestly with you? Secondly, is importance, does the company make you feel that you are important to them irrespective of the size or value of your order, and thirdly do they do anything that takes their level of service beyond what you as a consumer would expect from anyone?

You can probably already see that this customer care business is certainly not rocket science. It doesn’t matter what line of business you are in, it doesn’t matter whether you sell to the public or to business, it doesn’t matter what you sell or how you sell it, the same basics still apply. The question now is how do you convey the qualities that all consumers are looking for to your potential and existing clients? How do you let them know that you are trustworthy, reliable, keen for their business? How do you do this better than your competitors who are also trying to do the same thing if they are smart? It comes down to presentation. Every contact you make, every phone call, every e-mail, every letter, your website, any promotions you run, even down to invoices and dispatch notes need to speak to your customer about your efficiency and reliability, your credibility.

You are constantly being judged, whether you are aware of it or not, and there are some key lessons to draw out of this. These are aphorisms that have been doing the rounds for years but the reason for that is that there is more than a grain of truth in them. Firstly, if you make a customer happy they might tell one of their friends, maybe, if you let them down or upset them they’ll tell all of their friends. Secondly, if you lie to a customer you can be sure that at some point you will be found out, and they’ll become unhappy and tell all of their friends. Thirdly, reputation is everything, and reputation takes a lifetime to build and a second to destroy. Keep these thoughts in your mind and you won’t go far wrong, and never forget that if you are doing something to a customer that you wouldn’t be happy with having done to you as a customer you are probably doing something wrong…..

Thoughts on dealing with stress

I don’t think there is any question that one of the biggest health problems faced by people in the Western World, and one that is often pushed to the side is stress. It is a killer. Why do I say this? Well, lets look at stress and the implications of being stressed. Lets start with what it actually means. It seems to be confused with being under pressure but I’m not sure that this is the case. Stress, at route refers to a force applied to something. This can be physical or psychological. You can suffer a stress fracture of a limb bone for example from excessive force applied to the bone, just as you can suffer a psychological break from excessive force applied to the psyche. The force involved in breaking a limb can be obvious, impact, torsion etc, but the force applied to the psyche can be far more subtle. It can be anything from rational to irrational, from workload to feelings of inadequacy, from trauma to ill health to neuro-chemical imbalances.

So why is stress a problem, and why do we tend to suffer from it more in the Western World. Stress becomes an issue when the levels of force being applied exceed the capacity of the affected structure to cope with those forces. We all deal with stress on a daily basis, and in the main we deal with it successfully. It is only when our capacity to deal with it diminished, when we are unwell for example, or when the stress levels rise beyond our normal experience, in the case of say a car crash, or receiving news of a bereavement that the trouble starts. Issues associated with excessive stress can include feelings of anxiety, shaking, sweating, general malaise, stomach knots and cramps, shortness of breath, excessive tiredness, often couple with difficulty sleeping and can be very sever indeed. In some case, if the stress is not dealt with either by removing some or all of the stress or learning better ways to deal with the stress it can become life limiting or even life threatening.

There are may theories as to why we seem to suffer more from excessive stress in the West. The one that fits most well with my own experiences is that we are constantly bombarded with imagery of success and power and wealth and happiness and these images are often not achievable for the majority of people. These can act as aspirational drivers and act in a positive manner, but if the viewer is in a depleted state they can seem so unattainable that they become a fixation and the drive to achieve them becomes to high a stressor leading to psychological damage. If this occurs, the very fact that one cannot even deal with the aspirational aspects can cause additional stress in that it can engender feelings of inadequacy. This can again be heightened by the sense of insecurity that has become a key feature in modern life since the collapse of the banking system in 2008. Many people feel insecure in their jobs, and see increasing unemployment figures as further cause for concern.

So, given that stress is a serious concern, and given that it can have serious implications for health and well being, and given that it seems to be on the rise in the West how are we to best approach finding a workable solution. For me, the first step is to analyse and try to understand what it is in our lives that is causing us stress. Frequently there can be multiple sources of stress from money worries to relationship concerns, to insecurity and finding which are causing problems and which are of less concern can be difficult. It can be also be difficult to conduct this analysis yourself since your perception of the stressors and their impact may well be inaccurate as a consequence of the very stress that you are analysing. There is an argument that seeking external support whether professional or not can bring additional benefits. Having established a basis on which to move forward, it is essential to understand that it is neither possible nor desirable to completely eliminate stress. Stress can have a positive effect of making you stronger by acting as a stimulus for increased activity.

The trick therefore is to understand your personal stressors, understand how much stress is enough to keep you properly motivated but not too much that it becomes debilitating, and then address any causes of stress that fall outside acceptable/desirable levels. This is of course not as easy as it sounds laid out here but should be considered a route map to successful stress management. That journey may be a long and difficult one, but knowing your start point and having a clear idea of your end point, and having a map of the journey between can be part of that stress reduction program. As with any journey there may well be detours, unexpected changes to plans, even conscious decisions to take an alternative route, but these are all perfectly fine as long as the final destination  and the reason for the journey remain understood.

Just my thoughts….

Is talent real or can anything be learnt?

Usually with post and articles of this nature the writer has an opinion which they are trying to convey and express and which informs the article. This is an unusual one for me in that sense because I am genuinely undecided as to which side of the fence I come down on. There are two schools of thought. The first is that talents are set at birth primarily through genetics, the talents being passed down from the parents and that these may or may not be fully expressed depending on subsequent environmental factors. As an example a child born with a natural talent for running but born into a family that doesn’t value athletic ability is unlikely to express that talent to its fullest extent. The second thought is that all healthy children are born with the same potential in terms of talents which can be learnt such as mathematical ability or musicality, and that it only through subsequent environmental factors such as education that there is an appearance of talent, but that this talent could be expressed in any healthy child.

I think it is probably clear that environment plays a tremendous role in child development, and certainly there are a raft of environmental limiting factors to development, so it would make sense that there are corresponding environmental enhancing factors that would encourage the appearance of talent. The question is rather one of perception. Given that we have anecdotal evidence of children from less supportive and nurturing backgrounds ending up apparently highly talented, and correspondingly, children from tremendously supportive environments failing to show any obvious talents at all, can it be said that expression of ability above the average can be instilled in any child.

Part of the difficulty here for me is one of language. My understanding of “talent” is that it is an ability to perform a given task at a level above what could be considered average, or that it is a facility to learn a skill more easily that the average. This begs the question of how to measure average ability. Without a global testing programme this seems impossible. Further it raises the question of whether these are appropriate definitions, seeming to rely quite heavily on assumptions. Let us consider athletic talent. One could argue that a child who is genetically predisposed to develop a taller than average physique and who is provided with the nutrients to achieve full genetic potential is at a physical advantage in athletic pursuits in which height is an advantage over someone who is genetically programmed to be shorter. However, if we look at something like basketball, a sport where height is considered to be critical we see one of the best and most highly respected players in the professional sport, Michael Jordan was 6’ 4” tall, 6’ 6” in basketball boots, which is considerably taller than average, but somewhat short of the average for professional basketball players. There are several players under 6’ tall competing at professional level despite being a full foot shorter than some of their rivals.

This suggests to me that there is a possibility that children who are naturally tall are more likely to receive more basketball coaching, being perceived as being more likely to succeed, but that if the same level of training is given to shorter players they can be similarly successful, or to put it another way, talented. I believe that a similar case can be made in other areas where talent is considered to be crucial such as art, mathematics, chess and so on. In all of these areas we see that a supposed talent requires a tremendous amount of nurturing in order to be expressed and one wonders if that level of nurturing applied across a spectrum of children would produce significantly enhanced results for all of those children.

I think my concern with the concept of talent is that it may do a disservice to children who are not “spotted” as being talented. I know myself that during my school days I developed physically far quicker than my peers, and by age eleven or twelve was able to compete athletically with far older children and even adults, but I don’t consider myself to be talented. I simply benefitted from a well balanced and nutritious diet that removed limiting growth factors and provided me with a slightly faster metabolism from a very early age thus allowing me to develop physically more quickly. As a consequence I was singled out by sports coaches for additional coaching beyond that received by my peers as I was perceived to have “talent” but I know from inter-peer sports activities in the playground that there were children with more co-ordination and ability than I who didn’t receive this extra support. It seems somewhat unfair.

I’m not sure how we as a society resolve these challenges, nor do I know whether I believe talents are real or not, but I am certain that we let some of our children down by starting with an assumption that some are more talented than others rather than assuming that all children have the same basic potential. I’m also sure that in reality ability is a function of a combination of genetics and environment, but I’m pretty sure genetics is only a very small part…..

War Metal – Lord Alexanders workshops

Whatever we had been expecting as we went through those blast doors, we still got a shock. Deep in the bowels below the command centre we emerged into what had obviously been a natural cavern of tremendous size. The walls were solid limestone rock and the floor of the cavern had been leveled off with crushed rock overlayed with wooden planks. High powered lights hung from the roof of the cavern some forty feet over our heads bathing the whole area in a crisp white light revealing row upon row of workstations equipped with monitors and computer terminals. All around the cavern groups of people were hard at work bent over desk and worktops, peering through large lenses, fiddling with what looked to be electronic components and sections of machines. It was clear that this was some kind of production facility, but we were to learn that it was far more than that.

As we moved further into the cavern Lord Alexander was spotted by an older guy with long flowing grey hair and beard who almost scampered over, a tremendous smile on his face and greeted us all effusively

“You must be the Southerns!” He cried, shaking each of us vigourously by the hand “Welcome, welcome to our workshop, has his Lordship told you aout what we are doing here?”

“No Samuel, I haven’t had a chance to, and I thought that you might like to introduce your work personally”

This opportunity clearly pleased the guy that we now knew as Samuel as his face lit up even more and he almost capered with delight, obviously proud of his work and excited to share it.

“There’s so much to show you all, even you my Lord, we have made some amazing progress while you have been away, but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Introductions first. My name is Samuel, and I’m his Lordships developer and experimenter. It is my job to try to make the best of the equipment and machines that we have and to develop new and better versions to help keep all of us safe. I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions to the various problems we face even if I do say so myself. Down here we work on building and maintaining all of our defensive mechanical forces, like the drones and the attack robots, but the thing I’m most proud of is over here…..Follow me please”

There was no time to respond or get a word in edgeways, Samuel barely even paused for breath once he got started talking so looking at each other warily we followed this strange figure across the cavern toward a screened off area on the far side. As we approached the screening we could hear hammering and see flashes of light from welding torches reflected off the cavern walls but it wasn’t until we came around behind the screens that we got our biggest shock. There in front of us was the most massive robotic device any of us had ever seen. Standing fully twenty feet tall and covered in heavy metal armour, sporting two rotating cannons and shoulder mounted missile pods was something that made all of our own robotic defenses obsolete.

“Folks, allow me to introduce our pride and joy, only a prototype you understand, but fully operational and ready for its first test…..I give you The Hyperion….four tons of armour and weapons that should be a match for anything we have seen so far. Completely autonomous in defensive mode, and controlled by microwave burst transmission in offensive mode, no cables, no limit to range as long as we can boost our signals sufficiently, and we think we can produce ten of these a week from the material that we currently have. Pretty good huh?” This last was said with a wink, and we had to simply nod in agreement. This was something so far beyond what we thought was technologically possible, yet here it was.

Lord Alexander placed an arm around Samuels shoulder and said “Well done old friend, you have been working hard I see” before turning to us “You have to understand that we are under constant threat here. Not just from the Hatchlings but we are still under constant watch by the Red Maw that you have already dealt with. They are stronger up here, but so are we. We hear reports of advances that they are making and this is our response. And that is before we have to consider that not all of the camps around us support us, or agree with our position. We are constantly under threat from rival camps, and some of them are starting to band together into alliances themselves. It is a long road we have ahead of us and a constant struggle to keep ahead of our rivals and challengers.”

His face was grim as he said this, and all of us newcomers knew that if we were to have any chance of surviving ourselves with our freedom intact we would have to contribute whatever we could in terms of skills and talents to this most worthwhile of causes…..

The End of The World – A disambiguation

There have been a tremendous number of End of the World (EoW) predictions that have come and gone in the last ten thousand years or so since humanity started communicating. Plagues, famines, droughts, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroids, comets, acid rain, global warming, nuclear destruction and so on and so on, and you know what all of these predictions so far have in common? None of them have come to pass yet! Amazing isn’t it? It is almost as though we can’t wait to check out en masse from this mortal coil and yet as a species we seem to fall for it every time. The next Pope is the last one, the Mayans predicted global catastrophe, the aliens are coming, the next big asteroid is due any day now, Yellowstone parks volcano is a hundred thousand years overdue so that has got to blow soon. I sometimes wonder why we worry about this stuff. It isn’t as if any of us can do anything about these Extinction Level Events (ELE).

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that we are fundamentally self destructive and we just love to be reminded that our time here is limited. I think it is that coupled with the ease of making money from disaster scenarios that keep this nonsense at the forefront of the media. Did you know that there are several websites through which you can purchase food containers that will keep food fresh for twenty five years? Why? What food are you not going to eat in a disaster scenario for twenty five years? Wouldn’t you have pretty much run out of whatever you had stockpiled way before this? It seems like yet more cash in nonsense! Besides, whats wrong with tinned food? If it is good enough for transpolar expeditions I’m pretty certain it’s good for whatever else we might encounter.

What amuses me most I think is that when you talk to people who buy into this stuff they always seem to make the assumption that it is they who are going to survive. Who are they trying to kid? How does being prepared for a global disaster make you any more likely to survive the disaster, and if you did survive, wouldn’t you be better off just heading to a supermarket and clearing the shelves first? I can’t quite work out whether the whole thing makes me want to weep for our lack of comprehension, or jump on the bandwagon and start offering cheap radiation suits and survival rations on the premise that if we are ever in a position to need them I am extremely unlikely to be in a position to answer any complaints after whatever happens happens.

Sounds like great business sense to me. Here, buy this radiation suit. If it works you’ll be happy you bought it, if it doesn’t you’ll never know so you might as well….Sometimes my cynicism frightens me, but I guess that probably goes with the territory of trying to look a bit deeper into the psychology behind why we believe the things we believe. I’m pretty sure that the belief in our imminent destruction is closely linked to our belief in the divine, our spirituality. I suspect that both reside in the same part of the brain and are built from the same components. It is interesting to note that many disaster scenarios are closely linked to religious belief, either we don’t believe enough, or we believe in the wrong God or whatever it might be. Maybe we should consider that the time for superstition and belief without evidence is coming to an end and we should focus more heavily on understanding the World around us and the context of our World within the Universe.

Of course, there are even issues with this given that there are scientists employed in organizations that are specifically set up to investigate best practice in disaster scenarios. These scientists have a vested interest in keeping us fearful of global disasters as their very livelihood depends on continued funding which depends on continued fear of such events. When you watch supposedly unbiased and informational documentaries on subjects such as mega-tsunami and super-volcanoes and you see these scientists presenting their cases you can almost see them wink as they talk about how unlikely it is that Yellowstone will destroy us all or that Las Palmas will slip into the sea and flood the whole of North America…..but it could just happen tomorrow…..(suckers)

Maybe there isn’t a way around it, and we just have to deal with it as best we can…..

Thoughts on what is wrong with modern Western society….

Since the end of World War II in the Western World we seem to have had a philosophy that growth is good. That growth promotes strength. That growth should be pursued at all costs. This has led to the rise of political ideologies that support this mindset. If we look at the major players over the last fifty years we see a consistent trend towards freeing up business and particularly industry from the constraints of governance to increase productivity at the expense of workers pay and conditions. We have seen an increasing marginalization of those who are less productive through health or dis-ability. We have seen an increasing reliance of free market principles and in particular capitalism, and all of these drifts seem to have led us to where we are now, which I think most people would agree is not an ideal place to be.

Post 2008 and the collapse of the banking system, a collapse that has yet to reveal its full disastrous consequences, these having been carefully hidden so far from the general public and even to an extent the media, we have seen a drastic downturn in economies across Europe and America with increasing inflation, which is again poorly reported, increasing unemployment, reductions in government spending, reductions in manufacturing output and in the service sector, falls on stock markets wiping billions of pounds from pension funds, the very pension funds that our governments told us were the way to ensure a brighter future. At the same time that all of this is happening we are seeing our rampant consumption of fossil fuels creating fuel poverty as prices inevitably rise in de-regulated energy markets, and the damaging effects that we have had on our environment.

Is it any wonder that we are constantly alerted to conspiracy theories, that we have a population so fundamentally unhappy that they take to the streets in protest, that we seem to be heading for yet another Winter of Discontent? It feels very much as though our political leaders are either at a loss as to what to do to address the situation, or worse still simply don’t care. It should be noted that there has been a sharp rise in the success of politicians in securing very well paid careers after leaving politics, irrespective of the reason for their leaving. There are so many symptoms within our system of the general malaise, but for me what all of this boils down to is that for the last sixty years we as a population have been carefully and insidiously trained to expect something for nothing. One only has to look at the massive increases in consumer indebtedness, the freedom with which credit was offered through the supposed good times. Bankers get blamed for this greed but I’m not convinced that this is reality.

Think about it, no business likes bad debt, and yet here were banks lending to pretty much anyone with no reference to ability to repay that debt. The banks must have been aware that this was unsustainable and that it was creating a debt bubble that couldn’t possibly keep rising, yet they kept doing it. I can’t help but wonder why…..

Thoughts on alternative energy….

You would have thought that this would have been a fairly unambiguous subject area. As a species we are consuming fossil fuels at a far higher rate than they are produced. This is unsustainable and we have known for a while that it is unsustainable. We also know that the excessive use of fossil fuels is altering the chemical balance of our atmosphere. We have to find a viable alternative and we have to do it quickly. There is not much dispute about any of these statements as accurate statements of our current position, but it seems that whenever you try to have a discussion about these topics you become mired in so much spin from all sides of the debate that it quickly becomes almost impossible for a lay person to take an informed position. Lets look at these basic statements a little closer and you should see what I mean.

We are using fossil fuels at a faster rate than they are being produced. This is a fact and yet in discussion you start to hear that we have far more reserves of gas, oil and coal than we thought. New technologies such as “fracking” are giving us access to shale gas, previously abandoned coal mines are being re-opened in light of new mining technology and new areas for oil exploration are being discovered in Arctic and Antarctic regions that will keep us going for years, so there is nothing to worry about, right? Then an alternative view is presented, fracking causes earthquakes and water pipes that burst into flame, the new mining techniques damage the environment and threaten aquifer water supplies, the polar wildernesses are too precious a resource to threaten with oil exploration, so already we have conflict.

Turning now to the effect of using all of these fossil fuels, the statement that we are changing the composition of our atmosphere is pretty straightforward. The burning of fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is a fact. Ah, but the amount we produce is only the equivalent of a couple of volcanoes, and we can develop carbon capture and storage technology that will lessen any impact anyway. Besides there is no evidence that the CO2 that we produce is having a detrimental effect on us or our environment. To which the counter is often that CCS technology is unproven, and we can see climate change happening all around us so who says we aren’t contributing to that? Well, who says we are? It could all be part of a natural cycle! Natural cycle!? How can our pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere be natural? Well it helps the trees and plants to become more prolific so that’s a good thing, right? What?! At the same time we are doing this we are cutting down rainforests to grow fuel crops! Are you mad!? Of course we’re changing the planet! Prove it! And so it goes on, and on, and on until the average Joe doesn’t know whether they are coming or going!

And what about finding alternative energy sources? Again this seems at first glance pretty straight forward. The fuel we use is limited and we need alternatives, but which one, or which combination gives us the best possibility? Solar? Wind? Hydro? Nuclear? Hydrogen? Something else entirely? Each comes with its own set of pros and cons depending on who you ask. Solar and Wind? Great but inefficient and a bit of an eyesore, and maybe a danger to birds, and anyway you need batteries which are polluting in their manufacture and don’t last well, and need maintenance and so on. Nuclear has so much bad press that it really isn’t a viable option, and that’s before we start to think about disposal of nuclear waste. Hydrogen seems possible but it takes energy to produce Hydrogen so um…well…um… You can begin to see the issues faced by a non-specialist trying to form an opinion, and this is just the tip of the (probably) melting iceberg. It gets much, much worse and far more heated than this.

So, what is one to do to establish a personal position on alternative energy. The first step is to try to understand where these conflicts come from. Where is the money in all of these discussions? Then read around the subject. From both sides. Be open minded, but at the same time highly cynical – oh, and if you find the stuff about “free energy” or “perpetual motion machines” you are probably better off taking those with a fairly significant pinch of salt…..Just a thought J

The nanny state or good business practice?

Daily Mail readers will certainly be familiar with the idea that in the UK we live in a nanny state where there are ridiculous levels of health and safety red tape that business owners must comply with. Fire regulations for buildings and businesses, first aid requirements, safe working condition regulations, personal protective equipment legislation, hazardous substances legislation and so on ad infinitum. It can seem like an absolute minefield of complex rules and regulations that as a business owner you ignore at your peril, but is this necessarily the case? There are very few business owners who don’t feel an implicit duty of care to their staff, and generally those who don’t, don’t stay in business for very long. The penalties for not looking after staff and employees are severe up to and including jail time for more serious offences, but is health and safety the nightmare that it can at first appear?

In broad terms I think the answer to this is a resounding and emphatic no! I guess that having made such a bold statement I need to back it up, so here goes. The vast majority of health and safety is a combination of common sense and good basic business practice. It relates to making sure that the workplace environment is safe for people to move about, and carry out their tasks in. Things like tidying up to avoid trip hazards, wearing the correct safety equipment when using dangerous equipment, making sure that potentially dangerous machinery is properly guarded and so on are just common sense. Why would any business not follow these principles? The fact that an inspector can call round at any time shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference if you are keeping on top of day to day chores.

The same principle applies to fire safety and first aid. If your staff don’t know what to do in the event of fire then you should be asking yourself why not! If you don’t have anyone on staff who can give emergency first aid you already know that you should. It isn’t a difficult process to take a first aid course. St John Ambulance will sort you out very reasonably with very little effort on your part. You may ask why you should do this when you have never had a fire or a requirement for first aid, but these are the same questions you could ask about insurance, and most business owners wouldn’t think about not being insured, the risks are simply too great.

The other excuse I hear is that it is too expensive, but to my mind this is absolute nonsense. Most businesses can comply with health and safety requirements with very little input from expensive consultants. Talk to your staff, ask them what concerns them in the workplace. Look around yourself. If you are sharp enough to run a business you should be easily sharp enough to spot potential risks and do something about them. Above all, whatever measures you have to take I can guarantee that they will be a heck of a lot cheaper than a lawsuit for negligence of worse still corporate manslaughter! So to any business owner out there with a mindset that health and safety is the nanny state gone mad I would say just one thing. Imagine that rather than a staff member it was a family member who was at risk in your business…..I’m pretty sure you’d do something about the risk then, and that is how you should be thinking about your staff….Just a thought….