Hello!

You may have noticed a deluge of shorter blog posts over the past week. They’re not quite stream-of-consciousness, but they’re also not quite refined, finalised, percolated-into-the-crystal-goblet cogent ideas. Which is kind of apt really, because I’m just churning things over at the moment. Flitting specks of knowledge begin to form into ideas — and then spin away into the corners of my mind. They re-emerge a few days or weeks later — usually when I’m sitting on the toilet — and only then do they start to make sense.

What I’m trying to say is: I’m currently a gargantuan, hairy ape chock-full of knowledge, but almost bereft of useful ideas. I’m sure they’ll come, when they’re ready, but I’m more than happy to keep absorbing knowledge in the meantime!

So, since we last spoke, I’ve read three of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Slaughterhouse 5, Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle — in that order. Maybe you have to be high on LSD  to fully appreciate Breakfast of Champions, or heavily into meta-fiction… or something. Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle were both superb however. I don’t think Slaughterhouse 5 is as anti-war as people make it out to be. Anti-humanity, maybe. I also wish that he actually gave his books proper endings, rather than just fizzling out. Still, he does have his moments of perfectly-observed brilliance — especially in Slaughterhouse 5. I’ve picked out one passage to share. It’s long, but so it goes:

There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too. They couldn’t imagine what time looked like to him. Billy had given up on explaining that. The guide outside had to explain as best he could.

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.

This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, And there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.

The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped-went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, ‘That’s life.’

You’d need to have read the book for this to fully make sense, but basically: Billy sees the world in three dimensions; Talfamadorians experience the world in four. The entire passage feels like it’s dedicated to the bullheaded blindness of humanity.

Anyway, with Vonnegut out of the way (I really wish he’d written more short stories — he’s better at those), I’ve now moved onto Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The first 40 or 50 pages consisted of two introductions by irritating I-know-longer-words-than-you-ner-ner-ner scholars, and then a retrospective introduction by Aldous himself. After three nights, I’m finally onto page 2 of the book itself!

* * *

In other news, I passed my driving theory test again. 50 out of 50! I also booked my driving test for September! I’ll be going to Wales for 4 days — three days of intensive tuition, followed by a test on the final day. Exciting!

I’ve also booked my flights to Montenegro, for the end of July. I’ll spare you the exhaustive history of the country — instead, have a pretty photo of the Bay of Kotor:

And unlike drizzly, grey, underwhelming Norway, I’m almost guaranteed good weather! Yay July! Yay Mediterranean!

… I might even be a celibate gay like him too at this rate. (Though, with one of my cousins now successfully married off, there is slightly less pressure on me to, er, perform… in the Jewish sense…)

Anyway, the genius, polymath, inimitable and generally-awesome Stephen Fry twittered a link to a 30-minute video interview. Ostensibly, from the title, it’s some kind of retrospective… but it really isn’t. Stephen spends half an hour giving us a succinct and hyperacute overview of life on Earth. It’s almost like a sermon: what to avoid, how to behave and other little nuggets of info.

The scary bit, at least for me, is that we seem to share almost identical ideologies. As he spoke, it felt like it could’ve been me in 30 years. Very, very weird — but cool!

(Americans: you probably don’t know Stephen Fry. If you’ve heard of Blackadder, he was in that. He also spent most of his early career alongside Hugh Laurie of ‘House’ fame — they’re bestest friends, even.)

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll probably notice quite a few common strains between Fry and I.

It’s also very satisfying, and calming, to realise that I’m on the right path. I don’t want to spout all that usual crap about quarter-life crises, but there is definitely a gap between finding your feet between 18 and 25, and then learning to fly. Very satisfying indeed.

* * *
In unrelated other-than-first-name news Stephen Hawking’s new TV show (Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking) has just finished airing on the Discovery Channel. You can wait a while and the DVDs, or download it from reputable BitTorrent sites. The first part on aliens was excellent; the bit on time-travel was a bit boring (I’ve heard it all before) — and the last segment on The Story of Everything looks like it’ll be amazing (but I haven’t seen it yet!)

(You’ve all watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos by now, right?)

(The title is said with the same meter as ‘planes, trains and automobiles’, if you were wondering. When it’s written like that it sounds like this post will only contain planes — and that’s a lie. True, there will be lots of planes… but also a little musing. So even if you don’t like planes, read on!)

[There are photos of planes further down, if you want to cut straight to the goodies.]

It was my birthday on Tuesday! I am now 26. I have turned the ankle of my first half-century. To celebrate, we went north to Cambridge and to the Imperial War Museum Duxford. Duxford is an airport and has been for a long time. It saw very little action during World War II, but it still went through the motions. It has a control room, a war room — mission control — with wooden sticks and blocks representing its fighter squadrons. Today though, it’s just a museum with lots and lots of planes!

Now… let’s get this out of the way. I’m by no means an airplane nerd. Seriously — I don’t have a geekrection for any specific kind of vehicle. I’ve never spotted trains. I don’t go to motor shows. True, I like sailing, driving, the thrill of speed — but… that’s it. I’m an end-user, a consumer… which is really odd, if you know me. I’m anything but a damn consumer: I’m an engineer! A tinkerer! A geek! I actually learnt how to make a computer and how to program it before I first played video games! It is, to be quite frank, a miracle that I avoided becoming a train or plane nerd.

Until Sunday, until the Imperial War Museum, until I ran my hands over the cold titanium alloy fuselage of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Mmmm.

Planes, you see, are the pinnacle of technology. Not the pinnacle of contemporary society, but 50 years ago they were the most complicated and expensive tools ever made by man. Even by today’s high tech standard, the money spent on weapons of war dreamt up in the 50s dwarfs anything made today. Did you know that in 1944 the USA spent 38% of its entire GDP on military? Today it’s 4%. Wars are fantastic for creativity — invent and live, wane and die.

Look at it another way: the first EVER manned flight was 1903. It lasted 12 seconds! By 1945 we were flying at 350 miles per hour and dropping atomic bombs — I would have loved to have lived during the industrial revolution, or worked as an engineer during the war. But World War II isn’t the reason we’re able to fly cheaply across the world today — no, it’s because of the Cold War!

That’s the crazy bit — most of the planes we fly today — civilian and military! — were designed in the 50s and 60s. The 747, THE jumbo jet, was conceived in 1963 — the 737 in 1964. The 727 is from the frickin’ 50s! The SR-71, the beautiful Blackbird, uses a turbo/ram-jet combination capable of propelling the plane to three times the speed of sound — and it was made in 1958! 1903: 4mph. 1958: 2300mph. Holy shit.

Anyway… I just thought it was cool that until we master space travel, we’ll probably continue to use planes that were designed just after World War II. With the Cold War behind us our focus has shifted from imininent war and mutually-assured destruction to… the Internet. Can you imagine using computers that were made in the 50s and 60s? But get this — if war had continued and our attention remained focused on planes and other terrifying weapons of war, we probably would still be using room-sized computers and punch cards.

With that prelude out of the way, here are some airplane photos. Jet fighters! Strategic nuclear bombers! Missile defence! Something for everyone — or at least something for the plane nerds…

(The Memphis Belle!)

(I’ll hit the brakes, he’ll fly right by!)

(It’s hard to find a penis extension when you’re my size… but the B-52… well… that would do nicely)

(Looks like something you’d find in Shadowrun or some kind of steampunk setting, eh? Crazy. Beautiful.)

(The weather was brooding, the storm ready to strike.)

(War-time poster art rules!)

* * *

I actually have even more plane photos, but that’s enough for now… maybe a few more later today.

I had this crazy idea just before I fell asleep a few days ago. What if… what if consumable art and media was proportionally priced?

What if music CDs had a sliding scale of cost, from $5 through to $20, depending on your current net disposable income? What if a student could buy a video game for $10, while an affluent worker must pay $50 for the same product?

I’ll just get this out of the way at the start: is this a completely crazy idea?

I’ve been churning it over for a few days and nights now and I fail to see an obvious flaw.

The implementation wouldn’t be easy. You have to stop students selling their copies to affluent workers. You would have to keep track of everyone’s disposable income.

But these are problems with workable solutions! You might not like exposing your disposable income, but you could always make the system opt-in: don’t expose your income and you simply pay the full price. Your ‘price band’ could easily be stored on your credit card or similar: you wouldn’t have to tell the store clerk how much you earn. As for selling your cheap copy to someone in a higher price band… we’re now into the domain where this system would truly excel: the digital, online domain.

Yes, I’m talking about digital rights management: a dirty term with an awful reputation. But hang in there. You would have to expose your identity, and thus your price band, while online. The online shop — Steam, Amazon, etc. — would have to know who’s using the computer to make the purchase. There lots of single sign-on systems available (Facebook, OpenID, etc.) that could be used for this purpose. Again, the only additional info you are exposing is your net disposable income.

As with all digital distribution methods, there are loopholes. Yes, MP3s will still be pirated, but that’s not the point — this system isn’t about destroying piracy, it’s about creating a new sales market. iTunes and Steam have proven without doubt that people want to pay for the music and games that they enjoy. A student with no money isn’t going to save up to buy a $20 album when they can pirate it for free. If a student can buy the same album for $5, surely everyone wins?

Now replace ’student’ with ‘anyone not living in a Western country’. A vast percentage of worldwide piracy occurs outside of Western nations. In Malaysia you can buy a $50 video game, or feed yourself for a month. What if you could buy the game and feed yourself at the same time?

There are more advantages too! Proportionally priced art and media is the ideal hook. The poor students of today will become the rich workers of tomorrow. Hook them on $5 for an album and they won’t baulk at spending $20 when they have the money. With your disposable income exposed, either via your online identity or your credit card, there is also the opportunity to price anything using a sliding scale: Tesco or Walmart could offer cheaper bread and pasta to those with lower incomes; EasyJet could offer 10 cheap plane tickets for students on every flight — richer people could be charged more…

Despite what it looks like, this isn’t actually a system for squeezing more money out of the consumer. This is an enabling system. Intellectual property should not be arbitrarily priced. A book or CD or DVD should not have the same price across the world just because the words and music have the same inherent value. I won’t go as far as to say that humans have a right to art, media and culture but I do think they should be accessible to everyone: that’s what this system sets out to accomplish.

I went for a jog earlier!

I don’t own any trainers, nor training pants… or vests… or a portable music player. In fact, it’s safe to say I don’t own any kind of exercise-related tedium-reducing paraphernalia. But I do own shoes, and shorts, and t-shirts — I did the laces up tightly in the hope of increasing ankle support. I think it worked.

Ankle support was the least of my worries, anyway. My main concern, actually, was passing out. Or haemorrhaging. Collapsed in a bush somewhere, discovered at some later date by a farmer, or my stupid fat pet cat. And I’m not overreacting, that’s the sad thing: the last time I had a run-in with this fabled ‘exercise’ beastie, about six years ago, I blacked out. I used to cycle a lot, when I was younger. It was the only way to see my friends, because we live in the middle of nowhere. Then my friends left; I have very few friends now, outside of the digital realm. No friends, no fitness. That’s how, six years ago, I ended up blacking out — I tried to cycle into town. Bit off more than I could chew. Ended up falling off my bike about half way.

But, as it turned out, losing consciousness was also the least of my concerns.

Man boobs. Man boobs were the main stumbling block to jogging. Well, not actual stumbling blocks — they don’t hang that low — but… they jiggle. Seriously. Enough to pull me off balance and slightly out of step. Tick, tock-tock, tick, tock-tock… Maybe I have my technique all wrong — I mean, I haven’t run since I was 15 or something, when I was forced to play football; forced and bullied. But how hard is it? One foot in front of the other, heavy but firm THUD! footfalls, arms swinging, synchronized… but my boobs! Swinging! Bouncing! Unrestricted and fancy free! I tried tensing my chest muscles — pecs? — to tighten the region… but… I don’t have any.

Eventually, after pondering if this would be the closest I ever get to a young teenage girl (they’re surprisingly heavy!), I got on with it. My pulse quickened to a pace that my muscles and arterial walls haven’t experienced in months… years. I tried slowing down for a bit, walking the same distance I’d jogged. Up and down our road. I jogged some more — about 10 minutes, all told! — but eventually my leg muscles gave up. Lack of oxygen, I guess.

I didn’t pass out! I felt nauseous, though. Limited by my weak heart and weighty boobs I didn’t even exercise long enough to break a sweat. But there’s always tomorrow! I will get stronger! I will perspire!

* * *

I’m writing this at about 1am and I can hardly keep my eyes open. I blame the jogging thing for tiring me out! Lots of fragmented sentences, I know. Will write some more when I’m less tired! Oh, that’s not me in the picture, by the way…

Are you ready?

Things are going to change around here. I’m not quite sure how yet, but I thought I’d get it out in the open – that’s what blogs are good for, after all.

Things are… different. In my head. Thoughts aren’t lining themselves up in the same way they used to. It’s unnerving. It’s hard to explain, to you, when the right words won’t come — it’s a bit Catch-22 like that (the book, incidentally, still lays unfinished by my bed).

I don’t feel bad exactly, but off-balance. Where ideas and concepts would once slot themselves neatly together into cogent thoughts, there is now an incoalescent ether. It’s a lot darker than it used to be. There’s less hope, less points of starlight in the fabric — not for me, but…

It’s hard to explain, as I said.

It’s not like I’m sad. It might even be physical — God knows I need to work on my cardiac fitness. Maybe it’s because my diet in Norway was bad. I was fine in Norway… but the moment I got home things shifted! And I don’t know why! That’s scary.

So, as to the blog, it’s not going anywhere. I’m going to change it up a bit. I’m going to get outside more, away from my vast array of computer screens. I’m thinking of writing short stories. Fables… cautionary tales; meaty, dark warnings of what’s to come.

I’m worried, basically — but not for myself. About the world, I think; its future. Perhaps it’s the travelling. Maybe I’ve finally seen and experienced enough to fill and tip the trough — is it the ripples I’m feeling now? I need to try and shape this malaise into something useful, that’s all I know.

* * *

In other, less dour news, I’ve been doing some more filming with my new camera! I’m starting to get the hang of this ‘videographer‘ thing. It’s a lot more complicated than photography (but given how easy photography is, that’s not saying much). I’ve ordered a broadcast-quality stereo microphone that I can attach to the camera — you’ll finally hear my true voice! — and I’m also building a new computer to do video/audio editing on… exciting!

Here’s some recent video links: a smoky, hazy, windy fire, and some daffodils rustling in the wind (both are experiments at wide-open apertures in bright light — cool huh?!)

* * *

Finally, there will be more stories and reflection from Norway! I still haven’t shared all of my photos either — and if you fancy a piece of Sebby-captured Norway, I’ve listed one photo for sale on my online gallery. I’ll be listing a few more in the days to come. Until then…

This is what I call a missed opportunity.

Standing at the highest point around, stuck behind trees. No way out, no clear view of the fjord. A soft, tangerine glow reflecting off the water and filling the air. Stuck behind trees. Evening birds tweeting, my friend gently tugging at my arm, leading us towards our destination. ‘But the fjord’s over theeere!’ I swear, I can stick out my bottom lip like a frackin’ petulant heroine when necessary.

To put this gold and crystalline, clear sunset into perspective: out of 18 days in Norway, only one of them was fully clear — my last. That’s when this photo was taken.

Actually, I tell a lie. As I sat on the bus, heading towards the airport at 5 in the morning, the most beautiful dawn I’ve ever seen greeted me. But of course my camera was in damn my bag, in the hold of the bus… another missed opportunity. Blah!

I may have to invest in a high-quality compact camera that I can keep in my trouser pocket…

Many years ago, I used to rant. Before this blog, and a few years before my stint on LiveJournal, I used to write rants. In fact, that was all I would write, for some reason. I don’t remember being a particularly angst-ridden teenager; I think it was more about being smart. ‘Ooh, he has such passionate and informed opinions!’ — who cares if I swore a lot and used viscerally-tinged analogy like a foamingly rabid dog, eh?

Somewhere along the line, probably at university, I learnt how to vocalize my thoughts in a more intelligent fashion. I think it’s because I was suddenly surrounded by thousands of people that I’d never argued with. That’s not to say I was particularly challenged at university, but after 16 years of same-old-same-old it was refreshing. The main thing, for me, is differing view points and opinions. Part of me (the scientist) hopes that ‘absolute knowledge’ is attainable; but the realist knows that there is just the world – and myriad interpretations thereof. We all see the world differently, and machines and measuring devices see the world in yet other unfathomable ways.

It has become my job (or purpose) to gather up all of those views and opinions to create a valid representation or model of the world we live in. After all, what good is science if human nature doesn’t agree with it? There might be some joyous, divine apotheosis of science and the amalgamation of views in the future — but that’s the future. For now, I will try to understand humankind’s interpretation of the universe we occupy. It’ll take a while, and it’ll involve a lot of travel, but fortunately I’m a patient man that likes taking photos — that’s three birds with one stone!

But back to the topic at hand. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, I lost my anger. I have buckets of aggression, but no anger. Unbridled passion, but no anger. I haven’t a clue where it’s gone. Most of you have never experienced me when I ‘get going’ in real life — it’s pretty odd, I get louder, I speak faster and with more intent… but I smile as I do it! Get this: I can’t grimace or frown. I’ve tried to frown many times, but it just doesn’t work. I don’t actually have the muscles for it.

I wonder if this is what the Buddhist idea of Nirvana feels like. (I’m not going to flesh that idea out any further… at least not today…)

I don’t know where this is going. It was meant to be something about why I’m so calm, and seemingly rather wise. I think this post stems from the fact that someone recently misconstrued my aggression for anger, which irked me because they’re very different emotions. I’ve never hit anyone, for example; nor have I ever been in a fight. You only need to look at the differing derivations: anger comes from Ancient Greek ‘to choke or squeeze’; aggression comes from Latin ‘to approach, address, attack’. Anger is all about sadness, sorrow and a rage that doesn’t abate. Aggression is about meeting the world head on, sometimes with a resounding clash.

Why strangle someone when you can just address the situation instead?

That makes me sound rather boring and sensible.

Healthcare (or health care if you’re a colonial) means different things to different people. Depending on where you live, your background and your income, it might be synonymous with either insurance or the treatment of illness — and in some cases, it can even mean the public health of a nation or zone.

It’s important to think about these three things as separate entities: despite prevailing culture, you can’t mix up health insurance with the actual treatment of illness — they can both exist, but must be independent of each other. Health insurance, in countries without publicly-funded systems, is simply the way health care is paid for. In countries with ‘universal coverage’ like the UK, health insurance is used to pay for private care, or ‘complementary medicine’ (i.e. new/weird science). Public health is the overarching effort to improve health through improved knowledge and awareness, such as eating five portions of vegetables a day, ‘got milk?’, and so on.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s tuck in.

Healthcare is vital in the most true sense of the word. Without it we would die, immediately in a blaze of flame, or in a laboriously drawn-out fashion — it doesn’t matter: health care stops us from dying. Healthcare is so vital (there’s that word again) that about 10% of a Western nation’s GDP — 10% of its entire income — is spent on it. Some would argue that’s a small price to pay, for longevity of life. By comparison, most nations spend between 2 and 4% of their GDP on military/defence, and education comes in at about 5-7% of a nation’s GDP. So, as you can see, and have no doubt heard from Obama, health care is the biggest human issue.

But it’s all a damn mess; a horrible void of misunderstanding and overspending. And it all derives from a ‘knowledge gap’, between the doctor and the patient. The same can be said for most professions, but with healthcare the distance is most significant. Even if you don’t know the basic fundamentals of household plumbing, or how data traverses the Internet, you can still sleep soundly at night. But what if you’ve just been told you have cancer? Or that you’re being treated with Interferon beta-1a? You get a little jumpy, a little nervous — because you might die.

If we’ve learnt anything about the human body in the last 100 years, it’s that we should fear the inevitable onrush of death. Somewhere along the line we made the switch from ‘the most rugged and tenacious mammal on the planet’ to ‘wuss’. We used to live — and die. Now there are many more steps on the meter: alive, stressed, ill, broken, comatose, dead — and thousands more slotted in between.

Something doesn’t make sense. Why are we more afraid of our health now than 100 years ago? I’m not saying no one cared about death back then — people certainly put a lot of effort into making sure things were left tidy, and that the relevant gods would receive them into the afterlife — but it was just part of living. I think it has something to do with knowledge, and thus certainty and confidence. If you’re brought up with the knowledge that you will die by the age of 60 and you will die if you mistreat your body, that’s some stable knowledge that you can operate with. You can go out and live life.

What do we know about life and death today? Do you know how long you will live for, or if the quality of your life is assured? If I eat this burger, will it shorten my life — does that even matter? Should I be worried about senility, or will biotechnology/biopharmacy save me from that feckless fate?

It’s pretty weird to be confused about your own mortality, eh? A long, healthy life is the single most desirable wish — yet it is the one thing we are most uncertain about! I want to tie this in to the downfall of faith/belief and the rescinded promise of eternal (after)life, but I’m not sure I can yet — but it would make sense that, up until the last century, death was just been a temporary setback… but now it’s personal. (I kid, I kid, but you get the idea.)

To fix this problem, we need to close the gap between bleeding-edge research, the doctors, and us. We have to know more about our bodies and what they’re capable of; education obviously ties in at this point. I think we’re regularly reminded, and amazed, by what humans are capable of and how resilient we are — but at the same time, we have never been more aware of just how defenceless we ultimately are. Back then, we just died. No one knew why, we just died.

Now we die of cancer, heart disease, sclerosis, embolism — all invisible, all able to pounce at any time with little or no warning. But they’ve always been there, just like gravity or hydrogen. If we want to live long and healthy lives, we must teach about healthcare in schools. We must learn more about the body than the knee bone’s connection to the thigh bone, more than veins and arteries — like ancient Rome and Athens, education must be contemporary and hot on the heels of research.