DO0D

Years ago (early eighties) I was part of a discussion about building God’s Kingdom today. There were lots of undergraduates enthusing about how we could all live in communes and share everything equally.

I interrupted their warm and pious fantasies to ask “Who will shovel the shit?”

After a shocked silence – We’re in a church hall and he said ‘shit’! – someone said, very earnestly “Everyone will shovel their share.”

In practice, in most communes, this principle doesn’t work well. Some become free-loaders while others are grafters. Eventually the grafters get fed up with lonely shoveling and they leave. I’ve never tried living in a commune, but I have had many friends who set up communes, or joined them. Communes never seem to last more than a few years. Five years was about as good as it got.

As I said at the time “Everyone shoveling their share is not going to work if there are more than a dozen people. Look at Maggie Thatcher: you would have a hard time getting her to admit she ever had a shit, let alone persuade her to shovel her share.”

This Chondritics thing is meant to be a more constructive response to this key question about how societies work.

I’ve set up a little routine for getting my slow, authorial brain started in the mornings. I have a file listing the 6,000 most frequently used words in modern English. I draw a random sample of 20 from the list and then force myself to write a short story using all those 20 words, in the same order that the random sampler lists them.

Usually 20 minutes work will convert my 20 words into a 200 word short story. It’s no surprise that most of the stories are pretty useless, but the exercise has at least got my writing cells going. So I junk the little random fragment and – brain switched on now – I turn to more serious work.

The odd thing is that sometimes the story is promising and I can work it up into something much more valuable than a mere exercise.

There is a strange attractor in Wikipedia: if you follow the first link on a page, and then go to the first link on that page, and so on … you will nearly always end up at the page for Philosophy. There’s an article about it on the New Scientist site: Feedback: Wikipedia’s strange attractor – 15 July 2011 – New Scientist.

And there’s a beautiful diagram at bit.ly/wikispace which looks very like a fractal, especially if you look at it as a pdf file and enlarge it a few hundred times.

I’ve had a cold for the past few days. Nothing serious, but it affects my ability to think. The funny thing is that my loss of brainpower is very gradual. Over a period of three or four days my (admittedly tiny) intellect slowly leaks away. Then it stays away for about five days (the cold proper). But then it comes back in a matter of an hour. Suddenly, my brain is open for business again and full of ideas. It wants to make up for lost time. It is inconvenient when this recover process starts at one o’clock in the morning.

Years ago I worked in an Astronomy department. One of the students there was a man with cerebral palsy. He was not seriously disabled, but he had some problems with controlling his limbs, especially if he was excited or thinking very hard. Once, when talking to a distinguished visitor, he became so involved in the discussion that he suddenly threw a cup of hot coffee all over the eminent professor’s front. The professor was very nice about it and simply helped to clear up the mess.

The problem was that the guy’s brain could easily cope with holding a cup of coffee, but not with doing advanced maths at the same time. And yet, we all tend to think that the human brain is good enough to understand the secrets of the universe. There’s no real reason for that to be true. As Heisenberg pointed out, the universe may be far stranger than we can think. Most of us handle our coffee well, most of the time. But we shouldn’t put too much faith in it.

Aporian Adventurer

Who will shovel the shit?

A writer’s daily start-up

Wikipedia is a fractal

Slow decline – fast recovery

How good is the human brain?