gamboling.co.uk

I noticed a new family moving into a flat near me the other day. The father was in the van picking and choosing the next heavy thing he was going to lift while the kids were running back and forward with some smaller plastic bags and so on. I didn’t see the mother she was inside with the last heavy consignment no doubt.

At the particular moment that I was walking past the father was in the van while his eight year old daughter walked up to the van and said, “Daddy why do you think Mummy has so many clothes”?

“Baby,” he said back, “I just don’t know but one day I think you’ll know a lot better than me.”

To which she replied, “Nah. I don’t think so.”

Since I wrote about being shat upon by a pigeon the other day (Unlucky) I have been told many times that I was very lucky.

Yes it really did seem that some people thought it was lucky to be pooed on by a bird or more specifically that it would make me lucky.

This really does seem to be counter intuitive. But then perhaps that what I should expect from trying to intuit what’s going on with superstition. Some of them do kind of make sense though.

For example if you spill salt you get bad luck. And I suppose at the time this nugget came up was the time when salt was very expensive and it really was bad luck to spill it. And what’s the remedy? Throw more of it over your shoulder. By making the waste explicit in this way really makes it clear what you’re doing. Also it being unlucky to walk under ladders or cross on the stairs sort of make sense in that they are dangerous.

But what about the less obvious ones? Why is it unlucky to let a black cat cross your path? Perhaps it is because the cat might get under your feet and trip you up? But then why specifically a black cat. And what happens when you cross its path? I walk past a black cat every morning that is so docile there isn’t a rat’s chance in gouder that it will run under my feet. Put it this way he normally sits there looking incredibly bored at all of the pigeons that are wondering around. And how do I know I’m not crossing his path? From the look on his face he certainly thinks that he owns it.

So what of this luck that comes from enduring avian target practice? Is it simply to console a poor unfortunate or is it enough to win the lottery or a bet? And if the latte why don’t all the pigeon racers come first equal and betting shops have a roost available for those who are down to their final couple of quid?

I think the answer is we’ll never know but with a bit of luck we might find out.

As my train was attempting leave the station he ran for the closing doors and made it all the way through. The only thing he’d forgotten was the fact that he had a backpack on. Which contrived to get him caught in the doors.

Now I wonder what was going through his mind, other than the obvious, “I hope I can get this bag through the door with me”. But maybe he was thinking that if this had been a movie then right around now the director would be shouting out cut and he would be attempting it again.

But this being real life he had something quite different in store. The platform guard walked over to the door and started to help pushing the bag into to train. While he was doing it the guard was giving the guy a lecture, “maybe next time you’ll stand clear of the doors”. The man could clearly feel the bag coming his way and so he said, “maybe next time you’ll fuck off” and with that he flipped the guard the bird and pulled the bag clear and stepped back expecting to see the doors close and for the train to pull him away from the enraged guard. But once again the movie in his head didn’t turn out the way he had been plotting as the guard had managed to get his hand between the doors just in time and pulled them back open. “That’s the end of your journey mate,” he said as he looked over his shoulder, “can we get security over here I want this guy off”.

And for the rest of my journey I was feeling pleased right had won, wrong had been punished and all was good. Until we got to waterloo and waited for two minutes at the station because none of the people near the door understood that they might have to push a button to open the door. Even after everyone else on the train had explained it to them loudly several times. I feel that guy would have known what he was doing – although based on the kind of day he was having perhaps not.

People, it turns out, are generally bored. And boredom itself is a pretty interesting concept. I like to believe that I never get bored as there is always something to do. But that’s because I’m always using the old definition of bored that we all used when we were kids. When I was a kid other kids would plaintively look up to their mothers and say “I’m booooooooreeeeedd Mum, what can I do?” And I think a lot of other kids mothers would then find something for their child to do. “Here’s a game you could play or a movie you could watch”. Whereas my mother was more old school, she would say, “well I do need a hand picking gooseberries in the garden”.

Asking my mother for something to do wasn’t a mistake you made often. But it was a really useful way of making you never get to that bored stage. If you knew that the alternative was something that you didn’t want to do you would you would always make sure that you never ran out of things that you wanted to do (this is rather similar to the concept of dwarf bread – you take on a trip with you something so awful that you’d really have to be hungry to eat it and the knowledge that you have it with you conspires to keep you less hungry).

But once you’ve learnt the valuable lesson of how to stop yourself being bored you find yourself doing increasingly odd things to stop yourself from hitting rock bottom – watching tv programs that you don’t like, randomly surfing the internet hoping something comes up or playing solitaire?

In 2003 people around the world played solitaire for 9 billion hours! To give you a comparator it took 7 million hours to build the empire state building and 20 million to build the panama canal. The rate of humans to hours means that we are generating more than 1 million man hours of work for each hour of time that passes.

So researchers, led by Luis von Ahn have been trying to work out a way of harnessing this latent energy for productivity. Basically they’ve been trying to come up with a game that people still find fun to play, is simple enough that you can play it while your brain is on downtime (like solitaire) and that the result of playing is something productive.

The game von Ahn came up with is breathtakingly simple. It is “say what you see”. A picture pops up on screen and you have to type in a word or phrase that describes what it is that you’re looking at. At the same time another player is trying to do the same with the same picture. If you get the same label then you get points and you move on to the next picture. The productive part comes next when you realise who has been funding some of von Ahn’s research – Google. Google has a lot of pictures and doesn’t really have very good labels for these pictures. If two people who can’t communicate any other way both agree on the label for a picture then that is probably what is in the picture. If you would like to have a play it is here: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

I wonder what the next stage of this will be? With that much power available there has got to be some good stuff to do.

I have two active computers these days, I have many more hidden in cupboards so Katherine can’t find them and throw them away! (Not really Katherine 🙂

One of the computers is the main server tower computer that is speedy and fast but has all the big bloaty applications on it Office, Photoshop, Premier etc. The other computer is a nice sleek little laptop from Toshiba. I call it LapTosh and it’s my baby. That is where I do most of my writing, posting and surfing. And because I use that machine a lot, Katherine has tended to use the main computer for all her computer needs.

But this morning for another post (Word thing) I needed to draw a diagram so needed photoshop and for another reason I needed Excel so I ended up on the main computer which wasn’t particularly a problem at first because Katherine was still asleep. But once she woke up she found that we were turned round, she was on the laptop and I was on the main machine. It’s funny how quickly you get used to doing things one way around. And despite only having the laptop for four months it now seems impossible that we were able to function as human beings with only one of us on the internet at a time.

Although it probably doesn’t seem like it the title of this post makes sense. In fact it makes, in a way, more sense than most sentences.

The other day I mentioned auto-antonyms (here: Why different species can’t mate) and after doing so my father asked me what “Literally dusting” would be. As literal and dusting have two meanings a piece how many meanings of the sentence would there be? The answer is four meanings from two words.

And after that we started discussing how complicated we could actually make the sentence. We worked out that for each two meaning word we added we were doubling the previous number of options. Here’s how the options work visually:

And then we just started adding words. Now the sentence we ended up with does make sense, not necessarily at first perhaps, but it does. And fine has three meanings to boot exquisite, small and just good enough. Which means that “Literally overlook fine hard dusting custom run trial drive time” has 1536 different meanings. Which is pretty good going.

Some days you’re just luckier than others (as I was talking about the other day: Some days). And on Saturday this week I went to visit my cousin who lives down near Bath. It was going to be a long trip six hours in total of travelling for six hours of visit time but then it was just one of those things that you have to go and do sometimes. It was their housewarming, their husband’s birthday so a visit was in order. Anyway I thought, I’ll get a chance to catch up on some reading on the train.

So off we went to the station, Katherine and I were running a bit late. But so was Pete, we got to Clapham Junction and a train just magically pulled up, we made up the time and got to Paddington with plenty of time to buy the tickets and some food. And this is where the first thing went wrong of the day. Because of some confusion about how we were going to be getting down there (car or train) we didn’t buy any tickets until we got to the station. And once we went up to the machine the tickets were 45 pounds each! So £135 in the hole we went to the shops to buy some food. The rest of the train journey was fine, and actually quite enjoyable. That’s right we were being lulled into a false sense of security. In fact this security went on all of the way through the party at my cousins house. It was fun, there was good conversation and food. So it was time to leave, all we needed was a lift to the station. The journey to the station should have taken twenty minutes, but…

it took…

two hours. There was some kind of mysterious “cars driving into Bath convention” going on. Loads and loads of traffic and no seeming problem at the end of it. After about an hour and half we had to get out of the car and start walking. We’d missed two trains. And once we got out of the car and Dominic had turned around and went back home two things happened. It started raining, and there was suddenly no more traffic.

Pete suddenly said, “One of us is unlucky today who is it”?

To which I replied that it must have been Dominic and that the traffic had moved around now to block him on the way home.

Which seemed funny at the time but clearly it wasn’t true. So we headed off to the station in the rain and started following the signs to the station. But because we were on a ring road the signs were taking us the way that the cars are taken to the station. Katherine at one point said that surely we must need to walk through the town centre to get to the station but there were no signs in the town centre so we followed the road signs. And by the time we arrived at the station thoroughly soaked we could tell two things. First that we’d walked around the whole of the outside of Bath, and second we could see the place that we’d started from from the station and what had taken half an hour would have taken five minutes.

Well we got to the station and as luck would have it the train we thought we’d missed was running late and was still stopped at the station. Excellent we thought. Lets get on this one. However the train was broken, so then we had to get on a train on the other platform that then had to swap positions with the other train. Finally we were on a train and it started moving, after fifteen minutes it suddenly stopped and started going backwards. And another fifteen minutes later we were…

back in Bath train station.

Then another ten minutes later we finally left the station and headed for London. It had taken us two and a half hours to leave Bath!

After we got back to London we were walking back to our house. It was so late that the back entrance to the train station was closed so we had to walk around from the front and under the railway bridge. In the six years that I’ve lived here it’s something that I’ve probably done once a week without incident. But today, today something, some force, some something, needed to tell everyone that it wasn’t our group that was unlucky, but that no instead it was me – Alex.

How do I know it was me and not say Katherine or Pete?

I’ll tell you how. Because as I was walking under the railway bridge a Pigeon shat on me. And I’m not just talking a small amount either, oh no.

Massive white and brown runny gobs of crap all over my shirt. And then as I turned to see what it was the biggest bit of white shiny poo slid right into the middle of my crotch. Yes dear reader it looked like I had become a bit too excited.

All I could smell the entire time I was walking home was the incredible smell of scampi!

It was truly a crappy end to a crappy journey. At least Katherine and I got to laugh about it all the way home.

You can read her version of events here: A bird under a bridge

I’m not superstitious. But I know a lot of people who do things which would be called superstitious by any normal person – kind of just in case. And I am no exception. For example people might not walk under a ladder, kiss across the threshold, cross on the stairs and so on. Just in case it kind of might be true.

I’ve started a new one of late which is truly silly. I have days of the week socks (which is turns out I have talked about before:
At any rate today I am wearing on the left foot the correct sock for today and on the right foot the correct sock for tomorrow.)* I now end up wearing pairs of socks, but before I take them out I don’t know which one I’m going to wear. The socks have a day on them and if the day that it happens to be the day that it is then I’m going to have a lucky day. Because I’m an optimist I do not assume I’ll have an unlucky day on the other days. I just assume that I’ll have an even better day on the days when the day and socks match.

Obviously this is madness, and I don’t actually think that there will make a difference. But I do actually go through the process of thinking of it every time I put my socks on. I always check the day of the socks when I put them on. And I never attempt to cheat the system.

But I don’t think this means that I’m truly mad. People think much more crazy things than that. But which is worse thinking that not walking under a ladder makes a difference, or knowing that it doesn’t make a difference but not walking under them anyway?

It’s similar in a way to a phobia, spiders in this country can’t hurt you at all and yet people are still terrified. I think it’s like Woody Allen said, “I don’t believe in God but I feel guilty about it”, lots of atheist’s while actively not believing in God don’t actively go and do things to annoy God just in case.

Gosh that’s a pretty tortuous last sentence. If they don’t believe in God how can they avoid upsetting something they don’t believe in? Well that’s the essential problem I suppose.

Right quick time to leave with a joke, another from Woody Allen: “As the poet says, ‘Only God can make a tree’, maybe that’s because nobody else can figure out how to get the bark on”.

* I seem to have been just as obsessed with
Feng Shui back then too.

Could Astrology actually be true? It seems awfully unlikely but it is – of course – possible.

There are a variety of systems which exist in the world which sound almost laughably silly but help because they make things easier to remember. For example Feng Shui is effectively the practice of furniture arranging viewed as “what would a dragon do”? You might not think that dragons know about the arrangement of furniture but think of it another way. When you sit in a space and you feel too cramped what the arranger has forgotten is that people need space around them, when you look at a room that seems to be broken up and bitty you have forgotten that the room needs a visual sweep and that if you put a lamp in a precarious position you have forgotten that a dragons tail needs space when it goes round tricky corners. In fact it’s much easier to remember the few key rules of dragons and how they work than all the specific rules of style. It’s a form of systemization. It’s kind of like not having to remember exactly how long an inch is but instead measuring the thing with the bit between your knuckle and the tip of your fattest finger – a kind of rule of thumb.

Astrology probably developed in a similar way. People for a variety of reasons will tend to be similar if similar things have happened to them, and similar things will tend to happen to them based on the times of the year that they are born. These could vary from temperature of the child in bed in the first few days of life to being one of the oldest or youngest in the school year. So the stars could have nothing to do with it working or not working they could just be the way that people identify which time of the year you were born.

Actually I’ve never read a horoscope and had it ever come true. I’ve never seen it and said, “oh yeah that’s incredibly spooky”. There is so much generalisation in there as to make it completely irrelevant and stupid. The part that is harder to throw away is the descriptions of your sign. Some descriptions of Aquarius, Taurus etc seem to be reasonably accurate of the kind of people who fit in that group. And I think that part of it is probably reasonably likely to be due to a combination of real world factors as described above (eg. temperature, age oldest to youngest in class, etc).

But I once suggested this to a keen astrologist and she said I was completely wrong. So I asked her for her “scientific” explanation of astrology. Her answer? She said that the human brain gets a real kick at the exact time of birth and that kick is incredibly subtly influenced by gravity. So that even the exact positions of far away stars can affect the way that the child’s brain will grow from that moment on. Sounds unlikely to me but then I suppose – you never know.