Cynicism

Okay, I don't want to come across overly preaching and joyous, but this is something I really need to get off my chest. It's rather similar to the first post I made this year, though with a subtly different focus. I must stress that I'm not one of these naïvely optimistic types who think that everything in the world is good. I consider myself somewhat cynical insofar as I won't take "facts" given to me at face value but rather look for corroborative evidence, or at very least think for myself about how likely it is to be true. But it seems to me that it's become cool to be cynical about everything, to an excessive extent. To doubt has become the norm; while I am a firm believer that questioning things is extremely important, I also believe that giving people the benefit of the doubt (where there's no evidence to support or deny the case in point) is simply a healthy thing to do - and above that, the sort of thing that a nice person should do. And above all else, I believe that being nice is important and something more people should try.

So I think there is a danger that all too many people are at risk of falling into - that is, to disbelieve anything because it goes against your intuition or worse, your preconceptions. To question is healthy, but you must leave yourself open minded enough to accept good, logical arguments that support ideas that might not occur to you. Not to do so is just to be bloody-minded.

Growing old

I'm getting old. Now, I know a lot of people will be foaming at the mouth at reading this yelling "You're not old! Now stop whinging and go find me my cane!" or something like that. But it's true, I am definitely getting old. I've come to this conclusion after two observations made in the last month or so:

1. When it snowed, my reaction upon waking and seeing the blanket of white wasn't "Yay! Snow!", but rather "Ohhhh, I'm going to have to walk to the lab."
2. The urge to lick the spoon when baking no longer grips me, even when baking with chocolate.
   

Ah well, it had to happen sometime...

Book dimensions revisited

Okay, maybe I was a bit hasty with my previous post on the subject. The appropriate dimension of a book is not always the length of time it takes to read. I posted a paperback to a friend in France this week and discovered that occasionally, the weight of the book (and before someone tries to be smart, yes it is the weight and not the mass - the post office measures it with a top-pan balance) is the appropriate characteristic. But on that note, I discovered that air mail is really rather cheap. Sending a ~780g package to Paris cost just £5.11. Bargain.

Bach

I was listening to Radio 3 just now, and Bach's Prelude and Fugue no. 1 from the Well-Tempered Klavier came on. Now, I know I'm not exactly the biggest Bach fan in the world, but one thing did occur to me - it's not even as interesting as Musak. There has to be something wrong when you think lift music sounds more interesting...

Buying local

For those of you who don't already know, I'm a bit of a tree-hugging hippy. I recycle obsessively, constantly bemoan my lack of a compost heap - I am currently toying with the idea of an indoor wormery, but have rather a small room - and try to save energy like there's no tomorrow (which, metaphorically, there won't be the way the world is going, but that's a rant for another time). And I care about such things as food miles (though probably not nearly as much as I should do - and I really hate the term). So between minimising energy wastage with food transportation, supporting local producers and a belief that local, small producers will often output better quality produce, I like to buy things sourced locally where possible.

It's an uphill struggle though. Earlier this week, I tried to buy a particular high powered LED (a Seoul P4 U-bin cool-white emitter) in an attempt to upgrade my bike light. So I found a UK supplier - Farnell, based in Leeds - who would sell me the LED I wanted. Now, it's a single LED, but it's not cheap - I was trying to buy £7.89 worth of goods, not 20p. But they have a minimum order charge of £20 if you want to put it on a credit card - ostensibly for their free delivery. I would have been perfectly happy to pay an extra pound or two for delivery, but they wouldn't have it. Their FAQs state that they accept BACS or cheques as payment too, but when I rang them up, they said I would have to make the £20 minimum order charge. So after a little bit of searching, I found DealExtreme, who are based in Hong Kong. It turns out, they will send me the exact same LED, with no minimum order charge from across the other side of the world. Their price? $5.12, with free shipping. That's about £3.54 at current rates. So even leaving the minimum order charge aside, that's under half the price. I hate ordering from across the globe when there's a UK alternative, but the price difference is excessive - and in this case at least, that LED is more likely than not manufactured in Taiwan or nearby anyway, so the overall distance covered by it is probably rather similar from either supplier. But the point still stands.

Another thing that irks me on this note, is how difficult it is to find locally produced honey. If you go to a local farm store, it's dead easy, but I will admit that usually convenience corrupts me and I end up at a supermarket. Take a look at the honey - you'll find honey from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Venezuala and a whole myriad of places over a thousand kilometres away without any trouble at all. But try looking for English honey (not even honey from your county, just honey from anywhere in England) or even honey from anywhere in the UK, and see how much harder it is. In my local supermarket, I couldn't find a single jar of honey from the British Isles. But I had a choice of three from Australia. We are a nation of beekeepers - it should not be this difficult to get honey that has come from less than 500km away!

Evolution

Sight, I can understand. The retina responds to a narrow band of EM radiation, which corresponds (give or take) to the highest intensity band generally seen on Earth. Hearing reacts to pressure waves over a large range of frequencies in the air that surrounds us. Touch responds to pressure on your skin from the local deformation. While taste has to monitor a whole host of different chemical patterns, at least it is limited to the small subset of things we stick in our mouths.

But smell - what on Earth is going on there? Your sense of smell is incredible (unless you're anosmic, in which case, my apologies) - it responds to millions (if not more) of entirely unrelated chemicals. If you pay attention, you might notice that people have (to some extent at least) their own individual smell - not their sweat, not their shower gel, but an underlying scent that will be different to another person's. Buildings have their own characteristic smell. Even the slightest hint of an ingredient is often detectable in food or drink - while some French cheeses can be smelled through the box, a plastic bag and halfway across the house. And then you remember that compared with dogs or pigs, we have an incredibly crude sense of smell. I really wonder how the sense of smell developed. Evolution is a madman I tell you.

Book dimensions

Reaching the end of a good book is always a slightly bittersweet experience. You have the joy and the contentment that you've reached the end, that the story is wrapped up and all the loose ends that are going to be tidied up have been tidied. But then you have the knowledge that there's no more to enjoy. The end of a good book always sneaks up on me. All of a sudden, you turn the last page and it's there. It's always a shock.
But the end of a mediocre book is exactly where you expect it. And the end of a bad book is, in my experience, rarely ever reached. In an ideal world, I think that places like Amazon shouldn't list the number of pages contained in books; rather they should have the length of time it takes to read it. Time is definitely the appropriate dimension to be measuring books in, not the physical size.

If you're wondering what book prompted this thought, it was The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. You can get it for £5 on Amazon, and trust me, you won't be disappointed.

Jars of satisfaction

Jars of Nutella and instant coffee tend to come with a seal of foil-backed paper. I'm not sure I've come across anything quite as satisfying as puncturing the surface of these with a teaspoon handle or knife. I may need to start buying smaller jars of Nutella so that it happens more often.

Cool to hate

It's cool to hate. And it's easy to hate too. Turn on the TV and watch the news, and pretty much all that you'll hear is bad news. We're in the midst of a recession, unemployment is on the way up and the economy's going to get worse before it gets better. There's another war in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan are still pretty damned dangerous and the long-fought war in Sri Lanka still rages. Kenya, the one real example of African democracy actually working, just passed a bill curtailing the freedom of the press. Russia's cutting off it's gas supplies to the Ukraine and it's hitting Europe (again) and Zimbabwe's still trying - and failing - to free itself from Mugabe's evil grip - but now it's being ravaged by cholera too. Ask the average person on the street and they'll talk about how everything's more expensive, life is harder, taxes are too high and the government's terrible. They'll most likely yearn for the "good ol' days" and wax lyrical about how things were in days gone by.

But before you go and spend all day in the quagmire of a deep depression, this is not the point I want to make. My point is that life is pretty darned good actually. We're finally getting rid of that simian President of the USA and with the new administration, that disgrace to the supposedly free world (by which I mean the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp prison) might finally be dismantled. Technological advancements have never made life so easy as it is now. Labour saving devices abound and allow previously impossible tasks to be done with the click of a button. You can be fired in a metal tube weighing several hundred tonnes at nine-tenths of the speed of sound, 10km above the ground and expect to land safely - halfway across the world in less than a day. Even if you don't fly, you can still talk to family and friends in far-flung lands for absolutely nothing. Healthcare improves with every day and you will survive illnesses and accidents that would've killed you under half a century ago. Things we take for granted now were just dreams not very long ago at all.

Sure, there are things that aren't perfect and some things are getting worse. But there's a hell of a lot which is good and improving too. So next time you hear someone whinge that the world's crap and wish it was still the 1970s, don't just nod and give your half-hearted agreement. Have the courage to stand up and say "Actually no, you've never had it so good. Stop complaining and appreciate it, dammit!". Or at very least, think it.

Words that are missing from the English language part III

Okay, it's not really a word that's missing from English. I've been thinking about idioms, and I have come to what will probably seem to you quite an unusual conclusion: German is a really beautiful language. Not because it sounds nice, not because Germans have a particularly nice accent when they speak English and not because the grammatical structure is beautiful (though it is regular, I'll give them that). But the way in which they can create compound words that mean exactly what you think they should mean is a wonderful thing.

I bet you're all wondering where this is going. I'll cut to the chase - I think we need to introduce the German word "Handschuhschneeballwerfer" as a borrowed word in English. It literally translates as "One who wears gloves to throw snowballs", and is used to describe a coward. I think it's the best idiom I've ever come across in any language.

Effective learning

It's the lectures, classes, seminars and meetings where you leave with your head swimming with new concepts that seem just beyond your grasp that you learn the most from. Those situations that you leave the room fully understanding the subject never grant you with deeper insight - it's always the ones that make your head spin that herald the dawning of a new understanding.

Colourful cars

I'm very much a function-before-form kinda guy - after all, I'm an engineer. So if I were to buy a car, the colour would be very low down on my list of priorities. However, I'm certainly not going to say that I wouldn't care. Even I can see that there are times when it matters. But it would appear that not everyone appreciates this. Specifically, if you buy a large estate car and you decide on buying it in black, be aware that it will look like you're driving a hearse. I've seen quite a few hearses recently (I think I'm currently living near a funeral director), and I can tell you, all black estate cars look like hearses.

Air rage

Flying budget airlines is a generally awful experience. There's none of the glamour or special treatment from the golden era of air travel left. But by far the worst thing about flying budget airlines is that it really brings out the worst in people. Everyone becomes even more selfish than usual and seems to want to screw each other over just because they can. It really doesn't help foster faith in human nature.

Relative seediness

I was watching trash TV last night - a programme on Sky Three about Britain's dodgiest pubs - and there was a bit about a pub that had strippers at lunchtime. There's something about it happening at lunchtime that makes it so much seedier than people going to a strip club in the evening. I wonder why that is.

Perceived sizes

Most of you who know me will be well aware of the fact that there are some things that really screw with my perception of size - most obviously the pint-and-a-half glasses at the Cricketer's Arms in Oxford, but also other things like Arul's umbrella and the unbelievably cheap Asda barbecue we had at Imperial this year. The latest addition to the list is the act of pitching a tent indoors. If you have a tent, try it - your tent will never have looked bigger!

Words that are missing from the English language part II

I've noticed that a lot of these thoughts occur to me when I'm in the shower. I don't know what it is about my cleansing ritual, but I suspect that it's the sensation of the warm water and the state of relaxation that it brings that focuses thoughts and opens the mind's eye. It could also be down to just having five minutes where I'm not distracted by anything more taxing than operating a shower brush and so my mind is free to wander. Archimedes' "Eureka" moment was said to have happened in a bath. I think we might be onto something here.

The French have a lovely phrase "l'esprit d'escalier" - which literally translates as "staircase wit". It's a phrase that refers to that belated moment of inspiration that strikes as you wander down the stairs leaving a party - be it coming up with a pithy retort to an insult or a witty reply to a question. The Germans have the same phrase - "Treppenwitz". I think we need a similar phrase in English for the moment of brilliance that takes you as you scrub your back - I suggest "bathroom clarity", but feel free to make alternative suggestions.

Actually, sitting down with a cup of tea has much the same effect on me (and I suspect, most English people) - perhaps "teapot clarity" would be just as appropriate.

Terrorist inefficiency

I was watching the news last night, and there was a video clip of some terrorist group threatening to bomb the Beijing olympics. In the video, there were three people, all of whom were swaddled in some form of head dress that covered their entire faces, leaving a tiny slit through which to see, though you couldn't even really see their eyes. It struck me that if you're going to do that, you might just as well send an audio recording and a photo instead. Much more efficient.

The wisdom of Bacchus

There's a surprising amount of profundity to be found in the incoherent ramblings of drunk people. I just experienced what may just be the apogee of alcohol inspired depth. As I was cycling pretty quickly up a hill in Temple Cowley, a drunk chav took a break from mocking his also rather drunk friend (who'd fallen over on the pavement and was struggling to get back up) to inform me (as I zipped past) "Mate, your wheel's going round". Truly inspired.

Group stupidity

The larger the group of people, the lower the overall effective intelligence. This effect is most evident in seeing a large group attempt to divide a restaurant bill and is largely independent of the group's members' individual intelligences. Linked to this is the fact that the larger the group, the longer it takes to make decisions and the slower the group walks.

Old friends

Friends come and go, but there are some that, no matter how long it has been since you last saw them, it feels like no time has elapsed at all. These people are the friends that are worth hanging on to!