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Celebration of Cavewoman

My daughter and I were discussing innovation and inventiveness. Well, actually we weren’t but the subject got mentioned in the context of “what if….”. What if our caveman ancestor had not banged together two rocks and invented fire starting? My opinion was that it was probably our cavewoman ancestor who did it. Our caveman ancestor would probably have banged his thumbs together between the two rocks.

This started me thinking. Inventors are usually man. Rarely, in recent times anyway, is a great inventor a woman. Why is this? Is there really a gender gap in inventiveness?

Thinking back to the caveman and cavewoman days, it is likely that the woman was responsible for the invention of clothing. The caveman was probably happy to chase pigs through the scrub with his dangly bits flopping in the wind, while the cavewoman would be inventing the loin cloth, which the caveman would likely adopt with glee, as it prevented his said dangly bits coming in contact with the gorse and other spiky plants. For the cavewoman there was an advantage that it hid the dangly bits from her view.

Then when the woman in the next cave over, the blonde one with the big … assets, starting wearing that fitting badger skin outfit, cavewomen had invented fashion. Hmm. The charcoal from the newly invented fire really enhanced the under eyes, and the lighter ash really made the cheekbones stand out. Your move, blondie!

And cooking too. Caveman probably dropped his slice of bear loin in the fire and discovered that it tasted great, after you brushed the burnt bits and the ash off. Cavewoman then got a stone, put it on the fire and sizzled her steak on that. With a few grilled veges on the side, for the healthy touch.

Of course when caveman was unsuccessful in bringing home any meat, the family had to subsist on berries and seeds. Crushing the seeds between two rocks probably made them easier to eat and that a short step from grinding them up, which is a small step from mixing them with water and then dropping them on the hot stone. Somehow I don’t imagine the caveman doing that. He’d be too busy describing the ones that got away.

Then when the caveman invited next door over for tea, then something special was required. So wrap the grilled meat pieces in the flat bread, add a few herbs and spices, and hey presto! Instant cuisine. I bet blondie couldn’t even boil an egg. Oh, wait a minute, we haven’t invented boiling things yet.

What if we take that coconut shell and fill it with water and balance it on the fire? Add a few leaves from that bush over there, and we’ve invented tea. A few ground beans from that other bush and we have coffee. Hmm, let’s domesticate a goat, so that we have an assured source of meat, and hey, we can put some of the goat’s milk in the tea.

My semi-serious point is that all these things that were developed in the dim and distant past were likely invented by the women. While the men were out chasing pigs, goats, and badgers and developing weapons and warfare, and all those men things, women stayed in or around the cave inventing, well, home.

When the men came home with pig-on-a-stick, the woman would break down the animal, with a stone knife probably invented by a woman to make it easier, remove the tubes and other gruesome bits, and set it on the fire to cook. She probably accidentally domesticated the dog by feeding it the bits she didn’t want. The cat was always there.

Of course, when you spend your days, sitting on the ground, keeping the fire going, accidentally inventing smoking of meat by hanging it over the fire, the ground begins to get a bit, well, hard. Animals skins help somewhat, but animal skins with dried grass under them were even better! But to keep the grass from leaking out from under the skins, woman had to invent sewing.

Of course, sewing helped the skins look a lot better. Take that blonde girl. What? You bought yours! You invented shopping? Go, girl!!

I’d bet it was a woman who invented agriculture. While man was out chasing deer and tripping over rocks, while he was gathering a paleo diet on the side from bushes and shrubs, woman was at home noticing that some of the seeds gathered last year were sprouting. What if she were to scratch some shallow lines in the ground and plant those sprouting seeds? What is she were to water and weed them and, well, let’s invent a word, cultivate them? Then they wouldn’t have to go so far to find seeds when that idiot man couldn’t find any prey! And if they did grow, she’d save some seed for next year rather than just eat it all.

Then when the cave gets too small for a growing family, it’s the woman who looks around, finds a bigger, better cave, and pays the occupants half an antelope for it. It’s the woman who invents real estate.

It’s the woman who sticks a few palm fronds in cracks in the rock to give them shade from the sun in summer, and who piles up some rocks to block the wind in winter, it’s the woman who diverts the stream away from the living area. Yes, this cave has running water! No need to go down to the stream to drink! It’s the woman who invents home improvement.

Of course, my hypothesis above, that from fire to home improvement, these things were invented by women. The women were, in general, left behind while the men went hunting. The men didn’t have time to invent things, but the women were able to put their minds to work on improving things around the cave, but people give them little credit for it. But when push comes to shove it seems to me that civilisation is the greatest achievement of womankind.

Spring is here!

It’s officially spring and things are starting to warm up. Funnily the temperatures have not changed much, but it feels a lot warmer. The chrome sharp acid edge of winter has gone leaving a more bearable softer edged coolness behind. Lyrical words for a lyrical season.

Spring in this part of the world means waves of damp weather coming from the west. A cyclone, a normal one, not one of the monsters that cause devastation, may throw off several fronts as it approaches or passes over us, and we receive several burst of rain.

This year, we have had a wet winter and things are tending to be a bit boggy and muddy. It makes it much harder to keep things clean as the mud tracks indoors. This is particularly bad if you have a dog who think mud is for rolling in. Fortunately our pooch is not one of those.

The wet spring weather means spending time indoors, unless you are prepared to don wet weather gear and brave it. We look forward to the burst of spring sunshine between the bands of showers. Showery weather means clouds and while the sky may be grey, it is not the depressing slate grey sky dispensing drizzle that I remember from England.

The intervals of blue sky should become longer as spring progresses but they are welcome however brief. The enable one to get out and about, to note all the buds bursting from the trees and birds, particularly Tuis, dashing about defending territories, chasing off other birds and generally singing their hearts out.

Some trees have already blossomed and are now presumably in the process of fruiting. I’ve watched fruit trees in the garden throw out blossoms only for the blossoms to fall almost before I can get into the house for my camera! Some flowering cherries have been masses of blossom and are now merely green.

The pale green of new shoots is a unique colour, contrasting strongly with last year’s foliage which is a much darker colour. This changes the character of the light for photography, but the effect doesn’t last long. The new shoots rapidly lose that unique tinge, even if they are not yet as dark as the last year leaves.

The grass also grows strongly at this time. Paths which were mere tracks are now corridors between rapidly growing walls of grass. Much of this new grass will shortly pause, flower, seed, then turn yellow brown and die back. Fortunately I don’t suffer from hay fever, but during the flowering phase suffers with curse the wind blown pollen.

It’s not just grass that lets loose a volley of pollen. There are no fir trees near where I live, but the wind screen of my car, the edge of the lingering puddles and other sheltered spots develop a yellow edging from the pollen of fir trees kilometres away.

There’s a surprisingly sizeable population of ducks in this suburban area. The reserve and parks all seem to host a few ducks, and they even visit gardens in the area. It’s breeding season for the ducks, with all the raucous clamour that that entails. It’s sometimes difficult to know whether they are courting or fighting.

Good spring weather brings out the lawnmowers. I’m not sure that the ground isn’t a bit too wet at the moment as things are still pretty boggy. In the reserve which I and the dog visit the mostly frequently, the grass cutting has resulted in a mess of tyre marks and some areas where the grass is damaged by the mowers. It looks pretty bad, but for experience I can say that marks will be undetectable in a week or two.

I’ve not seen many insects this year yet, but they must be around as I’ve seen the Welcome Swallows around twisting and turning and catching insects in the air. They are called “Welcome Swallows” because they appear at the beginning of spring, heralding the better weather to come.

I’ve not seen the kingfisher recently where I usually see him/her in our local reserve. He/she has been about in the last weeks though, so I shall probably see him/her soon. The full name for the Kingfisher is the Sacred Kingfisher. It’s called “sacred” because it is said to holy to the Polynesians.

I like the bird’s original binary classification name of “Halcyon sancta”. “Halcyon” can mean calm, peaceful, happy or golden. “Sancta” means sacred of course. “Sacred peace”. The drug halcion is used to induce sleep or relaxation and there is possibly a connection between the two words. Unfortunately the binary classification name of the bird has been changed and it is now the less appealing “Todiramphus sanctus”.

One advantage of spring is that we can start to discard the multiple layers of clothes that we are forced to don over winter. I hate piling on the sweaters and overcoats, changing shoes and so on that going out in the winter involves. Every layer that I can leave off is a cause for rejoicing. Unfortunately the fickle weather of spring with the occasional cold snap means that tomorrow I might have to layer up again.

Today the weather is a bit grey. It’s not too cold. Later on it is forecast to be showery again. That’s OK because I know that better weather is coming. The weather will be up and down for a while, it’s true but the ‘ups’ will get more up and the ‘downs’ will be less down, and before we know it, the t-shirts and shorts will be out, we’ll be looking forward to summer.

Spring is a turn around season, where we say goodbye to the fierceness of winter and look forward to the mellowness of spring. No more chopping of wood and lighting fires, cold draughts through small cracks and mounds of bedclothes to keep us warm. No more donning layer upon layer of clothes when leaving the house. It’ll be back to open windows, time in the garden and much lighter bedclothes, and just picking up the car keys when we leave the house.

Mental Illness

More and more people are being diagnosed with mental illnesses these days. At least that’t the way it appears. Depression, which I suffer from a little, is rife and almost everyone knows someone who suffers from depression or suffers it themselves.

Schools now have special teachers or teachers’ aides to assist in the management of children with autism and other similar conditions. Sometimes these children cause significant disruption in classrooms and measures to handle this are almost always put into place.

It is unclear whether or not there is a real rise in these conditions. It may be that better diagnosis of these conditions is the cause of the upwards trend in the number of diagnoses of these conditions. Certainly I don’t recall there being a lot of mentally ill people when I was growing up. There were always people who were “different” in some ways, and as a result were often teased or tormented by others of the same age. Hopefully that at least we have left behind us.

Mental illness - blanket man — Mental illness – blanket man

It’s in the lesser mental ailments that I think that we have seen more diagnosis and consequent steep rise. For instance, one hears of the “autism spectrum”. I had erroneously assumed that everyone was on the autism spectrum somewhere with most being on the very low end and that those diagnosed with “autism” were located higher up the spectrum. Reading a few items on the Internet seems to prove me wrong and that there are people on the spectrum and people who aren’t.

When I was young everyone knew of someone whose mother always smelled of alcohol and who had perhaps crashed a car while drunk. Alcoholism was not mentioned as such, so I’m unsure if such a thing was recognised in those days. Alcoholics Anonymous was started in 1935, and I certainly heard of them at some stage when growing up.

Also most families had a creepy uncle who was kept away from the young girls and boys of the family. These days we have “online grooming” and paedophile registers. When I was young scandals were usually dealt with in the family, and steps were taken to avoid situations occurring that led to the scandal. Unfortunately this meant that the scandal was hidden and the victims were often made to feel guilty, when it was not their fault in any way.

With online grooming, the guilty person can be a complete stranger to the child, and this opens a whole new can of worms. Do parents severely restrict a child’s online access and police them every minute that they are online, or do they educate the children about the dangers? Obviously they need to do both. The first strategy mitigates the danger and the second prepares the child for those occasions when the first strategy fails.

When I was young, there was an occasional person who we learnt to avoid. The man on the corner with the fierce dog. The crazy cat lady who constantly talked to herself. The compulsive hoarder who built up a pile of junk in their front yard. These people are still with us, but now they have their own television programmes! They’ve always been with us, and likely always will. They are much more noticeable these days because the television programmes, but I suspect that there aren’t any more of them than there used to be.

I recall one old lady who lived alone. I think that she would, these days, be diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease or similar. She would wander the streets in her nightie and her robe and have to be taken back home by someone, usually a neighbour or the police. Now and then one of these confused older people would wander off and get lost sparking full scale searches. This still happens today and sadly, not all such cases are resolved happily.

In some ways the rise of the nuclear family and the relative decline of the extended family may have led to the higher visibility of mental illness in society. The nuclear family, mum, dad, and kids has no room for those who mentally don’t fit in. The extended family however can handle the less mentally stable family members to some extent. Adult children can take turns at looking after granny, or maybe pay for grannies care between them. The cousin who is socially inept or who is slightly autistic can find a niche in an extended family.

This can lead to less visibility of much mental illness as the family is unlikely to mention such problems outside of the family and the ill person may be helped by the familiar and nurturing environment.

Some mental illnesses, however, can’t be handled in this way. The mentally ill person may be violent towards other or to themselves. They may be dangerous to the public, as in the case of the drunk or drugged driver. They may be so out of tune with the world that they need professional help.

In today’s world professional help is often available. In some cases drugs can be effective, as in the case of depression and bipolar disorder. In others there is the possibility of committal to a psychiatric hospital. Such places are generally not nice. The patients are generally gravely ill, and nursers and carers in the hospitals have utmost respect. Often such hospitals are underfunded and can be over crowded. Efforts to make them look better often make then look sad.

In the past, even in some cases in the near past, mental hospitals or asylums were places of horror. The patients often lived in squalor, were strictly restrained and were subjected to horrific “treatments”. Fortunately treatment of mental illnesses has improved significantly over the last hundred years or so. Let’s hope it continues to get better.

Of the two hypotheses as to why the rate of mental illness has increased, I definitely think that the better reporting has been the main cause. That is exacerbated by the reduction in the level at which such problems are reported. Depression would not have considered an illness at one time, for example, and autism is reported more frequently because people are aware of it. I certainly don’t believe that there is more mental illness that when we were young. It’s certainly a lot more visible.

Writing

I’ve written about my process or lack of one when writing these posts. They sort of grow from an idea, a seed, a notion, a comment on something I’ve read. I rarely have a plan. I rarely have even an intro in mind and I definitely don’t have a finish in mind.

Mostly I write these 1000 word posts. In the past I’ve written some poetry, much of which I can reread without wincing too much. I’ve had goes at writing stories, technical articles and philosophical pieces of various lengths. I’ve never published any of this stuff, as I’ve never considered it good enough to be worth the effort. Or maybe I’m just lazy.



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My success in keeping the blog going for over 250 posts has encouraged me. I’ve lately been writing something which I hope to make novel length, and I’ve learnt a few things.

When I thought about writing something novel length I researched the topic of novel writing a little. I found that a useful length for a novel is around a hundred thousand words. The number doesn’t scare me, as I’ve written around 250,000 words in this blog, admittedly spread over five years or so. If I write 1,000 words a day for one hundred days, that’ll do it. (Yeah right!)

Advice about novel writing is scary though. You have to a plot, a timeline, a list of characters, and so on. Yikes! Then I stumbled upon a method called the snowflake method. The author writes that you still need the plan, the character biographies, and spreadsheets! Spreadsheets for goodness sake! But his overall concept attracted me. It’s based on a fractal called the Koch snowflake curve.

The Koch curve is easy to draw. First you draw an equilateral triangle, then you divide each side into three. On the middle bit you construct and outwards facing triangle. Then you erase the middle thirds of the original triangle and bingo, you have a six pointed star. Then you repeat this process a few times and end up with a fuzzy six lobed figure – the start of the Koch curve. Since this is a fractal you could do this forever and produce a rather boring snowflake shape.

A Koch curve has an infinitely repeating self-... — A Koch curve has an infinitely repeating self-similarity when it is magnified. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THAT process I could work with. Unfortunately when I read further on, as I said above, the author recommends spreadsheets, and character biographies and so on. I find that very off putting.

I had an idea, right from the start, for the main theme, the crux if you like. I had a main character. I had some of the development of the story, and some of the locations that the story took place in. And a scary fate, which led to the key story line. All good. But no supporting characters and no real way to go from premise to conclusion.

I decided to just go for it. While spreadsheets and lists sound like a good idea, I don’t think that I could work that way. So I just started.

I set up the main character in the prime location and I wrote his story. I filled in his back story, and suddenly he had a companion! I’m not too sure where she came from but the main character needed her. She knew the fate of the main character, and became close to him in spite of it. A potential reader, should the story ever get finished, is only given hints as to what that fate is.



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In some sort of seismic story shift the main character became the son of the character facing the scary fate, and the father also acquired a partner. The son would also face the same fate but long in the future.

Now I had four characters needing a back story. Slowly but surely the female companion of the main character took over and became the main character. How did that happen? She quickly acquired a family who were mostly less important characters. Well, at the moment that’s true, but who knows? Certainly not me, and I’m writing the damn story!



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The female main character had a female friend from the start. Well, from when she appeared that is. Originally the friend was going to serve as a brash contrast to the quietness of the female main character, but she swiftly mellowed to be just a bit more lively than the female main character. The friendship between the two girls became deeper and they became true BFFs. That meant that the friend had to come along with the now main character and soon developed her own story lines in parallel to her friend. She even gained a male partner of her own.

The main male character’s mother, the wife of the character who was the original main character also blossomed into a major character. She had to mentor the female main character and her origins became relevant so she also developed a story line.

Pause for thought. Oh yes, an additional theme running through the story is an unknown technology that enables a few things. If all goes well, it will remain a secondary theme and won’t crucially change any of the story line. It won’t be a magic bullet, and the characters will have to work hard to figure it out, like real technology. It won’t save any lives or change the characters into god like beings, if I have anything to do with it. But what do I know? I’m only writing the story. At the moment there only the merest hint of a link between the technology and the fate awaiting the main male characters.

So, at around 40,000 words, aiming for 100,000, where am I? Well, I started with one male character and an idea, but the girls have largely taken over, which is weird. They are strangely chaste – no sex scenes thank the little gods, but they are passionate – think Jane Austen. The girls outshine the boys in almost all departments. A gay couple appeared from nowhere. The BFF is poised for a major story thread. A couple of minor characters are begging for a story line, and I need to step back and review what I’ve done so far.

It’s been illuminating. It’s sort of like the snowflake method of perpetual refinement, and sort of like sheer random development, a mind dump put into words. I can only wonder where it will take me from here.

Two Hundred and Fifty

This post will be my 250th. 250 times approximation 1,000 words. A quarter of a million words. Wow. I didn’t think that I could do it. I hit the target. I reached the summit of Everest. I ran a marathon. And other similar metaphors for success.

Of course, I could be posting into a void. I see that I get, usually, a few dozen views for each post and some people are actually “following” me. I even, now and then, get a comment. I’ve done zero in the way of self promotion. I finish each post, figuratively pat it on its back and send it on its way, never to be seen again.

This doesn’t concern me. It seems that, for me, writing this blog is a bit like playing a piano in an empty room, or doing a jigsaw on the Internet. The reward is in the doing. I certainly feel a sense of achievement when I hit the “Publish” button, but I don’t often follow up on the post.

What I found amazing is my ability to ramble on for 1,000 words on any subject. I reckon that I could probably stretch any subject out to 1,000 words. In fact, I usually go over. Around the 300 to 400 word mark I’m wondering if I will reach the 1,000, and then suddenly I’m a couple of dozen words past the mark and wondering how to stop. Many times I will just stop so if you think I dropped a subject abruptly, you are probably right.

Some subjects have come up more than once. If you have been a regular reader you will have noticed themes running through my posts. There’s science, particularly physics and cosmology, there’s philosophy, there’s maths. I’ve tried to steer away from politics, but Trump has crept in there somewhere.

There’s weather, there’s seasons, there’s discussion on society, as I see it, and occasionally I discuss my posts themselves. These things are, obviously, the things that interest me, the things that I tend to think about.

Apparently I have 144 followers. That’s 144 more than I expected. I hope that some of them read my posts on a regular basis, but that’s not necessary. I hope that more dip in from time to time and find some interest nugget.

That sound disparaging to my followers, but that’s not my intent. My intent is to reflect on the realities of blogging. I follow other blogs, but I don’t read all the posts on those blogs. Maybe one or two of them I read pretty much every time the blogger posts a new post.

Someone's blog post — Someone’s blog post

That’s the reality of blogging I think. Millions of blog plots are published every day, and I reckon that very few of them are read by more than one or two people at the most. Some blogs strike the jackpot, though, and have millions of followers.

I’d guess that the big blogs are about politics in some shape or form, or fashion and fashion hints and tips. Maybe cooking? I’ve seen a few cooking blogs and they seem to be quite popular. Some big firms have taken to publishing a blog. Some people blog about their illnesses and their battles with it. The best of the latter can be both sad and uplifting.

You know the sort I mean? You go to the firm’s website and there’s a button or menu item that proudly proclaims “Blog”. When you look at the blog, it’s simply a list of what the CEO and board have been up to, or releases of new products, or sometimes posts about workers at the firm getting involved with the local community. All good earnest stuff, but scarcely riveting. I wonder how many followers they get? Probably about as many as me! I hope so. At least they are trying.

(Approaching 600 words of waffle. I can do it!)

Since I’m not doing a political blog, I don’t think that anything I post is controversial, which is probably reflected in the number of my followers. I don’t stir up any furores with my words on Plato’s Cave analogy, so far as I know. I get no furious comments about my views on Schrodinger’s Cat. “You should see what he says about Plato’s Cave! You must go on there and refute it!” Nah, doesn’t happen!

As I said, the low number of hits doesn’t worry me. It would be a hassle if suddenly my followers shot up to thousands, and I felt obligated to provide all these people an interesting post on a regular basis. As it is I can ramble on about prime numbers or the relationship between the different number sets and potentially only disappoint a few people. If any.

What have I learnt from all this blogging? That it is hard. It’s not just a matter of sitting down and blasting out a 1,000 words. Well sometimes it is, actually, but most times I grind it out in 100 word or so chunks. I aim to write the blog on Sunday and add pictures and publish on Monday.

Sometimes I miss the Monday deadline, out of sheer forgetfulness, mostly and pop it out on Tuesday or even later. Sometimes I forget to write my post until late on Sunday, but it is only rarely that I have to write it on Monday or even later. So far as I can tell, I’ve not completely missed a weekly post since the earliest days.

This is not the first blog I’ve tried to write. I had several goes before this one and I think that maybe this attempt “stuck” because I set out my aim to publish weekly early on. Maybe. It may also be the target of 250 posts that I set myself early on. Now I’ve achieved that goal.

So what next? I’ve not decided. I might stop now, or I might go on to 500. I may not know right up until the last minute. 500 posts is approaching 10 years of posts which seems a phenomenally long time. But then again, 250 posts is around 5 years of posts and I achieved that. We’ll have to see.

(As I sail past 1,000 words, I reflect that I can extract that many words from practically nothing. It seems to be a knack.)

The Universe in a Hair Tie

Hair Ties

I’m constantly bemused by the Universe. Why are some things the way they are? What is the Big Bang all about? Why Quantum? Why do people seemingly like to kill other people? Obviously on average this last is untrue, but that’s little comfort when a significant portion appears to be inflicting mayhem, in the forms of wars, terrorism, traffic accidents and even simple murder, on other people.

But let’s not get too serious. One quirk of the universe caught my eye in the supermarket. No, it wasn’t the solid wall of fizzy and sugary drinks. It wasn’t the half wall of cotton wool masquerading as bread. It wasn’t even the rows of vegetables liberally sprayed to make them look fresh, or the wall of salty crunchy snacks indistinguishable in look and taste to everyone except teenage boys who are picky connoisseurs of the things.

Chip Aisle

No, it was a humble object, a truncated ice cream cone shaped in plastic containing a small bag of hair ties, the sort of thing that girls use to put their hair in bunches. At first sight a good idea. It can sit on the dressing table, resting on the flat base, and the owner can remove one or two ties as required and replace them in due course.

Except – The truncated cone didn’t look very stable and the ball just rested on the cone, and would presumably roll away if the cone was upset. And the ball. In my limited experience of hair ties, they end up capturing loose hairs, the sparkly sheath snaps exposing the elastic core, or the elastic core breaks rendering them useless. They don’t have a long life.

Pigtails

In addition they get lost. Just like the planet of lost pens there is a planet of lost hair ties. Like the pens the hair ties rings around the planet just as ice and rocks form rings around Saturn. Just like a pen you can put one down anywhere and when you come back the hair tie has completely disappeared. Because of some law of probability or something sometimes there’s a pen in its place bearing the logo of some firm that you’ve never heard of and which operates in a different area to the one that you live in.

So after a while the semi stable holder of a ball of hair ties becomes a depleted bunch of hairy broken hair ties and a tipped over holder which has rolled off under the bed. I admit that much of the above is speculation. I’m not a girl, don’t wear hair ties, and I’m not an astronomer or statistician. But I suggest you try the experiment. Buy an ice cream holder and hair tie ball set and observe what happens. I reckon that it will be uncannily like the scenario I suggest above.

Ice Cream Cone

But think of all the unlikely things that had to happen to create that unlikely supermarket item. Firstly we had to have the Big Bang. But not just any Big Bang. This one. A slightly different Big Bang may not have resulted in a liveable Universe. The Big Bang might also have created a liveable Universe but not one where life evolved.

Life evolves on planets. Planets revolve around stars. Stars and planets have to be of right sort that life can evolve on. One of the things that is essential is a mix of elements which can only be created in the heart of a star. You see, the Universe is mostly hydrogen, as free protons, the occasional hydrogen atom, and the even rarer hydrogen molecules.

Pens

And that would be it, but some of the hydrogen/protons condensed into clumps or clouds, which grew until gravity compressed the hydrogen atoms to the point where they fused and produced helium and gave off energy. Stars. Generation I stars. Eventually pressures increased to the point where other elements started to be produced, and finally the stars exploded!

The Big Bang that started all this is the precise one that embodied or encoded all the nuclear interactions that I’ve just mentioned. Oh, there is a possibility that there was only one possible Big Bang – the one that led to us, but that doesn’t explain why all the universal constants have the values that they do. If any had been slightly different we wouldn’t be here.

Big Bang

When the stars exploded all the elements necessary to life were blasted into space. Over billions of years these very rare elements condensed to become our sun, and our earth. The earth and any rocky earthlike planet consists of a vast collection very rare atoms. We consist of a vast collection of very rare atoms that have somehow sprung to life. You can almost see the point of that religionists make when they say that such happenings as you and I could not have occurred by chance.

But of course they are wrong. Chance is the only reason for things happening, and it is so long since the Big Bang that unusual clusters of rare atoms, such as us, even though they are of very low probability, have come to pass, and all this was implicit in the Big Bang.

Periodic Table

By some chance some collection of very rare elements sat down one day and thought about hair ties and how to keep them tidy and protect them from being lost and came up with the ice creme cone concept. I’ve wondered about the concept above, and whether or not it is in fact a useful one. My feeling is that the flaws outweigh the advantages, but of course I may be wrong.

For all I know, the concept works fine, and is the greatest advance in hair tie technology since someone had the original concept of a hair tie. When you think about it, it is a pretty cool technology which does away with the need for ribbons and strings, and the difficulties of tying and adjusting them. The ice cream cone holder concept could be the next step in the evolution of hair technology.

Hair Tie Balls

The truly wondrous thing though, is that the ice cream cone hair tie holder concept and its execution and appearance on the supermarket shelves is implicit in the Big Bang. The Big Bang led to stars, supernovas, more stars, planets, life, supermarkets and ice cream cone hair tie holders, and that is truly amazing.

Supermarket

The Lurg

The invading army expanded in both directions from their beachhead. Soon they were almost everywhere, even invading the outlying areas. The resistance had little time to prepare, but soon they were building up their forces. The battle raged everywhere, noticeably raising the temperature.

Yes, I have the lurgy. It started a week ago with a sore throat and progressed to a crippling cough. Soon I was aching all over and doing anything at was getting very hard. My muscles ached from coughing and my back hurt, probably as a secondary result of the coughing.

I felt hot and sweaty, and got an appointment with the doctor. She told me that it was a “viral infection” and that I had to “last it out”. I didn’t have bronchitis or pneumonia fortunately, so I came out of the medical centre with no prescription. That’s fine by me. Antibiotics wouldn’t help with a viral infection and most cold “remedies” are hokum.

What I had was a bit more than a cold though, so over the next few days I was mostly collapsed in bed, sometimes listening to radio or playing games on the tablet. Did I feel sorry for myself? Not really, but my mood was sombre. Even in the depths of depression I haven’t felt sorry for myself and I rarely do. It seems a pointless way to feel, and depression, for me, is colouring of the world as grey (but see below), not a personal attack by the Universe.

Depression means many things. I was searching for an image related to the mental condition but came up with the meteorologic phenomenon instead.

The thing about this particular “viral infection” is that it has left me feeling weak and tired 24 hours a day. Sleep has not been easy as I wake up sweating and coughing several times a night, once I drop off. It hasn’t been too good for my wife who has been disturbed by my nocturnal coughing spells.

Only once, fortunately, was I woken by the shivers. I hate the shivers. I felt reasonably warm in bed but my body decided it wasn’t. I struggled against the shivers for a while then snaked an arm out to grab a sweater. Fighting the weakness and the shakes I managed to pull the sweater on and still the shivers without getting out bed, then relaxed into the warmth. Of course I was soaking in sweat when I woke up. Yuck!

A deep cold or maybe flu like this makes things hard to do. There’s a general feeling of weakness, but I think that’s mostly a mental thing. I had to swing an axe at some blocks of wood out of necessity (It’s winter here) but I was able to do it, albeit with lengthy pauses to cough my lungs out, Muscles complain if you ask them to do work, but with “viral infection” they do that anyway.

Maybe the system is marshalling all resources to attack the invader and resents having to let resources go to other ends. Speaking of resources, food and drink lose their savour with a cold like this. Solid food tastes of nothing much and tea and coffee taste strange. (I don’t actually drink coffee so I’m extrapolating here!) I don’t know why this happens, but it’s like half of your taste buds are MIA and the others only have time to register “food of some sort”.

Also you eat at strange times. Struggling out of bed, it is often quite late in the morning before breakfast happens. Since my usual breakfast is pretty bland (oat biscuits and milk) you can imagine what it tastes like… Well pulped cardboard would probably have more flavour.

Lunch time has been straying into the early afternoon. Whatever is for lunch, it is probably quick and easy. Tinned soup, something on toast, or similar. Not that I can taste what it is, of course. I made scrambled eggs today (whisk eggs, pinch of salt, milk if wanted, pepper if wanted) and I had eaten half of it before I realised that I had forgotten the pinch of salt In normal times I would have spotted that in the first mouthful, even though I only use a little.

The really annoying thing, though, over the course of the battle for my body is that my brain functions have been “softened”. I think that’s the best word. Just like a landscape is softened by a veil of rain, my brain feels a little fuzzy, like an out of focus photograph. The sharp edges are still there, though it is more of an effort to utilise them.

Puzzles, for example, are doable, but with more effort than usual. I quite like Sudoku puzzles and can complete them at my usual level, but I’m tired afterwards. Even Solitaire (what else can you do when you can’t go out, when you’ve completed all the Sudoku puzzles available to you) can seem like a pretty daunting proposition.

I was going to mention colour, wasn’t I? Colour leaches from the world much like it does when depression hits. You look at something and the colours are there – you can notice to a block of red in something for instance – but somehow colour doesn’t figure much in the composite image that your eyes report to your, or is dropped as irrelevant by your brain. Something in the visual presentation of your vision system appears to dial down the colours.

It doesn’t go completely monochrome (though deep depression does, occasionally, for me). It’s just that colour seems to lose significance. It’s AS IF everything was grey and white until you actually look specifically at something. Still it is not as unpleasant as those time when depression blasts everything with light, where everything feels metallic, there is a metallic taste in the mouth. Total sensory overload that won’t stop. I call it the “neon world”.

Grey Skies - Belgium — Grey Skies – Belgium

I’m approaching the end of this post, which shows that I must be much improved from how I was before! Yeah! Yeah, the defenders of my internal galaxy! I still have the nose runs and still have the coughs, but the aches have retreated to only the coughing muscles. I think that I’m going to survive. Well, I always knew I would really, but it’s hard to maintain the positiveness when you’ve been coughing for 10 minutes and can’t see the end.

Parallel worlds or a Continuum?

A cursory search on the Internet doesn’t tell me one way or another if Erwin Schrodinger owned a cat. Nevertheless he could have owned a cat, so the existence of Schrodinger’s actual cat is unknown to me. David Deutsch might possible argue that Schrodinger’s decision to own a cat or not own a cat resulted in two parallel worlds.

The above is obviously a play on the original scenario outlined by Schrodinger, the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. The cat’s state before the box is opened is a strange state, referred to as a superposition, where the cat is both alive and dead. When the box is opened it is argued that this state is somehow resolved with cat being definitely alive or dead.

Suppose that we install a detector in the box with the cat which determines whether or not the cat is dead and notes the time when it dies. Does this resolve the paradox? After all, if the detector says that the cat died three minutes ago, then we now know exactly when the cat died.

This doesn’t resolve the issue, though, as the detector will also be in a superposition until the box is opened – we don’t know if it has been triggered or not. Of course, some people, including Schrodinger himself, are not happy with this interpretation, and it does seem that, pragmatically, the cat is alive until the device in the box is triggered and is thereafter dead.

However the equation derived by Schrodinger appears to say that the cat exists in both states, so it appears as if Schodinger’s “ridiculous case” (his words) is in fact the case. Somehow the cat does appear to be in the strage state of superposition.

If we look at the experimenter, he (or she) has no clue before opening the box whether the cat is dead or not. Nothing appears to change for him (or her), but in fact it does. He (or she) is unaware of the state of the cat, so he (or she) is in the superimposed state : He (or she) is unaware whether or not the cat is alive or whether it is dead, which is a superposition state.

Yet we don’t find this strange. If we remove the scientific gadgets from the box, this doesn’t really change anything – the cat may drop dead from old ages or disease before the box is open. Once again we cannot know the live/dead status of the cat until we open the box.

So, what is special about opening the box? Well, the “when” is very important if we consider the usual case with the scientific gadgets in the box. If we open the box early we are more likely to find the cat alive. If we open it later it is more likely that the cat will be dead. Extinct. Shuffled the mortal coil.

So it is the probability of atomic decay leading to the cat’s death that is changing. It may be 70% likely that cat is dead, so if we could repeat the experiment 1000s of times 7/10th of the time the cat is dead, and 3/10th of the time the cat is still alive. Yeah, cat!! (There’s also a possibility that the experimenter gets a whiff of cyanide and dies, but let’s ignore that.)

But after the box is opened, the cat is 100% alive or 100% dead. Apparently. How did that happen? Some people claim that something mysterious called “the collapse of the waveform” happened. I don’t think that really explains anything.

The same thing happens in the real world. If I don’t check my lotto tickets I’m in a superposition state of having won a fortune and not having won a fortune. When I check them I find I haven’t won anything. Again! I must stop buying them. They are a waste of money.

The many worlds hypothesis gets around this by postulating the splitting of the world into two worlds whenever a situation like this arises. After I check my lotto ticket there are two worlds, one where I am a winner and one where I am not. How can I move to the world where I’m a millionaire? It doesn’t seem fair that I stuck here with two worthless bits of paper. does it?

And what does the probability mean? In the lotto case it is 1 in an astronomical number that I come out a winner and almost 1 that I get nothing. In the cat case it may be 60/40 or 70/30, and in the cat case it changes over time.

If the world splits every time a probabilistic situation arises, then the probabilities don’t actually mean much. What difference does it make if a situation is “more probable” than another situation if both situations come about in the multiverse regardless? It doesn’t seem that it is a meaningful attribute of the branches. What does it mean, in this model that branch A is three times more likely than branch B? Somehow a continuum (probability) reduces to a binary choice (A or B).

We could consider that the split is not a split at all, but that reality, the universe, whatever, has another dimension, that of probability. Imagine your worldline, a worm travelling through the dimensions of space and the new one of probability. You open the box and lo! Your worldline continues, and the cat is now dead or alive, but not both.

But which way does it go? That is determined purely by the probabilities, by the throw of the cosmic dice, but once it chooses a path, then there is no other possibility. In the space dimensions you can only be in one place at a time. If you are at A you cannot be at B, and similarly in the probability dimension, if you are at P you cannot be at Q.

However any point P (the cat is still alive!) is merely a point on the probability line. There are an uncountable number of points where the cat is alive and also an uncountable number of points where the cat is deceased. But the ratio between the two parts of the line is the probability of the cat’s survival.

Virtually real

Reputedly the French avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud took the view that illusion was not distinct from reality, advocating that spectators at a play should suspend disbelief and regard the drama on stage as reality. We do, in fact do this all the time.

From the slightly different perspective as spectators we watch our films and our soaps and our nature programs and we enter the reality shown on the screen while ignoring , to a large extent, what is going on around us. We even turn down the lights so that the brighter reality on the screen dominates. We cry for the characters, we laugh for and at them, we cheer their successes even though, at some level we realise that they are not “real”.

When we go to the cinema, we get the same thing only stronger, bigger and brighter. The theatre sound system knocks dust from the pelmets and detaches spider from the roof. The screen is so wide and we are so close that we are thrust deep into the action. The 5 metre high image of a face 15 metres away makes the same angle in the eye as a 200mm high face at arms length.

But we don’t need technology to enter a different reality. In a book we read of heroes and heroines, ogres and business men, of warfare and love making, of atoms and galaxies, of amoeba and star clouds. We use our imagination to enter their worlds and we get lost in them. We may beg, buy, borrow or steal a “page turner”, a book that we have to read through to the end, to find out the fate of the characters in it. We may purchase a travel book and visit in the imagination lands that we will never physically visit.

Photographs draw us in, religious books promise us heaven or hell, text books inform us and guide us, map books (or GPS) show us the way from A to B. Our games enter us into a different reality, sometimes one where it is kill or be killed, or where we get lost in a maze, or where we simply have to solve a puzzle. Games introduce us to a multilevel reality – we first enter the reality of the computer or PlayStation or XBox, or Nintendo, then we enter the reality of the game within the device.

Of course we may prefer old style board games like chess. Imagine a world that consists of 32 black and 32 white squares and black and white player pieces, which, quantum like, can only exist in one square at a time and when captured, cease to exist, so far as the reality of the chessboard is concerned. Players enter this reality in their minds and navigate their pieces in a war of black versus white, which starts with a given configuration and ends when the contest is decided, then returns like a cyclic Big Bang to the original configuration.

The fact that we can embed one reality (the fictional) inside another (the real) leads to the idea of an infinite regression of realities. In “The Matrix“, which I have never seen(!), Neo’s supposed reality turns out to be a simulation, and the real world is much more unpleasant than the supposed reality (not that unpleasant things don’t happen to Neo and others in the supposed reality).

The mathematician, the logician, the philosopher says “Only two?” If there are two realities, could it be possible that there are more? Maybe the real world of the Matrix is itself a simulation. Maybe that simulation is a simulation.

So we end up with the possibility of an infinite series of nested realities. There is one thing about the realities that I’ve been talking about though and that is that they are in our minds. If that pattern were to apply, every one of the nested realities would be in a mind. In the case of the Matrix Neo’s reality was imposed on his mind from outside, as it was for every other human in the Matrix.

The really clever thing about the Matrix was not that it was imposed on every human’s mind, but that it integrated all inputs from all the human minds into a consistent whole. For instance, if Neo sees a door and opens it, this information has to update the Matrix, and get downloaded into the minds of all the others in the Matrix, such as Trinity, who is waiting on the other side of the door.

That’s an impressive feat! The updating of the Matrix by all the human minds and the broadcasting of it back to all human minds is a much more impressive task than creating the Matrix in the first place. It is several orders of magnitude harder.

For instance, consider the immersive and interactive virtual realities which we have built and which generally involve the wearing of special gear such as VR helmets and VR gloves and connection to a fast computer which holds the information about the VR “world”.

If there are two individuals using the VR “world” at the same time, when Player One raises his hand, the information is fed to the computer and updates the VR “world”. Player Two’s view of the world has to be updated to show the avatar of Player One with his hand raised. If there are even more players all moving around the problem becomes much worse. Each player’s updates need to be fed to all other players (or all the “close” players to each player). The traffic rises exponentially.

But most of the time we don’t need fully immersive virtual reality to achieve a virtual reality. A simple book can do it. A movie can do it, probably even better. A play will do it too. All it requires is the suspension of disbelief, and the ability of the mind to draw pictures and fill in the gaps. It may be apparent to a person who walks in on the performance that Inspector Goole is only an actor, as are the member of the cast. The set is not really the sitting room of the Birlings, but a roughly painted lath and hardboard approximation.

But in the minds of the audience, for the duration of the play, J. B Priestly gives them a view into a different reality. One that is not fully immersive, but which uses the power of the human mind.

Trickle, Brook, Stream, River

When it rains water collects in little puddles and hollows in the uneven earth. Sometimes the water sinks into dirt until the dirt can hold no more and the water forms the puddle. If the rain continues to fall it forms a surface, rippled and blown by the wind. The puddle may be muddy, or it may be clear depending on whether the water is stirred enough by the wind or by an animal or maybe by a child, wrapped up for the weather and wearing rubber or plastic boots.

Some rain falls at altitude in mountains or hills and falls on rocks, trickling down into cracks and crevices. Some rain falls on plants and is absorbed or runs down to the roots and is absorbed by them. Such rain takes the shortcut back into the air as the plant pumps it to the leaves and it is expired into the air.

Much of the rain that falls is not seen again for a while. It trickles through the soil, through open spaces between and within rocks. Some it soaks into cracks which take it deep within the earth to aquifers which can hold the water for years, decades, or centuries. Some it soaks into soft and soluble rocks like limestone and can form caverns underground. Sometimes this water evaporates underground and creates the beautiful rock forms that we can stalactites or stalagmites.

Some of the water remains on the surface and is joined by water seeping through the soil or the rocks to form little streams. The visible part of the stream is not all there is to a stream. Most streams have rocky or pebbly beds, or gravel or sand beds and water flows through those, as well as the free-flowing visible water. Indeed, some streams are not visible at the surface with the water running under the pebbly bed. Unless the stream is in flood that is, when the water fills the channel perhaps to overflowing.

Up in the mountains or the hills the small trickles of water tumble over or under the rocks and gradually merge to form small streams. Water oozes from wet soil and sometimes springs from rocks where the aquifers reach the surface. Rocks stick up through the water, little waterfalls chute the water in glistening curves and air mixes with the water to produce little white water patches. Vegetation hangs over the little streams, moistened by the stream and dripping water back into. Water loving mosses abound, and trees dip their roots.

The stream is continually renewing. This is not the same steam that you saw here yesterday. That water has flowed on perhaps by now reaching the sea. This water was yesterday floating in the sky in the form of a fluffy white cloud, or a grey dense cloud, or merely as an unseen vapour, measured only by humidity. Gravity’s imperative call pulls the water down from the hill.

There may be life in the water. Small insects and similar tiny organisms survive in the tumbling water, and even smaller little animals, from single cells animalcules to tiny multi celled beings live in it. They creep over the rocks and pebbles, feeding on debris that falls into the water or on little plants that also cling to the rocks, or each other.

As the stream progresses downhill it gathers more and more water from tributary trickles and merging flows. It deepens and flows over rocks which higher up it would have flowed around. Pools form and pools make it easier for life to exists. Maybe crustaceans and fish could now be lurking in the pools and even in the deeper less turbulent flows. Such life would also attract birds such as ducks.

All this life lives on a knife edge. A sudden storm upstream may swell the flow to many times the normal rate, moving rocks and boulders and even reshaping the banks of the stream. This would be a disaster for the wildlife in the stream sweeping it downstream and out of its usual environment into areas to which it is not adapted. Such storm events shape the little streams much more than the every day trickle.

A stream which I’m describing has a steep course. It may sweep past last stones and boulders and drop many metres for each dozen or so metres traversed. In many places it will reach places where the underlying geology changes and a waterfall forms or a cascade. A cascade is where the stream drops several metres in a short distance and the bed is full of boulders and rocks which may be totally or partial covered by the stream.

A waterfall usually drop into a pool caused by the water falling on and removing rocks and boulders. The spectacle of the drop and the pool makes it very attractive and people will sometimes hike for miles to see a waterfall.

As the stream becomes a river it becomes more placid. More life lives in it, it is broader and deeper. We can fish in it, float boats on it, and use it as a highway. We often live by rivers as they generally follow the easiest route through a sometimes tricky landscape. Large cities are more often than not found on rivers for this reason. Farmers on the banks of a big river want to trade with people up of downstream.

We tend to forget, in these days when we travel mainly by road, that rivers were once the prime highways, and indeed our principle roads frequently follow the route of a river.

As a river reaches lower altitudes it become more placid, as I have mentioned. People live next to it, and so they are in danger of flooding if a storm hits up river. A river is constrained by nature banks, but these many be breached. Consequently we have tamed many rivers, building large earthworks to constrain it to its usual course in the case of floods. However, the flooding of a river and the bursting of its banks deposits nutrients on to the soils around the river.

The ancient Egyptians knew this and worked with the annual flooding of the Nile. They developed geometry and mathematics to reinstate farm boundaries after floods. They also developed a legal system at least in part to legislate the inevitable disputes.