Today I’m pissed off.

Into my third day of rebuilding the back wall of the garden. Painstakingly chipped old mortar off 150 bricks and started laying them. One mix in and no one insight I needed a pee so had one ‘on site’ as it were. Adjacent to this site is the back of the neighbour’s shed, plain manky ply except for three 2”diameter chicken wire covered holes. This neighbour is known to me from previous debates about his 12’ laylandii hedge less than a foot from said wall so that most of it grew in our garden, a surly bully type. Post pee a voice came from one of the 2” holes, “I can see what you’re doing you filthy bastard.” This phrase isn’t new to me but said seriously it is. I laughed and marvelled at his acuity through such a small orifice. Now cementing requires water and a little later mothermouse remonstrates me for putting a little plant in jeopardy. I’m building a wall here! I cannot hover especially with a brick in both hands! And the plant in question grows all over the place and if it isn’t a weed it should be. A little later another remonstration that she’d been looking for her gloves for hours and there they were on the wall. Why didn’t I tell her they were there?! One I hadn’t noticed them and two it’s highly likely she left them there during the first remonstration. So I’m pissed off, probably at myself for being a wimp. I could have called the neighbour an effing peeping Tom, not automatically assumed the gloves were my fault and pointed out that nothing short of incineration would stop that plant from growing even though it does looks a bit flat and muddy at the moment. Breaking up a wall, chipping off all the old mortar from 150 bricks, mixing new mortar and laying them in something resembling the geometry of a brick wall is hard work. I should not be chastised for my efforts. But then not having direct experience of doing something, anything, leaves one an inadequate judge of what it entails.

Bill Gates wrong?

Bill’s book, ‘How to Survive a Climate Change Event’ is as you might expect, from his unique perspective as CEO of a mega corporation and very wealthy, i.e. science, technology, innovation, investment capital, government funding: basically the creation of Microsoft all over again. It’s laudable but not revolutionary. Covid is currently doing a better job reducing population, personal spending and activity, damaging the drugs industry, decimating air and road travel and generally causing a world slow down. It all started long ago. Man invented farming which allowed time for dreaming and learning. Man then invented factories. Factories pay wages and profits and produce efficiently, so well in fact that the wages they paid could afford to buy the products the factories made. Obvious really, at least to us. But this ever so obvious situation caused a feedback loop. That’s where a little bit of the output is fed back into the input so, as the output increases the feedback increases the input which in turn further increases the output which, and so on. Before factories work produced only for the rich or friends and family. In the last 200 years this factory feedback loop has caused a boom in profits, wages and personal spending. We have all enjoyed the changes from horse and cart to Ford Mondeo, slate tablet to Apple iPad, Bill’s made his fortune and Elon Musk the largest ever factory. What on earth could be wrong with that? Well, as we’re finding, this almost exponential growth is not sustainable. That’s because there are hidden costs not accounted for that allow excess profits to pay higher wages that result in the afore mentioned feedback. Costs like raw materials that come free from the ground, pollution and environmental damage and human time and sweat not adequately paid for. Basically factories break the second law of thermodynamics, well at least in profitability terms. You can’t get more out than you put in. It’s just a case of humans being too clever by half. So Bill, an undoubtedly very intelligent and public spirited person, hasn’t come close to the revolution needed to solve our current riddle.

The riddle and its solution are far deeper than building a zero carbon cement factory. My life, having spanned nearly eighty years, has experienced horse and carts to very comfortable auto mobiles but its richness and happiness has not echoed those technical improvements. If it did I’d be ecstatic by now. It’s given me wonderful tools to play with, new ideas to understand, new opportunities, an excellent education and the NHS, but if I consider my happiness it’s depended on other things. Things like relationships, creativity, freedom to explore myself, achievements, and existing in a context of fun and acceptance. These bear little reliance on technological advancement.

The accepted view is we create a perception of our current surroundings as things happen; nothing strange in that. We easily compare and contrast other peoples surroundings like them having expensive jewellery or a cold. When our surroundings change quickly we compare the before and after for better or worse quite vividly, but if I try to compare my life now with how it was twenty or more years ago my attempt at comparison is far more foggy. It’s hard for me to recreate my sense of the feelings I had back then. I might look at a photograph for help but what I feel is dominated by my current emotional situation. While I cherished my first car at the time it seems like a piece of period junk now. If I’m content then expensive jewellery won’t be attractive but if I feel poor I might lust after it. All experience is coloured by my current condition, which is to be expected. My current car is far better but doesn’t carry the thrill and excitement of my first. But all this means is everything I consider as objective reality is actually based on drifting, ungrounded comparisons. I’m permanently floating on a sea without any inkling of how deep the water is or where I am in the scheme of things, if there is such a thing as the scheme of things. Luckily, being human, my conscious brain can reduce all this to, “When the fuck is this pandemic going to end?”

 

How They Built the Pyramids.

Nobody knows how they built the pyramids. Well Stiffmouse has figured it out.

Pyramids are deceptive because we only see them finished not as the builders saw it in the first place, as just a flat piece of land, so we imagine building it from the outside where they built it from the inside out. So they laid the first layer of rocks leaving a slot in which they created a ramp (red) at quite a shallow angle. The drawing of the ramps on the right doesn’t relate to the layers drawing on the left. They surfaced it with greased rollers or planks. With a rock at the bottom a rope led to a roller at the top of the ramp and out to a downward slope in the sand where many workers could haul it up. These rocks then formed the second layer again leaving a slot for a ramp. The whole arrangement was repeated at 90* to the first. The third layer rocks were hauled up the first ramp then the second and onto the third flat surface and distributed. On the fourth layer the first ramp was covered in to form a tunnel and maintain the structural strength but still available to haul rocks up. Subsequent lays were completed in the same fashion. Throughout the whole process the four hauling teams stayed in situ and could operate simultaneously to speed up the process. There could even be 2 or more separate teams at each haulage position. When the pyramid was complete the rope exits and the bottom entrance were filled in leaving no external evidence. The tunnels may have been back-filled but there’s no reason other than structural integrity. So there you have it. In my Stiffmouse world this is how I’d do it, but then I’m no a Pharaoh.

Regression.

Veritasium is an often mind blowing science YouTube channel. As a professional YouTuber he looked at it systemically. It has constantly adjusting algorithms to foster its own success. YouTubers then adapt their input to foster their success while the audience clicks on whatever they want from the pre-chosen infinitesimally small tip of its iceberg. These three entities mill around chasing each other’s tail. The result is regression. Apparently to be successful depends on a catchy title and an equally eye catching still with a video devoted to provide endorphins. But it’s still incredibly useful it you search for what you want, like replacing the heater fan resistor pack on a Renault Scenic Mk2, but that requires you to know what you want and have sufficient skills to do the repair. This divides the latter from those who’re simply grazing eye candy, which I suspect is the majority. It then just becomes a lengthier version of FaceBook or Twitter. So the regression built into all these platforms invisibly slips into the minds of their users. This regression does two things. It reduces knowledge to mean, “knowing what I like”, and hardens views to one site or the other. One begins to see the truth as more and more obvious and anything other as, well fake news. Everyone knows that tossing a coin enough times gives a 50/50 result so it’s highly likely the reason why every election these days is ~50/50. Regression has reduced millions of voters to be as predictable as a coin toss, heads or tails, 50% totally committed to one side and the other 50% to the other with a rising amount of animosity between the two. And each believing they’re ‘well informed’ and the other aren’t. Trump and Brexit are obvious examples. Trump was obviously a narcissistic psychopath well before he was elected and Brexit has always been a bad idea for the majority of UK citizens as we’re about to find out. Regression as provoked by YouTube, social media and traditional media has been rising up through society until those most easily swayed are the majority. And that’s why we invented sight, so the blind wouldn’t lead the blind.

Confusion Begone.

Last night a BBC4 film about a chap who’s composed an eight hour music performance for an audience on beds. Where rave music’s designed to give an endorphin rush this is designed to loosen one’s hyper mind to the possibilities of, well? I mean this is difficult. Lets say you live a fast, stressed, productive lifestyle with job, childcare, cooking, places to go, mortgage to pay etc. Lets call it the rat race; treading the fine line between living on the streets and mental exhaustion. And someone says, “It can all go away”, and you say, ‘yeh right, talk is cheap’. Then Max Richter’s ‘Sleep’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000qzlb/max-richters-sleep somehow makes it a real possibility. All music is composed, or designed to elicit a response. Also music works works at an almost autonomic level as a language of vibration way deeper than our created language of words. Words and their usage come from our conscious mind where vibrations, made and received bodily, bypass it. But music can convey ego from the almost vicious imagination of Stravinsky to the dreams of Debussy. Max, a skilled composer, wanted to conjure an earth like ego that repeats and evolves to some unfathomable plan governed by unfathomable rules, neither random or prescribed. What he’s created is an anathema to our conscious mind, boring, repetitive, tuneless, monotonous. Our conscious almost screams, ‘you’re not playing by my rules!’ But one feels relaxed, understood, connected. It’s bravery of the highest order to insult the listeners consciousness by ignoring it. But, though it won’t rival Beyoncé, it might rank high in the download charts. We don’t want the rat race and all its exhaustion, fear, duplicity and unfairness. This brief sojourn into egocentricity, like all others before it, is coming to an end. Thanks Max and well done.

Boris’s Balanced Confusion.

Watched the four parter on Celebrity. Sickening dinnertime watching. The century begins with the paparazzi feeding us with puerile, largely fictitious gossip about stars, like Venus getting out of a limo showing her nickers. I doubt upskirting, there you go, isn’t in my spell checker’s lexicon. They make £000s per pic. The stars life is corrupted by 000000s of us paying good money to prey on them. Paris Hilton, no doubt upstaged as a child by her parent’s hotel chain, makes a career out of it as consolation. She earns $00000s. Others with picturesque bodies follow suit. Now I don’t know if it’s my own personal bitterness but hulks rarely have a philosophical temperament and big boobs do not an intellectual make. Don’t get me wrong, bodies are beautiful, but mine, at any age, would not be chosen for its muscular looks. So by 2010 the public focus was on celebrities who, with a few exceptions, needed zip up shoes and a PA to remember their name. They earned $0000 which seemed to give them a divine rite to have an opinion. And that opinion was, “fun, sex, drink and social media. And there began the ‘me-too’ Love Island generation where countless shows could promote perfectly ordinary big boobed muscular hunks to celebrity status and also earn $0000s by having a million followers eager to vicariously share their humdrum ordinary lives. That earned them even more by casually slipping in that they’d just bought a Marks and Spencer’s jumper, and how lovely it was to have sex in. And got so drunk they threw up all over it and had to buy another one. $catching. And then it was 2016 and the final act in this comedy of egocentricity. Certain politicians renown for their vane egoistic temperament found it was the perfect time to rise. Social media had found its new kings. They could say any damn fool thing and it be perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist where, ‘if it’s my opinion it must be true.’ Now in 2021 Trump is playing out his last days ‘phoning a friend’ like on HW2BaM while Boris is busy polishing his Brexit turd. And who comes out of this unholy mess on top? Who are the British public cheering on louder than any politician, influencer or social media star? A twenty year old footballer who’s known childhood poverty, who’s struggled from those humble beginnings to achieve excellence, who speaks simply and true. This, hopefully, is the true beginning of the 2020’s.

Balanced Confusion.

I’ve stopped listening to The Moral Maze for health reasons. Four supposed experts maul over four expert guests towards a conclusion that’s never reached. It’s like Songs of Praise with the hymns sung backwards. And now all news on the Beeb is treading this same path in its quest for balance, one weary confused step at a time. Is the government right or wrong? Are the teachers right or wrong? Should this be that? Every point made by some expert is politely countered by a news caster with a GCSE in woodwork. The assertion that “Picasso used coloured paints” is met with, “But mightn’t he have painted in black and white and it’s been coloured in later?” GCSE pratt fishes out an old black and white photo to prove his point. “But that’s a b&w photo, look Picasso’s in b&W too.” “Yes but colour was only invented in 1945, well after Picasso’s period.” It’s like planting out a raised bed, one carrot and one anti-carrot at a time, every idea planted next to its opposite. Is it the old fascist idea of ruling by mass confusion? And then some nine year old is interviewed, because of course he has a valid view on government policy, and mouths some middle class verbatim about missing his friends and being worried about his own mental health and long term career prospects like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I’m now screaming at the screen like the Last of the Mohicans. If that’s what schooling does fuck it, fuck ‘em all, let him play in a field for a week, poor bastard! And Mohican is correct spell checker, I looked it up. I have not misspelt ‘Chicano’! If I’d wanted to say a person of Mexican descent I would have said so. And why is everyone waiting for ‘more data’? It’s like some spreadsheet’s going to come down from the sky and churn out a definitive answer so that basically I don’t have to think about it. And equally basically I must not make a decision because decisions are bad. If I ever make a decision it will likely be wrong and that’s way worse than doing nothing. I go back to the spell checker for comfort. ‘Chiastic’, Inversion in the second of two parallel phrases.’ OK I don’t understand that but it must be true. ‘Chiasma’, The crossing of the optic nerves from the two eyes at the base of the brain.’ OK, whatever. ‘Chicago’. Oh I know this one so lets try Synonyms. ‘boodle, Michigan, Newmarket, stops, Windy City.’ Who writes this stuff? I try ‘Bollocks’. It’s got to be done. ‘One of the two male reproductive glands that produce spermatozoa and secrete androgens.’ Oh right, must try that next time some twat gives me the benefit of his opinion. ‘she kicked him in the bollocks and got away.’ That’s more like it. At last something I can relate to. And that’s the trouble with data, most of it is boll….x.