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People have been asking “What if?” questions since the dawn of time, I imagine. My guess is that the first time two amoeba existed, one turned to the other and said, “What would happen if you did that again?”. It’s human nature.*

When you were a kid, you were able to spend the time to play the game properly. You really got the chance to put the effort in, you got to milk the apparent turn by turn nature of history. However when playing with my brother, Just as I was trying to get him to consider just what would have been different if Caesar hadn’t quite got around to all his veni, vidi, vici-ing, Pete would say, “But what if the whole universe didn’t exist?”.

Of course as adults it easier to see that it’s very rare that the world turns on a single decision. Most things that we do are cumulations of decisions. Things conspire together. It’s closer to the gathering storm, as Churchill had it. A lot of times, a single attempt to buck the trend doesn’t achieve very much.

There is a more serious point to some of this which is to do with regrets. Oftentimes I hear people talking about their regrets and I wonder what they really mean. Very few things are closed forever.

People who wish they had learned to play the piano when they were kids but don’t do it now are kidding themselves. They could learn now but the same thing that made them not want to put in the effort when they were kids is the same thing stopping them now. Just go and do it. But remember that Myleene Klass is disapointed that, because of her media career and kids, she doesn’t get as much time to keep up with her piano these days. Nowadays, she can only manage to practice for one hour a day! Being good at something takes a lot of effort. So you’d better get started.

The other side is that people regret things that are part of what makes them who they are. You are, to an extent, the product of the decisions you’ve made. So instead of wishing you could go back and change something (and unless you’ve invented time travel, you can’t do that), you should take the information you learned and make sure you aren’t making the same decision again. Remember that most days you decide to do the same thing you did yesterday. You don’t think you are deciding, but you are.

I was reminded of all of this when I met a friend’s three year old son. Lukas was just at the stage of incessantly asking “What if” questions. He just wanted to understand how the whole world worked. Those simple things that children all learn, how do these things fit together?, what happens if they don’t? We all start learning it. Some of us just stop. Anyway, at the end of our trip, we were getting on the plane and Lukas was trying to come up with things that might mean we didn’t have to go.

He tried several versions:
“What if they have no fuel?”
“They’ll get more fuel.”

“What if they’ve forgotten your bags?”
“They haven’t forgotten our bags, look they’re there.”

And then he had it, “What if the pilot talks nonsense?”.

And what, I thought to myself, if the universe doesn’t exist?

* And from the sounds of things, amoeba nature too.

A while ago I ran through a few of the phrases that I use at home http://www.gamboling.co.uk/2009/02/tragedy-of-self-mong.html and yesterday I asked you for your suggestions http://www.gamboling.co.uk/2010/01/what-is-your-favorite-at-home-phrase.html. I’m sure everyone has this kind of thing, but Katherine and I seem to have more than most. Now I’m not really talking here about something like slugabed. This is a phrase that means kind of layabout. I’d never heard it before I started going out with Katherine. I assumed she had made it up, but no, apparently it’s a real word. This is rather like, “honest indians”, that I use and I assume is American. It means, “no this is really true”, or “I swear”.

But no, I’m talking about phrases here that have been created in the homestead or have been at least wildly taken out of context.

You’ve met me before

I don’t know where this comes from, but in some ways it is the most normal of this bunch, so I guess it gets to go first. This is used by me a lot to diffuse the mock shock and surprise that Katherine demonstrates when I go on one of my damn foolish idealistic crusades*. Eg.
Katherine: “Why are all of the spoons on the dining room table?”
Me: “I was trying to magnetise them.”
Katherine: “Why?”
Me: “You know… you’ve met me before.”

Tiny dinosaur arms

Katherine does have slightly shorter and weaker arms than me. I seem to remember suggesting that the reason she couldn’t open something one day was because she only had tiny dinosaur arms. I was thinking along the lines of the T-Rex style. However, this one has slightly backfired on me as I now often hear, “Can you do it? I can’t because of my tiny dinosaur arms”.

They’ll be closed

This one can be pinpointed exactly. In the first live stage show of the TV series Bottom, when very few lines of the play seem to be actually getting said, Rik Mayall says, “Come on, they’ll be closed”. Meaning the pub. This is invoked at home whenever one person is faffing. It sounds a pretty generic phrase but it still seems to cause confusion because other people say, “What’s closing? When’s it closing?”

Trouble with a capital TR

This is pretty straightforward as it goes. Some people are trouble, others are trouble with a capital T. Katherine is trouble with a capital TR. Because she’s more trouble than your traditional captial T Trouble-maker. This actually does rely on a strange understanding of the word trouble that we seem to employ, which is quite similar to cheeky.

Are you Joaquin Phoenix?

Well instead of saying “Are you joking?”, I tend to say, “Are you Joaquin Phoenix”. Yes I know. It’s not great is it?

Joaquin Phoenix it in

Well you must know that really you don’t pronounce Joaquin like joking. In fact it’s pronounced much more like “wha-keen”. And in my addled mind it sounds a bit like “whacking” hence “so take that cake and just Joaquin Phoenix it in the oven”. Yes it does tend to get me looks.

[And sighs from your Editor as you can spell neither Joaquin nor Phoenix. I thank the stars that these are spoken phrases.]

* This is from Indiana Jones and the last crusade. I’m pretty sure Nick said this about some crazy scheme I was plotting when I was about 12 or 13. It’s been accurate ever since.

There is a really broken thing on your computer and I am constantly amazed that it hasn’t been fixed. It’s the way addresses and contacts work. The issue is this: on a computer, you should never have to enter the same information twice, but that’s what keeps happening in your contacts.

Think about Katherine and me. How do we feature in your address book*. Most people used to have the couple at their home address in their address book with the house phone and then underneath you have something saying, “Alex Mob” etc.

But now in the electronic world you want to be able to know that when one of us calls you on the phone you have the right name pop up. So you set up both people individually, with their own mobile number. But where do you store the home address and the home phone number? Generally, you end up putting the home number on both people. Luckily my iPhone is smart with this and would say “Alex or Katherine calling” if the home number calls me.

But there is a problem. Something is broken. I’ve had to enter the home phone number twice, same problem with the address. But why? There is no real reason.

Personally, I think the way it should work is that you are able to nest information. So a regular person that you put in the contacts is at the top level. When you scroll through the contacts you only see this top set of people exactly as you do now. However you would be able to add a subordinate set of information – these would be houses, offices, children, etc. They would, in reality, be contacts exactly like the normal contacts, but they would be owned by at least one other contact, so don’t show up in the normal list.

That way, if we move you only need to change the address once. If your work friend, Karen, is in the phone and you want to add their partner’s name, you would make a subordinate contact. It wouldn’t normally show up, but when you need to remember Steve’s name, it’s there. Suddenly Karen can’t come to the football and Steve’s coming, you have a place to put his name and you can later work out which Steve it is. Then after the game, you actually exchange e-mails and suddenly Steve is a real mate so you promote him up and he no longer belongs to Karen. He’s just a regular contact and you don’t have to copy and paste that info out of some notes field you were using.

Surely this is the right way to do it?

*Obviously there’s a good chance we aren’t in your address book, but instead replace the names with some other random names of a couple that you know that you pluck from the air that make sense for your address book.

It would seem that men and women run at different temperatures. This seems to be a universal truth. I am warmer than Katherine at almost all times. And that’s because, like most girls, Katherine is a radiator. All of her heat is being transmitted outwards.*

So what do we do about this? We turn the heating on. Or we don’t if we’re fourstar. The problem is that this isn’t necessarily the correct approach. Christine complained that is not necessarily the right thing to do because men quite often then go on to make the women feel guilty. Christine would rather put a coat on and be done with it. But if men see a woman with a coat on indoors they would want to turn the heat up to “do the right thing”. But then they have to take clothes off.

In my office our desk is populated currently by three males and one female. And the thermostat has been turned up so the coldest person is warm. This means that we were actually running desk fans while it was snowing outside. Surely this isn’t right? I’m not sure I know what the solution is. But maybe you do?

* The reason for this is that men’s fat deposits tend to be stored in a couple of key areas (mainly the stomach) whereas women’s are more evenly distributed. Added to which, women also have thicker subcutaneous (under the skin) fat deposits as standard than men. This means that the fat is near the surface. And the fat is your insulation. Now it seems counter-intuitive to think that this everywhere insulation is worse. But it is, because more heat is gathered from the outside world than is created by you. So women are insulating against the heat source. Whoops.

As we’ve been talking about my mythical travel planning website idea, we’ve had a couple of pieces of feedback.

First my friend Rich, hot on the heels of his converter of the London BBC Weather site for degrees Andronov has made an implementation of the distance to hot problem mentioned in this post last week. It’s really nice and, of course, it shows the temperatures in degrees Andronov as well. Check it out here: http://andronov.rjmd.eu/holiday/

Second, my father has mentioned another really simple thing that is almost impossible to do. He recently wanted to travel somewhere as a quick weekend break and because he wanted it to be easy he wanted to be able to travel from his closest airport. So all he needed was a list of all of the places you could fly to from that airport.

This is something that you can’t get hold of. You could go to an airport website and say, “show me all flights from Birmingham International to Prague” and see if any flights come up. And then repeat the search with, “show me all flights from Birmingham International to Copenhagen” and build up a list that way. But that seems a really inefficient way of doing this.

As I said in my last post. I keep finding different ways that I want to be able to get to the data.

How many top notch restaurants are there in the city? How likely is it to rain? How many museums are there? How many clubs? How hot is it? Are there public beaches? How far away is it? Is it available from my local airport? How much is it?

Each of us has different mechanisms to decide how we go on holiday. We all go through a process. And that’s what I want to simplify here. I want to put all those factors in order of importance to me and then have the destinations which are most likely to work to bubble to the top. So at the moment I want to get some winter sun. I want to go somewhere on holiday in February which is not too far away and has some nice restaurants and a few museums. So say that list above was the complete set of questions, I would put them in order of importance on the screen of my mythical website like this:

Most Important
1 – In February
2 – Warmer than [25 degrees C]
3 – Closer than [Not set – order by this factor]
4 – More than [2] top notch restaurants
5 – More than [3] museums
6 – Less than [£xxxx can’t think of a good number to put in here]
Least Important

So what it would do is bring me back a list ordered in bands. Band 1 would be places that match every criteria ordered by distance from the UK. Band 2 would be places that match the first 5 criteria, but cost more than the limit price, etc.

I think that would be a really neat way of helping me decide where to go. But what other criteria can you think of? Which other questions do you have when you are deciding where to go?

I’m not sure if you remember my idea for a travel website but I have been thinking about it some more, and I am pretty certain that there is another problem that needs solving. I have just been trying to figure this out for myself and there seems to be no sane or easy way to do it.

I suddenly, in the middle of the winter, decided that I would like to be warm and get a bit of sun. I asked around and people told me that 25 degrees centigrade was warm. Things would obviously be easier if we were all just using the Andronov Temperature Scale by now. But I couldn’t just say, “lets go to Barbados”. Katherine isn’t a particularly big fan of long haul flights. So what I needed to do was somehow find a list all of the cities with average temperatures in February higher than 25 degrees in order of how far away they are.

Then I would be able to look down the list and decide where to go. I like the idea that there should be lots of ways into the same dataset. What I can’t understand is why I can’t find this information. The information clearly exists out there on the internet. I can type in to google, “what is the average temperature in Valencia in February” and get an answer but that isn’t really what I want. I want this data to be organized properly.

Surely other people must want the same thing?

In Stewart Lee’s first series of his Comedy Vehicle, he made the point that a lot of people seem to be getting quite confused between Health and Safety and Political Correctness. I was exposed to this the other night in a taxi. I know you should never take what taxi drivers say to heart, but sometimes it is priceless. I am thinking of pitching to the TV channel Dave a show called ‘Cab drivers say the funniest things’.

It was icy on the night and the driver was getting worked up on his favourite subject of pensions. He’d already had a few attempts at the subject. Now he said, “see this ice? You see all of this ice right? Why aren’t they gritting the pavements? Why do you think they aren’t gritting the pavements? I’ll tell you why. They’ll grit them up here next to the shops. They’ll grit them in front of the shops alright, but not outside your house, oh no. You know why? Health and safety. They can’t grit outside your house can they? ‘Cos if they grit outside your house and they miss one little bit of ice and you find it, you can sue ’em if you slip. But outside shops it’s different because of all the laws. Anyway as long as they all get their pensions I guess it’s all right. I mean, that’s all they’re worried about, not your ice.”

I didn’t really know what to say about this, so I just kind of mumbled something vaguely positive-sounding and hoped for the subject to change. My guess is that they don’t have the money to pay for gritting your pavement. But the companies pay business rates and so get preferential treatment. But… But… There is a strange kernel of interest to derive from all of this.

A lot of people seem to not like health and safety regulations. Partly because they only seem to restrict you. And you don’t notice the times when they save you. It’s like computer downtime or train delays. People’s perceptions magnify the memories of when things go wrong because things being normal is quite literally unremarkable. So the rules seem pointless.

So people say, “wouldn’t it be better if people were to take responsibility for themselves?”. The people who say this are also the kind of people who are sure that all other drivers are maniacs. They say, “people should take responsibility for themselves” as though they haven’t met other people.

There is, I suppose, a point to part of their argument and it is a bit like the grit argument. If you know the whole pavement is icy, you know you have to be careful. If it looks gritted and clear but little bit of ice remains, you might not be as careful and it might be more dangerous. People posit arguments like this about health and safety all the time and I’m pretty sure I see a logical fallacy here.

You want to make people more aware that things are scary so that they take responsibility. That means you already don’t think they can take responsibility for themselves.

There are lots of great things about the iPhone. The killer feature is the internet access. The fact that you can really actually browse the internet on the move is a huge thing. Like the mobile phone before it, this is such a huge feature that people don’t know they need it before they get it, and once they have it, could never go back.

But that isn’t the feature people talk about. The feature that people interrupt me to talk to me about is the ability to watch TV shows on the train. It’s really simple to get a TV show onto your iPhone. I have Friends and The IT Crowd on mine and there’s plenty of room for whole series. You don’t need a TV screen larger than the one on the iPhone to watch these kinds of shows. It works great. Once, when I was watching Friends, I heard two people talking next to me about how, having seen that, they were going to get iPhones. And on two separate occasions, people have asked me how difficult it is to get shows on there. And the answer is – it’s simple.

Come for the TV shows, stay for the internet.

The other day, I was suddenly struck by the question, “Are there an even number of even numbers?”. I mean, is it something that is known?, can it be calculated?, and then I went on to worry about the rather obvious follow-up question involving odd numbers.

There has actually been a lot of confusion about this over the years. The mathematics of evenness and oddness is called Parity. And it was really confused by the Greeks. The rule is pretty simple: if you pick a number and divide it by 2, and there is no remainder, it is even. So 4 is even because 4 divided 2 is 2. 3 is not even (and therefore odd) because 3 divided by 2 is 1 and a half. 2 divided by 2 is 1 and so 2 is even…

‘Whoops, hold on’, said the Greeks. ‘1 isn’t a number. So 2 can’t be even.’

Why didn’t the Greeks think that 1 was a number? Because they hadn’t discovered the concept of zero yet.

Basically, because the Greeks didn’t understand the concept of zero, they had to make 1 do all kinds of complicated stuff to try and get around the fact that zero didn’t exist. So they figured the simplest way to get around this was to declare 1 not a number. Therefore the Greeks believed that neither 1 or 2 were odd or even.

But then some smartypants in India started saying zero was a number for sure, and they had the maths to prove it. So if zero was a number then 1 was definitely a number, so suddenly 2 became even and 1 became odd.

But what about zero? Presumably, some of the previous concern about whether zero was a number led to many thinking that it was neither odd nor even. But a lot of people still believe, for some hard wired reason, (perhaps because it is lower than 2) that it must be odd. But it isn’t, it is even. If you take 0 and divide it by 2 then you get no remainder, you get zero.

Also, it helps with the symmetry. If you line the numbers up including minus numbers you will see that it’s really good to have an even number there between -1 and 1.

So now we know that, we can answer the question. Between 1 and infinity and between minus 1 and minus infinity there are the same number of even and odd numbers. There must be. So everything is in pairs (or parity). But we know there is 1 extra number, the number zero. And zero is even.

This means that there are an odd number of even numbers and an even number of odd numbers. Weird huh?