John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

31 January 2007: SPSS is statistics software. Try and buy some from that site.

I've no clue where to turn. Am I a predictive enterprise? Hell nn nnn ye yeee naa. Nnnnnn. Yyyyyyy. ? If I go to the 'store', I get a choice of: Books, New Software - Commercial, New Software - Higher Education, New Software - K-12, Software - Upgrade, Training, Training Guides. What's K-12? Oh, OK, so it's relevant to the US and Canada but not to me. So I must be "New software - commercial". I'll just click that and ..

Description	Price
Amos™ 7.0 	 $1049.00  
AnswerTree® 3.1 	 $1495.00  
Database Analyst Bundle 	 $2280.00  
DecisionTime® 	 $999.00  
Plan and Forecast Analyst Bundle 	 $2470.00  
SamplePower® 2.0 	 $999.00  
SmartViewer® 14.0 	 $199.00  
SPSS® Base 15.0 for Windows® 	 $1599.00  
SPSS® Base 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $1599.00  
SPSS Advanced Models™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $899.00  
SPSS Advanced Models™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $899.00  
SPSS Categories™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $899.00  
SPSS Categories™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $899.00  
SPSS Classification Trees™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $899.00  
SPSS Classification Trees™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $899.00  
SPSS Complex Samples™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $899.00  
SPSS Complex Samples™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $899.00  
SPSS Conjoint™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $699.00  
SPSS Conjoint™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $699.00  
SPSS Data Entry Builder 4.0 	 $1249.00  
SPSS Data Entry Station 4.0 	 $299.00  
SPSS Data Preparation™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $699.00  
SPSS Exact Tests™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $699.00  
SPSS Maps™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $699.00  
SPSS Missing Value Analysis™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $699.00  
SPSS Missing Value Analysis™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $699.00  
SPSS Regression Models™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $899.00  
SPSS Regression Models™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $899.00  
SPSS Tables™ 15.0 for Windows® 	 $899.00  
SPSS Tables™ 13.0 for Mac® OS X 	 $899.00

Isn't that beautiful? There are two pages of this. And just look at those prices! So .. what? Am I supposed to click each one to work out which suits me best? Any chance of prices in £? If you click one, you get the option, on a $699 product of buying $175 of maintenance. Maintenance? Different world.

I was looking the other day at some web developer's page, he was charging something like £3.78 per month to develop, that's develop (spec, design, project manage, graphic design, photograph, write, program, and test) .. and maintain .. a website. Whatever you can imagine, we'll build it, he said .. more or less. £3.78 a month. Wow. And I can imagine quite big things too. So, SPSS charges $2,470 for something they've already built, while me laddo charges £3.78 a month to build a whole website only limited by the imagination of the purchaser. Curious.

And look at the software and solutions page .. is it actually possible to decide what to press? And if you do choose something, a lot of nonsense words land on your screen. It's like a nightmare learned helplessness experiment where whatever you do ends in an electric shock through your chair.

I looked at predictive web analytics. Software that, I hope, would (if I could ever understand it) help me work out how to improve sales from a website. It's just comedy. Obviously I'll buy some of that because I can see it's working so well on their own site.

OK, there's a role for maths and analytics in optimising a website, but I'd say there's a far greater role for real living breathing users, almost every one of whom can tell you in just a few minutes what's wrong with your site.

It looks like the open source world isn't there yet. PSPP might be the best chance, but I could just as easily poke fun at that for its arcane installation requirements.

Website testers

31 January 2007: I could do with a few more usability testers. If you can spare an occasional hour to tell me your thoughts, I will pay for your time, so if that's half useful please register here.

Recent tests have included wondering generally about your thoughts and experiences about bowling alleys and websites thereon and your thoughts about websites for location tracking devices for vulnerable people. I need some kids to talk to for the bowling alley website: pocket money anyone?

I can't guess what you think, and I need to know what's in your head. Talk to me. Join in, let's make the web better (and pass this on to anyone else you think might be able to help).

Wright vs Kyle

31 January 2007: Since working too late and accidentally sleeping in, I've finally solved the mystery of Jeremy Kyle and Matthew Wright. I was really confused. I really thought they were the same person. I thought The Wright Stuff was maybe something Ian Wright had started but with a new host, who I basically thought was Jeremy Kyle .. because they look the same. They do don't they?

It's only after a lot of flicking and real study that I worked out Matthew Wright and Jeremy Kyle really are different people. By jove I think I've got it!

I did think it was strange they were on different channels, at the same time. I know the Jeremy Kyle show's obviously recorded but it did seem like a lot of work for one man.

That's an example, actually, of a learning trick. I read somewhere, if you don't understand a paragraph or two of a book, skip over it and continue reading and learning. Your mind will construct a theory to cross the gap. It may be right, it may be wrong, but there'll be something and it will aid your understanding. Plus when you do find out the truth, you'll remember it. That gap crossing thing was happening here when my mind was subconsciously working out how Jeremy Kyle could hold down two jobs at once.

You may mock, but if you do .. you know too much about daytime tv.

West Pier

31 January 2007: There are initial proposals for the redevelopment of West Pier, and what looks like a thorough consultation process to find out what we think. Take a look, have your say. You can't moan about it later if you don't contribute now.

iPhone

28 January 2007: I'm not a Mac user, particularly .. there's an iBook knocking around for testing. I don't buy the idea that Apples are easy to use, or don't have problems and I don't like the fact that the software and hardware are locked in. But I have always loved Jobs' style. He brings human desire to technology in a way that no-one else does, and that's truly magical.

There's a lot of negative stuff online about the iPhone. Security issues. Questions about why it's been pre-announced (when Apple doesn't really do that). The downside of it being a closed architecture.

But it reminds me of something Clarkson once said on Top Gear (which is back on tonight, incidentally). In a world where everyone's got a car, he'd found a rash of products built to be wanted. Here, he said, were cars you'd buy just for fun.

Just look. It's like bathing in ewes milk. It's love. The people who say it won't be a smash hit, or it will sell mainly to Apple fans are wrong. Regardless. Whatever the downsides. Whatever it takes. People will want this. I want this (and I know two others who want it too).

It is, actually, a revolution in phones. Praise Jobs for that. Sometimes business can be very beautiful indeed.

Trophy Trader

28 January 2007: Another case study for you.

Biscuits

26 January 2007: What does the arrow mean in this picture?

Perhaps it's clear that the arrow is pointing to where you need to tear. But then I got all confused. I'm used to there being a bit of plastic to pull at. In which direction should I pull it? Common sense tells me I should pull around leftwise, but the arrow's pointing right so surely it's telling me I should pull to the right. I could starve in these moments.

The result of my attempt to get into the McVities Digestives pack

As you can see, in the end it didn't matter. The system failed anyway. It tore about ninety degrees around and then took a turn south, then came off in my hand, leaving an opening not really large enough to remove a biscuit without breaking it. I'm planning to eat this pack like a sweetcorn.

The point is: if McVities can't get the usability of a packet of digestive biscuits right, then we're all going to hell in a handcart.

Scunthorpe

26 January 2007: I went to a training session with the local business link at their offices in John Cooper Clarke's favourite town, Scunthorpe, yesterday, from 14:00 to 17:00. I assessed my options of getting there from Scarborough.

thetrainline.com was out of action. Anyway, nowadays it gives popup ads for ropey things like dating.

Using National Rail Enquiries: the train would take three hours to get there, and three and a quarter to get back, had two changes (one involving an hour's wait) and cost £33.80. I'd have had to set off from my house at 10:20, and would have arrived back home at 21:45.

The bus was even more impressive. I'd have had to leave the house at 6:20 to get me into Hull at 9:16. Buses from Hull to Scunthorpe are every three hours, so I'd then be able to get the 10:25 which would get me to Scunthorpe at 11:35, leaving me there 2 hours 25 minutes before my appointment. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to Scunthorpe .. but, personally, that didn't appeal.

The other thing about the bus timetable is it assumes a whole lot of prior knowledge. How do I use that to work out my journey? Bus routes are listed according to their start and destination, so if I'm not getting off at the terminus I need to have a mental map of the region. What if I'm a visitor?

How do I know I've found all the possibilities? Previously I've found a service and turned up for it only to find it's not in service out of the holiday season, and I had to use a whole different service that I'd completely missed online.

Bus stations don't seem to be shown every time on maps, particularly online. So I'm relying on a guess that I'll arrive in the centre of Scunthorpe in order to guess how long it'll take me to walk where I'm going, but when I arrive, I'll not actually know exactly where I am or in which direction to walk. The website should include maps showing where these places are.

Even the timetables don't make sense unless you already use the bus routes described. Where is the Crows Nest/Flower of May? Where's the Blue Dolphin? The bus stops there on the way from Scarborough to Bridlington, and I've lived here for over a decade and I've no clue, and they don't sound like road names. Pubs perhaps? So the buses navigate by pubs do they? These words should be clickable so I can see their location.

It's a classic case of the organisation assuming we know what they know. All this is second nature to them: "You want to go from here to Biddly Bumberton? Well I wouldn't start from here. But since you are, you need the 53x from Pimply Lane, you've got five minutes. Change at The Yoghurt to the Raincaster service, get off at Geoffrey and you'll be fine." To anyone else, it's gibberish. I found catching the bus from Tossa De Mar to Barcelona easier, and that was all in foreign.

The trains do it much better. Enter where you are and where you want to be and it works out your options. It's hellishly complicated programming, but it makes the user's life easier. Functionality leading to usability. The bus services need to do the same.

All that's before you risk the weather. I've stood, previously, in snow waiting for a bus for so long I called the helpline number printed on the shelter. They had no clue where their late bus was. So, what to do? With the snow coming down, if the bus is actually stuck, what were my options? I could be stranded. At least with the trains you get announcements so you can make a decision, and there's shelter. Being able to see where the buses are in real time on an interactive map would be useful.

So I drove. 2.5 hours. 73.3 miles x 2. About £58.64 of total cost if you take the tax office's 40p per mile allowance to cover the total cost of owning a car. Plus, I wasn't able to work during that time.

Actually, I think I made the wrong choice. Train would have been better.

But the other thing about this is the meeting was at the Business Link's offices. Now, being a government thing that's going to be functional, and it was. And it's not exactly going to be in a high rent area. Consequently, it's not going to have good transport links.

So. As a government department, you put on a training session. Then you look at the costs and shave some away in order to stay within budget and save taxpayer's money. This was originally to be held in a hotel in Bradford, which has a great train link with Scarborough.

Consequently the six people on the course all had to make decisions like the one I did. Each of us had to make long and complex, time consuming, expensive, and not very environmentally friendly journies. That doesn't seem like in-depth thinking on the government's part, to me. Had they paid, whatever, £100 for a more central room, the overall spend would have been less. That's public service.

Even better, perhaps, would be some sort of online training and support instead. That way, we don't have to travel at all. And since the audience was IT people, online training wouldn't hit any equipment stumbles for this market. The chap who obviously spent a good four hours talking to us, could have spent that time answering questions, managing a FAQ, etc. and reached a wider audience. And since the training was 'free' there's no income loss in that strategy.

Oh, and I got to meet a .net developer chappy who came over enthusiastically to swap cards until he realised I'm on the open source wagon whereupon he all but just turned on his heels and strode off to talk to someone else without so much as a bye your leave. Whatever a 'bye your leave' is.

But at least I did get to practice singing in the car, which would have been embarrassing had I tried it on the train. Someone did suggest to me one time that I could take a practice drum pad on the train to practice my paradiddles. Bet he'd been reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Global Warming

24 January 2007: As the world gets warmer it gets less able to absorb carbon so we're in a positive feedback loop that means we are closer to a complete environmental cock-up than we thought. So says The Hindu, which seems to be the favourite online source of something some bloke or other mentioned a few days ago. Well he must have read it somewhere other that here.

So how worried should we be? (That's me poking fun at mass TV news).

Nottingham

24 January 2007: I grew up ten miles from Nottingham, it's my home city. I wouldn't go back there though. Since living away, I've been able to see Nottingham with new eyes.

The first thing was noticing a late eighties feel about it .. still. For the uninitiated, the late eighties was a Thatcher boom. Property prices increased more than ever before .. that time was the root of the current obsession with property. I bought my first house for, I think £12,500, and sold it just a few years later for £35,000. To put that in context, I could do that on my early career wage at the time quite comfortably. Now .. with my career that much further on .. I'd need another wage to contribute.

Everyone became obsessed with money. Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney character, was (I think) a plasterer who was making money from people's property ambitions. There were loads of houses at the time that needed renovation (nowadays they've all been done). The character was noteworthy especially because until then it was expected that people in the trades earned less than those in the professions .. not anything like so true nowadays. I was talking to a joiner the other day who said he just buys what he wants. He has Sky HDTV, the first person I know to have it.

During those times, I felt (but maybe it was also that Nottingham was like this), that people were judged by their finances. Cars and houses were symbols particularly, but also I think it's during this time the designer thing came out too. Prior to that I don't think ordinary people bought designer clothes.

I remember, too, a spoof tv programme from the period in which a couple invited some friends round to their house in which they'd installed a bar. They offered their guests a drink, pulled them a pint and a glass of wine, took them over and then said "that'll be £2.50". The time was money obsessed.

Nowadays, I know I'm in Nottingham by the cars around me at the petrol station. They are cars designed to be noticed. They aren't Ferraris .. designed around function, or Aston Martins .. designed around quality .. both deep wells. They are frivolous .. brightly coloured, or just designed differently to stand out. They are designer statements. Shallow "everyone look at me's".

There's an old Nottingham saying: "fur coat and no knickers", which is a derisory term for someone who is all show. It looks good on the outside, but underneath there's no foundation. A car with no engine. A city with no soul.

Where is the soul of a city? Manchester has its music. Sheffield its proud industry and music. Newcastle its football. Nottingham .. Robin Hood. Well Robin Hood is at the most, a legend, and if there is any root to it he appears to have come from somewhere between Doncaster and Pontefract. In other words, the whole Robin Hood thing was sucked into service as a PR icon for Nottingham. All image, no roots. "We'll have that".

Nottingham Castle isn't a castle at all, more a big house built in 1660 on the grounds of a feeble progenitor that blew over one day when it got a bit windy.

It feels like the roots of Nottingham's shallow attitudes go deep.

Nottingham University, a commanding campus university, has a similar feeling to it. We probably have an image of it as in a tier second only to Oxbridge. An award from Nottingham has prestige, kudos. But again, the same thing. It's image. Try to connect to the university wireless network and, sure, you can get a 100% wireless connection, but you can't get out to the Internet. No day, no how. Plug in wired, the same. Over Christmas, the server allowing students access to academic papers went down and was out of action for about three weeks while, presumably, tech support had a holiday. Meanwhile the whole university was attempting to prepare for January exams. It all looks good, but try to use it and it doesn't work.

Nottingham: Fur coat. No knickers.

Update: but see this later blog.

Cheetham

21 January 2007: If you are a follower and admirer of Andrew Cheetham, as me and my bird are, his latest exhibition is at Harrogate's Mercer gallery. It's the work he did as artist in residence at Knaresborough Castle over the summer. There's a lot to see, and the range of talent is impressive.

We'd seen the work before, of course, when we visited him in Knaresborough, so besides the pleasure and pride of seeing it all mounted and displayed properly, the thing that I came away with is the text he's written to accompany the work.

There's no pretension here. The descriptions are clear, naked observations of the people involved. The people who ate chips while he drew. The man who had his hair cut especially before having his portrait taken.

It's art for and of the people.

The magic's in seeing the world anew, as it really is. I love it.

It's affordable too, so take your chequebook.

He's been talking about doing another residency, this time in Antarctica. Maybe in time he'll be able to tackle the really big questions, like Jade Goody's one that she's always wanted the answer to: "why don't eskimos turn into human icicles".

Moble mast finder

21 January 2007: Ooh look, you can find out where the mobile phone masts are near you. Wow and you can click it and see the operator, it's power and everything. Wow.

STREETWISEsales.co.uk

17 January 2007: Another case study for you. Plus another nice project came in today.

Flash

15 January 2007: I was just speaking with a designer friend and he said, relieved, that he'd just had a website signed off. He pointed me to it. I loaded it. It said I needed to upgrade my Flash player. I think Macromedia hadn't released the Linux Flash player to a sufficiently high version last time I looked, but I clicked on the upgrade button and after several attempts it successfully passed me to the Adobe site which gave me a link and some instructions.

I followed the instructions until it all crashed. I think it had served me an .exe file which I'd say is a Windows executable. Normally it senses what OS you're using, so I'd have expected an rpm or something.

The Adobe site said I could go to a page that would tell me what version I had installed. I did. It didn't. The version box was blank, although it confirmed I have Flash installed.

I went back to the original site. There was no alternative to running Flash.

Now, I know I'm being awkward and Linux users are in the minority but this kind-of illustrates the problem. Flash has something hegemonic about it. Basically, it's their way or no way. There's little recognition of the variety of ways people could access the web, and how many combinations of those wouldn't display a Flash-only site. In other words, there's little acceptance of individuality. Of their customers.

How do people using PDA's get on with this sort of thing?

The other thing about it is: even the 'about us' pages were Flash and I was unable to view them. 'Contact us', too. So I was entirely stopped from using this website or discovering anything about this company. How whizzy does a phone number have to be before these people are satisfied?

I was looking at this. Besides the music being a dead giveaway to your boss that you're planning what to do at the weekend .. and it's only Tuesday afternoon .. if you enter the site and look at the League info there's another problem with Flash sites. They just aren't as easily updated as proper websites. So your funky new site pretty soon becomes a dusty old out of date site because every time you want something changing it costs you (more than it probably should). I'm just guessing there. But I'm thinking surely it must cost more to sit and work out whether you want the new phone number to fall in from the left or appear from the mist and then implement that than it would to just, err, change the phone number .. like a normal person would. For evidence: There are no 'latest pictures', there is no news. Oh no, hang on. There are the pictures. Trapped in my popup blocker. Dated 2003. I rest my case. Except to say, I thought I'd print out the instructions for how to play the game and got a blank piece of paper. Weird. I thought you put paper in and it came out with information on it, not just slightly warmed.

I know Flash is pretty much given away free, so many people are able to access a Flash site should they wish to, and be able to, download and install the Flash player. But it still feels like a gated community to me. Flash development tools certainly aren't free. So nice lovely white west can do Flash things, while the rest of the world probably can't. One way traffic. Us to them. Smashing.

The W3C, our standards body, spends its days energetically furthering standards that allow the information on the World Wide Web to be displayed and read by anyone, anywhere, using any device. You can write a web page with Notepad. It has standards for accessibility and for internationalisation. The promise of the Internet and the World Wide Web is of global access to knowledge. That's in everyone's interest.

It appears Macromedia is pitted against those goals for its own interests.

So I really, really struggle when I come up against a sign that says "no Linux users", or, effectively, "no-one may enter who hasn't followed our company's news and its product upgrade path". Fine. I'll do without your whizzy website. You box yourself in. My world will be a whole lot more compelling.

Cafe Heart site upgrade

14 January 2007: I've another case study for you, Cafe Heart has upgraded their site to reflect their new menu and the new extension. The pics are all mine.

In Business, radio 4, open source

11 January 2007: In Business on Radio 4 just covered Open Source. It was pretty breathless stuff, but interesting nevertheless. And motivating. Definitely motivating. It's repeated on Sunday night, or you can stream it off the website.

North sea collision wait

11 January 2007: Apparently there's a ship, the Vindo, adrift without power in the North Sea, in a storm force 10 gale, 80 miles east of Flamborough head. It's currently drifting towards the Murdoch gas platform and is due to collide before 11pm tonight if they don't get the engines started, according to the BBC. It's carrying fertiliser. Fertiliser and gas sounds a pretty explosive mixture to me.

It seems the Vindo is no stranger to newsworthy events.

We've peeked out of the window. It's a pretty bleak and stormy night, but we can see two things we can't usually. One is a flashing sodium light on the horizon. The other is what looks like a helicopter searchlight. There's no reason why we should be able to see anything unusual unless it really does light up, as 80 miles is four times the distance from Dover to Calais and I'd guess the curvature of the earth would scupper any line of sight, no matter what telescope we had.

Update: It missed a second platform by 700m and is carrying 'manure' Adfero (pic), full story Reuters. Interestingly, BBC News 24 carried infra-red footage of the ship at sea at about 11pm, which got me thinking about how organised the coastguard operations are to provide information to the news media.

Update: Final summary: BBC

Cor!

10 January 2007: What I want to know is: if in Lanzarote you can pour a pot of water down a hole and a few seconds later it comes back at you as steam, why Lanzarote isn't a huge and rich electricity exporter from geothermal energy?

And why is geothermal energy not on anyone's agenda? Is it just too difficult? I've no idea, but it does seem to be possible to get boundless electricity at least at some points on the earth. Wikipedia. I suppose this answers it.

Lost for words

5 January 2007: My g/f, recovering from a heavy cold and a night of little sleep, happened upon This Morning just a few minutes ago where the father of Adrian Thomas, one of the people who so awfully murdered Mary-Ann Leneghan in May, was talking about what has happened since.

In one, perhaps, ten minute interview, that man has done more good than anyone or anything else I can think of. Against all our media-led images of black culture, he was .. jeez .. so incredibly beautiful. I don't know how to put it into words. He came across as an amazing father, still there for his son, there for all the families involved. He was dressed well and in a black style, he was perfectly articulate, emotionally mature and intelligent, and .. what's the word .. well it's best illustrated by, when the interview ended and they thanked him, he thanked them back and then asked sincerely "was that alright?" Alright? We were in pools of tears. I still am, writing this, and I honestly don't think Schofield could answer him without embarrassing himself.

In searching for this story I notice that the third item that comes up in a Google search for Mary-Ann Leneghan is an article on the start of the trial on the BNP website. Well yes, these are black youths who killed a white woman. Well, I believe Mr Thomas Snr when he says this isn't a black thing it crosses all races. He is an amazing role model for us all. I want to be like him.

The ITV site doesn't appear to provide a 'watch it again' facility. If anyone finds the interview, perhaps on YouTube or similar, I'd appreciate notification because I'd love to link to it and then you'll see what I mean. Just amazing.

Update: I found a link.

A Vista downside

5 January 2007: I wouldn't normally but this seems an interesting look at how Vista seems likely to cripple your system. It's presented like an academic paper but is written with some bias in style and content, but it still highlights some very interesting issues.

The Economist, brain

4 January 2007: The current issue of The Economist has a special on the brain. I love The Economist's writing style so much. There's an article about how living in Palestine isn't so different from living there in biblical times. They write about a five year old boy whose home 'adjoins the traditional site of the Shepherds' Field' (which I presume is a bible story). Here's The Economist doing the bible: ".. the Shepherds' Field: where angels are said to have filled the sky and informed an astonished group of pastoralists that an infant destined to save mankind was lying up the road in a hay-trough." I don't think that sentence couldn't have come from any other periodical.

Anyway: the brain. I've previously blogged, I'm sure (but I can't seem to find it) about reading a book on the psychology of art which accidentally gave me insight into what it might be like to be an animal .. basically devoid of higher consciousness and reasoning and acting not on instinct, on learned things, but without a sense of self or any means to consider why.

I've also been through a cycle of becoming vegetarian, then vegan, then vegetarian, to now where I eat fish (but never meat). And through all that, I'd never seen anyone say what The Economist says in this issue: "Most neurologists now recognise six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise" and later "Humans share the basic emotions .. with other mammals". Hang on. Science says that cats and dogs and mice can feel those six emotions? Wow. I thought the whole basis of the way we treat animals was founded on a science that said they don't really think or feel and can't be said to be suffering.

Then there are higher emotions which depend on us having a sense of self .. the ability to recognise yourself in a mirror and not just think "oh look, another human". Emotions such as guilt, embarrassment, shame and sympathy require a sense of self to work because they are about how others might react to us. A handful of animals have this too: chimpanzees, elephants, great apes, dolphins. Elephants can recognise themselves in a mirror! Where did they learn to do that?An embarrassed dolphin?

Interestingly, the article goes on to ask "what are emotions for", and citing a case of a brain damaged patient whose reasoning remained intact but who didn't feel emotion and who could summarise the options open to him but couldn't make a decision, they summarised that emotions are a mechanism that's evolved to help us make good decisions. They end beautifully: "As fans of 'Star Trek' will remember, it is Captain Kirk, the emotion-ridden human, not Mr Spock, the emotionless Vulcan, who has the nous the run the spaceship." So much for male rationality. (Update: someone said "Aha, but Spock had emotion, he had to battle to keep it under control". Actually, I'm not that interested, I'm certainly not going to get drawn into a geekversation about Star Trek.)

Then there's memory, and breaking that down into different types. Within long-term memory there's autobiographical or episodic memory which records the experiences themselves, and semantic memory which tries to generalise from these experiences. Memory has evolved for a purpose, and that purpose is to help us react appropriately to stimuli. So, putting it into my own words, if you meet a lion in the jungle, it's no good sitting down and thinking through all the other instances where you met a lion, what the weather was like, how they roared and so on. There's little point in committing resources to a memory like that. What you want is a generalised memory that's gathered all your lion experiences together to form a lion model or rule and tells you in an instant: lion->dangerous->run.

Apparently they've spotted where all this generalisation goes on in the brain. Also it explains why old people remember the detail of things from their childhood, but not what they did yesterday. It's not necessarily that their memory is failing. It's that what happened yesterday didn't add anything significant to their model of the world, which was formed from those early experiences. It wasn't worth remembering. That's memory working properly.

Curiously, prior to this article my g/f and I were considering how my memory works and we had a perfect example which I've now, characteristically, forgotten. And that's the thing. I'm really bad at remembering details, but I tend to remember how I felt about something and then in order to remember what happened I try to piece together a likely scenario that would make me feel like I remember feeling and conclude "that's what must have happened". My g/f is much more likely to remember details and in almost every case she's been proved right where it's been possible to check. (Guys, does that sound familiar?)

But that's clearly what's going on. I'm generalising, forming and honing life rules. And if you talk to me I think you'll sense that's actually what I'm good at.

Fascinating too were the tales of experiments on how rats dream ".. and day-dream - about what they've been up to". In essence the brain's neural connections are part of our memory process and those connections become stronger with use. The more often you recall something, the easier it will be to recall it in the future (because the biological connection will be strong). A rat running around a maze will fire off numerous mental connections as it does, and these are repeated during rapid-eye-movement sleep. Sleep, and dreaming, are therefore very important to memory formation. But, and this is a WOW (but I don't really know why), when day-dreaming about the maze, the same patterns occur .. but backwards.

Further experiments have shown generalised patterns forming in higher parts of the brain to do with things you can generalise from maze to maze .. corners, for example, forming evidence that generalisation is a physical process.

There's a lovely sentence in here, too: "The world is not really coloured, it just looks that way because it is tremendously useful that it should".

And here's a thing. If you decide to move a finger, the process to do so starts three tenths of a second before you become aware of it. So the consciousness is observing, not deciding.

This all reminds me of a rather depressing book I read over a year ago about neuroscience which basically said that our consciousness, our sense of self, our soul, is a pure illusion. A fabrication of the mind. It's there because it's useful for us to model other people so that we can predict their behaviour and play strategy games to our advantage. And if we are going to model them, we may as well model ourselves too.

That may be the case, and if it is, when I'm dead I won't be conscious to be disappointed so there's no point getting wound up about it. So I prefer to live my life regardless of what science may throw against my belief in the soul. To my mind, death is interesting (though obviously I'd prefer to lead a full life here first) because I'll get to find out what happens next to my soul. I formulated that as an adolescent reading books from Long Eaton Library, and it's kept me content so far. While the science is fascinating, I have no intention of letting scientists take my teddy bear.

New Year

2 January 2007: Hello. Welcome back. 2007. Happy new year. Hands up who feels the millenium was only five minutes ago.

A couple of things. New year resolutions. I don't really do them (if I need to make a decision I don't wait till the turn of the year). But I do like Anthony Robbins' approach to decisions which is, if I can paraphrase from memory, a decision isn't a decision unless it's absolute and acted upon right now. Anything else is a want, a nice-to-have, a wish. So the beautiful thing about a decision is, it changes you from this moment on.

Personally, I'm going to start 2007 with my usual rant. So there I was, a few minutes after midnight on the 1st, in a pub, sending a text to my g/f who was poorly sick at home. I know, but hey. And my phone said it couldn't send the text because the network was busy. I tried another a bit later, and it was still busy, and, basically, the SMS network was jiggered for most of the night.

When Heathrow had to handle the liquid bomb issue, its server couldn't cope with the requests for information.

After a week of the fuel protest, we were dangerously close to running out of food in the shops. Heathrow (again), at least initially, seemed unable to cope with fog.

It just scares me. It feels like everything is so finely tuned and so completely unable to cope with even regular, predictable problems .. the SMS surge at new year is surely there every year .. that if something serious did happen, we would be without any support systems at all. It feels like we'd have no water, no electricity and within a week we'd be eating lichen. Mind you, I'd be alright there, being 6'6" I'd be able to graze the lichens others couldn't reach.

And it's a recent thing. Not so very long ago my main printer was a daisy wheel build like a Sherman tank. Metal. Real metal. Cold to the touch. Incredibly heavy to move around. Ridiculous, I'm not advocating going back to that, I'm just saying that we've maybe only lived in this close-to-the-edge world for thirty years or so. That's not long, it worries me.

We ought to have robust systems, and back to my world, at the very least Heathrow's website should have been able to cope with a surge like that. Surely when people need information, the web is supposed to be one place they turn to. If I had Heathrow's website to do, stress testing it would be high on my priority list. Not stress testing me .. the website, silly!

Oh, and the pop charts have changed completely, apparently. Now it includes all music downloads .. there doesn't have to be a physical single out. So, for instance, with James Brown's death people will presumably be downloading "Get on up" or whatever, which could make him numbers 1-10 in the chart this week. Now that's a huge change. Very interesting.