Spirit Camp 2015: Taps.

Faith, hope and prayer must never appear in the lexicon of a designer. Materials have no compunction to do you a favour; they’re best viewed as immoral. In fact one begins to see God’s problem in creating man. Over three Spirit camps I’ve tried to fix the knee operated automatic water valves for the four hand-wash stations. The first camp was taken up understanding how they worked and believe me that’s not obvious. The second was spent postulating and testing various theories as to why they didn’t. I mean they did but not reliably. This year began similarly. Now one assumes as they’re manufactured and sold in a nice box etc they are designed to work reliably but in this case the designer had faith and hope: Faith that a small o-ring would not compress under constant pressure and hope that it would magically centre itself into a small hole to cut the supply off. Obviously magic is another no-no concept to the designer. A good design must give zero alternatives to a mechanism other than to work. These valves had several and have now been junked for ordinary taps. This raises an interesting philosophical point. If, as is supposed, God or Spirit gave man free will might the master designer junk his protégé as an unsuccessful prototype if we prove unreliable? A salutary thought. Might he not appreciate our faith, hope and prayer approach and prefer we follow his own design philosophy of the rigorous application of truth and reality to create our best solutions? I know no better focus for contemplation than the simple phrase, “Everything is.” Its linguistic simplicity allows it to go any and everywhere without building a complexity of manuals, codes and beliefs. And of course magic.

Revolution Time.

Remember the other revolutions, the French, Russian, the collapse of Communism, the Boston Tea Party etc? They all began when the people weren’t getting enough to reasonably live on. Time and time again a ‘system class’ has risen to take control and within their own concept of reason has considered themselves worth more and more. It’s a basic loophole in cognition that it is wholly comparative. Cognition doesn’t have absolute or objective measurement. I was going to say we have rulers to do that, which throws up an interesting double use of the word. The system class thus has no means of judging their needs other than in comparison with their equally wealthy neighbours, and just like the rest of us they’d just like a little bit more. Wealth becomes unbalanced simply because of the nature of cognition, and at some tipping point there is a revolution. It’s surely time we took account of this basic cognitive impairment and designed a system around it. The Greeks, God bless them, have reminded us of the philosophical struggle they went through millennia ago to create such a system. Democracy, though we cling to the word, has been much subverted since then by many different circumstances. It’s time we went back to its philosophical root. This time the system class is global and the whole planet is at stake. They are unaccountable to any populous, government or rule of law. The checks and balances on their cognition have been overcome and all that’s left is a decent into Caligula. 

Karma Dharma.

I don’t know much about these two but as I see it Karma is getting in your own way and Dharma is not. I suspect there’s probably an area of the brain that constantly figures out what’s gone wrong, and because we don’t like things going wrong it makes up stuff as to why it’s all gone wrong. Of course nothing has gone wrong, it’s just gone the way it’s gone, just not the way we wanted it to so the stuff it makes up is a fabrication of how it could have gone right if it hadn’t gone wrong when it was neither right or wrong in the first place. These fabrications form an insulator between reality, which is neither right nor wrong, and one’s inner state that’s dam sure it is all about right and wrong and that you’re getting the worst of it. You then act as if that’s the case and retaliate to even things up. Basic mistake because what’s wrong will have a different version of what’s right and wrong and retaliate back. These retaliations reverberate around the system producing karma. Basically don’t take it personal. Then comes the butterfly state as one exits the “get this fucking shit off me” cocoon. Here the same stuff happens but that little area in the brain has given up, it’s gone on a sabbatical, (from which it rarely returns) and everything just is. And it ‘is’ in a gently humorous way. Imagine you’re a Velcro covered hedgehog. Everything you come up against snags and tags and you become a big ball of twigs, leaves, slugs and cat food. OK I don’t know why cat food but it’s possible. Yuck! And then as if by magic the Velcro turns into glossy straight spines. Nothing snags, the crap falls off and you’re a clean go anywhere hedgehog just like you’re meant to be. And the only way you can go is forward. That’s Dharma. And don’t blame me if this is all bollocks, I learnt it from our cat Britney. 

The Power of Tea.

Yesterday I was given a cup of tea, which was nice. Today I measured the time it took to boil two mugs of water as it’s virtually impossible to boil just one in a kettle. (one minute) As the kettle is 3 kilowatts it thus takes 1.5 Kw minutes per mug full. OK so far? Now the person making the tea yesterday filled the kettle to around a litre, enough for around four mugs full so the other three would be left to go cold. I’d guess on average two mug fulls will be left to go cold waiting for the next brew, which is 3 Kw minutes of wasted energy per cup. Now I drink a lot of tea but I’d say on average a typical adult will drink five cups of tea or coffee a day. That’s then 15 Kw minutes wasted energy per adult per day or 0.25 Kw hrs. As this happens most days, say 350 per year, that’s 87.5 Kw hrs per year. OK lets say around 40 million adults are in the habit of drinking five hot drinks per day, that’s 3,500,000,000 Kw hrs per year, which is 3.5 million megawatt hours. Now the Drax power station generates 3,960 megawatts. Times that by hours in a year, 8760, and you get KW hrs/yr and a very big number, 34.6 million megawatt hrs per year as opposed to our 3.5 million. But it does mean that 10% of the energy of our largest power station is being wasted by overfilling electric kettles. So here’s the thing. Turn on the cold tap fully and count the seconds it takes to fill a mug using the tried and tested “thousand and one, thousand and two” method. On ours it’s three. Then fill the kettle on that basis from empty. Keep doing it this way and it will always be near empty, which is fine, and it’ll boil twice as quick too. If you have an old kettle with an element in the water you’ll still have to cover the element and waste energy, but you can begin to see why power stations dread half time in the world cup final. 

Victimhood.

Forgetting The Moral Maze is the most aggravating radio program ever I listened to them mauling the subject of Victimhood and the Tim Hunt debacle. Argh! In relationship psychology there’s a diagram, ‘The Co-dependent Triangle’. It contains three stances, victim, persecutor and rescuer. It defines a poorly functioning relationship where each role undermines the other person in some way. Obviously there’s a wide variation in a peoples susceptibility to Victimhood from the weak and sensitive to strong and resilient. Some brush it off while others succumb to it rather too easily. Tim Hunt remarked that men and women fall in love, nothing wrong in that, we all do and often with colleagues, and women cry if you criticise them. In my mind and his I imagine this was a gentle joke about sexual stereotyping. OK he shouldn’t give up the day job and join the comedy circuit but then women often complain that men don’t show their emotions so it might have seemed acceptable, but that’s immaterial compared with what happened next. The sensitive end of the spectrum immediately assumed Victimhood. Those less sensitive came to their aid in sisterhood and the robust gave them the benefit of the doubt. As the twitter storm gathered the counter voices, not wishing the flack to land on them too, mostly fell silent. In essence there was a domino effect in apparent support of the most sensitive and their tendency to co-dependency, a widespread landslide towards a poorly functioning relationship. In less than an hour the victim became the persecutor and Tim Hunt was shunted into hopefully happy overdue retirement. Might it be that social media is reducing constructive thought to the nearest knee-jerk reaction and bringing us all into a poorly functioning co-dependent relationship? Even The Moral Maze circled the margins of sanity and proved incapable of useful analysis, but then that’s what it’s know for. But in the end Tim will be free to watch Wimbledon, Twitterers have been shown up as twits and the biased situation of female scientists has had an airing. One nil for free speech. 

The Truth.

True Camoron now has a slim majority, but even amphetamines won’t keep the whips awake for five years, so why the capitulation? And why have Miliband, Clegg and Farage resigned without the usual ‘we’ll fight on in opposition’ speeches? I mean was Clegg shown in an empty car park and presented with a worm-ridden hedgehog stage-managed? Did Miliband fall off the plinth on purpose and get his aids to punch him in the face to maintain the slant, Farage’s men promise to shoot their opposing candidate and all their other gaffs for a reason? Is there something they’re not telling us? I mean what if they know there’s an ISIS bomb in the Mace and it’s begun ticking, or the SNP has two thousand angry Glaswegian shipbuilders set to invade Westminster, or are banking on five more years of austerity putting an end to the Conservatives forever. Has Camoron threatened them with his own resignation in favour of Boris, or worse Gove if he didn’t get a majority? Could you spend five years sitting opposite either without secretly taking a shotgun into work and getting life? An attractive thought but risky. Has Murdoch offered them a job presenting Sky’s new reality show, ‘I’m a LibDem get me out of here’? It makes you think doesn’t it? I mean ITV’s already got Paxman doing stand-up. Has Putin booby trapped No 10 or put polonium in the sandwiches? Or has he sold Camoron the secrets of how to create a one party system?

The Result.

Well we treated it as a joke and we got a joke. There’s never been such a mass un-think since the late 30’s in Germany. Then again we’ve been given nothing to think about apart from trivia and a smoke screen of numbers and ridicule. If anything the cheap joke crowd have won it for the Bullingdon Club simply because their genetic, unshakable confidence is impervious to slapstick. It’s as if Murdoch’s now employing comedians instead of journalists because he’s found cheap jokes are more powerful than investigative reporting. You only have to count the numbers of laughs we got from the party leaders to predict the outcome, Sturgeon nill, Cameron negligible, Miliband lots, Clegg even more, and for all his comedic value even Farage wasn’t slandered much by comedy. In the light of the SNP landslide is UK politics becoming zonal? I mean if I was Welsh I’d definitely be aiming for a Plaid Cymru landslide, or if Cornish voting for ‘The Sticky out Bit Party’, and might there then be an opening for ‘The North’ party? Appealing isn’t it. I mean it would leave London with less than a hundred seats that even in coalition with the home countries couldn’t form a majority. And lets face it the left/right political paradigm is well past its sell by date. Perhaps then this parochial politics will give rise to a new sort of candidate who’s allegiance is local rather than Westminster-centric, who’re chosen for their individual quality rather than being able to ya-boo on one way or the other. I’m reminded of a Chinese official who commented that ‘in China we choose on ability. Your British politicians would not stand a chance in China’, and from my days in industry where the marketing department didn’t have a clue; they just knew how to make bad things look good. And that’s what we’ve got, bad politicians that look good. Well today anyway.