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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.