Watching the apprentice

It is interesting from a business point of view to watch Lord Sugar and his candidates in action. This current series has changed the format somewhat being a fight to have Lord Sugar as a business partner. The cynic in me is of the opinion that this suggests that either the previous candidates have been unsuccessful as employees of the Sugar empire, or that the enobled Alan is in a more precarious position from a business sense and is struggling to find vacancies. Either position amuses me somewhat, but is merely an interesting aside to the main event. Lord Sugar is offering 250000 to the winner in cash and support, although the proportions of each have yet to be clearly defined, and the usual cotterie of business high fliers have been replaced by a group of young entrepreneurs.

Now, I know from my time in corporate business that the way things are done, and the way people appear to act is radically different to real life, but even for me this year is beyond amusing. The level of infighting between the contestants, the level of bullying and vitriol, the sheer visciousness of the backstabbing is a sight to see. Perhaps leading the visciousness stakes is the young lady with a background in youth work, apparently at UN level. If she truly is a youth leader, her performance could easily be seen as leading them in completely the wrong direction. The sales star, an irish chat who may have kissed the blarney stone once too often is more double glazing salesman than businessman. Then we have the poor old inventor. A lovely, slightly disorganised chap who has been on the losing team 9 times out of 9 and still manages to stay in the process, one can only suspect for the lols as he is consistently completely out of his depth with no sales or management ability. Then we have the only one I'm prepared to namecheck, the wonderfully sweet and innocent and slightly bemused Suzie, the baby of the group and the butt of most of the bullying, and yet she keeps smiling, and actually occasionally comes up with some real gems. You can probably tell that I quite like Suzie.

The real standout performance however is the first contestant to win every single challenge to date, both as team player and project manager. A refined saleswoman, and a serious corporate animal she is the only contestant to have managed to get this far with almost no bitching, backstabbing or overt cynicism, but of course, if you are winning all the time that does rather make life easier. Question is, is she making it all look at bit easy and not showing Lord Sugar how she copes with set-backs? It will be interesting to see what happens should she fail to win one. She has yet to experience the boardroom and it could still all come apart for her, but we will have to see.

As an insight into the corporate world, the apprentice does its job admirably, revealing the stress and pressure of operating at this level, but in terms of demonstrating the finer aspects of humanity, it is a complete and utter failure. Car crash tv at its very best....

How social networking works…..part 1

You are you, I’m me, were we to meet in real life we might communicate, we might slowly establish that we understand each other, that we have some shared interests, that we are able to communicate reasonably well. Our interactions over time may lead to us developing from a nodding acquaintance, through “someone I like to talk to”, then “Someone who I understand and value” and over time this interaction may even develop into friendship, a much misunderstood relationship that is built on mutual trust and understanding, a strong bond that last through difficult times as well as happy times. Most people, at some point in their lives, usually early on, have heard, perhaps from a parent or grandparent, that they can expect to have perhaps five “real” friends through their life, but that these friends are the people who will support you no matter what, who will be there to celebrate your triumphs, and to pick you up when you fall.

It takes time to build a friendship. It takes times to establish trust in another person, and there is a reason that it takes time, in my opinion. As a species, humans are social creatures, we naturally communicate, even overcoming the barriers of language relatively easily. We like companionship, and interaction, and often use those interactions to define our roles. We are not psychologically designed for isolation, and indeed in most societies isolation and denial of interaction are synonymous with the harshest of punishments. This perceived need for social interaction is almost certainly build in at a genetic level. We are not, on an individual level very good at surviving, and certainly not very good at hunting large game so in order to survive we band together, firstly in family groups, then later into larger communities bonded together for mutual advantage. It has even been suggested by Richard Dawkins that altruism in a genetically coded evolutionary survival trait, in part for this reason.

It is because we seem to be coded for friendship that I have an issue with social networking sites such as facebook, myspace and twitter. It is a fairly simple issue, and one that may seem petty, but for me context is everything, which is why I discussed my views on friendship first. I dislike the ease with which one can establish “friends” on these sites. I think my problem is in the use of the word. We understand what a friend is in real life, we have the experiences necessary to make judgments of what is and isn’t appropriate with friends, we know how to behave because we have established these friendships over a number of years. On social networking sites this isn’t the case, the majority of our online friends are complete strangers who we know next to nothing about, yet time and again I see people who barely know each other sharing the most intimate details of their lives, and perhaps even more problematically, offering advice on other peoples problems from a position of almost complete ignorance.

I am sure many people don’t see this as an issue at all, and many would consider anything that promotes greater interaction between disparate peoples as a good think, encouraging dialogue, but for me there are issues in, as I see it, the misuse of the word friend in this manner…..

Thoughts on human evolution

Evolution is pretty much accepted as the means by which species develop over time to function more effectively in their environment. The idea of evolution was being discussed before Charles Darwin, indeed his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin was familiar with the concept. Darwin formalised the idea in his book "On the origin of species" but even with this work Darwin was forced to publish to avoid being beaten to it by another thinker. Darwins theory was complete for it's time, but has since been superceeded as science has advanced, particularly in discoveries of the mechanism of evolution, and in genetics. We now know that in some key areas at least, Darwin was wrong, but the principles remain sound, species change over time in response to environmental factors, developing specific competitive advantages through a process of mutation.

This is accepted, but it does rather beg a question. As a species, humanity has now developed to a point whereby we are able to control, at least at a basic level, our environment. In the main we no longer have to hunt for food, we no longer have to devote so much time and effort to basic survival, in the main we no longer need to fight for everything that we get, and this causes a potential issue when thinking about evolution. Are we, as a species, moving to a point whereby the pressures that drive evolution are being negated? Perhaps more importantly, are we moving away from the biological drives which allow evolution to function naturally? This is more of a leap in terms of possibility, but bear with me....

....If we consider that evolution can be thought of as "survival of the fittest" a phrase which Darwin avoided but which has been associated, we see that one of the drivers of evolution and species development is the selection of a suitable mate. Here we are defining suitable as being fit for purpose, a mate who offers a competitive advantage to the potential offspring, a mate who is most likely to ensure successful transmission of genetic material onwards in time. Fitness in this context is not necessarily synonymous with strength, speed, power, looks, health or anything so concrete, but simply having the best ability to survive and thrive in a given environment. Since we, as a species, no longer have to be so concerned with survival per se, I would suggest that the possibility exists that we are no longer making decisions in terms of a reproductive mate in accord with evolutionary drivers, but are being influenced by other factors. Perhaps this is simply another form of evolution, but perhaps it is something that should be of concern. I guess only time will tell....

The joy of laughter

A sense of humour is essential in life and in business. The ability to laugh at oneself and situations can be what keeps us sane in an increasingly difficuly World. People say that laughter is the best medicine, and indeed there has been a lot of research into the health benefits of laughter, and even a form of therapy that uses laughter as a means of combating depression. Laughter can be an icebreaker in awkward situations, it can be an emotional release in times of great distress and can change the mood in an office completely. There is good scientific evidence for the neurological effects of laughter from the release of dopamine and ceretonin and for physiological benefits in terms of increased blood flow and oxygenation. Laughter makes the World go around, and makes us feel better.

And yet, there are some people who don't seem to get it, who have decided for reasons best known to themselves that laughter is inappropriate. This is particularly the case in a work environment where there are a great many managers and bosses who seem not to understand that work is stressful, tiring and at times pretty depressing, and sometimes people just need to have a little giggle and release that tension. Sure, there are times when have a laugh can be questionable, but having been to a few funerals, the best ones, the ones that are the most cathartic in terms of the mourners releasing their emotions, are the ones at which laughter is encouraged by the words of those who knew the deceased and can tell funny stories about them.

So, to those who would limit laughter, to those who think cartoons at work are frivolous, to those who just don't get the joke, I'll say just one thing.......Ha Ha Ha Hee Hee Hee, I'm the laughing gnome and you can't catch me.......

(From the David Bowie classic "The laughing gnome")

These guys get it.......

My first UFO sighting....and why it wasn't....

So, I was out in the garden late last night, watching the clouds moving across the sky, mid-level cumulus clouds at a base of about 3000ft, and as I watched I saw something unusual. There was a luminosity, circular in shape that appeared to be coming from behind the clouds some distance away to the North of my position. It looked as though there was something above the clouds that was causing them to be illuminated, and it was moving. I'm on a flight path, and periodically the planes will come in with their collision lights on and in the right atmospheric conditions this can illuminate the clouds but in a totaly different way. The perceived movement didn't match either. It was a clearly defined reverse L shape moving first North to South and then East to West at the bottom of the vertical stroke from my position.

I watched it for perhaps 15 minutes before it suddenly disappeared. I considered what possibilities existed to cause such an effect, and had an opportunity to utilise Occhams razor. There were four possibilities that immediately sprang to mind. The aforementioned plane with collision lights on was quickly discounted as failing to match the perceived effect. The possibility that it was a police helicopter using a searchlight was similarly discounted as although it is a fairly regular occurance in my area it again failed to match the perceived effect. There was no evidence of a physical source for the luminosity, since it disappeared when it moved through a break in the cloud, and it was this that gave me my biggest clue. Although it appeared to be illuminating the cloud from above, this had to be an optical illusion since it would have been more visible through a cloud break, rather than disappearing. The implication of this was that it was something shining onto the base of the clouds from the ground.

having established that this was the most likely source, the analysis became much more straightforward. So, waht was this mystery light? The most likely cause, taking into account the principle of selecting the solution with the least number of dependant assumptions was.....

........well, I think that I will let you, dear readers decide that, and hearty congratulations to the first person with the correct answer, and yes, I confirmed my assessment and was proved correct! 

Thoughts on thought experiments

There is a long tradition within philosophy and science of making use of thought experiments to explore ideas that are impossible or ethical or otherwise are difficult to explore in reality. There have been arguments that the age of the thought experiment is over and that it is only by experimenting in the real World that trye progress can be made, but is this the case? Let us look at the two main areas of thought experiment seperately. In the world of science there are theories within physics that are not currently possible to test in the real world. I am thinking in of the details of particle physics where the Higgs Boson has been hypothesised by mathematical calculation but has yet to be discovered as a consequence of the enormous forces required to generate sub-atomic particles, and the difficulties in observing those particles whose lifetimes are almost infinitesimally small. Similarly the thought experiments of Erwin Schroedinger regarding chaos theory and inherent uncertainty and the influence of the observer would be impractical to replicate in the real World and would certainly raise animal welfare issues.

Looking now at the philosophical area we generally see thought experiments used where to cary out the experiment in real life would compromise ethical and moral mores. Examples of this type of thought experiment would be those based around thoughts on sacrifice for the great good, so perhaps the runaway tram experiment where there is a choice between killing one person and killing a tram full of passengers. This leads directly on to one of the counter arguments. It is generally considered to be extraordinarily difficult to place oneself as the subject of an experiment of this type into the mindset of someone actually in that situation, and consequently the results are suspect at best. We see evidence for this in research carried out by the American Army during the Second Wotld War and later during the Vietnam War where it was found that even after intense physical and psychological training it was very difficult for soldiers to actually kill the enemy except in the most extreme situations. There have been suggestions that the CIA attempted to counter this by the use of hallucinogenic drugs, particularly LSD, and this technique in itself has been used historically across Europe with psilocybin mushrooms and in Africa using a refined variant of THC the active component in cannabis.

A similar argument is put forward within science thought experiments in that they do not necessarily replicate real world conditions and are therefore subject to error. Additionally, by taking out real world influences, thought experiments can be seen as been more prone to the initial concepts of the experimenter being more subjective than would otherwise be the case. Personally I believe that there is still a place for these creative exercises, but in terms of stimulating intellectual and creative thought rather than with producing results in and of themselves. Whether this is the case or not, the concept of thought experiments is an interesting one, and certain deserves consideration….

Do we still need spiritual nourishment?

Across the Western World there has been, over the last 50 years or so, a decline in perceived spirituality. Church congregations are generally falling, people who describe themselves as spiritual are generally older, with a shift away from faith by the younger generations. This is not a global phenomenon. The Catholic church is seeing global adherants rising, as is Islam, but despite repeated efforts from the mainstream religions, the decline is ongoing. There can be little dounbt that the Uk can now be considered a secular society, as can areas of America and Europe. However there is a note which must be added to this. Whilst mainstream religions seem to be on the wane there is a growing undercurrent of non-mainstream faith paths based losely around the "new-age" pseudo-philosophies that came out of the 1960's and '70's and the revival of Western mystery faiths grouped together under paganism.

There have been numerous proposals for both the decline in religion and the upsurge in alternative faiths, from a greater understanding of science, through the work of academics such as Richard Dawkins, through to the failure of the mainstream faiths to address relevant issues in a changing World, but there are flaws with all of these arguments. As is so often the case the real reasons will almost certainly be a conflation of a number of different reasons, each given different importance by each individual affected. The complexity of the interactions between conflicting though processes and the way those processes and causal positions are interpreted by individual minds is beyond our current capabilities to map in any but the most surface level.

What is interesting is that even as we approach an understanding of our World and its' processes, we still feel draw to something beyond, something more, something beyond the scope and remit of science. It seems to be built in, coded into our very DNA, fundamental to who we are as a species. I wonder why?

Dealing with stress

Life is stressful. This is a given whether you are Prince or pauper. There is good evidence from recent scientific papers to suggest that as a society we are finding it harder and harder to cope with the demands of modern life. The rates of mental health issues, self harm and self neglect are rising year on year, and there doesn't seem to be an easy solutions. In the UK the prevalent treatment for mental health conditions is medication to control the symptoms. I can understand that this is the start point in treatment since with most mental health conditions, the symptoms can be a block to effective treatment of the underlying condition. The problem comes in the lack of professional support once the symptoms are under control. This is in part a function of the lack of mental health professionals in the NHS and in part because we still do not take a holistic approach to health care.

When you look deeper into the whole question of mental health there is an underlying theme. It appears that for a great many people modern life is unsustainable as it is currently lived. The pressures that we place on each other to perform and achieve leads to a general feeling of dis-satisfaction, not just with other people but with oneself, and this leads initially to depression and subsequently to more serious mental health problems. We are finally beginning to understand the complexities of the brain, and it is likely that from this research we will begin to understand the far more complex question of mind, the function of the brain that defines who we are as individuals, and how we perceive reality.

So, what is the solution? That really depends on the root cause of the problem. Personally I feel that there is a good case to be made for the lack of a sense of community in the sense that we live in a heavily populated world but certainly in the UK rarely know who our immediate neighbours are. I think a strong case can be made for thinking locally and developing strong supportive communities such as those seem in the interwar period when extended families shared in the duties of care for each other and problems were shared between a small tight knit community. One potential downside of this is the fracturing of "Big picture" society into discrete social units that would potentially then compete for finite resources. I think it is worth a try though.....

The joys of social gaming

I joined Facebook recently, primarily to play games. I have always loved the idea of working collaboratively when playing games, and a friend of mine who knows my tastes suggested that I signed up and had a look at a game called War Metal. It is a multiplayer Facebook game that allows the player to work their way through levels of missions collecting rewards as they go. There is a particularly strong community around this game, and that is primarily why it was recommended to me. I noticed quite quickly that the developers are regularly on the game forums, and respond to players posts, and also that players who acted in the spirit of the game actually developed a sort of status within the community. It was interesting to see this interaction in what is, after all, just a game. It even extends to a couple of respected players being immortalised within the game after they passed on in real life. I like that.

There is an aspect within the game that highlights this particularly well. There are battles which are described as co-operative battles and generally require multiple players to co-ordinate their attacks against a much more powerful opponent. In one case this can be up to 1000 players. An etiquette has developed within the game, as I understand it, at the instigation of the players themselves whereby the initiator of the battle, called the host sets a cap, or limit to the amount of damage each player in the fight is allowed to do. This is not a hard cap in the sense that the host can physically limit the players, but is a soft cap more in the style of a gentlemans agreement. It is a question of respect for the host to keep to the cap, and players who break cap are considered valid targets for player versus player attacks. Some players even refer to this practice as farming and keep lists of consistent cap breakers for the purpose of having people to attack.

It is, by and large, a self policing system that seems to work. There are periodic spats and squabbles and some internecine warfare, but it is quite a fun little game and I am enjoying it at present. That is all that one can ask for really.

Celebrating the original blockbuster

It is one of the most overused words in the entire lexicon of hyperbole that is Hollywood, but 36 years ago today there was one cinema release that earned its epithet, and started the trend of ig summer movies. It was the film for which the word was coined and it ctapulted the director, one Steven Spielberg to international fame. it is still one of the highest grossing films of all time and tells the tale of one mans battle against the forces on nature personified and indeed demonised in the shape of a killer great white shark with a hunger for human flesh. The film of course was Jaws, and the epithet was coined for the queues of cinema goers who lined the blocks around movie theatres throughout that summer.

The story was written by Peter Benchley, perhaps the best author in the genre of nautical adventures being a highly experienced diver and quite a passable marine biologist. He had written the story of a rogue shark lured away from its usual hunting grounds into the shallow of American coastal waters, and kept there by the ready availability of prey items, namely Americans enjoying their summer. There has been a lot written about the unlikely circumstances of the story, but it is in fact based on real events 30 years earlier when there were a series of attacks on swimmers around the American coast and even in tidal creeks and rivers moving inland. The most likely candidate for these attacks was actually the more aggressive Bull shark, which can effect the transfer from salt to fresh water, and is the only shark so far known that can achieve this. However for the purpose of the story the more well known, and feared Great White was substituted.

This transference mirrors nicely the scene in the film when the response to the shark attacks is to demonise every species of shark in the area, with a nurse shark being hailed as the killer, which is very unlikely. It also highlights the prevalence of the American attitude found throughout the cold war era that threats should be met with overwhelming force rather than perhaps rational thought. In the end it comes down to the efforts of a small group of unlikely heroes to rescue the beaches of America from the lurking menace in the best traditions of the disaster movie and creature feature, but Jaws did something that was very new. It approached what had traditionally been B-movie fodder as a major feature with a strong story, high quality cinematography and a stunning soundtrack including that now iconic theme music based on the sharks heartbeat accelerating as it prepares to attack.

So heres to the summer blockbuster, those big ticket super films that appear each year and stimulate so much debate about quality and content, and more specifically to the film that started it all. Happy birthday Jaws!

The developemnt of a design concept

There are times in my professional life when I find myself challenged by client expectations. There are all sort of ways that this can happen, but the one that comes up most often is an expectation that I can create a company profile from scratch with no information whatsover. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a creative writer, I create original content, and I'm quite comfortable writing fiction, but given that my clients range from engineers to shopkeepers to estate agents to bankers, I'm pretty certain that if they thought about it they would probably not simply want me to make content up for their corporate website. I try to start my working relationship with a client by getting an understanding of who they are, and what is it that their business does. In the brief period that I have with a client there is no way that I am going to understand fully all of the technical aspects of their business, but I pride myself on having at least a basic idea about most of the business types that I interact with.

I have, in the past had clients who were very reticent about discussing any aspects of their personal styles and tastes and even in a couple of case about talking about their businesses. If I don't understand what is is you do as my client, how am I going to convey what you do to your customer through the content on your shiny new website? It is only through a collaborative process of communication and shared understanding that I can do my job to the standard that firstly I, and more importantly my clients require. I make no apologies for this, but I am  aperfectionist, and I set myself extraordinarily high standards in all of the content I create. It is a challenging process to create something unique for each client, and it is a challenge that I love, but a little co-operation can be very useful....

Developing an online persona

Here's a question that has been exercising my old grey matter for a little while now. Am I the same person online as I am offline? By this I mean do I have a different personality when I am communicating online as when I meet people face to face. Certainly there are inherent differences which I guess everyone to a greater or lesser extent encounters. There are the differences caused by the lack of visual cues to communication. Working online I have to find a way to express emotion through language rather than gesture or facial expression. I also find a change in that face to face I can be quite shy and reserved but online I find I can express myself more freely.

So, how am I different online? More verbose perhaps? (You, dear reader may have your own opinion on this!) More avant-garde? Less inhibited with relative strangers? I believe so, bacuse it can take me quite a long time to become comfortable with people in real life, and I am quite reticent about sharing personal information with people, prefering to keep things private. Online I am happy to chat about all sorts of things. I think for me, there is an anonymity to online interaction, even when I know the person I am interacting with in real life.

I'm not sure why this is, but it is something that I will be monitoring over the coming months to see if there are aspects of each personality that would be better combined into one over-arching, universally acceptable me...

The joy of reading lists

It was a while ago that I was at university, but I still remember the thrill I used to get at the start of each academic year when the reading lists came out. That guilty pleasure of seeing my peers scanning through the list bemoaning the quantity and length of the books whilst I sat there planning my library trips and organising my reading time. By the end of the first week of term I had generally already digested the first couple of books and was making copious notes and writing draft essays on the more obvious topics. I can't remember a time when I haven't loved reading. It doesn't matter what the subject matter, whether it is fact or fiction, the genre is irrelevant, I just love the feel of a book in my hands, and the process of reading and learning.

I still create reading lists and have a spreadsheet of the books I am looking forward to reading, but this integration of technology and passion is causing me a slight problem. My aquaintances who are aware of my little hobby and have seen my spreadsheet have been very helpfully showing my their iPhone apps, iPad readers, Kindles and e-books and the reading lists that these useful pieces of technology can provide. They have demonstrated the "paper screen" technology that makes these electronic books as easy on the eye as paper books. They have shown me how easy they are to use in bright sunlight. They have taken me through the ease with which books can be loaded onto them and how many free books there are, and yet, for me, they are just gimmicks. I can use them well enough, I'm happy enough with technology, I'm certainly no Luddite, but in the end it comes down to one thing - they are not books.

I can't explain it any better than that, I guess I am more of a traditionalist than I realised but there is something about the look, feel, smell of a book that just works for me. It was in thinking about this that I realised that this mindset informs quite a lot of what interests me. I think it is the sensory experience that is the key for me, and certainly when I am browsing on the internet it is often the sites that feel more organic, as though they have been designed with care and attention to stimulating as many senses as possible that work best for me. It is almost a form of synesthesia whereby a visual cue on the screen can trigger a smell or taste sensation in my mind. It can be quite a strange experience, but it is not one that I have experienced with an electronic book yet. Maybe one day.....

The ethics of magic

Within the world of magical practice there is a tremendous debate about the morals and ethics of magical practice. For me this debate starts with a personal decision on how magic is viewed. There are generally two schools of thought, people who believe that magic is essentially a placebo effect, and people who believe that magic is an external force that can be accessed to effect a change in the World. It should be noted that defining magic as a placebo effect is in no suggesting that magic is not real. There is clear evidence of the reality of the placebo effect in medical studies, but this belief system with regard to magic does have implications for me on the question of ethics.

If we think of magic as a placebo we are considering it as a set of techniques that are specifically designed to effect an internal change be that physically or psychologically, potentially leading to a change in the external world as a consequence. To use an example, one could decide to work magic to encourage wealth, the magical process effecting a psychological transformation making one more aware of money making opportunities. To compare this to magic as an external force, we would be considering the possibility that the same magical working to attract wealth would have a more direct impact on the external world taking money from someone else to increase the magic users personal wealth.

Clearly there are implications in each of these cases, but personally I see a far clearer ethical dilemma with the latter case whereby the magic user, unless they are extremely careful, appears to have limited control over where the wealth comes from. I believe that this may have been a thought that occured to the early pioneers of the revival in magical practice in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and can be seem expressed most clearly in the Wiccan Rede written by Gerald Gardiner and modified by Doreen Valiente, particularly in the final line "These words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, an' it harm none do what ye will". This also echoes the rather less ethical injunction favoured earlier by Crowley encapsulated by his epithet "Love is the law, love under will" and further "The overwhelming first principle of magical practice requires an understanding of ones true will and the strength to act upon it".

The idea of magic as an external force requires a practitioner to consider the ramifications of their actions in far closer detail than if magic is simply a placebo in my opinion, and in so doing forces that magical practitioner to hold themselves responsible for their actions if they are to take any morally acceptable position. Therefor I would argue that it is intrinsic to the pagan mindset that magic, if it is considered at all within Paganism, is considered to be an external force which may be tapped and utilised as any other tool might, and accorded a similar level of respect. It is only be thinking in this way that the necessary mental discipline will be achieved.

Do we still need stories?

Throughout human history man has been a storyteller. The development of language from a physiological viewpoint has been traced back at least 100000 years, and appears to have been common between Neanderthal and Modern humans, although the specific structures are not identical, so it appears that the ability for verbal communication is one of the defining qualities of the development of hominids. There are of course many types of non-verbal communication used by many animals from communal insects through to higher primates, and version of verbal communication used by aquatic mammals that we have yet to comprehend fully. The difference appears to be in the ability to convey abstract concepts. A colony of bees can use body language to convey location to a source of pollen, but would struggle to convey an artistic concept.

There is a question over whether the ability to think in an abstract way was a condition in developing verbal communication, or vice versa, but it does appear based on cerebral morphology that the two abilities developed in parallel perhaps with one driving the other. Whatever the developmental process, what is clear is that as far as we can tell, humans are the only animal that has developed the ability to create and tell stories. The question today is, what purpose have stories historically had? And perhaps just as importantly, are they still necessary today. Broadly we can split stories into a number of categories. We have stories which provide information on morals and ethics, stories that carry a warning, stories that convey complex arguments succinctly and stories that serve to explain the inexplicable.

We currently live in an age where we are beginning to understand the World around us, and our place wthin it, so it could be argued that explanatory stories have less of a place. The myths of thunder Gods and wrathful sea demons have largely been consigned to the annals of history. We also have ways of teaching about morality and how to live in society that rely less heavily on stories for their method of dissemination. Early years education appears to be moving away from story telling towards a more focused and integrated approach to societal interactions. The warning stories of history, primarily in the form of fairy tales still have a place, but their role is being diminished by earlier exposure to the brutality of reality with danger being increasingly explicit rather than implicit.

So what rle for modern day storytellers, the bards of yore? Personally I believe that the role of the story needs to change. If we consider stories as thought experiments, specifically designed to promote creative and logical thinking patterns, and to encourage a love of experimentation and learning then I can envisage a future in which the creative storyteller weaving a believable situation can havea  strong role to play. We can also perhaps see a role in terms of expanding the remit of what is currently considered “Pathworking” using a story to create an altered state of conciousness to allow for enhanced creative ability and psychological healing. Perhaps a core area of research that needs to be explored is the symbiosis of practical psychology, talking therapies, hypnotism and altered states of conciousness and philosophy. By weaving a story using these tools it may be possible to use stories to enhance peoples experiences of life, and possibly even to create an environment whereby individuals are more able to “think” creatively and develop new ideas beyond the facilities of the physical world.

The possibilities may in fact be truly limitless….

Thoughts on strange ideas

This is a response to a conversation I had about the possibility of the moon being a hollow sphere, containing who knows what.....

I consider the hollow moon in the same way that I consider the old hollow Earth theories. Doesn’t seem particularly credible, especially when considered with the results of geological surveys of the moons surface showing reasonably unequivocally that it was formed by a large scale planetary collision in the early days of the solar system blasting debris into orbit around the still forming Earth. I guess you could make a case for the possibility. You could consider the use of a toroidal plasma engine as a power source similar to that suggested for the TR3B black project anti-grav aircraft, but on a much larger scale, possibly with the outer surface being taken from the early Earth by a hyper-advanced alien civilization. The use of this type of engine would allow both for the enormous energy requirement, and the gravitational discrepancies between a solid body and a hollow sphere.

Of course, potentially anything is possible for a sufficiently advanced civilization. Michio Kaku and others have suggested that there are levels of civilization based on energy usage, with a level one civilization using all the power output of a star, through to a level three civilization using the power output of entire galaxies, and if you consider that the universe is some 15 billion years old and our particular bit of it is more like 6 billion, the possibility of a civilization a billion or so years in advance of ours is not beyond the bounds of credibility, but there is a substantial caveat in my opinion….

….Why? What purpose would a hollow moon serve? It would have to have been created, but to what end? It seems an enormous amount of effort fr some sort of observation post. I guess it could be part of an overarching plan to stabilize the early earth to make it more habitable but wouldn’t just moving a planetessimal into position be easier? It doesn’t seem to make sense, unless of course it is an interplanetary escape module left there for when we become so technologically advanced we can recognize it for what it is, and coincidentally have so completely stuffed up our own planet that we need it? That would be quite cool, but personally I think it is unlikely.

Of course, since we haven’t yet managed to full comprehend life and all of its possibilities perhaps hollow moons are some tremendously ancient life form that we simply can’t comprehend, but I fear that we are slipping into Pratchetts World Turtle realms here…..speaking of which, I liked the answer given by Didactylos in Pratchetts “Small Gods” when asked to refute the World Turtle story, “I will write another paper to refute it, a universe of spinning balls, I shall give you more balls than you can imagine…”

Enjoying simple pleasures....

There are many things that don't take a lot of effort, don't take a lot of money, don't even take much organising but can be a real joy after a hard week at work. Personally I take enormous pleasure from simply preparing a meal for myself and my friends, sitting quietly listening to good music, having a conversation with an old friend. The lifestyle that many of us live is frantic, urgent, constantly full of deadlines, meetings, agenda, and at the end of a week of stress and exertion it is nice to unwind properly. I know from speaking to friends and aquaintances that there is a phenomena that seems to affect the current generation of workers. It is a little odd, but it appears that when people go on holiday, there is a tendency to suddenly feel unwell after the first couple of days. I have been observing this for a while now and I am convinced that it comes down to having to be constantly on the go at work that the body stores up all the aches and twinges and illness ready for that moment when you finally get to relax.

Once that happens, all of those maladies re-emerge and as your stress levels go down, your feeling of wellbeing go down at the same time, you end up having a less than enjoyable holiday, and you almost get to the point when you crave being back at work. This is one of the reasons that I try to make it a personal policy that work gets done at work. I try not to bring anything home with me, so that once I switch off for the day I can properly relax. I have my wind down routine that starts the minute my work phone goes off and I leave the office. Even just on the walk to the bus stop I am already starting to let the pressures of the day dissipate and beginning to wind down, so that by the time I get home I can really relax properly.

It has got to the stage that even the sales calls in the evening are nothing more than a minor irritant, and that feels really good....

The dubious joys of the infomercial

Last night I almost fell off my chair I was shouting so hard at the TV. I was watching a programme on the National Geographic channel, a channel that I quite like despite its heavily American slant and style, when my enjoyment of a programme putting forward a rather dubious (in my opinion) version of the Stonehenge story was ruined by an infomercial sponsored by Panasonic heralding their successful links with UNESCO World Heriatge Sites programme. It wasn't just that the infomercial was fronted by a rather strange looking Sarah Brightman, whose environmental credentials are by no means clear. It wasn't just that a major contributor to the consumer driven growth that is seriously threatening our planet was indulging in the worst sort of greenwash. It wasn't even that UNESCO had seen fit to allow this use of their name and logo for advertising purposes. It was more the blatant lack of credible science being presented, and the half truths and part stories being pushed as fact.

I take a keen interest in environmentalism, and in ethics, and I am quite reasonably aware of the flaws in the current range of proposed solutions, but to run through them one at a time, and bearing in mind that Panasonic are rated at number 8 out of 18 globally by Greenpeace amongst electronics companies for their environmental impact, we can start with the assertion in the infomercial that solar power is a sustainable way forward for energy production. This is clearly nonsense since reports are now being published showing that the materials used in the manufacture of solar panels are far from sustainable, particularly the rare earth elements that are not only finite in quantity but are also rather damaging in terms of excavation and production. This is before we move on to the manufacturing of the batteries required. For quite some time there have been debates over the environmental impact of manufacturing batteries for hybrid/electric vehicles, and the same applies here.

Moving on to the claims of conserving precious water, certainly I am aware that Panasonic, along with many oth global companies are working to imprve water quality and cleanliness around the World as part of their community development programmes, but this is largely being done in the same way that 18th and 19th century industrialists arranged accomodation and sanitation for their workforce primarily to ensure that they still had a workforce despite the horrendous conditions their factories produced. Even the feature on sustainable building techniques talking about recycling stone roofs used images of limewashed houses in southern Spain, limewashing being an incredibly environmentally damaging building technique given the manufacturing process involved in creating the lime mortar.

Not a particularly useful or accurate infomercial then, and certainly not one that addressed perhaps the most important issue in building a sustainable global economy, the need for all of us to consume less. But of course, what global manufacturer is going to say that?

Art for the sake of art.....

I wonder sometimes if the whole of human development hasn't been a quest for the freedom to be creative. Even before we made the transition from hunter/gatherer to settled agricultural society we were creating art. Many of the examples of rock art found around the World, from the cave art in Western Europe, to the petroglyphs in South America, to the aboriginal art on Australasia depict hunting scenes and may well have been markers to wandering communities passing through the area, but many seem to have no clear relevance to the conveyance of anything other than "We were here". If we consider the prevalance of hand and foot paintings found, and consider also the discoveries of very early rock carved figures and images that seem to serve no purpose other than to be objects in and of themselves it would appear that we have an inbuilt desire to create art.

We have been striving since our earliest development to find more and more efficient ways to do the things that must be done for survival, thereby freeing up more time for creativity. This creativity comes in the form of art, music, literature, theatre and more recently film and computer games. It is as if we can't stop ourselves, and I wonder why that is. In general terms, creativity beyond practical considerations is not a strong survival trait. We can think perhaps of Bower birds where mates are selected on the quality of their nests, and the nests certainly to our eyes appear full of artistry but they serve a purely practical function, protecting the eggs of tree climbing snakes. I am certain that there must be an evolutionary reason for the desire to create art, but I can't quite get my head around what this might be. I will have to muse on it further....

Philosophy from a non-philosopher

Defining what a philosopher actually does is not as easy as you might think. In principle a philosopher studies the world and the problems and dilemmas faced by people in order to better understand the World as a whole. The remit of the philosopher covers a vast arena of study taking in all that is, and all that could possibly be. Going back to the early Greek philosophers, they were engaged in exploring their understanding of the physical and metaphysical world, using a combination of mental and physical experiments. It should be noted that in this context, the origin of metaphysics as a concept needs to be understood. The term comes from the collected works of Aristotle, and wasn't coined until about 100 years after his death. There are two collections pertinent to the use of the word. The first collection is known as Aristotles Physics, and pertains to "things that change" the second collection is known as Aristotles Metaphysics and pertains specifically to "things which do not change". The label metaphysics is thought to be a reference by later compilers to the understanding that students would read "Physics" first and that therefore "Metaphysics" would be read later, the word meaning literally "after physcs".

I make no claims to any structured philosophical training, but I do have a desire for knowledge, and for understanding of the World and its systems at a fundamental level. I have been told that I am eclectic in my study areas, attempting to access and discover knowledge by immersing myself in a chosen paradigm until such time as that paradigm no longer serves my purposes. This is a fairly intense process starting with developing the core basics of a subject area, before slowly moving on to more advanced work. Of course this has to be fitted in around real life, but that is part of the fun. Over the course of the next few months I am aiming for a philosophical paradigm, the first step may well be to try to refine exactly which branch of philosophy that will be. My current preference is ethics and morality, as that fits in quite nicely with a couple of other projects, but on of the joys of eclecticism and exploring new areas is that in that initial exploration process there are all sorts of ideas that present themselves.

Thoughts on alternative medicine

There has been a lot of debate recently about the use of alternative or complimentary therapies such as accupunture, homeopathy, reflexology, crystal healing, even chiropracty, and whether these have a positive or negative effect on health. There are a couple of distinct arguments around the subject and it is an interesting topic to debate I think, as it draws in ideas of ethics, psychology and pathology, and creates thoughts around how we as a society and as individuals perceive health and wellness. To begin, there is an arguement that in general, we, as a society are becoming more focused on our personal health, and that potentially this is leading us as individuals to become more selfish in terms of our demands on healthcare professionals. There has been a dramatic increase in the rates of diagnosis of a range of medical conditions which broadly fall into a category of having a unknown cause. These are conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatique syndrome, fibro-myalgia, chronic pain syndrome and the like. What makes all of these conditions similar is that they are diagnosed by exclusion. That is, doctors act to rule out other possible medical conditions that have known causes and can be treated, and having ruled those out, conclude that the symptoms in essence have an unknown cause.

This causes problems for the mainstream medical profession since if the cause of symptoms is unknown, treatment of the underlying condition is impossible. All doctors can do is try to treat the symptoms and hope that through alleviation the condition will improve. It also causes problems for the patient in that without a clear cause and treatment it is difficult to convince people that there is anything really wrong. From the point of view of the general public there can be a feeling that people suffering from these conditions are malingering and that there is nothing really wrong with them. This can create a sense of desperation in the patient in that the patient can become willing to try anything to ease their condition. Consequently it is a fertile ground for alternative treatments.

Concurrent with this is a prevelent idea that many of these conditions are neurologically created, either in a psychosomatic way, or as a consequence of psychological stress. The mechanisms of the mind in dealing with stress are not fully understood, so it is at least possible that changes in neurological, and more specifically neurochemical conditions can manifest as physical ailments. Having experienced extreme stress personally I can attest to thephysical manifestations of neuro-chemical imbalances, but if neurological changes are a contributing factor in these conditions, could these not be tested for? Cost is clearly an issue, since the testing procedure would involve FMRI scanning of the brain which is not easy or cheap to organise given the prevalence of these conditions. It also, if we accept a psychological component, opens the door for alternative therapies to actually be of benefit since they may work quite effectively at a psychological level.

There has been some evidence that GP's who take longer to talk to patients, and who are perceived to take patients seriously tend to have a better success rate in terms of alieviating symptoms than those GP's who appear to lack time, empathy and genuine concern. It could well be the case that in certain specific areas, the use of complimentary healthcare could give measurable benefits, based on the attention given to the patient by the practitioner, even if the therapy itself is limited in its practical funtionality. My personal opinion is that much more research is equired into the whole field, and that, if nothing else, taking a more holistic approach to patient well being would provide long term health benefits.