I Think They Should Play the Whole Day at the Wrong Speed

It is dark when I leave home in the mornings now; the sky lightens as I go and this morning it was particularly beautiful. There was no colour in the sky, just a succession of patterns in the dark grey clouds, calling to mind animal spots or stripes. I suppose the chaos and math that produces both are related at some deep level. Maybe rather than striving to link the various branches of physics with their boiled-down equations, humans should be working to determine how to relate the simple things with the chaotic at a deep level. On the one hand, you can have the clear equation for the spirals of seeds in a sunflower, while on the other you get the fractal growth of a fern. Maybe one boils out of a simplification of the other and I am sure people far cleverer than I am, have been working on this for years.

The solutions to human issues probably lie in the same direction. I know Richard Dawkins believes that religious belief is a meme, which I think he likens to a virus that not only infects its host but also causes the host to disagree with people infected with other varieties of that meme. I don’t know enough to say whether he advocates complete vaccination as it were, though I do know that he enjoys the artistic trappings of religion. Maybe we should work out a balance sheet of positives and negatives. Like my assertion that, while I understand that peace deals with terrorists upset some people, the greater good is served by the fact that people are no longer killing each other; maybe the ending of religious war is worth the loss of spirituality. As my wife says, religion does not cause the wars; it is used as an excuse. To believe that a terrorist attack can be justified under any of the main religions proves that you are either mad or secretly do not believe the rubbish you spout. I can understand why the UN has failed to define what terrorism actually is; there are a great many fuzzy areas even at the heart of the current debate. But you are not allowed to say that in case you are seen as weak. You can never make a mistake.