The Vyne

In the long, dark, cold winter of 1528, the Lord Sandys's beloved Lady was taken with a fever, and though he knelt a ceaseless vigil at her bedside, her soul slipped from this world after 2 and 10 nights.

The Lord was then engulfed by a torrent of grief, and deaf to the entreaties of kith and kin, he wandered beyond care into the Northern woods. There, in a small moonlit glade, he plunged to his knees amongst the gnarled roots, and wailed inconsolable woe to the mute earth.

Consumed by grief, there the Lord Sandys remains to this day, his mourning figure petrified eternally amongst the Beech and Oak.

The Golden Army

The lights rose, and a teenage girl ambled to the front of the auditorium, a tray of assorted Ben and Jerry's suspended from a strap around her neck.

"Would anyone like some ice cream?" she asked.

"I like your arse more than your ice cream," retorted one of the boys behind me.

The girl walked silently back down the aisle. "Thanks for asking, though," said the boy as she passed.

This was The Screen in Winchester, a freezing cold, half-empty shithole of a cinema. It was like a trip back into the 1970s. The fuckwits a few rows behind me literally talked throughout the entire film. So it was just as well that I was watching Hellboy II, and the almost incessant clanging, smashing, bashing and exploding drowned out most of the sound from the fuckwits.

It was a remarkable film though. Guillermo del Toro's gothic and fantasy imagination is quite stupendous, and if he keeps up this type of form, The Hobbit is going to be truly memorable. There was one monster, a type of elemental forest spirit, "the last of its kind", which rose about the cityscape like a ferocious, whirling Tree-Ent; when it died, its remains transformed all it touched to verdant grass, tree and flower. And then there were the Tooth-Fairies: these swarmed like locust, consuming all flesh and bone in their path, but their particular delicacy was, of course, human teeth.

The only criticism I would pitch at the film is that, like Blade II and Hellboy I, there's an awful lot of Monster vs. Monster combat. Stylistically, this type of thing seems to match the action found within many modern computer games, and it doesn't really do much for me. I guess this is Guillermo doing the commercial thing, keeping his Hollywood patrons happy, so that he can also make films like Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone.

Incidentally, the basic plot for Hellboy II involved an ancient, apocalyptic battle between man and elf; it was almost as if Guillermo was visibly limbering up for The Hobbit...

Crashed and Byrned

I was soon living with Angie. She lived in these slum apartments near the garage. Her mother had an apartment downstairs where she lived with Pat. I came to think of her mother as 'Panda' because her face was always black and blue from the beatings Pat gave her when he got a few drinks inside of him. He was a monster. One night Angie and I could hear him knocking seven colours of shite out of her mum, so Angie and I went down to try and stop it. We calmed him down and he sat down with Panda and apologised, and me and Angie went back upstairs. About ten minutes later we heard it all kick off again, so off I went again. This time it ended with him on top of me, choking me and taking a bite out of my cheek. I was begging for my life. He had the strength of ten men and was completely crazy. I came back upstairs. Angie used to rock back and forth when she was distraught. There we both sat rocking on the sofa together as Pat went another couple of rounds with Panda. After about fifteen minutes of this I was starting to get mad about the begging I'd had to do to save my ass and started looking for a weapon. There was a broken table in the flat from another of Pat's temper fits. I picked one of the legs from it and hid the others around the room and told Angie to call him upstairs and that when he came we'd beat the shit out of him. So she calls down the stairs, 'Leave my mum alone you Irish bastard. Come up here and I'll give you what you deserve.' So he comes running up the stairs and the first thing he does is punch Angie in the face, knocking her out cold. I grabbed my weapon and began hitting him across the skull with it. With the help of Panda I got him to the ground and every time he tried to get up I'd whack him again. I was hitting him so hard it was ricocheting up my arm. I actually began to feel sorry for him but I knew if I let him get up I was a dead man. I thought of running but decided to stay because he would have taken it out on the two women. Eventually he started to lick ass, 'Ah, Tommy, Angie. I'm sorry. I was only jokin' with yers. Let me up so I can have a fag.' I wasn't buying it but Panda was and the silly cow had been letting him get away with it for years. Suddenly a growl comes from him and he gathers his strength and goes to get up. I whacked him really hard: BANG, stay the fuck down, BANG, stay down - this time catching Panda's finger and breaking it. Eventually the police arrived and because he was such a mess they wanted to charge me, not him. But that was sorted when he threw another of his crazy fits in front of them. Now they believed me.

Half an hour later I was in the emergency room, lying in a bed getting a tetanus shot in my ass, with Pat in the next bed, getting fifty stiches in his head. He was talking and laughing about it all, friendly, like nothing had happened. The police assured me he would be spending about a week in jail. Angie, Panda and me went back to the flat. About 6am I was woken by the sound of breaking glass. The bastard was trying to get in through the front door. I grabbed a broom handle and began beating him back through the broken door window, shouting for Angie to call the police. He then took off, vowing he was going to get me.

This, I predict, will become the most acclaimed sporting book of the year. It is the story of how Tommy Byrne, a 'culchey' (redneck) from a poor Catholic family near Dundalk, rose to the cusp of a glittering Formula One career, and then lost it all. Byrne's words are conveyed and linked together into a coherent narrative by motorsport's best journalist and writer, Mark Hughes. It's a fabulous book.

Three years after the events above, Byrne is dominating in Formula 3, and meets McLaren's Ron Dennis, with a view to Dennis signing an option on Byrne's future services:

Ron did most of the talking then started asking questions. I'm an open sort of guy and just answered very honestly.

'Where were you born?' Dundalk. 'What was your education?' None. I left school at fifteen and got a job. 'What does your father do?' Works in a factory making shoes. 'How many brothers and sisters do you have?' Four sisters and a brother. 'How good are you as a driver?' The best in the world.

Then I popped in the question of getting money to finish the F3 season. 'All our money is tied up in R&D,' he replied.

'What's R&D?' I asked quizzically.

You could have heard a pin drop. I knew I'd just made a bad mistake. He looked at me like I was The Knacker from Dundalk and in a tone you wouldn't use on a dog, he sneered, 'research and development.'

Twenty-five years later, I still feel that moment. It fucking haunts me.

Tommy Byrne Mark Hughes Ron Dennis

The human condition and the linear narrative of history

Civilisation is a chaotic, deterministic non-linear dynamical system. Despite this, human history clearly has the structure of a linear narrative, where in this context, 'linear' means 'unidirectional'. This suggests that human history is converging to some sort of attractor. It is worth reviewing this linear narrative because the nature of the attractor might be inferred from the nature of the narrative.

The human condition is a biological and cultural condition, and because both biology and culture have varied over the history of humanity, the human condition is fundamentally a variable state. Humans diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees approximately 6 million years ago, and our DNA has been mutating at the rate of approximately 0.71% per million years ever since. Our ancestors lived in the trees, had not the capability to walk upright, nor the power of language, nor even the self-consciousness we now possess. Their human condition was fundamentally different to our own.

The durations over which linguistic capability and self-consciousness evolved are difficult to identify, but by the time at which Australopithecus existed, circa 3.2 million years ago, bipedal capability had developed. 2.5 million years ago, hominids began using stone tools, and this defines the beginning of the paleolithic age. Humans persisted as hunter-gatherers until the agricultural revolution 10 to 12 thousand years ago, when the introduction of crops and livestock, and the establishment of more permanent settlements defined the transition to the neolithic age. The stone age was then succeeded by the bronze age several thousand years ago, which in turn was succeeded by the iron age a thousand years or so BC, the exact time varying in different parts of the world. The industrial revolution occurred several hundred years ago, and the electronic/information revolution has occurred in the last century.

Two crucial facts emerge from this outline of human history:

1) There is a linear narrative in the cultural evolution of humanity. After the agricultural revolution, humanity did not, some time later, revert to being hunters and gatherers; after the stone age was succeeded by the bronze age, bronze age humanity did not revert to stone age humanity; after the bronze age was succeeded by the iron age, iron age humanity did not revert to bronze age humanity; after the industrial revolution, humanity did not revert to a pre-industrialised state.

2) The rate of cultural evolution has been accelerating over human history.

The electronic/information revolution has now brought with it the possibility that humanity will be able to bootstrap itself outside evolution by natural selection. Cybernetics will permit humanity to change its biological nature, and then to ultimately replace its biological substrate with an electronic substrate. In doing so, the human condition will not only change, but become subject to human control. This transition perhaps defines the end of the human narrative.

Human condition Linear narrative of history Chaos theory Deterministic nonlinear dynamical system

Scrotal temperature

"Heated seats may be frying sperm," warns New Scientist today. Whilst most scientists are wasting their time with mass spectrometers and fume cupboards, "Andreas Jung at the University of Giessen in Germany and his colleagues fitted temperature sensors to the scrotums of 30 healthy men, who then sat on a heated car seat for 90 minutes.

"An hour in, and scrotal temperature had already risen to an average of 37.3 °C, with a maximum temperature in one man of 39.7 °C."

Sadly, there is no mention of possible confounding factors or sources of bias, such as the presence of a pretty research assistant with cold fingers.

I think we're all pretty acclimatised to this sort of 'stupid science' by now, and have come to enjoy it. The article duly concludes with a dead-pan flourish: "The team did not test the effect of the heated seat on sperm quality or quantity." And what about the possible relationship between scrotal temperature and ejaculatory distance, pray? An opportunity, surely, for some further research.

The new phrenology

An irrefutable study of ice hockey players, which can safely be generalised to the whole population, reveals that the larger the width-to-height ratio of an individual’s face, the more aggressive they are. By way of explanation, it is suggested that

In general, men's faces tend to have a larger width-to-height ratio than women's. This physical characteristic has been linked to higher levels of testosterone, which in turn is linked to aggressive behaviour.

This, of course, suggests that Sophie-Ellis Bextor must have very high levels of testosterone and aggression. And Michael Schumacher, (a man who would be hard-pushed to ever get his face stuck between railings), must be on the verge of ovulating. Or maybe these are just the exceptions which prove the rule.

Chunky fingers

What is it with noisy typers?

Bang, bang, rat-a-tat bang, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat bang!

Chunky little idiot-driven fingers, in a frantic rush, hitting and banging the keys rather than thoughtfully caressing and stroking them. If you sit down randomly in any office or library, then the chances are that at least one person within audible range will be a noisy typer.

Bang, bang, rat-a-tat bang, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat bang!

No noisy typer has ever typed anything of subtlety or significance. Noisy typers merely want to finish what they're doing; they're not savouring the process. Troglodytes.

Dawkins and the teachers

Richard Dawkins's three-part Channel 4 series on The Genius of Charles Darwin concluded on Monday evening, and by far the most entertaining segment, I thought, was that in which Dawkins read out the profanity-laden vitriol hurled at him by theists over the internet ("I hope a church van runs you over on the way home and kills you," wrote one of the-meek-who-shall-inherit-the-Earth). More salutary, however, was the reaction Dawkins received when he met some of the school teachers who found it difficult to contradict the religious beliefs of their pupils in science lessons. The teachers tacitly endorsed the notion of the relativity of the truth, the idea that things are not absolutely true or false, it's just that some things are true to some people, and other, often contradictory things, are true to other people.

"Well, as a scientist, I can see that evolution is true," said one.

"No, not just as a scientist," interjected Dawkins, "it's just true, full-stop, isn't it?"

The teachers appeared stunned and bemused by this argument. You could almost see them thinking:

What is this person saying? This is not what we were told at Teacher-Training College! There is nothing about this in the policies of our Local Education Authority or school Parent-Teacher Association! These are not the beliefs we have mutually reinforced in each other as a professional community for many years. This has not been passed as a resolution at one of our Teacher Trade Union Conferences!

A delightful moment.

A polythene car?

Erstwhile Formula 1 design genius Gordon Murray, has been working on an environmentally-friendly road car, called the T25. It will be smaller, lighter, more powerful, cheaper, more fuel-efficient, and emit less carbon dioxide, than its current main competitor, the Smart ForTwo.
In the September issue of Motorsport Magazine, Murray reveals that the bodywork of the T25 will be made from a material never used before in the car industry, but hints that "it's been staring us in the face for years. Think water bottles."

Most water bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), so I'd infer from this that the bodywork of the T25 will be made from some type of polyethylene. Now, PET is a type of polyester, and glass-reinforced plastic (aka 'glassfibre' or 'fibreglass'), a composite material consisting of glass fibres embedded in a polyester resin, has previously been used by the car industry for bodywork. Perhaps, then, the T25 will be made from non-reinforced polyethylene. Despite this, Murray predicts a four-star Euro NCAP rating for its crash-worthiness.

Best of all, Murray points out that "the T25 weighs just 500kg - believe me, it will be fun to drive."

The System

To begin with, you are without knowing that you are. There is no comprehension or incomprehension, there is simply experience and feeling.

Then, gradually, vapours of thought condense, a kernel of self-awareness crystallises, and a nascent layer of linguistic understanding accumulates. A new I has entered the world.

There is then a period of play and exploration. There is boisterous exuberance, an untrammelled joy at being and learning.

Then, at some stage, one discovers that one has been born into a system:

"Why do I have to go to school?"

"To learn things."

"Why do I have to learn things?"

"So you can get a job."

"Why do I have to get a job?"

"So you can make money."

"Why do I have to make money?"

"So you can buy things."

"Why don't we just give people money without making them work?"

"Then nobody would do the things people don't want to do, to make the things to buy."

So, grudgingly, we enter the system. After some years, however, a second existential transition creeps upon us. Not only is each I born into an external system, but each I is incarnated in its own animal system, and that animal system is programmed to reproduce. Previously dormant mental systems and hormones kick into action, and suddenly it is these body systems which are in control, the I simply a means to realise their imperatives.

A re-interpretation of the external system then takes place. It becomes a system to be played to our advantage to satisfy the physiological exigencies. Money will provide not only food, drink and shelter, but a means of attracting mates, and a means of rearing progeny. This second existential transition converts most into an acceptance of the system. Many are consumed by ambition from this point on. The world for most is then a world of careers, families, mortgages, bills, and pensions. A world of planning, rules and systems.

The joy and spontaneity of the young I is a barely acknowledged mote of memory.

And then a third existential transition creeps upon us. The internal system begins to decay and fail. The reproductive drive shrivels. The layers of linguistic understanding erode, and eventually even the kernel of self-awareness becomes brittle. Thought evaporates, and only feeling and experience remain. At the end, you are without knowing that you are. Beyond, there is nothing.

Strategic Trends 2007-2036

If you're looking for a reliable guide to the political, environmental, social, technological and social trends which will shape the world over the next 30 years, look no further than Strategic Trends, a rolling document produced by the MoD's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC).

The latest iteration of this document emphasises the importance of global warming to a much greater extent than its 2003 predecessor. It also includes a short section on Non-Western perspectives, and now acknowledges that the growth of moral relativism is an important trend:

"Secularism and materialism are likely to grow in significance in an increasingly competitive, inter-connected world, reflecting trends that are already well established in the more developed regions. Meanwhile, cultural mixing, the pace of change and a rapid confluence of modern ideas and traditional values are likely to increase the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values. These developments will trigger responses from complex, traditionally defined communities, as well as among significant minorities, whic will seek the sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism," (p12).

However, in one respect, I think that the authors of the current document have failed to make an obvious connection between a couple of their observations. Firstly, consider this accurate analysis of the geopolitical significance of the Arctic:

"The US Geological Survey estimates that around 25% of the remaining global oil and gas reserves are likely to be located in the Arctic. Although the harsh climate and environmental restrictions currently militate against oil exploration and production in this region, Arctic warming is likely to be double the global average and this will significantly improve prospects for future exploitation. Petrochemical companies, aggressively developing new extraction technologies, are likely to pursue oil production, undeterred by current environmental limitations, constraints and concerns. The annual reduction in Arctic ice coverage is likely to continue, leading to the prospect of a year-round Northern sea route across the Arctic Ocean between continents and may culminate in a summer ice-free Arctic in the period 2040 to 2080. These routes will become strategically significant, offering shorter and more direct trade links between North America, Europe and Asia," (p26).

Secondly, it is noted that:

"Russia's significance and influence in Europe is likely to increase, reflecting its extensive natural resources, particularly in oil and gas, but its ability to exert direct leverage or leadership will be limited by its internal tensions, not least its acute demographic crisis, threats to stability from radical Islam and severe regional instability on its southern periphery. The failure of Russia to diversify its economy from a single sector based on energy, as a 'Saudi Arabia of the North', may result in stunted economic development and huge inequalities resulting in political stasis and the potential for instability and disorder. This tendency will be perpetuated by ongoing difficulties in generating a self-sustaining middle class, significant levels of civic responsibility and a socio-economic model based on the rule of law. A failure to overcome these problems is likely, given historic experience, to result in an increasingly authoritarian, overtly nationalistic posture, characterized by a highly regulated, but irregular and criminalized economic sector and poor democratic credentials," (p45).

And yet, on p5, the map of conflict points around the world does not suggest that the Arctic will be a region of potential military conflict...