Sniffing the Air

Tiny Claws Still Hurt

Baby Possum

I spent some time with this bloke today. He'd spend twenty minutes in a frenzy of climbing and dangling, and then suddenly it would be sleepy-time and he'd have to curl up inside a warm dark place for a rest.

A Dogged Friend

Without World War Two

Imagine if Hitler had been stopped early enough to avert the Second World War. What a different world we'd be living in. Of course fifty million lives would have been saved but more importantly, the thousands of hours of war documentaries would not have been created, and all those tedious war movies would never have been necessary. SBS and the History Channel would have had to find some more original way to fill their schedules than endlessly reliving pivotal moments in the war.

If only...

Magical Building Blocks

Speaking of Lego, reading a Finnish newspaper today I saw that Hitler's visit to Eastern Finland has been commemorated using our favourite building blocks. Strangely enough, I've not seen Nazi sets on sale in any toyshops near me, although this controversial set can be found.

http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/news/2011/10/lego_hitler_visits_eastern_finland_2979256.html

Today's Post is Sponsored by Lego

I'm hoping that mentioning Lego enough times might get me some freebies. So if any Lego representatives are out there, please send me some blocks. I only need enough to build a modestly-sized Eiffel Tower, one with a working lift that can accommodate cats. And in truth, I had more fun playing with Lego as a child than any other toy, so I am truly pleased to promote them.

Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego

Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego

Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego

Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego Lego

And can I also say that Denmark is one of my favourite countries and their citizens are wonderful, and not at all block-like. Here's a typical Danish cyclist.

Things I Hate #20 (and Things I Love #1)

Walking through a busy car park, I often find vehicles following me, hoping I'll lead them to my soon-to-be-vacant spot. This can be irritating and I don't like to be pressured, so in order to turn this from my pet hat #20 into something fun I play with them. If someone is close behind me, my favourite trick is to walk a few metres past my car then pretend to realise I've gone too far and do a u-turn. The trailing car has likely now gone too far to get into my spot and may need to reverse or quickly drive all the way around the aisle again. Or a car behind it may get the spot. Ha !

An artist's depiction of me as Morph, leading a car astray.

Another technique is to make it totally unclear where I'm heading. Walking purposefully along one aisle then suddenly nipping through to another aisle at the last moment is very enjoyable.

Try these techniques yourself. You'll be pleased at how much anguish you can cause.

Things I Hate #19

Starting to read a novel for the first time, what I can't cope with is the introduction of too many characters at once. I read the first few pages and one or two people are described, and I try to hold images of them and their relationships in my head. Then suddenly another three characters appear, all with their own lives and histories. Then another four people turn up, somehow connected to the others. We now have several people whose names and appearances are all blurred and jumbled in my mind and it's too much information for me to process. At this stage I have to go back to the start of the novel and try again, taking notes of the characters or finding a synopsis on the internet. I always finish books I start, but it can be painful getting through this expository stage. It's much smoother once I'm into the flow of the plot and I'm familiar with everyone. So my plea to authors is to introduce no more than one character per ten pages, and give them all radically different names. We can't have a Brad and a Brod, or a  Robert and a Bob. And similarly we can't cope with have several names for the same character. I've been known to reach the end of a thousand page novel not realising that Amon and Fuzzy were the same person, but one was a nickname. Why would an author do that to me?

Moody Cat is Coming Towards Meo

A Succulent Succulent

Discovered in the wilds of my backyard this evening. These plants can miraculously start growing from a single leaf.

WatchCat is Watching

He guards the steps with a stoic catiness.

Warp Speed Nine

Having read my previous posts on how to manipulate your perception of time to advantage, let me mention that sometimes you have no say in the matter. Have you seen the Star Trek episode Wink of an Eye? A species of aliens moves so fast they're invisible to humans who only perceive a buzzing noise as they flit around, while the aliens see humans as statues, stuck in time.

This is exactly how I see elderly people when I'm whizzing around a supermarket and they're motionless, stuck in indecision between choosing between raspberry or strawberry jam, or trying to remember why they're in the pet food aisle when they don't have a pet.

And on the roads, when they're trundling along at pedestrian pace, and then emergency stopping when a crisp packet blows across the road. To them, I must suddenly appear out of nowhere at frightening speed. We're living in the same physical world but our time is ticking at a completely different rate.

Something interesting to look forward to in a few decades.

Physiologically, the reason for this decline is a combination of deteriorating senses (vision and hearing), plus the longer cognitive processing time needed to make sense of incoming information.

Ceramics in Seattle

This is how crockery should be displayed, at the Seattle Art Museum.

I've remodelled my kitchen based on this design. It's a pain when I need to use a plate though.

A Thousand Years of Nobility

It's hard to believe, but in England today, those with Norman surnames (French-sounding names such as Darcy, Olivier, Duval, Le Blanc) are on average ten per cent richer than the rest of the population. The Norman Barons who invaded in 1066 have passed on their wealth, albeit greatly diluted, and their heirs still do better on average than the Anglo-Saxons and Celts they ruled over. What's more, they even live an extra three years.

My ancestor Norbert de Clancy

Those with artisan's surnames fare less well. Being descended from mediaeval tradespeople and craftsmen they have names that describe their jobs: Cooper, Smith, Clark, Mason. If I were named thus, I'd think about Frenchifying it like so: de Cooper, Le Smith. It might be only the only chance at wealth !

ps. My new name is Lewk Le Photo

Further reading

More on Time Travel

Building on the previous posting on the perception of time, if you're stuck in the present and nothing is happening, time creeps forward agonisingly      s  l  o  w  l  y. The very longest way to spend a minute is to stare at a watch as the seconds progress one by one. You have very little sensory input to occupy the brain, only your own thoughts. Your personal clock is hardly moving.Whereas if you're fully absorbed in an experience, driving a car over a treacherous mountain pass, or snorkelling over a coral reef, or trying to win a game of squash, all of your cognitive capacity is used up, and before you know it, hours have disappeared.

So the Catch-22 situation is that to stretch out your life so that it seems like an eternity, spend your time idle and unstimulated in the most tedious situations. Thinking back, you won't have regarded it as a long life, and childhood will seem so close. But if you fill your days with stimulating experiences, time will fly past, and in retrospect you'll feel as if you've lived a long and full life.  



Further reading: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6926500.stm

Art in Progress - Discotheque

Here's a painting I'm working on. It's not finished yet.

Times Flies Past Ever Quicker

Why does time fly past when we're older? As a child, a year was an eternity. Waiting for another birthday was too long to bear, you measured your age in quarter and half years and the summer holidays went on forever. But when you've been around for a while, annual events whoosh past you and before you know it, a decade or two have disappeared. Why so?

My latest New Scientist magazine explains how the brain seems to use the amount of energy spent recording events to estimate time. And it takes more energy processing novel events. Youngsters experiencing life for the the first time are fully occupied taking in novel and stimulating events, soaking up all the detail and making sense of it. But when you've settled into a routine, there's no need to  pay attention to the same extents. You can nearly run on autopilot.

When you think back over the past year, it's likely very similar to the previous year and the year before that. There's no point remembering details of a thousand nearly identical commutes to work, a thousand trips to the supermarket, a daily watering of the garden, and countless evenings spent sitting in a favourite chair watching tv. And so looking backwards, there aren't many memorable events in the recent past to fill your time.

Your colleague heads to Europe for a month, returning chock full of thousands of new memories. You're surprised they're back so soon because in the same time nothing worth recording has happened to you.

So what have we learnt from this? The good news is that doing a prolonged stretch in prison won't feel too long when you think backwards. And for my non-criminal readers, the best way to prolong your life is to vary your routine and pack in different things. If you're stuck in Groundhog Day then you're speeding through life too quickly.

Hound of Darkness

She's jet black and nearly invisible after dark. In low light conditions she can only located by following the loud snoring, or her meaty breath.

Favourite Poddies

Here be my current favourite podcasts, ones I can't bear to miss.

1. Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews. I prefer their bickering about movies rather than their endless interviews of actors and directors.

2. Dr Karl on JJJ's . I've been listening to his science phone-in for almost twenty years, and much of my science knowledge is based on misremembering Dr Karl's explanations of various complicated concepts.

3. Freakonomics - hosted by one gregarious and garrulous economist, and another more learned but laconic economist. Their topics stray far and wide into sociology, consumer behaviour, psychology, criminology, marketing and burgers.

4. BBC Friday Night Comedy - especially the News Quiz

5. Ricky Gervais - everything he does is entertaining, but I prefer listening to his three-way discussions involving Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington.

Old-Style Painting is So Retro

Having discovered the benefits of digital painting, I'm ready to retire from the traditional methods entirely. Why spend hours painstakingly mixing colours, cleaning brushes, painting layer upon layer when I can so rapidly achieve similar result by sitting at a keyboard? Here are the benefits of using Photoshop or the GIMP:

1. It's speedier
2. It's cheaper
3. It's easier to reproduce
4. Complicated effects can be done with ease
5. It's more precise. Physical painting is so messy. It's tough putting the paint where you want it. The consistency may be too runny or to solid, the brush may not be cooperative. Cats may run across the painting leaving footprints. This is much rarer in digital painting although it does still occur.

Who Needs Photography?

It's so easy to build a pretty picture from scratch using the GIMP or Photoshop. This one took ten minutes and a glass of wine. I call it The Cliffs of City Beach at Dusk.

Decline of Memory

Your memory is remarkable, but it's likely worse than that of previous generations. And even today, kids store less information in their heads than their parents.

My pseudoneurophsychology degree allows me to fabricate the following plausible sequence of events, describing how over history our need to memorise has declined markedly.

In prehistoric times, when humans had spoken language but hadn't invented writing, stories had to be committed to memory. Sitting around campfires in the evening, people would tell each other tales of their ancestors, myths of their origins and lessons of life. Significant events from previous generations were passed down orally and such was the accuracy of the retelling, they could last many thousands of years in nearly unchanged form. This was largely due to the repetition - stories would be repeated so many times night after night that they were burnt into the memory and not easily forgotten. Ancestral memories of events such as mass migration, tribal conflicts, volcanic eruptions and other disasters have been pass down in stories to the current day.

Eventually written language spread around the tribes and civilisations, but still the common people had to use their memory. With growing literacy, it was possible to commit to paper some ideas and stories. It was no longer necessary to memorise recipes and family stories. But without photography, how could we recognise the faces of our relatives or famous people? We weren't sketching everyone we met, so memory was all we had to go on. And although going on holiday was less common in earlier centuries before mass transportation facilitated easy travel, it still occurred. And without a camera, the grand cities and vistas seen needed to be remembered in our heads. It's curious to imagine the complete absence of tourists snapping photos in front of tourist icons such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Big Ben.  

Moving forward to the twentieth century we reach the era of photography, sound reproduction, the mass media and print. Schoolkids still learned masses of facts by rote, memorising their times tables and the years of significant battles, and when the kings and queens reigned. But gradually over decades towards the turn of the millenium, aides memoire were becoming more prominent. Calculators were allowed into maths lessons and exams; open book exams were more common and the learning of facts was frowned upon - instead applied knowledge was the key. No longer were poems memorised for English literature studies, instead students might be asked to comment on an advertisement or the lyrics of a pop song. Mobile phones and other electronic devices now stored more and more factoids for us. If we want to know something, in seconds we could google an answer. Only ten or fifteen years ago we'd have needed to visit a library and spent time researching books or journals, or perhaps a set of encyclopaedia at home.

Today these electronic repositories are an extension of our brains. Why bother memorising a phone number or someone's birthday when you can just store it in a device. Why bother learning directions when our sat nav will tell us? Why learn a recipe by heart if we can read it off an iPad?

Thus our memories are withering with lack of use. And when civilisation collapses, we'll all be stuffed.

Thus ends today's plausible but unscientific ramble.

Volcano Climbing

Mount Rainier is visible from much of Washington state and even from Canada to the north and from Oregon to the south on a clear day. That's over 120km. It's  4.4km high, and covered with glaciers and snow all year round, with a crater lake at the top.

This is where you can start your climb to the summit. It takes about three days so don't forget a Mars bar to keep your energy up. From this point I jogged up for about 15 minutes, far enough to reach the snowline but not far enough to exhaust myself.

Things I Hate #18

Bloggers who don't post regularly.

Brownness or Browness?

However this word is spelt, here is a digital painting of mine using shades of that colour.

Things I Hate #17

Did you notice how Microsoft released the first Xbox, and then the next version was called Xbox 360 rather than XBox2.  They were so desperate to keep up with the Sony Playstation's numbering (which was nearing release of a third version) that they wanted a name that gave the impression it was the third one.

Or how about Microsoft Word jumping from version 2.0 to version 6.0. Or how Microsoft Access went from version 2.0 to version 7.0?

Being a mathematician, I hate this corruption in the numbering process. Thousands of years of algebra has taught us how to do this properly. So there are no excuses for companies or individuals who indulge in this process.

Forest Twit

My very own composition, soon to be released as part of my wallpaper range. And I mean the traditional paper glued to your wall, not the digital image on your pc.

How Would You Make Melbourne a Better Place?

Hoodies Heading to Kmart

Taking a shortcut through Len Shearer Reserve to Kmart Garden City to buy some blank DVDs. Chanel twisted her ankle earlier so she's grabbed some piping from a road verge to use as a staff. The DVDs are to record Neighbours onto, and she's hoping to pay for them using a refund from a pair of jeggings she bought that split open when she went ten-pin bowling.

Things I Hate #3

I hate smarty-pants self-referential blog posts. Rather than creating an original thought, a lazy author will merely slyly write about nothing, but disguise the words in intractable prose and esoterica. Egregious in my books. One tedious approach such writers employ is to passer à une autre langue. Ils sont si bien éduqués! Ils cachent leurs mots insignifiants derrière un vocabulaire étranger. Mais ne soyez pas dupé.

Don't Sleep with the Curtains Open

My chthonic nightmares are drawn through the suppurative mists towards my bedchamber.

Sadness with a Cat

She is a Collingwood supporter. Black Cat supports Geelong.

Things I Hate #2

More than anything, I despise lists of things that people hate, and the snooty writers of such lists. What gives them the right to pass judgement? This month green Doc Martens are out of fashion, and beating up grandmas is unacceptable. We loved Masterchef last year but now we hate it. White iPhones are in, and Keira Knightley is out.

There's too much vitriol and negativity, and I hate it.

Fountainous

In a San Francisco park, there was a greenhouse. And in the greenhouse was a fountain.

Things I Hate #1

You visit a website in search of information. Rather than showing a comprehensive list of the site's content, you're confronted with questions as to who you are. Then depending on your response, a tailored subset of the content is available to you. How thoughtful of them.

For instance, the menu to the right is from a university homepage. It doesn't allow me to follow a link directly to the page I want; instead my poor brain has to work out what category of person the website designer thinks I am. This often leads to an identity crisis as I can't fit myself into any of their categories. There's no option for "Rival University Staff", or "Confused Web-surfer". So I try a few options and none of them leads to the page I want, so I give up and google instead.

Or when I visit an online shop the options are: Products, Solutions, Store or Company. What on earth do these labels mean?

Be thankful that mobile websites are designed to work on such small screens they're forced to be more focused and concise. It's often easier navigating via a phone's web browser than visiting the full website with their fancy presentation.

If Life Were a Video Game

Since realising that life is an unending video game, I've been trying to figure out the rules, so I can try to win or at least not lose all my lives too quickly.

Firstly, what type of game am I in? Here are some possibilities:

1. Counter Strike, a first person shooter, where I have to kill the enemy as they pop out in front of me. Not likely. Some high school massacres have been carried out by kids who got this wrong idea.

2. King's Quest X. A role-playing game where I have to assemble a party of adventurers, complete various quests, gaining experience and wisdom and eventually becoming a hero. Possibly.

Lose 10 pts if the boss catches you out of your seat
Gain 15 pts if you don't visit the toilets all day

3. Monopoly: everyone is competing to accumulate the greatest wealth and property. There are many players in this game, but I'm not one of them.

4. Space Invaders. Unlikely. But if any aliens in formation do start zig-zagging down from the sky toward me I'll know what to do (i.e. find my laser pointer, and zap them one by one).

5. Pac-Man. Wander around gobbling up as much as possible (including the occasional fruit). Nope, except at mealtimes.

6. Myst. An immersive adventure game of puzzles and beautiful scenery and mystical experiences. I'm living in Perth so that's a no. If I was in Bickley, this might be different.

7. Grand Theft Auto Wembley: Suburb of Sin. This involves speeding around the suburbs, avoiding the cops and carrying out various tasks (for instance picking up an axe from Bunnings, fist-fighting various crims)

My life most resembles 2 and 7. Both of these games are complex and have no shortcuts. You just have to plug away, day after day, with occasional bursts of excitement but most of the time you're just plodding around from one place to another doing mundane tasks.