Blog › January 2007 Archives

Sacrificial chips
When eating a bowl of chips at a pub, or a packet of fries at a fast-food outlet, I like to empty 2 or 3 ketchup sachets onto a limited area of chippage. Normally most of the ketchup falls onto one chip, but there is always a fallout area covering 3 or 4 chips. The central chip in the catchment area will normally become so soggy that when I do eat it, after consuming all other available non-dead chips*, it's difficult to taste anything other than ketchup.

Anyway, I like to refer to this as the "sacrificial chip". Please help me to push this phrase into common use. Personally, I like the sacrificial chip, indeed consider it the pinnacle of the bowl-of-chips eating experience, but I have at least one friend who dislikes sacrificing chips so much that she will "ketchup" (that's a verb) each chip individually, directly from the sachet.

*Dead chips are the chips that are either too crispy to chew, or chips that simply look odd, presumably due to inconsistencies in the McKentuckyBurger "french fry" manufacturing process.
29 January, 2007 at 19:15 1 Comment
Free will
There is a lot of discussion going on at the moment about free will; so I feel compelled (geddit?) to post on the subject myself. Some interesting reading, if you haven't seen this stuff before:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8453850
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19025504.000

I can't offer much in the way of philosphical or experimental arguments for or against free will, so I'd like to approach it in a different way.

When I was a teenager I was, it's fair to say, a very different person. I was, as teenagers invariably are, the product of a combination of influences: family, school, friends, church. From these influences I had built up a certain world view. I happened upon some essays and stores that I wrote at school, reproduced here for your amusement (the fact that I now cringe when reading this stuff perfectly illustrates the point I'm about to make):
"In the book of Genesis, inspired by God, and written by Moses, we find the beginnings of man"
"In 1984, a stamp was issued in Britain that commemorated the 2nd Election of the European Parliament. This shows a woman riding on a beast which is on seven waves, or mounds. This symbolism bears a striking similarity to the passage in Revelation 17, which states: 'I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and the ten horns ... Here is the mind which has wisdom: The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits...'" [I like this one; in my opinion, Christians rule the roost at conspiracy theories]
"[Jesus] has given us clear instructions about how to be a servant. These have priority over our own desires for success ... Let us strive to humble ourselves to Him. Only by doing that will we find true fulfillment and satisfaction."
"State schools ... are feeding children evolution, atheism, and every other ‘ism’ that is opposed to God." [I think was actually right on this point, but my stance on it now may be somewhat different]
Ouch. I feel quite uncomfortable even reading those quotes myself, let alone sharing them. But I want to make a point: I'm different from who I was then. I'm very different. But why?

As I see it, there are three possible ways in which I might have changed:
  • I realised that my views were "wrong", and pro-actively decided to change my views to fit better with what I perceived to be more right. For me, there was certainly an element of dissatisfaction with how my world view, but I didn't plan to throw out the baby and the bathwater.
  • I made no conscious choice to change, but instead a complicated sequence of events and people in my life led to where I am now. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems to me. Some people have been quite influential in my life, and without them I may well have followed a different path. In turn, the lives of those people have been shaped by others, in infinitely complex and different ways.
  • Some combination of the above
The part that is not straightforward about the 2nd option is that, on the face of it, there's an implication that nobody is responsible for the person they in fact are. I disagree: I view myself as a standalone entity, and am responsible for both my opinions and my actions. Maybe this is the where the "veto" mechanism mentioned in one of the articles I linked to above comes in, such that each time my brain was about to allow a change to its view of the world, my conscious mind had the opportunity to veto it, and my not vetoing a change is the only way I can express free will and "uniqueness".

Since this whole subject is damn near unprovable, I look at it as an interesting diversion, with no real purpose. That said, like most pointless discussions, I find it fascinating. What do you think - do we choose to develop our personalities and characters, or are those traits merely effects of complex causes?
16 January, 2007 at 17:45 1 Comment
Happiness
After a discussion I had tonight with a friend, over [quite a few] drinks, regarding happiness, I got to thinking, how do you really define a concept as vague as happiness?

The dictionary.com definition is:
  1. the quality or state of being happy
  2. good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy
It seems to me that of the second definition, both good fortune and pleasure are externally derived, and probably an unstable basis for happiness. Contentment is a passive feeling, of having achieved what you want to or acquired the possessions you desire, etc.

This leaves joy, which I again looked up on dictionary.com, only to find that most of the definitions relate again to external influences. The same with happy.

Is our species really so dependent on others? I like to think that if I was stuck on the dark side of the moon, with only an antique Apollo moon buggy for company [yes, this was a scenario that was discussed tonight] it would still be possible for me to be happy. Maybe not happy in the dictionary sense.

Here's a question, and I wouldn't say I know the answer: Is it possible to be happy with other people if you are not happy on your own?
12 January, 2007 at 01:35 2 Comments
Thief Steals Urinal
Just when you thought all the innovative thiefs were moving into the high-tech worlds of identity and digital theft, somebody comes along to remind you that there's still some old-skool crooks out there.

The BBC is reporting that a man has stolen a urinal from a pub in Southampton. Apparently he went into the pub at about 5pm and ordered a half-pint of Fosters. He then went into the toilet several times, each time removing part of the white urinal bowl from the wall. It seems the guy did a highly professional job, turning off the stopcock and capping the pipe, and wiping his fingerprints from the door as he left (one wonders if he also wiped his fingerprints from his half-pint glass).

He left the pub with a bulging rucksack, and was caught on CCTV.

I like to imagine the conversation that may have happened between this man and a friend the night before:

Thief: "I have a nice house, but I'm worried it's missing something. The pièce de la resistance, so to speak."

Friend: "You mean like a banqueting hall, or a built-in cinema?"

Thief: "Actually I was thinking smaller-scale. Maybe a urinal in my bathroom."

Friend: "Why would you want a urinal in your bathroom?"

Thief: "For one thing, I wouldn't need to lift the seat back up after my girlfriend has used the bathroom. Also, I wouldn't need to remember to flush."

Friend: "Okay, so where do you buy urinals from?"

Thief: "Well, there weren't any on the Ikea website, but I did spot a nice one at the Royal Oak..."

Maybe.
06 January, 2007 at 11:57 1 Comment
New Year's Resolutions
My new year's resolution: 1280 x 1024.

Sorry.

Although I agree with those who say that making resolutions at the beginning of a new year is a pointless activity - because if something's worth doing at the beginning of a year then it's worth doing all the time - I find it's a useful crutch.

Here's some of mine:
  • Learn to play the oboe. I have a dream of sitting at the top of a mountain, guru-like, playing comforting melodies on the oboe to weary travellers. I shall call myself Sage Tim The Cold And Not That Wise.
  • Expand my repertoire of recipes. There's thousands of different ingredients available in the average supermarket, and a number several orders of magnitude higher ways of combining those ingredients. And I know how to cook, oh, about 6 different dinners.
  • Cycle to work. I've been promising this one to myself and others for a year now, but this time I'm, uhmm, slightly more serious.
  • Enter some local 5k and 10k runs. I loved running these distances when preparing for the Nike 10k run in October, and I'd like to do some more competitive running, especially at the 5k distance, primarily because it's over nice and quickly.
03 January, 2007 at 17:54 0 Comments