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I was on a train the other day when I saw a woman who was asking for money. She was doing that thing that is now very common which is that you stand at one end of the train and ask very loudly for the attention of the entire train. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry to have disturbed you this evening, but I need just 12 pounds to be able to get in a hostel this evening and so that I don’t have to sleep rough again tonight”.

It is strange that this speech is now standard across a wide variety of people asking for money. I wonder how that happens? Although I suppose it might simply be that when people have managed to get themselves into shelter for the evening that they then exchange war stories of how they scraped up enough money for the evening.

On this particular occasion a woman who was sitting next to where I was standing gave her twenty pounds. It seemed an incredible amount of money to give. And I wondered both about why she gave so much, what was going on in her life so that she would give that much and also what twenty pounds would mean to the woman asking for money.

I was pleased to see that the woman who had received the money did get off of the train at the very next stop and didn’t ask anyone else for any money. She didn’t want to be greedy I guess. Also though as I was getting off of the train at the same point I was able to see that she wasn’t a professional beggar as so many Daily Mail readers would believe. As she was walking along the platform, twenty pounds in her pocket, she picked up a fag butt off of the floor. It had clearly been smoked up to the bitter end but she clearly thought there might be something there so she put it in her pocket (after testing it in her mouth).

But what was it that made the woman give the twenty pounds. Had she never heard anyone tell this particular story? Was it that she felt solidarity for the beggar as a woman? Or was it simply that she decided to give something and a twenty was the smallest thing that she had but felt that it would be rude to ask for change?

I will never know. I really did feel moved to strike up conversation with the benefactor but I decided against it. I felt that she’d be charitable enough without testing her patience as well. And I really didn’t want to discourage her which I felt I could have done when in fact I was simply curious.

I had got on the wrong train by accident and this wrong train had taken me down a different fork of the line. Either I could have gone back into London or somehow I needed to cut across to the other arm of the fork. Taxi seemed to be the only reasonable option, but unfortunately they only had one taxi in this tiny little town. So I had to wait and wait I did. Unfortunately the little room that they had for waiting in was being kept at a healthy 100 degrees and the lady running the place was chain smoking so the room was humid, clammy and smoke ridden. And so I announced that I would wait outside.

I couldn’t tell if it was actually cool outside or just in comparison to the heat of inside. But it was that kind of cool rush that you get sometimes which is so deliciously enveloping.

Anyway, while I was waiting there the taxi driver arrived. He as a young Hindu guy and he’d been told by phone that I was waiting for him so when he walked up to the taxi rank he said “Are you the guy who wants to go to Otford”?

I told him that I was. He said, “Hi I’m the Turbanator”. And then he popped his head around the corner of the taxi office and said, “I found my fare, I’ll be back”.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch they say. Although I did go to a corporate evenings entertainment with my friend. We went along to drink beer in the sunshine, chat and eat canapés. And that’s exactly what we did for four hours, and yet at no point were we approached by any member of the host firm. We have never bought any product from that firm and if anything we feel less keen on doing so simply because if we continue not to we have a free lunch story which beats what most economists think is going on.

There is another example of “free lunch” economics going on, or rather “something for nothing” which sounds perhaps more palatable and certainly is a more flexible phrase. The comes from two charities, both connected.

The first is a charity called play pump. Their idea is breathtakingly simple. They install a water pump for people who need water in Africa. But they install a childrens playground on top of the water pump and they install this playground next to schools. The simple plan is that when the children are playing on the round about they are, unwittingly, pumping water for everyone. This simple idea is so powerful and fantastic. It really is something for nothing. Their website is here: http://www.playpumps.org/

Also play pump have inspired another charity which is a little bit closer to home. It is a charity called One Water. It’s a very strange kind of charity in that they basically just market and sell a product, bottled water, but all of the profits from the sale of the water go to play pump. It’s a strange idea similar to the fair trade mark I suppose. But it does make sense. By buying water you are providing water for others. Their website is here: http://www.we-are-one.org.uk/ You can buy this water instead of other water and yet the water you’re buying is making a difference. Also something for nothing.

Here is a video about one of their projects, it’s about 10 minutes long, but probably worth watching.

The other day I was talking about Automagic Shock (Automagically), the sudden realisation that you have no idea how the device you are using actually works. The flip side of this is, in many ways, the situations where we miss the realisation of how making something slightly less complicated might make it better.

I have had much experience, and I’m sure many engineers and software developers are the same, that releasing something that kind of works is very dangerous. Because if you release something before it is ready then it can be the hardest thing in the world to convince people to upgrade to the new thing once you’ve fixed it. This is not the same if the new thing is just the same design but faster or cheaper, in those cases people will happily upgrade. This is specifically in the case where there is a barrier to them getting the new thing.

For example: Consider a toaster. It is very simple but it has problems. What if you want four slices cooking at the same time (then get a four slice toaster), what if you only want to cook two slices once you have a four slice toaster. Or if you have an uneven number of slices. You will no doubt have experienced that if you have only one slice of toast in a toaster then it doesn’t really work as well. Only one side of the toast seems to get cooked. Also we know that when we’re making toast to be buttered, the second slice of toast gets cold while we’re buttering the first slice. The bread is often a different size than the size of the toaster. The bread is often too thin or thick and it’s difficult to quantify before you’ve cooked some what the thickness means in terms of the number on the dial. What about the different needs of different toast eaters – some like lightly brown some burnt. And what about that second set of toast that comes after you’ve already done one set. The first set needs more time than any of the others because you’re heating up the element too.

I’m sure all of these problems and more have been solved in different toasters on the market (I know that there is even a toaster that delays the cooking time of the second slice of toast specifically so that it will finish toasting just after you’ve finished buttering the first one). But the problem is that people in general think that toast is kind of fine. It’s sorted really. And because people want a non-complicated life the maximum complexity that a toaster has is the dial on the front. And maybe the humble toaster doesn’t need to get fixed but if it doesn’t need to be fixed then why do people keep designing a new toaster?

I didn’t know how rubbish my video recorder was until I had a PVR. Once I could simply navigate the television programs and press record and series link I realised how easy the thing was, but before then I always looked down my nose slightly at people who couldn’t program the video recorder because to me it seemed like it was so easy that they weren’t even trying.

If it had been up to me the video recorder technology would have probably stayed the same forever. But now it’s been fixed I love it and realise what an idiot I was being. This problem was solved because real users kept complaining that it was too complicated for long enough. It’s very rare that we should require users to come to us, we should always go to them.

All of those people who are designing new toasters are doing it because as geeks they can see an inefficiency. Something that is broken as far as they are concerned. And it doesn’t matter to them if something gets more complicated, they just want it to work. The video recorder worked for geeks, they understood it, and there wasn’t a single program they couldn’t record. But to most real people the situation was the other way around. The toaster is fine, the video recorder is broken.

So what’s the next thing that’s broken I wonder?

Lots of people think that the reason that it is generally women who make telephone announcements is because they have better and clearer voices. And that their voices are more reassuring. And they do, studies have proven this to be the case after the fact. However that’s not the reason that women were selected. In fact the reason was far less scientific than that.

Originally the people who were telephone operators were all boys who had previously been employed as telegraph operators. They were ideal for the telegraph service which involved a lot of learning of systematic techniques and running about delivering telegrams (mainly the second thing was the thing they were good at it turns out).

But when they started converting them to work on the telephone system it was soon obvious that they were not very good at working in the new conditions. In the telephone system they had to speak to the punters and ask them what they wanted them to do (rather than simply saying, while out of breath, “telegram for you sir”). And then they would have to connect the right wire into the right socket in an incredibly complicated series of wires. And in amongst all of the wires and the enclosed operating spaces not only were practical jokes a problem for the customers more often the bored boys would break out into fights. And so it was realised that girls were the exact thing for this new service and that perhaps they would be able to understand technology after all. Women have never looked back, whereas boys well they’re still fighting over the latest gadgets.

How do things that we think of as magic become technology? When does the mysticism of the old become the reliability of the new. And if I don’t know how a mobile telephone actually works… don’t I believe in magic too? Arthur C. Clarke once said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

I really like technology, gadgets and the like. I don’t always have the newest and latest thing, but I do like to get the word out when I find something that is actually really good. And as part of my fascination in this area I tend to know quite a lot about how the thing actually works. Not necessarily the nuts and bolts, but at a conceptual level I have an idea of how a thing works.

But like most people I don’t say things like “well I can’t have this in my house unless I know how it works”. I don’t have to have a working knowledge of something before I will be willing to let it in the house. Some things I know a lot about, some not much.

For example I could explain to you at length how a Microwave oven works, but I don’t really know much about how a mobile phone works other than it uses microwaves to send a signal somewhere. Realisation about things like this come to you from time to time. The other month I was a passenger in a car in England talking to a person on a mobile phone who was in America and who was able to tell better than I was what the traffic situation was a mile up the road because they were looking on the internet for that information and relaying it to me over the phone. The oddness of this situation occurred to me instantly. And I realised that I didn’t really understand how all of the things connecting me to this information actually work. I had a bout of what I refer to as “Automagic Shock”. A moment of realisation that what I’m doing could just as well be magic, and yet every single bit of it is explainable, somebody does know how all of the separate bits of this thing work, I just have faith that they do.

I wonder if the situation is exacerbated by me knowing some of how it works? In that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I wonder if people that I know who claim to hate technology ever get such a feeling?

The other day I got a call from a friend who said, “I’m really sorry but I just had to ask for your help with my computer – I just really hate technology”. Obviously it didn’t occur to them that they were using technology to make the telephone call. That they used sophisticated technology in their car, mobile phone, washing machine and so on every day without any problems at all. Because these technologies have achieved that great feat of stopping from being a nebulous bit of technology and have succeeded in becoming a thing in their own right. Computers are slowly but surely trying to move that way, but the problem for a computer is that it is specifically designed to not be proscriptive. The proscriptive “word processors” and “adding machines” were not versatile enough, but while computers have taken the trade-off to become more versatile what they are effectively doing is allowing the computer to surprise us. But the fact that the computer can surprise is both good and bad, it means that somebody can show us a new program like “Google Earth” which makes you really go “Wow” my old computer can do that! But it also means that your computer can surprise you by saying to you “Stack Error Memory Dump”.

I think that’s the difference between technology and devices. Even though my new phone doesn’t just make telephone calls it cannot surprise me because on the very first day I got it I knew all of the things it could do: take calls, photos, send e-mail, browse the internet. I might not have used all of those features on day one, but I’m not going to suddenly get a surprise in a while by discovering that the thing can make toast.

And I think that’s the difference, we’re more likely to get automagic shock from a device then a bit of technology because it slips in under the radar without us asking how it actually works.

In an article (Kingdom of God) the other day I spoke about what I thought was the way that Christianity and Islam isn’t that different in what people are striving for and that the thing that people are striving for, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, was for a sense of satisfaction. An increase in a sense of peace and a reduction in a sense of guilt.

This I suggested sounded to me like Buddhism and it does. The idea of Nirvana is not a far off heaven it is a state of mind that one can enter here on earth only when you have understood how to make your actions not affect the world. And you can only reach true Nirvana at death on the last time you die when you won’t be reborn.

The problem with religions, especially for non-religious people like me, is that really the greatest bits of philosophical reality are often obscured by some hocus-pocus gobbledygook.

Buddhism has become popular in the west, but particularly a brand of Buddhism which is almost areligious. People simply take the concepts of nirvana and karma and detach them from the rest of the religion.

I’m always surprised that Hinduism wasn’t the religion that this happened to. In many ways Hinduism is the most open religion. It accepts scripture from other religions and is still continuing to learn about the world. It has some great world view concepts, like the idea that that truth is a conceptual reality just as gravity is. Gravity existed before people described it and truth existed before people tested it.

And of course the point of Hinduism is that over time you will enter the state of Jivan-mukta and will achieve “perfect mental peace and a freedom from worldly desires”.

There have always been three areas that religion dealt with in society. The questions relating to where do we come from which science have taken over for many. The questions relating to what we are allowed to do which government has taken over for many. The questions relating to how we feel inside ourselves which psychologists are trying to take over for many. However the problem is that this third area is only dealt with by psychologists when people realise they have a specific problem. And philosophers while dealing with general issues also tend to be some of the most self-reflective individuals around. They seem to care little with making their ideas practical. Perhaps this is the area that Religion can claim in the modern world.

The idea that all people want to fell better and less guilty, and that this is not achievable through hedonism. That we all want to overcome Jihad, enter the Kingdom of God, reach Nirvana or become Jivan-mukta. Or simply be.

In Formula 1 (no wait this is a crossover story come back) there are two different competitions going on the Drivers championship and the Constructors championship. And both are supposed to be equal. But everyone knows that really it is the driver’s championship that is most important.

The way that you can see that codified is that the number 1 is given to the driver who wins the drivers championship above whether he’s driving for the team that won the constructor’s championship. So if Alonso who currently races for Renault but is moving to McLaren wins the drivers championship and Renault win the constructors championship then he will have the number 1 on his McLaren next year. And to keep things neat his team-mate will have the number 2 even though there’s a good chance he’ll have never driven in a grand prix before. In this case the two Renault drivers would be number 3 and 4 (because other than the world champion it always goes in constructors championship order).

But what happens if as could still happen Michael Schumacher wins the Drivers championship. He won’t be racing next year. Well in this case they do something rather bizarre. To preserve the importance of the Number 1 they don’t give it to anyone, but to keep the evenness they use a 0. So if Michael wins the world championship and retires then whichever team wins the constructors championship will have a 0 and a 2.

It seems such an odd thing, but it’s exactly the kind of random crazy rules that make following formula 1 such a joy. You can think of the most impossibly bizarre situation and somebody will have already thought of it and made a rule about it. For example what happens if Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso get the same number of points? Well in that case the person who won the most races wins. But what if they have won the same number of races? Well then it is the person who came second the most number of times. It’s all kind of logical but at the same time kind of crazy. And that’s why I love it.

For more formula one stuff, check out http://www.sofaf1.com

When I speak to smart Christians and ask them about Heaven I sometimes ask them if they believe that there really can be such a place. Some of them do believe in Heaven as a place, and then find themselves getting twisted around in all kinds of problems of semantics as they try and describe what it’s actually like.

Try asking them if they believe there can be such a concept as free will in heaven. They will suggest that you can do anything you want in heaven. Then ask them what would happen if you did something bad. Then they will nod wisely and say that if you were the kind of person who wanted to do something bad then you wouldn’t be allowed into heaven. Then ask them about things that don’t seem bad at the time but turn out to have been bad later – accidents and so on. And they will tell you that they don’t think that you can make mistakes in heaven. Then suggest that when you’re making a decision in heaven that you always somehow know what the right thing to do is. And they say “yes, that’s exactly it, you always know the right thing to do”. And then you ask them how that tallies with Free Will. They love you for this and always invite you back to their parties (for more fun ask them how many times they plan to play golf in heaven and what they like about golf – they’ll soon realise that challenge and doing something an infinite number of times is something that doesn’t quite square).

But a lot of smart Christians describe the “Kingdom of God” which is all the bible says about Heaven really as more of a state of mind. Something that you can achieve right here on earth. Yes that’s right they think that “Heaven is a place on earth”. But more seriously the idea is that through doing good things and living well you will achieve a sense of peace and wellbeing which is enables you to be one of God’s subjects. Basically brining together feeling good and feeling guilty as being the punishments and rewards for a good life. It might sound an awful lot like Buddhism to you (and me) but that’s the general idea.

I have another question that I ask to smart Muslim’s I know. I try and find out about the idea of Jihad. And while many will talk about the issues that most westerners will know about. The idea that Jihad is a struggle against the oppressors of Islam and the idea that Jihad is something that is specifically written into their religion that extols them to offer conversion to non-believers or death. Which is not really true, or its no more true than the way that the Jewish and Christian traditions demand the same. There is an element of interpretation to all of these things.

But the smart Muslim’s I know also talk about what they see as the more important part of Jihad, what to them Jihad is really about. It is the idea that the struggle for most Muslims is within themselves. The idea that their own passions and heart want them to do things that they know is wrong, and they must struggle against those impulses to be better Muslims. The idea that there is good and evil in each person and that by making the correct choices they will be happier or feel guilty is a large part of what Jihad means to them. And if that sounds a bit like Buddhism to you (and me) then, well I can’t really argue with that.

I’m currently working on a novel which I wish was taking up all of my time. But of course there are a million and one other things that I end up doing instead of writing a bit of it every day. One of the most difficult things to do while writing a novel is “get on with it”. The actual business of starting writing each time is the one that is the most tricky. Once started I tend to write a lot, but the main problem is throwing your cap over the wall.*

But one of the most complicated things for me is writing this blog. I want to use all of the writing time that I have for the novel. But then what about the good readers of the blog. And what about myself? I can’t use all of my writerly thoughts in the novel, some of the stories don’t fit, some of the ideas aren’t right. So what to do? I must keep up with the blog simply to let those ideas fall out.

Now all I have to do is reduce some of the other stuff that I get up to to try and increase my writing time!

* Frank O’Connor or JFK or both seem to have told the story of young Irish men who would be running through the forest and would come across a wall. When they came across such a wall they would through their caps over the wall so that they had no choice but to climb it.