Gimme Six!

At last I've got onto the one John Wyndham book which my wife has read and raves about. This one takes us beyond the usual JW Cosy Catastrophe and projects us hundreds or thousands of years into the future after some sort of apocalypse where mutations are seen as being against the will of God. People are made is His exact image and any deviation is treated ruthlessly with banishment to badlands. In this Amish-like setting, comes the ultimate in mutations - telepathy - which Wyndham was fascinated with.

Now this has me thinking. I don't believe in any of the usual new-age tosh and was rooting for Dawkins all the way in his Enemies of Reason World Tour. However, I suppose because telepathy relates directly to the organ which I use to think about it, I have a slight anti-reason view that there is possibly a perfectly acceptable real-world vector for it. If an eye can evolve to detect light and a firefly can evolve to give it off then why not imagine a creature which emits and receives other electromagnetic radiation? To our ancestors, communication by writing and reading would seem like telepathy - and better still it is telepathy that spans not only space but time as well. All human radio communication is, for all but the few centimetres between the mouth and the microphone and the speaker and the ear, telepathy. We only need to work on a direct link between the black boxes and the brain and the link is complete.

I suppose there must be a reason why organisms have evolved to use only certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate - it probably is to do with wavelength in relation to the size of the cells capable of reacting to it - but I cannot see why we could not evolve (or even re-design ourselves) to broadcast and receive radio waves. The brain after all is an electrical device and we can read some of its output already by direct contact. Maybe two heads close together could already each get an idea of the general field state put out by the other. I am sure that devices to extend the range of this are not far away.

White Sails

It rains! It rains again and the rivers flood and wash away all the hose-pipe inspectors. I love this weather even if it does flood the garden and mean we have to think about lifting the drain covers to let it flow away. Even in the winter a good shower makes me happy which might seem odd but just think about all the negative ions that go with it. They make the air fresh and keep the dust down. Think of the sound a raindrops staging their way down through the different levels of a thick summer wood. You can walk surrounded by spheres of sound from the crashing white noise of the indistinguishable multitude that hit the outer leaves to the chaotic bass of the conglomerated monsters that make it to the forest floor.

From the window here I have a view over green lawns towards trees that hide a few cars, not like the car park that surrounded the previous office. And right now the rains falls, straight down in the windless air. This sealed building steals all the sound, giving us just the muffled murmur of various conversations and a mid-range hum of blowers and air-conditioners. I look forward to the short walk to my car in the rain this evening; it makes the thought of the longer journey home more bearable. I think of all the unpopulated places around - the empty forests with their unheard rainstorms, the undulating grass of moorland taking the deluge unhindered by the protection of trees - the beaches with the sound of wave and tide. These places have been here all the time, long before there was any mind capable of remembering them. Like existence defined by the last memory of the last person you knew, they will fade from our notes and yet they will still go one until we have ceased to be either through destruction or our own evolution into something more worthy of the custodianship of this planet.

I'll make it into Pseuds' Corner one day.

Life After Archie

Apparently there will be Noctilucent Clouds visible over Britain all this week which I suppose is quite exciting though obviously I have to stay awake long enough to see them and hope that the permanent greyness disperses as well. None of which is as wonderful as seeing the Horseshoe Vortex cloud that was in the sky as I drove home the other week.



It was indeed fleeting and because I did not have my camera (and couldn't have used it anyway officer) I am sure that bagging it in my Cloud Collector's Handbook would not be allowed.

We have been enjoying Rev on BBC2, a sitcom that has the basic premise of The Vicar of Dibley only not with a woman vicar and not in a charming country parish. And yet for all that lack of cosy teatime goodness it leaves a much warmer feeling. It seems that the struggle to do the right thing in the face of real urban issues makes for better people than the bucolic glow of Dibley. I'm not sure it's gone down too well with the standard C of E old-guard but we like it.

The Base White Mug of the Universe

(From BestSub Technologies Co., Ltd.)

And the big news is we have moved offices - rather a long way in fact - but to a place with a much nicer view. The entire contents of the previous place have been transported to here - sinks and everything. My entire working life is summed up in a couple of crates and a mobile cabinet. The main reception has New Scientist in the magazine racks and the view is of green - trees and grass which is a huge improvement on the brick wall that I looked out on from my first office at Plessey in 1986. Actually I lie about that because before that I did a placement year in the IT department of The Bristol and West Building Society which looked out over the very centre of Bristol - a spectacular view of theatres, docksides and art galleries - all within staggering distance of at least 100 bars/pubs/clubs/strip joints/kebab shops etc. However, at my age (noticing the first grey hairs) a nice bit of calm greenery is all I want. And so thoughts of the simple view out of a generic office window turn to meditation on getting old.

Until the free vending machines arrive we have liberated some catering-sized cans of coffee and a number of white mugs unusually not bearing the log of various suppliers/clients which, to extend the deep and pretentious theme of today, could almost be Plato's Universal Idea of a cup, though reading that Wiki article I got as far as "category error" before I realised I was out of my depth and gave up. Be thankful that the office is light and airy or I might have mentioned Plato's Cave and then where would we be?