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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.

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