First, a little derivation of one of the most recognisable phrases in modern English. ‘Till death us do part’ is one of a few phrases from the Book of Common Prayer. Along with the works of Shakespeare and the King James bible, these three works form the basis of English as we know it today.

I just looked up the full title, it’s one hell of a mouthful: The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church according to the use of the Church of England together with the Psalter or Psalms of David pointed as they are to be sung or said in churches and the form and manner of making, ordaining, and consecrating of bishops, priests, and deacons. I guess that didn’t fit on the front cover (it must’ve been horrible to copy out in full, back before printing presses were invented), so it’s known simply as ‘The Book of Common Prayer’ today.

It seems that the book was written and revised a few times around the 1500s and then majorly in 1662. The point is, I’m not sure who actually penned the famous phrases. I guess, much like the Bible, no one really knows who wrote it. It just kind of… appeared on paper. A great example of divine will at work, I guess…

Much like the works of Shakespeare and passages from King James Bible, phrases from the Common Prayer Book have actually become part of our language. Today, many people use phrases such as ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace’, or ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ without really knowing where they came from; we heard them as children, or more commonly nowadays in popular media. They are very religious phrases indeed; they stem from some of the oldest Christian rites!

Anyway, using a line from the marriage liturgy was perhaps a little disingenuous, as I actually want to write about the complete opposite of marriage: death. Perhaps the ‘Earth to earth’ phrase would’ve been a better choice… Oh well!

For those of you that are following me on Twitter you might be aware that a few days ago my great uncle died. Now, being the lucky kind of guy that I am, this is actually the first death I’ve had in my immediate family, discounting my grandmother that died when I was quite young (and I wasn’t very close to). Tomorrow I will attend his memorial service, and on Thursday I will attend my very first funeral.

‘What will the mood be?’ I asked the world in general, when I found out I would be attending a funeral. ‘Bittersweet’ came the reply from my friends. Instantly, being a connoisseur of dark chocolate, my mind hopped, skipped and jumped back to the sensations I experienced while eating my very first piece of 99% cocoa Lindt chocolate. Now, I have to tell you that my first piece was enjoyed in the presence of The American, so my senses were perhaps just a little skewed, but the experience was… unique. But what I do remember clearly, once I strip out the fuzzy, love-fuelled memories, was a moment — a brief, fleeting explosion — of dark and powerful intensity. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was intense.

That’s what I imagine the funeral will be like: dark and intense, but swiftly followed by clarity and the brightness of things to come. Once our farewells have been said and our prayers delivered I hope the sadness and loss that hangs over the ceremony like a cloud will simply waft away. He’s gone and the darkness of his death will be quickly be replaced by the sparkling possibilities of tomorrow.

If anything does in fact remain after death, it will certainly be his wise, gently-nagging Jewish rasping voice whispering time-tested advice into our ears!

Looking forward though, even if the day itself is veiled with sadness, I know he will be happy knowing that he brought the entire family together again. People will come from all over the world — hundreds of people — to remember a great man, a man that was dearly loved by many and respected by all.

Discussing the funeral itself, I posed a rather silly question to my mother:

‘Mum, can I go to the funeral with my half-good-half-evil beard? I’ll be able to mourn with one side, and be happy with the other at the end!’

‘No, Seb, don’t be silly; there might be some nice girls there that you can marry!’

Jewish to the very end!

If you like what you've read, or seen, or heard, subscribe to my RSS feed!

Alternatively, if you're new here, you might want to find out more about me, the author. Or perhaps you want to hear a posh Brit rant on about anything and everything (podcasts), or you want to read something more serious?

No, it’s not a review… I haven’t actually seen the film — I probably should… — but I know enough about it to make my OWN!

The premise: a list of things that you’d like to do before you ‘kick the bucket’ (die, for you non-idiomatic types).

I know it’s a flogged-to-death idea, but the thing is… I want to do a lot. If I don’t write down what I want to do, I’m going to forget something. I’m like a kid that sees a butterfly outside, opens the door, stumbles and shambles across towards the butterfly… and then spots a football on the ground, so I run towards that, pace quickening, but before I get there, I trip and fall, face-planting into the soft grass — but that’s OK, I’m now up-close and personal with an ant hill, I’m watching the ants scurry around, living a completely different life to mine. I crawl around for a while and there are worms, rabbit holes, acorns and dead leaves, each one interesting and magical in its own way.

I smile and pick myself up, still marvelling at the other world I’d just discovered.  The butterfly’s flown off and I’ve completely forgotten about the ball, but the journey wasn’t in vain.

I’m an impulsive guy. I think of something I want to do, and do it. I see something or someone that I want, and go and get it. Incidentally, in the words of my mother: ‘Sebastian, you are the single worst person in the world to buy a birthday present for because you’ve already got everything.‘ (It’s my birthday next week, by the way, and I’ve been kind enough this year to leave a couple of things unobtained, just so my mother has an easier time of it…)

The problem with being impulsive is those butterflies get away. Those footballs remain unkicked. I might have an incredibly diverse body of knowledge tucked away in my head, and a lot of worldwide, well-tested wisdom — but sometimes I let the simple things pass me by. When I die, I don’t want to be the authority on ‘Invertebrates In The Sub-Amazonian Delta’ (actually, that’s a lie, I’d love to be the authority on anything, but hang on). When I die, I want to have experienced everything. No matter how big or how small, how expensive or cheap, how important or frivolous — the world has so much to offer, and I don’t want to pass any of it by.

And that’s what my bucket list is for.

Sebastian’s Bucket List

N.B. I reserve the right to re-shuffle this list at any time. I also don’t have to justify any of my choices, though I might be convinced to do so at a later date. This list is also not exhaustive… I’m sure I’ll come across more ‘Oooh shiny!’ butterflies as life goes on. Lots more.

1. Get married in a large cathedral –  we’re talking St Paul’s Cathedral, or St Peter’s Basilica. May entertain the idea of moving to a state like Utah where multiple marriages are acceptable, if potential secondary wife has contacts that enable use of aforementioned cathedrals… (do I have to marry a Princess/Queen?)
2. Live in a castle, one with turrets and multiple wings – a wing for my parents… and an even more distant wing for the in-laws. A turret that I can stand atop and survey my kingdom, like in The Lion King.
3. Lunch with a comedian — don’t mind which, I just want to see who’s funnier in person: me or them. For the longest time, I wanted to have a date with Eddie Izzard, but his recent Twitterings suggest he might be a bit… dull when he’s not being a comic genius on stage.
4. Hold a tiger/lion cub – don’t judge me. Boys want to do this too! Admittedly, an emasculated boy, but…
5. Go back to Italy and eat more pizza — this will make more sense after I write about my trip to Italy, and my 10-day epic journey full of trials and tribulations in an effort to find the BEST PIZZA IN THE WORLD.
6. Obtain some kind of super power – a little out there, but I firmly believe I’m of the generation that will live for ever. We can’t, therefore, be that far away from ’super powers’, even if it’s something ’simple’ like heightened empathy. Flight would be neat (personal jetpack might be an easy solution to this one?) but I guess Magneto-like powers are out of the question, right?
7. Get a piano lesson from Ben Folds — favourite musician, favourite instrument. If he then played ‘Emaline’ to me I’d probably swoon and he would catch me. Later, upon waking up in his arms, I would ask him to marry me.
8. Try to make a cola variant that’s better than Coca-Cola – I’m a Coke addict, and proud. But after 24 years of chain-slurping Coke down (yes, my mother was a druggy at the time, so I was even breastfed coke), I’ve begun to wonder if, possibly, there’s something better out there. Maybe… I could make Coca-Cola even better? Unlikely, but I’d like to try.
9. Drive a rally car at high-speed around a mountain track – similar to the previous item, I also love speed. Hah, just kidding. I mean ACCELERATION! G-force! Wild-eyed, edge-of-the-seat, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants break-neck SPEED! If you’ve ever seen the ‘World Rally Championships’ and the kinds of conditions that they do 100MPH in… well, I want to do that.
10. Kiss The American one more time — self explanatory.
11. Dress up in a realistic dog costume, and actually convince someone that I’m a really large dog – don’t ask.

That’ll do for now, I’ll add more as I think of them. I’ll cross them off as and when I do them — and trust me, I’ll do all of them. I told you I was impulsive.

Did I miss anything obvious? (Hah, you all thought I’d miss out the dog-suit one… HAH! I bet you’re all out of suggestions now…)

The search for immortality has plagued humanity since the dawn of time. The only certain thing in life is death: we can run from the Reaper but we can’t hide. Eternal life, or the lack of, remains a problem that scientists and philosophers alike have failed to solve for millennia.

For centuries we have gone to extreme lengths to prolong our life, but so far physical immortality has eluded us. With drugs and surgery — and leeches and the warm blood of animals! — we can maintain the illusion of youth for decades, but evading death itself has proven a little trickier.

Enter religion with its universal theme of immortality of the soul, or in some cases reincarnation — the best get-out-of-jail-free card ever. ‘Hey, we can’t grant this body of yours eternal life, but how about another go if you mess up?’ The single most wished for trait of all time, that which all humans crave — more than wealth, or happiness, or progeny — immortality became available at a low low price of a few Hail Marys or donation to the church of your choosing.

Immortality: the frustratingly-close mirage, finally within reach! Trample each other as you try to get to it first; God doesn’t mind. Anyone can have it, at the price of your dignity and a handful of coins; who cares if you live this life in squalor, while a fat priest sleeps soundly, resplendent in his gold-trimmed vestments — there’s always the next life! A helpful, portly priest once told me that there’s surround-sound TVs in Heaven; The Kingdom of God, Araboth, Nirvana. In the old days there was obviously lots of black slaves, and taverns with lots of beer — and quaffing! — and Valkyries. But today, that doesn’t sell so well…

I wouldn’t be quite so pessimistic if all religions could at least agree on one common theme — immortality of the soul or reincarnation — but as they can’t seem to agree, and kill each other over the minutiae, it’s likely that none of them are right. God himself seems to vary a lot from religion to religion, and if you can’t agree on something as basic and omnipresent as God, what’s the point? Were the gods of ancient history (there were hundreds of them!) fake?

That’s the problem with a divinely-inspired canon – words, from the infallible mandible of God – if you disprove just a single facet of it, one breathlessly intoned phrase of God, the entire thing falls to pieces. So if the tribal shaman got it wrong about their deities, and the Greek priests got it wrong about their polytheistic Parthenon, why should we believe modern-day monotheistic religion? You can read a little more about my views on monotheistic religion, if you like, but that’s enough for this entry.

If you take God and paid-for immortality out of the equation what do you have left? A moral code of conduct and a few archaic rules that (sometimes) made sense in the religion’s hey-day: a moral code then, and not much else.

But wait… there has to be something to it. Unless humanity really has fabricated a belief in the supernatural (and geneticists will argue that this is the case) for the past 10,000 years, there has to be some truth in it all. What if we take God or any ‘higher power’ that we are subservient to out of the equation, and just leave the spiritual side of things? Current science is leaning towards something, a quantum force created by particles either millions of times smaller than atoms, or by something else entirely. We might never know what that force is, but the mere fact that there’s something outside the realm of empirical measurement — the most common argument against the existence of a spirit or soul — will certainly be a tricky one for scientists.

Physical immortality is just around the corner, or at least you’ll soon have new organs grown at a whim. Bust your heart? Buy another one — it might be grown inside a pig, but who are you to complain? You’ve probably seen or heard about the mouse genetically engineered to grow an ear on its back. There are projects working on the important biological aspects of aging (cell aging being the main one), but there are other caveats too. Is it ethical for us to live forever? Do we have the technology and the resources to sustain 40, 50, 60 billion people here on Earth? Perhaps most importantly: would we do anything today if we could always put it off until tomorrow?

It’s at times like this I wish I could remove myself from the equation. I have beliefs which interfere with my objectivity! It’s awfully hard to derive a solution or even an answer when my flesh-and-blood brain has to be consulted first — my brain which has been meddled with by my parents, my friends and the media. It’s comforting to know that everyone else suffers the same fate though; even philosophers had to grow up.  It’s impossible for me to claim there’s a world beyond our own, but if science and technology has shown us anything in the last 50 years: don’t place any bets.

If we could give birth to a fully-grown adult — a test-tube human born into physical and mental maturity, without any of the pain or suffering sustained in childhood — how would they view the world? Without bias and with complete and utter objectivity, some pieces of the universal puzzle might just slip into place.

If immortality yet again slips  between our greedy paws, we still have transhumanism to look forward to: augmented human bodies. Bionic eyes, mithril exoskeletons and steam-powered muscles — well, perhaps not so much the mithril or the steam-power, but it’s coming! I’ll talk about that after Terminator 4: Salvation hits the cinemas.

Life is the game of infinite choices. A field that you can wend your way through a billion times and still stumble across patches you’ve not seen before.

Every quick-running or slow-walking step alters your route through the field, through life. When you stop to smell the blooms of beauty, pause a while beneath the boughs of a tree or simply lift your head and eyes to the skies and smile, these experiences change who you are. They don’t change you but they affect your senses: you are born looking through eyes of pure clarity but with age comes fettered, foggy vision.

It’s not that the field is different. It just looks and feels different. The field itself changes very little, in ways that are predictable. The framework of existence brings periods of pestilence and death when the lush emerald greens of life all but vanish, but it also  brings new births, explosions of new energy. There are always seasons of bountiful growth when the booming burst of life seems to oust even the most die-hard spectres of dark pasts.

In the space between there is balance. It is among and between the spurts of life and rubble of death that we walk. It is right here and now, where we breathe and live and smile and survive that we make decisions about how we live our life; how best to cross that field, one step at a time.

What path should I choose? Will I let divine covenant or the winds of fortune guide me, knowing that every step I make will alter my ultimate destination?

If it helps, there are no wrong moves and only one rule, one obligation: I must make it to the end. I must survive the infinite game of life. How well I survive is only limited by my zeal and imagination.

Live life. Enjoy, relish and savour its tumultuous twists and turns: it’s meant to be fun!

It’s been a while since I last wrote about music. Listening to music, like the appreciation of all art forms, is a very personal and subjective thing. You might like rock and I might like soul, but as long as we both get what we’re looking for, who cares? Well, I care! I listen to contemporary pop and sigh. It saddens me to think that, for some people, this is as good as it gets.

If we’re not careful the King of Pop will be nothing more than an honourific title thrown around by future generations in the playground: ‘Dad says the King of Pop died recently.’ ‘Yeah, sucks. Did you hear the latest Britney Spears song? It rocks!’ Unless someone — you or I — steps in and reminds children of what real music once sounded like and where their music originally came from, we can forget all hope of there ever being another King of Pop, Soul or Rock ‘n’ Roll.

* * *

The King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Not the Baron or Prince or Godfather — the King; the top dog upon which all comparisons are made and will be for years to come. I’m not going to talk about the last 20 years of his life but instead I will focus on the first 30, the three decades that revitalised a flagging music industry. In those thirty years, Michael Jackson became the greatest and most influential musician of our time. To those amongst us that appreciate music and its power; to those of us that are prone to bouts of aural sex: we have a lot to be grateful for! I just hope I can do Michael justice and nail the most important aspects of his influential and protean career.

While certainly successful, the first ten years of his life as the lead singer of The Jackson 5 were hardly monumental. The Jackson family were recognised as a musically-gifted family and Michael was nothing more than a charismatic and spectacular performer. But he could only grow so much, restricted by Motown’s draconian production rules and an oppressive father. The Jacksons were destined, unless something changed, to be a flash in the pan — certainly one of Motown’s biggest success stories (four successive number ones is nothing to be ashamed of!), but minuscule compared to what the Jackson family in general and Michael in particular were capable of. Perhaps the most important role of the Jacksons would be to become the first black teen idols. Breaking down barriers would be a recurring aspect of Michael Jackson’s life at the forefront of the music industry.

Stifled by Motown, The Jacksons jumped ship to CBS in 1975, a move that would finally grant the band the creative freedom it required. The Jacksons produced lots of albums in the following decade, but none of them approaching the success of their early Motown hits. But for Michael, it would be a different story indeed: in 1978 he met Quincy Jones on the set of The Wiz — “I hated doing The Wiz… I did not want to do it,” Quincy said later — they didn’t know it then but Quincy’s involvement with the film would soon change musical history and forge the greatest, most influential and successful collaboration in music history. Quincy Jones is a musician and conductor whose career and incredible influence spans five decades. With 27 Grammys and countless other awards, Quincy, like the Jacksons, broke down barriers that would allow future African-Americans to succeed in the culturally-biased media industry. The scope of Quincy Jones’ work is so varied and vast that it’s hard to comprehend: we’re talking about a legend that played alongisde Miles Davis during the creation of modern jazz and bebop, but then later produced the largest-selling album of all time (Thriller). He’s worked with Sinatra, Spielberg and even Bill Cosby. However, after Bad, his production and arrangement days were over — perhaps, after five decades of musicianship, the impresario had finally set down on paper the notes and themes that had run through his head for fifty years. Perhaps it was time to make way for future generations?

But I digress: it was on the set of The Wiz that this partnership of mentor and young prodigy begun. Off The Wall was born from the marriage of orchestral jazz, soul and 70s disco. Off The Wall fused sounds and melodies and dazzlingly energetic themes that had been building up for decades but never fully exemplified until this album was mastered and distributed. It’s worth noting, though their influences were not particularly significant, that both Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney wrote tracks for Off The Wall — perhaps this shows just how much confidence these musical geniuses had in Michael?

If Quincy and Jackson’s first collaboration hadn’t quite cemented things — Off The Wall only sold 20 million copies! — their next album would prove beyond doubt that they’d hit the spot. Thriller would be the first and only album to become something more than just a finely-crafted collection of songs. The astronomical number of sales — 109 million — would thrust Thriller into the category of ‘household staple’ rather than ‘commodity’ — families would go to the supermarket to buy bread, milk and a copy of Thriller. To this day, Thriller has more than doubled the next-largest album (45 million — Dark Side of the Moon) and its universally popular appeal will no doubt continue its reign of supremacy.

The bone of contention that one usually comes across when examining Jackson’s career is thus: how much of the success was actually due to him? Did Michael’s career begin as a vehicle for Motown’s music machine and end as nothing more than the pop industry’s poster child? Is it important? If we can learn one thing from history it’s one thing: for better or worse, the outcome is what counts, not the minutia, not those that fall by the wayside. If you discount his later work and simply focus on his early-adult albums — Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad and Dangerous – you have a body of work that was not only phenomenally successful but also more influential than the creations of any other artist in the last 40 years. It’s because of Jackson that we have hip-hop and rap music. Jackson revitalised a pop industry that was suffocating under the burgeoning force of uncreative, uninspired electronica. The phenomenon of Michael Jackson caused a rebirth of popular music that inspired and influenced almost every modern R&B, funk and pop musician.

I haven’t even begun to touch on the immortal influence that Michael Jackson had on both the youth and adults of the world with his music videos and live performances. Jackson created the music video that we know today; he single-handedly launched MTV to stardom with Thriller. Jackson, through sheer artistic brilliance, destroyed the last vestiges of African-American inequality in the media. Michael Jackson’s choreographic style — oh, that white trilby, those hip-thrusts and those gloves — had an effect more profound than anything since Fosse’s jazz or Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story.

I hope that the world, the media-consuming public, can in the next few years put aside any moral objections they have to the man himself and simply focus on what he created. It is irrelevant to wonder whether he is solely to thank for his wondrous advances in music or if he was merely the focus of myriad prodigious input from Quincy Jones. The matter of the fact is thus: Michael Jackson pioneered and sat atop the pinnacle of a musical, a rich cadence that had been bubbling and building up for decades. It finally exploded with Michael Jackson’s solo albums and the world is a richer place for it. From Miles Davis to Stevie Wonder and the entire R&B, jazz and soul libraries that flutter and reside in between, Michael Jackson created, embraced and become the very embodiment of modern pop music.

* * *

The two best albums you could buy a child or musical neophyte are Davis’ Kind Of Blue and Jackson’s Off The Wall. There is no better way to be quickly brought up to speed on the roots and direction of modern music. And if you haven’t heard either of them, you are doing yourself and rest of the world an injustice!

RIP, Michael Jackson. Surely one of your sons must be reaching the age where he might show an interest in singing or dancing…

What happens when you die?

If you’re not spiritually-inclined, death is just a moment in time. You’re alive and then, a moment later, you’re dead. There is a cessation of all that makes us physically alive: we stop breathing, our blood circulation halts and finally our brain activity flat-lines — we are deceased.

And medically speaking that is true. Your time is up; the grains of sand have emptied and the ticking has ceased.

On the other hand, if you believe in some kind of soul, something beyond the world that we can see and measure scientifically, death is more of a way-point on your travels.  You might believe that heaven awaits, or that your soul takes a little trip before returning back to the physical realm, but it doesn’t really matter: you believe that death isn’t the end of your story.

What we really have to do is define ‘death’, a task that many people would claim is very easy: it’s body death; a flat line on both the ECG (heart) and EEG (brain) machines. Someone whispers into our ear or shines a light into our eyes and there is no response, no reflex — that’s body death. But then why are there billions of people that believe that we’re not actually dead, that our soul has simply left the building in search of other stomping grounds or greener pastures? Death is meant to be the end! And it is for every other animal and plant in the world! Why does it have to be so tricky when it comes to humans, why do we persist in refuting death? Why do we insist that we ‘live on’?

Maybe, just possibly, there’s something to it. Perhaps there is a soul. Perhaps body death isn’t the end! What if we are just poorly-equipped to define ‘death’ scientifically? What if science simply refuses, by definition, to acknowledge something that is impossible to measure and define?

But then why is more than half of Earth’s population so strongly opposed to the finality of death? Why, for thousands of years, have we tried to define life after death? For millennia we have struggled to elucidate what really goes on after death as we traverse the great unknown — and curiously, after 6,000 years of modern civilisation, we still don’t even know how to get there! Attaining spiritual immortality in ancient history and religion reads like a hilarious list of scatter-gun, maybe-this-will-work approaches. First, right at the cusp of recorded history, there were deified statues and bloody rituals. Then with the first great civilisations we had burial rites and coins on our eyelids to ensure our safe passage into the afterlife. The Dark Ages saw a change from polytheism to monotheism and it became more about repentance, seeking forgiveness for our sins and regimented worship. Finally, with the Middle Ages and the glorious, opulent lives of feudal nobility and merchant oligarchies, immortality could be obtained by paying someone that’s close enough to an Almighty Being — i.e. buy some new stained-glass windows and you’re in.

The problem is: they can’t all be right. Is obtaining life after death simply a matter of mentally flagellating or prostrating yourself before the eyes of a suitably-powerful deity? Almost all religions claim that that they are correct and infallible, their scriptures often divined or prophesied from a god. They don’t all claim that other religions are false but most do — my god is more goddy than yours! — which causes a little problem: who’s right? Are they all right? Or, as I’m inclined to believe, are they all wrong? I won’t turn this into a theological discussion, but I do want to work out which religion got it right because the concept of everlasting life must be pretty enthralling if five billion people want to believe in it.

In fact, the concept that we might simply cease to exist, both body and soul (if it exists!), is a relatively new concept. An enlightened concept that we’ve been scared of acknowledging all along, just in case it’s true. We’ve finally arrived back at the stage where challenging or disproving religion doesn’t end up with you being burnt at the stake. We’re finally at the point where we can question our existence in this universe with some semblance of objectivity. Pure and absolute rationality is still a little way off — maybe quantum mechanics has the real answers? — but we can still revisit with a critical eye, unfettered by either dogma or tradition, the concept of allaying or postponing our ultimate death.

Science has gone a long way to explaining many things we’ve historically considered ‘magical’ or ‘miraculous’ but there are still many unknowns. There are a whole slew of phenomena that can be explained by the existence of a ’spiritual universe’ too — in fact, it’s a very good way of explaining away almost anything that remains a mystery to us. Eventually though — and this is guaranteed — someone will get to the bottom of near-death experiences and the continued consciousness that people experience throughout brain death. In a truly ‘eureka!’ moment a scientist will discover exactly what happens, if anything, when we die.

It’ll feel like the unravelling of the greatest of magic tricks: one of the few remaining mysteries of human existence ripped apart and laid bare for all to see. And then, like all exploited magic — or technology — it’ll just become a ubiquitous part of everyday life: if we do have souls, we’ll make glorious plans for the afterlife; if we don’t we’ll be able to finally stop wasting our time trying to earn and validate our ticket to the afterlife.

I hope people won’t be too disappointed when they find out that all those years of prayer and sacrifice and unwavering belief were for nothing. The Norse and Greek had the right idea: perform amazing deeds of strength and bravery, kindness and mercy. Achieve immortality through renown alone. Of course, they also knew that if any gods just happened to be watching they were hitting two birds with one stone.

Discussing ethics is a little fruitless, at least if you like reaching conclusions. Generally they are rules that govern a particular area or school of thought: medical ethics, political ethics, social ethics — in any given setting, there are ways in which you ’should’ act or behave or even think.

Fortunately, due to us pesky humans being at the top of the food chain, it’s been fairly easy to decide what is and isn’t ethical: that which helps mankind is good; that which harms mankind is bad.

But… how would you about creating a system of ethics for that which isn’t human?

If you can save a human or a cat from falling into a chasm, you save your fellow man.

What if the cat has to decide whether he saves you or another cat?

* * *

The ‘classic’ Robot Ethics example is this:

If a robot murders, who is accountable?

Robots can not yet program themselves; so must the designer be sent to jail?

Robots can not yet build themselves; so must the engineer be sent to jail?

Or… can we actually blame the robot? What good is justice, jail or the death penalty if the robot does not feel? If a robot is a senseless, emotionless killing machine, will justice have been served by just unplugging the robot?

* * *

Now the really sticky bit: what if we (somehow) create robots in good conscience, robots that never murder, never steal — robots that always act ‘ethically’. What if, as they would surely follow in the footsteps of their human creators, they learn to program themselves? What if robots can build themselves?

This is all a very old train of thought but it ties in with the question I asked yesterday: ‘What makes us human?‘ — at what stage do these robots become sentient, self-aware? Better yet: if you unplug a sentient robot, do they cease being self-aware? If there’s a soul, what happens?

In the original falling-into-a-chasm example, you don’t hesitate to choose the human as more important than a cat. What if a robot has to choose between saving one of us, or another robot? What’s the ethical choice from the robot’s point of view?

<Mind explodes>

* * *

Back to humans and humanity. What happens when we finally play around with cybernetic brain implants? Does this become a religious or spiritual issue? If having a soul is what separates us from the rest of the food chain, surely we must somehow look after this tenuous physical/spiritual link; would modifying our brain with artificial technology alter or sever that link; would it make us soulless?

At what stage do we, by definition, become robots?

Looking into Pandora’s box I can see another nastier, gloopier issue: what if we’re already soulless? What if there’s really nothing to differentiate us from our finely-engineered robotic brethren? Would that just make us our android overlord’s herd of cattle?

Yesterday I laid the ground rules for mysteries and why they have played such a huge role in the development of our society.

Note how I say ‘huge’ rather than important or vital.

Are these mysteries a good thing for survival? Better yet: is this incessant hunt for the unknowable a human-only trait? Did we evolve this love of mystery?

The general argument goes like this: we like to see patterns. We attribute cause to every effect. We like to believe that there’s something more to life than just 80 years of humdrum mundanity followed by death and burial and rigor mortis. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know if animals and plants feel the same way, but it’s often stated that only humans ponder the existence of an after-life (though who knows if this is true…) So it’s something in the brain — our brain — that sets us apart from the rest of them. We must’ve evolved that functionality, or been given it by our Creator — whatever, I’m not going to get into a theological discussion here.

The point is, at some point in time, we grew to love mystery. Like, seriously adore. You can look at certain times in history when almost everything in your day-to-day life was ritual. Wake up; pray. Hunt; pray. Eat; pray. Old wives’ tales. Turning three times widdershins before crossing a cursed threshold. Naming of children. Gods! Astrology! It’s all attributing cause to effect.

I sometimes wonder if people realise how feeble it is to be nothing but a pawn of the universe. You are merely the result of billions of random-chance-and-cause-unknown effects. Only, wait a second, the cause isn’t unknown! It’s the god of war! Of the hunt! Wine! The Israelites — God!

But, hang on, we’re not all mystery junkies. There are some people that hate the idea of mystery. They’re called ’scientists’.

And that’s the bit I don’t get. There are people that can only sleep at night knowing that God is looking over them, that Jesus makes their miserable, sinful life bearable — and then there are those that are the complete opposite. There are people that find the idea of spirituality or immortality repulsive: ‘that which can not be proven does not exist, so why give such concepts such credence?’

Are these scientists, these doubters-of-mysterious-coincidence, an evolutionary creation? Are they relatively new — the last few thousand years or so — or have there always been questioning, discerning doubters since the dawn of time? Was fire really stolen from the gods, or did Ug the Caveman create it through trial and error? Throughout history there have always been a few that question their surroundings. Rarely are their voices heard — usually only for a split, blood-curdling second before the guillotine drops or the tinder is lit. In fact, today and for the first time in history, scientists seem to finally have gained more respect and gravitas than theologians. Thank God.

The sad bit is that mystery, or at least those that ‘believe’ in mystery, far outweighs the truth, the cause-seeker, the scientists. The vast majority believe in the omnipresence and omnipotence of God or gods. On top of that there a lot of people that are apathetic to the discovery of knowledge and truth. It seems to me that ‘mystery junky’ is the dominant genetic trait. Maybe we can genetically engineer our DNA to remove such a trait…

I do hope that suffixing things with ‘gasm’ doesn’t become my catchphrase. I can just see it now… thirty years in the future, sitting on a couch, doing an interview for some crappy daytime TV show… ‘Go on, say it.’ — ‘But I’m here to drum up interest for-’ – ‘Say it! We’re not here to hear about your new book!’ — ‘OK OK… gasm. Gasm, gasm, gasm. There, I said it.’

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

I wonder what kind of phrases/quotes will be remembered when I die. I wonder if I’ve already said my greatest words of wisdom (what a sad thought…) The phrases you find online, one spoken or written by influential and important people, were they great at the time? Will something I’ve written in the past year come back in 50 years, without context, and sound far more pertinent or awesome than I ever intended?

I’m ranting, sorry. My eyes hurt because I’ve been either under or oversleeping — why do my eyes hurt when I oversleep? God knows. Also, my eyesight is failing again which means I need to get new lenses. I wish I knew for sure if this was just genetic (both my parents have poor eyesight) or if it’s the continued, excessive computer-use. Or maybe it’s both. How bad can it get…? I’m only -4 at the moment, and apparently I shouldn’t worry until I’m at -8 or so… but still…

This week’s photos come from New Year’s Eve. Just a few minutes before New Year’s Day actually. It’s been incredibly cold for the last couple of weeks and conditions haven’t been great for photography (and I’ve been sleeping at odd hours, which doesn’t help).  I think I alluded to a previous love of low-light photography — it was basically all I did at college, when I first started taking photos.

I’ve been out the last few nights trying to take some more photos, but so far nothing else has worked. It’s pretty hit and miss, pointing your camera at puddles (like yesterday’s 52), or into misty windows. If there’s any kind of photography that actually lies, it’s photos of night-time or low-light scenes. Photography is all about drawing with light (literally), so when there is no light it’s no surprise that the results are a little weird.

As always, you can hover over photos for my notes. Not much this week, but with Christmas and New Year celebrations, I think you can forgive me. I’m going to try and do some more night-time photography in the next few days, while the moon is still quite full.

(This actually looks really cool when cropped to just the end of the road… there’s some fogginess and some nice light… but I’m showing you the whole thing because of the MOON! There’s a couple of stars in there too, if you look closely…)

(This week’s 52 wasn’t a crop of this — they are different photos, from different angles. I love the light in the puddle in this version though!)

* * *

And we’re done for another week! The last photo was actually going to be this week’s ‘19 of 52′, but I went with the ‘puddle of ink’ at the last moment. I still haven’t got my driving license… did you know that? I really should get it this year…

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.