I have known for a long time that I should get serious about yoga. Apart from the obvious health benefits (both physical and spiritual) there's the aesthetic appeal of composing one’s body into all sorts of interesting, attractive and impressive postures. And if that isn’t enough, there is the tantalising prospect— for those willing to undertake a rigorous regime of self-discipline — of attaining an elevated state of consciousness and even bursting through to full-blown spiritual enlightenment.
What’s not to like about it ?
The trouble is, I'm hopeless at yoga. I can't touch my toes; I can't even sit on a flat floor with my legs outstretched without toppling backwards. At the last yoga class I attended — and I have attended many over the years — I considered asking if I might do my exercises in a little curtained-off area, visible only to the teacher and thereby sparing my fellow participants the half-glimpsed sight of my lumbering efforts.
Of course, given even a modicum of serious application, all this would undoubtedly improve. At the yoga class the teacher advises starting every day with 10 or 15 minutes practice but on the first morning there is invariably something more important that needs doing; on the second I forget completely; on the third, I do 3 minutes and realise that it is nowhere near enough and then it’s too late. Best try again next week. This goes on for a week or two, after which I decide that I won’t go back to the class until I have cracked the problem of daily practice. After that it all goes rapidly downhill until the whole cycle starts again.
I believe it boils down to a problem with self-discipline (towards which I have a stubborn and perverse resistance). If only it were possible to practice yoga in a similar way to those Michel Thomas language courses. There, the advice is that you should not try to remember any of the words you are learning and on no account should you revisit lessons or attempt to revise. Now that's the kind of discipline that appeals to me. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to work when it comes to yoga.
And so — though the day I have to ask someone to tie my shoelaces is still a little way off — I have come to accept that suppleness is a quality I am destined never to enjoy.
But then recently something interesting happened. As if reluctant to give up on the yoga business completely, I found myself wondering precisely why it is I am so bad at it. So for example, if I lie on my back with my arms out to the sides and let my knees fall to the right, I get a sense of tautness in my left upper arm. It’s a similar case with the other bits. It led me to develop a mental picture of my body as a complicated system of interlinked strings (frayed) and pulleys (seized-up) in which every part is linked in some strange and intriguing way to all the others.
These days, I find myself unable to resist spending a few minutes every morning on the mat, exploring the minute details of my incompetence.
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Monday, July 18, 2016
Trident
The thing that most frustrates me about people who support renewal of the Trident weapons system is their apparent inability (or unwillingness) to imagine what would happen if we ever came to use it. I may be wrong, but I picture them saying something fatalistic like:
"Well, we'll all be dead anyway - so it doesn't bear thinking about".
But it does bear thinking about; we have a responsibility to think about it.
And by no stretch of the imagination would everyone be dead after a nuclear exchange. The reality would be far worse than that - for around every ground zero there would be a series of zones within which every imaginable horror would be endured.
Just to bring it home: if a single Trident warhead was exploded over a major city (similar to London) there would be half a million fatalities but, more significantly, around a quarter of a million people would suffer third degree burns and of these, upwards of 50,000 would be children. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to picture the chaos and suffering that these numbers represent.
Bearing in mind that the UK National Burns Care Group currently defines a Mass Casualty Incident as one involving around 1000 patients, it is no exaggeration to say that injuries resulting from a nuclear strike, would overwhelm even the best-resourced medical services.
I for one am not prepared to support a defence policy that threatens to unleash an obscenity of this sort - even in retaliation.
"Well, we'll all be dead anyway - so it doesn't bear thinking about".
But it does bear thinking about; we have a responsibility to think about it.
And by no stretch of the imagination would everyone be dead after a nuclear exchange. The reality would be far worse than that - for around every ground zero there would be a series of zones within which every imaginable horror would be endured.
Just to bring it home: if a single Trident warhead was exploded over a major city (similar to London) there would be half a million fatalities but, more significantly, around a quarter of a million people would suffer third degree burns and of these, upwards of 50,000 would be children. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to picture the chaos and suffering that these numbers represent.
Bearing in mind that the UK National Burns Care Group currently defines a Mass Casualty Incident as one involving around 1000 patients, it is no exaggeration to say that injuries resulting from a nuclear strike, would overwhelm even the best-resourced medical services.
I for one am not prepared to support a defence policy that threatens to unleash an obscenity of this sort - even in retaliation.
Friday, February 19, 2016
More fun with the smell-checker
One of my favourite comic writers - "the soles of whose shoes I am unworthy to lick" (to quote Eric Idle) - was Paul Jennings. Some of his best pieces were published as a collection called The Jenguin Pennings. If you have ever read any of these you might have noticed a certain similarity to the infinitely more humble offerings of your's truly.
There's no secret about it; Paul Jennings is a great insulation.
All of which reminds me of one of my favourite Jennings pieces. As is customary he starts with something quite innocuous before letting his comic imagination get to work. In this case he was learning to touch type and, in particular, typing the standard test phrase: "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Forbidden to look at the keys, he inevitably made mistakes and then went on the analyse them for hidden, subconscious significance.
Of course, the spell-checker gives the whole enterprise a turbot boat - or should I say a turbo boost - and so I decided to give it a try.
Using Hamlet's famous soliloquy as the test piece, I typed it out as fast as I could with the spell-checker turned up to 11.
Here's what emerged:
To be or not ego end; that is the quiet son
And you see how, right from the word go, we're into some pretty deep stuff. That 'ego end' for example. What more profound way to talk about death?
Whether it is an oblige in the mind to suffer the Swiss and arrows of outrageous rotund
This is more undoubtedly more difficult. 'An oblige in the mind' has something primitive about it - there are hints here of a subconscious compulsion, but quite what the Swiss have to do with it is unclear.
Or to take absinthe and sea-dog trailers and by opening end them.
Stranger and stranger. Despite the fact that a sea-dog trailer is exactly the sort of thing you might expect to come across after a dose of absinthe, it is utterly incomprehensible why you should want to open them and how that's going to help anything.
This was clearly going to demand some serious analysis; I decided to try something simpler:
Humpy dimply dat one a wall
Humphrys dedumpty had agreed to a fall
All the kinda horse and all the makings men
Couldn't pry Humply together again
… which I am sure you will agree can confidently hold its own against the original.
As to what it means exactly - I will leave you to decide.
There's no secret about it; Paul Jennings is a great insulation.
All of which reminds me of one of my favourite Jennings pieces. As is customary he starts with something quite innocuous before letting his comic imagination get to work. In this case he was learning to touch type and, in particular, typing the standard test phrase: "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Forbidden to look at the keys, he inevitably made mistakes and then went on the analyse them for hidden, subconscious significance.
Of course, the spell-checker gives the whole enterprise a turbot boat - or should I say a turbo boost - and so I decided to give it a try.
Using Hamlet's famous soliloquy as the test piece, I typed it out as fast as I could with the spell-checker turned up to 11.
Here's what emerged:
To be or not ego end; that is the quiet son
And you see how, right from the word go, we're into some pretty deep stuff. That 'ego end' for example. What more profound way to talk about death?
Whether it is an oblige in the mind to suffer the Swiss and arrows of outrageous rotund
This is more undoubtedly more difficult. 'An oblige in the mind' has something primitive about it - there are hints here of a subconscious compulsion, but quite what the Swiss have to do with it is unclear.
Or to take absinthe and sea-dog trailers and by opening end them.
Stranger and stranger. Despite the fact that a sea-dog trailer is exactly the sort of thing you might expect to come across after a dose of absinthe, it is utterly incomprehensible why you should want to open them and how that's going to help anything.
This was clearly going to demand some serious analysis; I decided to try something simpler:
Humpy dimply dat one a wall
Humphrys dedumpty had agreed to a fall
All the kinda horse and all the makings men
Couldn't pry Humply together again
… which I am sure you will agree can confidently hold its own against the original.
As to what it means exactly - I will leave you to decide.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
What is Life? 1
So, in response to the invitation that concluded my last blog as to which topic should be the 'first up' out of:
1. Buy-to-let
2. Identity theft
3. Bitcoin
4. What is Life?
I can now announce the result, namely that 100% of respondents opted for topic no.4
Readers: You say respondents. How many were there exactly ?
Three as it happens; but it doesn’t matter. What is Life? it is.
Of course, by life, we could be talking about any number of things. I mean, there's life in the abstract poetic sense:
… then there’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Version ….
Readers: That one will do too. Whatever. Just get on with it.
But I’m not thinking of either of these. No, I'm talking about life in the biological sense — what you see when you look at other people, dogs, trees, spiders, worms, flies. slugs and slime ... that sort of life.
Readers: Heaven preserve us.
And so the question is .... what is it exactly. What is life ?
(Some people, sensing an imminent plunge into something resembling a school chemistry lesson, might choose to get off at this point. If you are one of them then please don’t feel badly about it; it’s not like I’ll ever know. Just try to leave quietly without upsetting the others.)
I have been interested in this topic for a number of years. It would be reasonable to ask why.
Readers: Maybe — but do we really have to ?
I could talk about the books I have read, about theories and scientific disciplines but that would be to miss the essential thing, which is more to do with the sense of wonder we experience when we stand back and contemplate the mysterious world that surrounds us. And so it was in my case, initially through literature and film — and in particular, Stanislaw Lem’s book, Solaris and the later film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky — that I first caught a glimpse of the world seen as a stranger or innocent might see it.
In Lem’s story, the planet Solaris is so unfathomably complex that entire institutes are established, dedicated to the study of the bizarre and incomprehensible processes and structures observed on its surface. The consensus view is that the planet is effectively a single, sentient organism and, though this was some years before James Lovelock’s Gaia, it didn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see that Solaris might easily be taken to stand for our own planet. In the film version Tarkovsky takes this a step further, in making it clear how those who have experienced the planet firsthand are irrevocably changed by the experience — being left with the sense that things formerly seen as ordinary or commonplace have taken on a quality of profound mystery.
Then sometime later, I was watching a wildlife documentary in which a flock of white birds, filmed from above, was flying over an empty landscape and I found myself thinking how Earth is a planet on which the basic building blocks of matter have mysteriously become alive to the extent that pieces can actually detach themselves from the surface and engage in all sorts of complex behaviours. In truth, Earth itself is a living planet - not just a planet with life on it, but a planet that is itself alive; seemingly unique among the other planets in the solar system; and, for all we know, in the entire universe.
In attempting to explain life, scientists — at least until recently — have had little to offer beyond the idea that, given sufficient time, the generation of a mind-boggling number of random combinations of molecules will eventually result in the accidental creation of one or more exquisite biological mechanisms, capable of self-organisation and replication.
Meanwhile, to people of faith, it is all down to the hand of God — it being utterly inconceivable that the rich tapestry of life could have come about by means of a mere lottery, however many rolls of the balls are allowed.
I find both of these views — which could respectively be labeled creationist and mechanistic — completely unsatisfactory, inasmuch as they regard the material world as oddly limited in its capacity to give rise to new forms and structures. In both scenarios, the laws of physics and chemistry are allowed to explain certain natural combinations: molecules, crystals — even amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) but it is as if, beyond a certain level of complexity, further structural elaboration is assumed to be implausible and something else has to be brought into play: either God or Dawkins’ blind watchmaker.
There is another alternative however: namely that it is in the nature of basic matter to assemble itself, first as simple and later more complex molecules, all the way up to the astounding nano-machines found in even the simplest cells and that this process entails a rich interplay of structure and environment — subject, all the while, to a number of simple rules. This is discussed in a recent book by Nick Lane: The Vital Question. As I have only a rudimentary understanding of chemistry, I have found the book fairly hard going and am still only around halfway through reading it, but it is inspiring to see the author explain how the fundamental processes found in the simplest bacterial forms of life might have come about almost inevitably, given the right environment.
Readers: so that’s what you spend your time thinking about …
Well not all my time exactly, but yes - and for no other reason than that I find this stuff seriously fascinating. And what’s more, it raises all sorts of interesting questions — for example:
Evolution would appear to account for the ‘endless forms’ in which life manifests itself, but the underlying mechanisms governing replication, respiration etc are virtually identical in all living species - even the most primitive. How did such mechanisms themselves evolve and why are there virtually no traces of alternative designs ?
Readers: Why indeed ?
And is life on earth unique or does it exist elsewhere in the universe?
Readers: Yes — that’s a good one and what’s the answer do you think ?
Ah - we might have to leave that till next time.
Readers: What? There’s more ?
Lots. We’ve barely scratched the surface
1. Buy-to-let
2. Identity theft
3. Bitcoin
4. What is Life?
I can now announce the result, namely that 100% of respondents opted for topic no.4
Readers: You say respondents. How many were there exactly ?
Three as it happens; but it doesn’t matter. What is Life? it is.
Of course, by life, we could be talking about any number of things. I mean, there's life in the abstract poetic sense:
What is this life if, full of care,Readers: Yeah, yeah — that's the one we want.
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as …..
… then there’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Version ….
Readers: That one will do too. Whatever. Just get on with it.
But I’m not thinking of either of these. No, I'm talking about life in the biological sense — what you see when you look at other people, dogs, trees, spiders, worms, flies. slugs and slime ... that sort of life.
Readers: Heaven preserve us.
And so the question is .... what is it exactly. What is life ?
(Some people, sensing an imminent plunge into something resembling a school chemistry lesson, might choose to get off at this point. If you are one of them then please don’t feel badly about it; it’s not like I’ll ever know. Just try to leave quietly without upsetting the others.)
I have been interested in this topic for a number of years. It would be reasonable to ask why.
Readers: Maybe — but do we really have to ?
I could talk about the books I have read, about theories and scientific disciplines but that would be to miss the essential thing, which is more to do with the sense of wonder we experience when we stand back and contemplate the mysterious world that surrounds us. And so it was in my case, initially through literature and film — and in particular, Stanislaw Lem’s book, Solaris and the later film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky — that I first caught a glimpse of the world seen as a stranger or innocent might see it.
In Lem’s story, the planet Solaris is so unfathomably complex that entire institutes are established, dedicated to the study of the bizarre and incomprehensible processes and structures observed on its surface. The consensus view is that the planet is effectively a single, sentient organism and, though this was some years before James Lovelock’s Gaia, it didn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see that Solaris might easily be taken to stand for our own planet. In the film version Tarkovsky takes this a step further, in making it clear how those who have experienced the planet firsthand are irrevocably changed by the experience — being left with the sense that things formerly seen as ordinary or commonplace have taken on a quality of profound mystery.
Then sometime later, I was watching a wildlife documentary in which a flock of white birds, filmed from above, was flying over an empty landscape and I found myself thinking how Earth is a planet on which the basic building blocks of matter have mysteriously become alive to the extent that pieces can actually detach themselves from the surface and engage in all sorts of complex behaviours. In truth, Earth itself is a living planet - not just a planet with life on it, but a planet that is itself alive; seemingly unique among the other planets in the solar system; and, for all we know, in the entire universe.
In attempting to explain life, scientists — at least until recently — have had little to offer beyond the idea that, given sufficient time, the generation of a mind-boggling number of random combinations of molecules will eventually result in the accidental creation of one or more exquisite biological mechanisms, capable of self-organisation and replication.
Meanwhile, to people of faith, it is all down to the hand of God — it being utterly inconceivable that the rich tapestry of life could have come about by means of a mere lottery, however many rolls of the balls are allowed.
I find both of these views — which could respectively be labeled creationist and mechanistic — completely unsatisfactory, inasmuch as they regard the material world as oddly limited in its capacity to give rise to new forms and structures. In both scenarios, the laws of physics and chemistry are allowed to explain certain natural combinations: molecules, crystals — even amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) but it is as if, beyond a certain level of complexity, further structural elaboration is assumed to be implausible and something else has to be brought into play: either God or Dawkins’ blind watchmaker.
There is another alternative however: namely that it is in the nature of basic matter to assemble itself, first as simple and later more complex molecules, all the way up to the astounding nano-machines found in even the simplest cells and that this process entails a rich interplay of structure and environment — subject, all the while, to a number of simple rules. This is discussed in a recent book by Nick Lane: The Vital Question. As I have only a rudimentary understanding of chemistry, I have found the book fairly hard going and am still only around halfway through reading it, but it is inspiring to see the author explain how the fundamental processes found in the simplest bacterial forms of life might have come about almost inevitably, given the right environment.
Readers: so that’s what you spend your time thinking about …
Well not all my time exactly, but yes - and for no other reason than that I find this stuff seriously fascinating. And what’s more, it raises all sorts of interesting questions — for example:
Evolution would appear to account for the ‘endless forms’ in which life manifests itself, but the underlying mechanisms governing replication, respiration etc are virtually identical in all living species - even the most primitive. How did such mechanisms themselves evolve and why are there virtually no traces of alternative designs ?
Readers: Why indeed ?
And is life on earth unique or does it exist elsewhere in the universe?
Readers: Yes — that’s a good one and what’s the answer do you think ?
Ah - we might have to leave that till next time.
Readers: What? There’s more ?
Lots. We’ve barely scratched the surface
Monday, January 04, 2016
New Year's resolutions
I don’t normally do these — resolutions that is — but this year one just sort of popped up, namely:
Get on with it
It has the attraction of being fairly non-specific, while simultaneously addressing my main problem, namely a tendency to engage in wool gathering — which the dictionary defines as indulgence in aimless thought or dreamy imagining.
Anyway, while my New Year’s resolution has broad scope (being applicable to everything, from tidying the cellar to being more sociable), for you dear readers, the fruit will be dished up on these very pages. I have a number of topics waiting in the wings, including:
Buy-to-let
Identity theft
Bitcoin
What is Life?
… as well as a selection of lighthearted extracts from Horsley’s Over the Wall magazine.
If you have a particular preference as to which of these delicacies you would like to sample first, please let me know.
In the meantime, here’s wishing you a very happy (and productive) New Year
Get on with it
It has the attraction of being fairly non-specific, while simultaneously addressing my main problem, namely a tendency to engage in wool gathering — which the dictionary defines as indulgence in aimless thought or dreamy imagining.
Anyway, while my New Year’s resolution has broad scope (being applicable to everything, from tidying the cellar to being more sociable), for you dear readers, the fruit will be dished up on these very pages. I have a number of topics waiting in the wings, including:
Buy-to-let
Identity theft
Bitcoin
What is Life?
… as well as a selection of lighthearted extracts from Horsley’s Over the Wall magazine.
If you have a particular preference as to which of these delicacies you would like to sample first, please let me know.
In the meantime, here’s wishing you a very happy (and productive) New Year
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