It's like a giant encyclopaedia

I was a little bored with the music on the radio on the way home yesterday so I switched to the old standby, Radio 4. The programme on at the time was All in The Mind which I have not really listened to before. I was taken with the description of 'Kelly's Repertory Grid'. Read the instructions so that you know how it works. This reminds me of a project I saw probably on a Horizon programme some years ago where a computer had been set up to accept what the operators called 'common sense' data to allow a robot or Artificial Intelligence program with access to this data to have an idea about the real world. After many millions of items of data had been entered, the program was allowed to start looking for consistencies in the entered data. It began coming up with some strange, previously unnoticed things. There was one thing which I can't remember entirely but was to do with a link between firearms culture and an aspect of the country in which that culture developed; something akin to the US being a stable country not prone to invasion or revolution band yet with a deep gun culture. I would ove to see all the other similar constructs which this program came up with. Anyway - I am going to try the grid for myself and if I get anywhere with it I may post the results though if I don't you will never know whether it is because it showed up a personaility flaw or because I am just a slacker (Which I suppose is a personality flaw of sorts though not a major one).

The BBC web site just gets better and better. It could have so easily become a messy, un-maintained depository for anything that was shown on TV. (There are many web-sites like this.) Instead, it is well laid out, easily searchable and attractive. It also has the h2g2 site which is really just an extension of the BBC site itself is.

Why is your own existence the only one comprehensible? It is an extension of the anthropomorphic principle. I am lucky to be living in a Western country with a good standard of living but why do I think that this life is the best? I have this weird idea which I may have talked about before, that Quantum effects make everyone have the best possible life; really bad things only happen to other people. The further removed from your own locality you look at people, the less real is your perception of their existence. I know of course that this is not true because that would mean that places where there is famine and mine fields and continuous low level war are, for the people whoh experience them, really safe and stable and that it is us here who appear to them to suffer badly. There is a psychological aspect to this which in a way is true. Most people are resistant to change and like their own existence to continue relatively un-disturbed; there are only a few people who want to change the world and it is these people who either go out of their way to help other people or who start wars to change their world that way or who change their own personal life to help themselves. I could make my life so much better with only a few simple changes but they would upset the gentle forward motion and make me nervous. (More nervous). Sometime, when things appear to be bad locally (I mean in time and space) I think of how little I would have to do to make things better and it comforts me.