Knoppix

Knoppix is a version of the LINUX operating system which runs off a CD. My lovely touchscreen laptop recently developed an unknown malady which swiftly caused Windows XP to become useless: it would not start up. It took me a few days to work out what to do, as the so called Recovery Disk that came with the computer seems to just overwrite the data on the disk with a new copy of Windows. I did not want to lose my data, particularly photographs that were on the hard drive. So I needed a way to boot up the computer AND see the existing files. There is something called the Ultimate Windows Boot CD, but that requires an existing bootable CD to make it, it seems. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. However Knoppix boots up from a CD and claimed that it would be able to see existing files on the computer.

I downloaded Knoppix and burned it onto a CD. When my computer booted up into Linux, I was so happy that little penguins appeared. It did what it said on the tin, and my data is now rescued. All that remains to do is download another version of Linux to install on the hard drive, as I've had it up to here with Windows!

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 does not have to be 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 area 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 in an eight or a three area.

The effect on people, unfortunately, is that as I mentioned, 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.

The trouble with Science

Sorry to revisit old themes, but if I can't explore the thoughts that bother me, fluttering around my head in a disturbing manner, then what's the point of having a blog? (Don't answer that, please.)

Science seems to be the religion of this era. When in doubt, we consult 'experts' or 'scientists', which are synonymous terms, it seems. And science has all kinds of good qualities, at least in theory. Precision, robustness, thoroughness, some kind of objectivity.

But many things cannot be measured by science, in any meaningful way. How, for example, do you measure love? Or any other feeling, for that matter? Is it possible to simply 'know' something, in an intuitive way? It often feels as though it is. Ironically, many scientific advances have come about through intuitive leaps: "I just knew that I should leave the calcium out of the experiment, this time." Can intuition be said to have any meaning, from a scientific point of view?

In fact many of the things that define us as humans are quite meaningless from a 'scientific' point of view, where we interpret science as rational and materialist. Social sciences attempt to measure such things as one's personal sense of worth and other nebulous qualities, but in fact are stymied by the personal nature of one's experience.

More fundamentally, being itself is a term whose meaning begins to fall apart when we question it. Being is experiential, rather than measurable. Consciousness is what they call the 'Hard Problem' in cognitive fields; there is no easy way even to define it clearly, let alone explain where it comes from. Materialistic thinking tends to regard it as an 'emergent' property of the complexity of living beings, though this creates an uncomfortable dichotomy between living and consciousness. In other words, you have to assert that there are living beings which are not conscious, but that at some level of complexity, consciousness arises.

There is another problem with science that I have mentioned before - see 'String Theory' entry. Clearly, there is a boundary between the categories of 'explained by science' and 'not explained by science', which, as science progresses, is enlarging, from one point of view. As we learn more about the world, that boundary increases in area, and thus what is just on the other side of that boundary is enlarged too. In other words, as we learn more, we see more that we don't know. Many learners will have had this experience personally, and it applies to the human race as a whole, too.

One interesting question is whether knowledge is finite in any way. As far as I know, nobody has ever found 'the end' of a branch of knowledge; there is always more complexity, more details, more questions that arise. The implication of that is that knowledge is infinite; that however much humans find out about their universe, there will always be an infinite amount more to know.

I suppose it is the arrogance of a science which supposes it has all the answers that is my motivation here: I would like to suggest that in fact we could say it has very few of the answers. In fact comparing the sum of human knowledge with all that we don't know, we could legitimately say that we know almost nothing, at least in a conventional 'scientific' sense. So in consulting our 'experts', we should bear in mind that their expertise could be within a rather limited sphere.

This brings me back to the validity of intuition in a decision-making process. Knowing so little, can we assume that we don't know things intuitively? Of course, that is no reason to assume that intuition is always correct, either. That seems to be an impossible to illuminate clearly. When we think about 'intuition', we might think of dramatic stories, like deciding not to go out, and then a chimney pot falls down where you would have been. Coincidence? Intuition?

But intuition is a more intrinsic process than that, something which is bubbling along the whole time sub or semi-consciously. Or is part of something that is, the awareness that governs everything we do or think. I'll have to come back to this last musing, as I haven't thought it through yet.

Arbitrary

Arbitrary is not my favourite word, these days. To say the least. Whether it is a real concept or not is not a matter for this blog to discuss. Ok, maybe it is, a bit. Arbitrary is defined as

1.	subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: an arbitrary decision.

2.	decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute.

3.	having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government.

4.	capricious; unreasonable; unsupported: an arbitrary demand for payment.

5.	Mathematics. undetermined; not assigned a specific value: an arbitrary constant.

[ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/arbitrary]

These are some emotive definitions, right? And apparently arbitrary events can be extremely irritating. A job interview that is only offered at one specific time, which happens to be at the very time when you need to be on the other side of the country. User names you are given over which you have no control, especially when they have a vulgar connotation. A computer fault which means you may or may not have access to the Internet.

In fact none of these events are arbitrary, as such. There are valid reasons for them to occur. Interestingly, computers may be involved in all these situations. The computer is simply folowing the instructions with which it has been programmed, leading to a situation which is not ideal for somebody. The 'computer says no' scenario. We have checked our records and you do not exist.

A computer can easily allocate user names according to a certain rule. In the case of the Computer Science Department here at Queen Mary, the first two letters of your first name, the first letter of your last name and an integer are concatenated. My username is therefore sil1. Quite reasonable and appropriate, in fact better than my real name, no? short, sweet and impossible to confuse with sil2 or later sils. But what if my name was Sam Peterson? I'd be sap1, or, perhaps worse, sap2. How about Burton Moffat, Tim Taylor or Vanessa Gordon (the sixth).

Ok, I'll stop making people up now. I know ruts and peds and various other slightly uncomfortable (to me) user names. I'm sure that if you really had a problem with your name, you could change it, the people here are very nice.

The point I'm making is that actually, there is nothing arbirary about the process of allocating names. I expect a lot of thought went into choosing the appropriate format. At least the names are short, and quite easy to remember. My general username for the university is much more of a headful - ac06187. It took me quite a while to remember it, and on the library helpdesk I often encountered people who had forgotten theirs.

Likewise, decisions made by people may appear arbitrary but are made according to rules applied by that person. They may not even be aware of the rules, and the rules may be as simple as 'I want to get home, so I'm going to go with the first timeslot I have available, without checking whether this fits with the other person's availability'. This is laziness. I recognise that a lot of the things I criticise as being arbitrary, are where a fellow human has not been prepared to negotiate; they have simply imposed a situation on me. It's that lack of communication, lack of care, which is frustrating.

Lucky number seven

A computer contains a (surprisingly small) number of interconnected main components. Main ones:

• CPU or chip
• RAM or main memory
• Hard drive or other bulk storage
• Buses, the wiring between these components

All of them need to operate at a similar level. It's pointless having a super-fast chip when your memory can only input and output data very slowly. And vice versa. And that pretty much applies to the cartesian product of all four of these components (i.e. how each interacts with each other).

Well, I've come to the conclusion that I have some kind of mismatch between the components of my brain. My thoughts sometimes go so fast that there's no way to store them, and I sort of lose them halfway. Apparently our RAM is pretty small, or rather, contains a small number of discrete storage areas, seven being the classic number. It may be that this is the bottleneck, that because I need to keep track of more than this number of things, that suddenly the whole idea just kind of collapses.

I don't know. Anyway, what was I doing?

The Joy of Texts

Sorry for the unoriginal title. This is a discussion of when texting is appropriate and when not.

Is texting appropriate in the following situations?

1. You're running late for an appointment.
2. To ask somebody whether they are free on such and such a date
3. To update somebody on your mood
4. To ask someone to marry you
5. To dump someone

Answers:

1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes
4. Duh
5. Maybe

Comments are welcome. I think the only contentious one is 2. I will supply the reasons later...

The Circle of Life

Modern ecologists make some very interesting points. They talk about the world in terms of biomes, of ecosystems, and of interacting organisms. Biomes contain ecosystems which contain organism. The biosphere is the total of the living systems on the planet. Within an ecosystem, plants photosynthesise to produce carbohydrates and other substances, some of which are then consumed by primary consumers; those in turn may be eaten by secondary consumers, and sometimes there may be another level above that. For example, grass is eaten by rabbits which are predated by hawks. When creatures die, they are consumed by other creatures, ultimately bacteria, which return the chemical components to the soil as nutrients. This point is also made quite poignantly in the Lion King, the opening song being The Circle of Life.

When humans exploit natural resources with little or no regard for the circle, or more accurately, web, of life, they can cause the impoverishment or even collapse of ecosystems. Overfishing in the oceans may even cause the entire biome to shut down. Species are apparently dying off at a rate surpassing that of the major extinction periods in geological history. This is due to human unsympathetic and rather myopic overuse of resources, careless use of toxic substances, introduction of non-native, aggressive species, and so on.

Happy birthday happy world

It's the New Year now (Tibetan) which feels about right, as the sap is rising.

I don't have a lot to say, except, who could doubt Darwin, when watching a human eat a banana? I mean...

Anyway, unprovable theories. Which are called theses, as it happens, due to their not having been proved. One of them is that of Church. Church's thesis, says, in a nutshell, that any computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Which is possible to disprove, by finding one that isn't, but never to prove. Because there happen to be rather a lot of computable functions out there.

But is Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection provable? Well, it has been observed in various populations that they can quite swiftly change in response to changing environments. Not just micro-organisms, either, Darwin's own Galapagos finches have been extensively studied and seem to morph in response to changing climatic conditions. I say 'seem to' because one can never say with certainty that the change in beak thickness has been caused by the fact that there has been a drought, and that that in turn has favoured young with thicker bills. Perhaps it is a natural fluctiation; perhaps both effects were caused by another factor.

But common sense, such as I have, leads me to believe that one has caused the other. Indirectly, but nevertheless unstoppably. It is such an obvious idea that creatures that mutate (and surely that has been proven) would mutate in directions which enabled them to live longer and therefore be more likely to breed, that I cannot resist it.

As for Church's thesis, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to disprove it...

Stuckness

I always seem to be stuck on something, these days. In the mathematical modules I'm taking, I'm always stuck on some theorem or other. And in the more practical programming courses, I'm inevitably stuck somewhere in the program. It's extremely rare that I just code and it's done, there's always a process of looking at the error messages and trying to figure out a) what they mean and b) how to correct them.

I guess this is how one learns, but it's a bit frustrating.