Life is sweet in the beehive

Yes, I do work in a hive. It's the university study area. There is a real beehive outside, to inspire the students in their selfless dedication to the welfare of the colony. My job is to supervise it, which mostly consists of telling students to keep the noise down, their feet off the furniture, and to leave, if they get out of control.

Occasionally there is a bit more drama, I was threatened by some non-students who had managed to get in once, and a couple of days ago somebody stole the cashbox from one of the vending machines.

But today, much more significant events are unfolding. Today, a couple of big guys arrived with a new vending machine on a little trollyjack. They took out the old machine, which had vended, very occasionally, plastic cups of fruit squash. They then pushed the new machine into place, revealing the type of goods it would dispense. And just take a guess what it is...

PORRIDGE! Can you Adam and Eve it? My friend Debbie thinks I'm the luckiest person alive, and now I think my good fortune is complete! My mouth began to water immediately. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the sort to toil over oats and water first thing in the morning. But I can just imagine how sweet and sickly the Oats So Simple pumped product will be.

Unfortunately the machine doesn't work. The guys are still here, working hard, by telephoning people mostly, trying to fix it. Will it be here, dispensing fresh hot sticky goo the next time I work here? Watch this space.

Breasts

I have recently begun to realise that approximately 50% of the population is obsessed with breasts. I think you know which sector of the population that is. That's right, women. I suppose we all need a part of the anatomy to hang our pride, neurosis, perhaps our very identity on, and in the absence of a certain other part, this role is filled, often amply, by the aforementioned protruberances.

Size seems to really matter to women, whereas men profess that it is quality, not quantity, that counts. You have only to examine the pages of page three to see that breasts of all sizes are displayed.

I have a theory that there is a feeding response that is triggered in people of all genders by visible breasts. Possibly large breasts make one hungrier than small ones, somehow. (Another interesting response that I have noted is that of sympathetic eating: when one is watching somebody taking a mouthful of food, one naturally and subconsciously opens ones own mouth.)

It may have been Desmond Morris that suggested the similarity between breasts and bottoms is no coincidence. Evolutionary selection is responsible for shaping breasts into similar 'humps' to those on the posterior, the reason being that bottoms are primary sexual characteristics, triggering a sexual response in males. In our close cousins, the baboons, one can see how this can be taken a little far.

Since humans have walked upright, our posteriors and faces are not generally aligned in a way that presents the posterior directly to the eyes. Therefore, breasts have taken on that role, by imitating the shape and therefore stimulating the same response as the backside. It's a wonderful hypothesis, and I have given it a little thought, although I find it rather easy to get distracted in my research.

Energy Project Update

When I was about 12, I did a school summer project on Energy. It surpassed my previous year's project on plastics, both in interest and the number of "Good Show Ups" that it generated. Don't ask me what a good show up is, but we were awarded them for good school work, and I think I got four, the maximum, for this project.

What I found particularly exciting was that humans were on the brink of a new era of harnessing the freely available energy around us, rather than the polluting and finite fossil fuels on which we had become dependant. Well, that was 27 years ago, and I'm pleased to announce that now... we really are on the brink of a new era of harnessing the freely available energy etc. Possibly. That is if we manage to survive long enough.

I'm quite a frugal person, I suppose, having lived on meagre incomes for much of my life. I eat well, but I tend to buy secondhand clothes, and rarely splash out on new things. Perhaps my experience of feeling quite well-off as a student is not typical, but I really did, especially compared to being a gardener. In any case, if I am presented with opportunities to have something that I want for free, I tend to take it. That is, of course, if it is legal, although at various times I have allowed for some creative interpretation of this term.

So it struck me, even as a privileged public schoolboy, that using the freely available sources of energy such as the sun, the wind and the waves, was a no-brainer. Of course now that we know how to extract energy from totally renewable sources we will. But we didn't then. At least not on the kind of scale that I expected. At present, only 1.2% of UK electricity is generated by renewables. Ok, so our sunlight isn't the strongest in the world, but we have plenty of wind, waves and currents to take advantage of. What's happening in the UK? Makers of wind energy technology are closing factories! Why? They (Vestas) blame the nimbys. (Not in my backyard? You won't have a backyard if we don't do something soon.)

I don't want to get political, particularly, but I love that picture at the top, from the picketing Vestas workers.

Anyway, things are brightening up a bit, particularly in the energy-hungry States. Obama is pushing for reform in various areas, electricity generation and transmission among them. Solar thermal and high voltage DC transmission (video by John O'Donnell, energy and climate entrepreneur) are old technologies with fresh paintjobs and could go a long way to meeting the US's needs. The UK is committed to 15% energy generation from renewables by 2020, actually that's a European guideline. It is way behind almost all other European countries, Germany is over 10% already, and Scandinavian countries and Switzerland are much further ahead. (Bundles of EU statistics.)

To round off, one more little bit of data from the EU website (link as above):

Oil (in barrels)

• Total world reserves Jan. 1st 2009: 1206780968626

• World usage per second: 986

• Estimated date of exhaustion: 16:36 Oct 22, 2047

Pacifism, Passivity

Pacifism and Passivity are not the same. That will not come as much of a surprise to the finely tuned linguists that read this blog. I, on the other hand, am just beginning to work out the difference.

Pacifism is usually defined as not regarding war as a solution to problems. This is often in the context of international conflicts, but I am using it to define the Buddhist approach to life and one's own mind and problems. Passivity, on the other hand, has much more the sense of torpor, of taking no action.

Taking an attitude of Peace
The Buddhist approach is not one of conquering your life, but accepting who you are. The practice of meditation is the practice of peace, making friends with yourself (self in the sense of the thoughts and feelings that you experience) by looking inward without reserve or judgement. While the attitude is one of peace, action is required to start and accomplish the practice.

Many people assume that meditation is about stopping thoughts, about somehow 'gaining' peace through some kind of mental gymnastics or trance. While the practice of meditation does bring about some kind of peace, this arises due to a subtle combination of action and inaction. One allows one's own experience in all its colour, but brings the mind back to the present moment when distracted. This requires discipline. The paradox is that it is discipline to continually come back to naked mind, which requires no maintenance.

Wild in the city

I've always had a fascination for the wild parts of the city, and admired those plants and creatures that make a living in spite of humans. Of course, compared to other places, the biodiversity can be rather small, but in some ways the city is the ultimate multi-ecology environment, with each garden having its own microclimate and resultant suitability for colonisation.

For a long time the dominant trend in city gardening has been micromanagement: designing and building a garden around its human occupants and creating sharp edges, very few wild parts. I think that with the current interest in matters ecological that is starting to change.

But in any case, humans are not capable of absolute control of the environment. There are always natural processes that interfere, even with the most tightly governed of environments. For example, in the Biosphere projects, where the species that were grown or lived in a sealed glass dome were carefully introduced into a formerly sterile environment, other species that had not been deliberately introduced (ants) appeared and began to strongly affect the ecology.

In the city, which somehow seems quite sterile, species find a niche that they can exploit. Bats roost in old railway tunnels (for example in Sydenham Woods). Feral pigeons, which descend from cliff-dwelling rock doves, find ideal conditions in cities, with balconies and bridge struts taking the place of natural ledges and caves. Any under-maintained area can quickly become a rich pocket of life. The rear wall of my house, where water has dripped for years, has a small collection of ferns and mosses.

Natural processes such as rainfall and wind and earthquakes also cannot be controlled, obviously. I love finding stalactites and stalagmites in the city, where rainwater has dripped through layers of concrete and dissolved calcium carbonate, which is then deposited out as the water drips off onto the ground. Under the South Bank concrete monstrosities is a good place to see this.

The rainwater flows into storm drains, which are often the only remnants of rivers that once flowed through London. I take great delight in showing people where the Fleet River used to enter the Thames. To the west of St Paul's Cathedral, it was once wide and deep enough for boats to navigate at least to Holborn Viaduct. If you walk the area (it runs roughly where the railway line goes from Blackfriars to King's Cross) you can see how the surrounding areas slope down towards the old river channel. The Fleet was gradually covered over, as were many other rivers, even in central London. It does still exist as a storm drain, coming out under the Blackfriars platforms.

Canals, man-made and often rather unsavoury-looking, are hotspots for wildlife observation. It is very helpful now that bodies like British Waterways now keenly promote the environmental impacts of the canals. I observed a cormorant taking an eel in the Regent's Canal, which runs alongside Queen Mary College. The eel was big, and the cormorant struggled to swallow it for around half an hour, dropping and recatching it several times. Eventually it flew away, but with the eel's tail still protruding from its beak.

BBC news report of a similar encounter: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8097291.stm

Egolessness, Evolution, Revolution

It's just a thought that occurred to me, while I was practicing meditation, as tends to happen, so I noted it down to come back to later. What I wrote was: "Interesting parallel between idea of egolessness in Buddhism and that of Natural Selection."

It is not so much about a similarity between those two things, but about the dynamics around the ideas. At the moment there is a heightened interest in Darwin and his theories, particularly his Theory of Natural Selection and species formation. His ideas were revolutionary at the time, and are still highly controversial in certain areas.I think that the Buddha's theory of Egolessness is another revolutionary idea, perhaps a contentious one, perhaps not, whose time has come.

The idea of egolessness is not a new one in certain cultures. The ideas of the Buddha spread two and a half thousand years ago in Asia. Here in the West, there have been proponents of some Buddhist ideas for around two hundred years, but in the early days the ideas were often elucidated by scholars with little feeling for or personal experience of the teachings. Only in the last fifty years or so have experienced teachers from Buddhist cultures been to the West to teach.

And what is the essence of that message? The initial and perhaps most vital teachings of the Buddha were 1) Beings suffer; 2) They suffer because they believe in ego, some ongoing, eternal part of themselves which needs constant reinforcement and protection; 3) That there is an end to that process of creating ones personal world of pain and 4) There is a particular path (the Buddhist path) that leads you to that cessation.

You could, cynically, look on it as purely a sales pitch for Buddhism. In fact it seems fairly traditional to start trying to convert someone to your religion by drawing attention to their pain and hardship and promising some relief from that if they do what you say. The key point here is that the Buddha actually gives you the answer, he doesn't say pay me some money and then you can have the answer, he gives it straight away, then says, you don't have to believe me, see for yourself.

Number 2) above is the answer. It's not entirely complete without 1, 3 and 4, but it's the essential message. Which is that however much one looks, one can never find a part of oneself that is eternal, unchanging. Existence is rather slippery, it seems, neither there nor not there.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not philosophical musings, however important, nor to convert anyone, particularly. But more to point out that like the ideas that Darwin proposed, it's revolutionary. Likewise it is also hard to prove, except by looking and looking. There is no formula that will capture it.

So to be a little bolder here, what are the parallels between the two theories? (Let's call egolessness a theory.) Well, in one way they both deny the necessity of God's involvement in creating and maintaining this world we live in. Natural selection suggests a mechanism for the diversity of life on this planet, and as I've said in a previous post, there is plenty of evidence for it, and no evidence against. I realise that's a contentious point, but it seems clear to me.

Egolessness means there is no need to explain beings with some idea of 'soul' or 'ghost in the machine'. That humans are a product of many causes and conditions, ever changing in response to surroundings and their responses, rather than having some nugget of identity at the base. There's a similar mechanistic idea here to that of natural selection.

I would go so far as to say that the idea of human consciousness being an emergent property of the complexity of the brain, a current contender in rational scientific circles, does not contradict the Buddhist view. However neither does the more thoughtful idea that everything is consciousness, neither really do some kinds of creationist logics, funnily enough. The main point, that fundamentally there is no one single thing that makes me Me, is fairly robust.

My personal view? I did what the Buddha suggested and spent a lot of time looking at my own mind. By the way, I have read in books about consciousness that introspection doesn't work. I disagree, but one needs to retain an open mind, in the sense of no fixed preconceptions, and no particular goal. In any case, my experience over the last 15 years has not disagreed with the theory of egolessness. I see patterns, some deeply ingrained habitual patterns that make my life difficult at times. But I have in no way been able to pin down the Me-ness of me. It's pretty liberating.

The Sad History of London's telephone area code

If you ask a Londoner what their telephone number is, there is a good chance that they won't know. I'm not talking here about the fact that we tend to move around a lot, or that people often get new mobile numbers, and don't know them for a while. I'm talking about landlines, and that when people even think they know their number, they often don't.

To give an example, you ask for a telephone number, and the reply is "oh two oh seven [pause] seven three one, five four one four". The pause here indicates the break between the area code and the number within that area. You will also see numbers written like this, for example 0208 6445667. But in fact the area code is 020 for London, followed by eight digits. So if someone within London asks your telephone number, the correct way to answer is "seven seven three one, five four one four," giving just the number, the area code being redundant. (According to research by regulator Ofcom in February 2005, only 13% of respondents identified the code for London correctly without prompting: 59% incorrectly identified it as "0207" or "0208".)

This may seem a trivial, nit-picking example, but there is more to it than that. The number following the area code is not necessarily either a seven or an eight, so many people are not in either of these fantasy area codes 0207 or 0208. There are already people with a three prefix after the area code, like 020 34567890, and the other prefixes are waiting in the wings. There are 10 million of the threes to be allocated, so they should last a little while. The implication of course, is that there are around 20 million existing London telephone connections!

So how did this bizarre situation arise? When I was young, the are code for London was 01, and an individual number had seven digits. In other words, there were approaching 10 million numbers. This wasn't enough, so British Telecom divided London into two areas, inner London having code 071 and outer having 081. This was shortsighted in two ways.

1. It only doubled the number of numbers
2. It did not consider that people may not want an outer London phone number

Next, they increased the code lengths to four digits: 0171 and 0181. This is a way to say more without saying anything helpful.

Finally the new system came into place where again there was a single code for London and an eight digit number. If your number used to start with the area code 0171, your new eight digit phone number would begin with a seven, likewise 0181 to eight.

So the end result? We have several results. In terms of numbers, we have added one meaningful digit and one redundant digit. For the area code, which is now 020, instead of 01, we are saying the same thing but using one more digit. For the phone number itself, we have multiplied the number of available numbers by a factor of ten, from ten million to one hundred million.

Another effect is that the geographic information which arose from dividing into sevens and eights has now been lost. You may have a number beginning with seven and live between an eight and a three.

The effect on people, unfortunately, is that which I mentioned, that many people no longer understand what their telephone numbers mean. When I tell people my phone number in the correct form, they often do not understand. Being me, I then try to educate them, ("a London number has eight digits, not eleven, etc.") rather than just say it incorrectly. It makes me wonder how much time is wasted telling each other phone numbers with those three extra digits, and the confusion they bring...sigh.

For a more thorough explanation, including the confusion within other British cities, see the article below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_telephone_code_misconceptions

Footnote: numbers used to be specified by the local exchange (where someone would sit plugging in wires to make your call) followed by a short number. My grandparents used to answer their telephone by saying "Matching 367," even in the 1980s.