The Cons

Nothing puts a chap off breakfasting on the remains of the previous night's curry like switching on the television to see David Cameron giving a speech to conference: the smug oiliness of his delivery, entitlement oozing out of every pore. The loathing rising inside of me met the slightly stale but dhal-dipped coriander and garlic naan bread on its way down and, strong of stomach though I consider myself, caused a slight acid reflux for which David Cameron is squarely getting the blame.

"Three million apprenticeships! Full employment! The most competitive corporate taxes in the G20! Elimination of the deficit through spending cuts not tax rises!" 

If you don't speak Tory, I can translate these promises for you:

"Passing the responsibility and cost of youth employment to the private sector! Fudging of numbers to remove single parents and incapacity claimants from the unemployment statistics! Tax breaks for the rich! Removal of essential services for the needy to raise money for enormous banking corporations!" 

Then came his sop for people like me: The Conservatives, if elected, intend to raise the threshold at which subjects start to pay income tax to £12,500. The upshot of which is that if you work a thirty hour week for minimum wage (currently £6.50 an hour) you would pay no income tax. My hourly rate is slightly more than that and I would pay no income tax. Presumably there would still be National Insurance deductions so I wouldn't get the full whack. 

You may be shocked to read this, but last tax year, I paid £500 income tax (and about the same in National Insurance). Can David Cameron buy me for £500? That's a lot of money. I could use a new laptop.

Five hundred quid. What do I get for that? My share of all the schools, hospitals, roads, drinking water and Middle Eastern wars must be pretty small. 

Five hundred quid. It seems a small amount for our ruler to offer for a stealth disenfranchisement. "Here's your five hundred quid," he seems to be saying, "Now go and spend it (preferably on booze and fags and gambling so that we can get most of it back) while we get on and cut the services that make your lives tolerable."

Five hundred quid? What do I have to do to get the money? "Vote Conservative in 2015." (Vote for another 5 years of austerity for the poor and relief for the wealthy). And when do I get the money? "Er... by 2020." 

No thanks.


   

Ambiguous predictions

I consider myself uncannily good at making predictions. At work, I always like to guess in my head what drink a customer is going to order and have something like a twenty percent success rate on first drinks and maybe 90% on second drinks (most people drink the same thing all night). Regular readers will have already observed that most of my predictions for 2014 have come true: just pumpkins, moustaches and Xmas to go.

A family story tells that when I was a little boy, my mother bought some heather or a rabbit's foot or something from an old gypsy lady. The gypsy pointed at the ginger-locked toddler accompanying my mother and said: "That child will never have a grey hair!" My mother, who wanted me to grow up to look like 80s newscaster Nicholas Witchell, was delighted by this. But when I was old enough to understand the prediction, I saw it for what it was: a curse. However you read the gypsy's prediction, I would die before a grey hair appeared on my scalp. At what age do people start to go grey? I wondered. Forty? Thirty? How long did I have?    

For a really long distance prediction, you need to instill a degree of ambiguity. There are two main ways of doing this. Ambiguity of date and ambiguity of encryption.

Ambiguity of date works as follows: I might make a prediction for Scottish Independence, say, but as long as I don't specify a date for the referendum/revolution/destruction-of-England-in-nuclear-war my prediction will never be wrong, just in a kind of "hasn't happened yet" limbo until it happens. Successful religions employ this kind of ambiguity with their Second Comings and Judgement Days. Never be pinned down to a date. You just look like an idiot when nothing remotely apocalyptic happens on the 15th March 2015.

Ambiguity of encryption is the type of prediction practiced by Nostradamus and his ilk. The cryptic signifies that we have entered the realm of prophecy. With sufficiently cryptic prose you can claim to have predicted any momentous event after it has happened:

When winter winds wind widdershins,

Then thorns that threaten thrice

Shall sink Scotland's shallow shining sun.

(Worryingly, when I googled Nostradamus for the above link to his Wikipedia page, the third link was to an article by online stocktrader rag Business Insider hailing Michele de Nostredame as a savant genius.)

My first grey hair came and went years ago. So our gypsy's oral prediction of my early demise has not come true. But a third ambiguity may come to her rescue. An ambiguity of sound perhaps in the form of a homophone. I have never possessed a grey hare.  

A bargain in Mile Cross

Check out what I bought in Mile Cross for less than a fiver!

That's right! Two rocks of Quartzite and a bag of Potassium Aluminium Sulphate. Now I can grow my own crystals in the airing cupboard. (Note to self - remember to tell Charlie that I am growing Aluminium Sulphate crystals in the airing cupboard.) Expect updates.

The two charity shops on Mile Cross are a goldmine. I nearly came home with a genuine set of steel petanque balls that only had a light dusting of rust for £1.50! They could have lived so happily beside the (unused) table tennis bats (£1) and the authentic Yangzhou writing-brush kit (£2).

But it's the books that are the real bargain. Six for a pound on paperbacks. The Oxfam bookshop in the city centre charge a fortune for books they get for free (they will barely even take a donation from you unless it's a signed first edition hardback) and in the Golden Triangle you are looking at two to three quid a book. 

And paucity of choice makes a decision easier. In the Book Hive on London Street, I can happily lose an hour and not buy anything because I want to buy everything. I've banned myself from going in there except to buy gifts. In a Mile Cross charity shop the six readable paperbacks out of two-hundred leap out at you.

The Brief Briefcase Brief

At a recent family gathering, my father presented me with a briefcase full of documents from my childhood and adolescence that he (understandably) no longer wanted to be storing. Most of it was pretty tedious: long-forgotten pieces of half-completed 'homework'.

Homework gave me anxiety when I was too young to know what anxiety was. I would start worrying from the moment it was set. I would put off doing it until the last possible minute and spend the time I could have spent doing it, worrying that I wouldn't have enough time to do it. I would get it done, but often hurriedly and scrappily at breaktime or worse, on the schoolbus. I was far too much of a coward to turn up to a lesson wondering whether I could get an extension or whether the teacher might forget to ask for it in. If most people's experiences of homework were like mine - the only thing it improved was our ability to do shoddy work at the last minute in unusual circumstances.  

Most of the briefcase's contents went straight in the recycling. I did find this early poem, though. Judging by the handwriting, I wrote it when I was about nine and it is the earliest extant example of a poem in my 'lists of things that don't quite rhyme' style: (more modern examples of which can be found here, here and here)

Oily puddle poem

Red is a sparkling red wine
Orange is a sunset scene
Blue is a bright sapphire
Green is a cox's apple
Violet is a purple flower
Yellow is the brilliant sun

I am quite pleased that my nine-year-old self refused to countenance the ridiculous 'indigo' invention (included by mystically inclined Isaac Newton because he liked the number seven!)

See! Six! I told you!

There are six colours in a rainbow. I know this because I have counted them. You can count them for yourself in this photograph I have taken of a rainbow I created using only sunlight and Charlie's prismatic bottle of DKNY perfume.

I have a couple of problems with the imagery in the poem though - 'sparkling RED wine'? That's quite a niche taste. And 'violet is a purple flower' reads like a placeholder - a line a writer includes intending to replace it with something better later but never does. (Douglas Adams pointed out that the greatest placeholder to have entered the musical canon is Rodgers and Hammerstein's line "Lah - a note to follow Soh" in the Doh - a deer song from The Sound of Music.) 

Other items of mild interest I found in the briefcase included a sheet of Badges from Soviet-era Russia, a complete setlist from the imaginary Britpop band The Choral Variation that my friends and I invented (and whose story can be found here) and an SFW photograph of me having a wee whilst wearing a dress at a festival, the provenance of which is a mystery. I invite any readers who might remember to tell me when and where it was taken.

A list

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, gave a speech to the 'Better Together' campaign to keep Britain united in which he asked, "What could be scarier than not knowing what your currency will be?" This is the sort of terror that keeps the economist awake at night? Lucky bastard. 

Finnginn's list of things that are scarier than not knowing what your currency will be:

Spiders (obviously)

Heights

Crowded Flights

Crowded Trains

Aeroplanes

Tsunamis

Horror Movies

Alzheimer's (or any degenerative disease)

The sting from a wasp

The death of bees

House spiders

Sharks

The dark

And Walking home alone at night

A stranger lurking just outside the light

Climate change and global warming

Ants and cockroaches (anything swarming)

Ferocious animals like tigers and bears

And daddy-long-legs (when they fly into your hair)

Orb-weaving spiders

Zombies that walk

Zombies that run

The ultimate heat-death of the Sun

Vampires in their vampire hats

Werewolves' teeth and vampire bats

Bird-eating spiders

Deep water - seas and lakes

Snakes

And lizards and amphibians

Guns and the people who are into guns

Sleep paralysis

Crowded spaces

And spiders (obviously)

Redfingers

Spike next to my disappointing gladioli (apologies for the terrible photo)

My Gladioli are refusing to open. They stand in their vase, turning the water a pale green, stubbornly refusing to open. It's been a week. It looks like I have decided to display six giant spears of asparagus in a vase. They come with a little sachet of plant food, but I always give it to Spike in the hope that he might relent and flower. Sometimes I think Spike might be one of those desert cacti that only flower once every hundred years, but my failure with the Gladioli suggests that the more likely solution is that my fingers are whatever colour denotes lack of gardening skill. Let's go with red because it is the primary colour that is left over when you have finished making green out of blue and yellow. I have redfingers.

I entered a sonnet into a sonnet competition and received 'highly commended' (which I'm thinking of as 'equal-second - must try harder'). I was surprised how much the other poets on the website disliked the form. Some going so far as to enter a sonnet about their hatred of the constraints of sonnets into the competition.
Here's mine:

On Raver's Beach, with blistered lips, we drank
Our privilege - a champagne toast to days
Ahead. Looked inland as a charabanc
Spewed cargo mutely dressed in blues and greys.
"Not us (not quite)," we laughed and went in search
Of shade to shade our burning skin and ice
To chill the wine. There, underneath a birch
Tree's gaze, we laid a picnic paradise.
We ate and drank and dozed and when we woke
A charitable child asked: "You alright?
A bus just left with all of the old folk."
"Not ours!" we laughed indignantly. That night
We danced and partied barefoot and felt free
(And hid our breathless resting in the sea.) 

Ask Finnginn

Some of my recent posts have inspired some of you to contact me with questions of varying degrees of difficulty. Here I select a few of my favourites and attempt some responses:

Stuart, 29, of North Pickenham asks: "What are the roots/is the history of maths? Was it developed independently by various people around the world?"

A hypercube unfolded into three dimensions so you can see it

To answer the second question first: yes. 

The answer to the first question is a little trickier to manage in a paragraph, but here goes: The roots of human mathematical understanding are in a few mental capabilities common to all humans. These include: spatial reasoning, counting, logic and abstraction (the ability to notice common properties in different objects). The interplay between these properties is the key here, I think. By applying logic to spatial reasoning you get Euclidian Geometry and you can abstract from those principles to imagine four-dimensional hypercubes that we could never actually see. A similar process will get you from counting sheep to imaginary numbers. As discussed last month, I see this process as discovery not development - it so happens that conditions on this planet have been such that creatures with brains sufficiently complex to comprehend mathematical truths have evolved. It's a big Universe, I bet it's happening all over the place. And the truths will be the same, whatever is comprehending them.

Clare, 32, of Southampton doesn't like numbers. She wants to know "Why do you think humans feel the need to quantify things?"

Well Clare, as usual it is the farmers who are to blame. Pre-agricultural societies such as the Piraha lack number words. Crucially, they do not lack the cognitive ability to understand numbers, so when a culture needs to develop a complex counting system - due to the development of farming, say, or the sudden arrival of hordes of Anthropology students demanding that they count batteries (this happens more frequently than the development of agriculture) - they can, as dismaying as that may be for you.

Anonymous sets up a false dichotomy with his question: "Do you think there's a logic to the mathematics of quantum physics that we haven't discovered yet? Or is it truly random?"

As I understand it, there are several competing explanations for observed quantum phenomena, none of which are compatible with the relativity we observe in the Macro-Universe. When dealing with large numbers of repeated experiments, probability theory can be used to make fairly accurate predictions.

Finally, Tim, 62, of Weymouth wants to know "Since when was elfs the plural of elf?" 

It never has been. The plural of "elf" is "elves". I used the word "elfs" in a list of non-existent supernatural entities. So whatever the hell "elfs" are, I don't believe in them. (Still undecided about elves.)