If it were a drug

Suppose that there was a medical intervention that would reduce the risk of getting dementia by 50%, of developing type 2 diabetes by 58%, produce a 41% reduction in hip fractures in post-menopausal women, reduce anxiety by 48%, depression by 30%, reduce your chances of premature death by 23%, would be the number one treatment for fatigue, dramatically ameliorate the health risks of being obese and have major impacts on cardio- vascular disease and bowel cancer, then you'd think that health services and governments around the world would leap at the opportunity to promote it.

What's the intervention? 

Half an hour of purposeful walking per day. The sort of walking that slightly lifts your heart rate and gets you breathing just that little bit faster.

Now it isn't hard to find this stuff out and I'm sure that most of our policy makers have encountered these facts if not really taken them in. So the question becomes why haven't they been acted upon? Why don't they seem to be informing public decision making in anything like the way they should?

For what it's worth I've got a few hypotheses. Taken together they may contain an explanation.

The first is quite simple. There isn't any money in it. If there was a pill that had these effects we'd be jumping over ourselves to give money to the big pharmaceutical companies, but there isn't.

The second is that it represents an implicit challenge to car culture. What's the point of having a car if you're going to leave it at home when you go to the shops? Where's the opportunity for the public display of wealth and status if you're on foot and indistinguishable from poor people who are doing it through necessity rather than choice?

The third is that it in electoral terms walking is seen as trivial and attempts to encourage people it would get categorised under the heading of "nanny state makes us feel guilty about our lifestyles and then tells us what to do".

In what sometimes feels like a previous lifetime I used to teach a course called Science in Society and would make use of a lot of video materials. Amongst these videos, captured from ordinary broadcast television, I remember one that included a discussion among 14 year old girls about the relative benefits of smoking and exercise. As far as they were concerned both of these activities carried a financial cost. For the price of a packet of fags you could have a session at the gym. Their conclusion was that it was better to spend the money on cigarettes rather than down at the gym because you could share the cigarettes with your friends. 

A friend, who is now a Professor of Medicine, and well aware of my frustration in attempting to push this particular issue, sent me a link to a short video lecture. If you've got ten minutes it's well worth a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo&app=desktop

The skinflint photographer

During Ronald Reagan's early presidency I briefly lived and worked in Connecticut on the east coast of the United States. My colleague/boss had recently moved there herself and I offered to bring her car from California. Of course, a trip like that, taking the northern route across Montana and the Dakotas, gives lots of opportunities to take photographs but, what with the American landscape being a slowly changing thing, unlike the UK which is a geological mess, and my general reluctance to waste money on film, I ended up considering many photographs but only taking 36 actual pictures (one roll of film).

In the end it turned out that the camera hadn't been working properly and none of the photos came out. But, such had been the deliberation in deciding what pictures to take I realised that all of these images were firmly lodged in my head and from then on decided to make a virtue of my tight arsedness by asserting that the looking was more important than the taking. I'd back this up with the tale of a Japanese colleague's son who was a proper photographer. he'd just spent three days standing by a waterfall in Yosemite National Park and at the end of that period used his 70mm Hasselblad to take just two photographs; one of them being a spare in case the other hadn't worked. He knew what he wanted and was prepared to wait.

As someone who spends what many would consider an inordinate amount of time wandering or cycling about the place and just looking, I began, after many years, to feel the urge to capture some of my favourite scenes if not for anyone else's consumption then my own. The big challenge being how to capture extensive landscapes on film (a squeomorph if ever there was). Hence, I finally got around to buying a decent quality digital camera.

 The first photo with the new camera

This first photo was taken sat at the kitchen table. A revealing tableau of domestic life in a scruffy household.

Heavy seas the day after the highest tide for 60 years.

We went to Malta in the summer, out of curiosity and to visit a cousin who lives there, but didn't take a camera. This astonished the cousin who, when he was about to take us to visit a coastal feature called the Azure Window (a natural stone arch that you can look through to see the sea), couldn't really see the point of going if you weren't going to take a picture. How will you share the experience with your friends? 

By sending them this link, that's how.

Common aspirations

A scheme for reducing greenhouse gases was put forward by Mayer Hillman under the name of contract and converge. The basic idea was that an international body of respected scientists would decide on what would be a sustainable per capita carbon budget. They'd then plot a path from the current level of emissions to the ultimately sustainable level and each year the total allowable emissions would be reduced. If a country exceeded its allowed amount it would be obliged to purchase surplus emissions from somewhere that hadn't. Over the years the overall carbon emissions would contract but the per capita emissions from individual countries would converge.

Now, whilst climate change may be the most pressing global environmental issue, the wider problem, to put it simply, is that we're consuming too much. At least those of us in the developed world are. For everyone to live like a typical citizen of the UK we'd need a planet at least three times larger than the only one we've got.

Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction industries are doing their best to make us feel unfulfilled with what we've got even though, were it more reasonably distributed, the developed world has already got more than enough.

It simply isn't realistic for the whole world to aspire to the consumption levels of the rich and famous. But when those of us in the developed world start talking about restraining our consumption it can feel very much as though we are consigning the rest of the world to eternal poverty. "You've all got cars and shiny things why can't we have them too?"

Even though the global cake is clearly finite the classic capitalist solution is to keep trying to make it grow. But this can't happen in a world of finite resources and the likely outcome is that a small number of people get richer at the expense of everyone else. So, to bring our consumption patterns back into line with what the planet can sustainably provide, some people can get more but only if someone else get less.

Now, if a person's sense of well being is inextricably linked to how much they consume, how much stuff they've got, then we're in real trouble. But it turns out that this isn't the case. Once basic needs, such as decent housing, food and personal relationships have been sorted out then further increases in income don't actually make people happier. Indeed, some evidence suggest that once you've got past a fairly modest income all that happens is that you start to envy those that have even more. Bankers could be genuinely upset that they only got a £2m bonus when someone else got £4m. Inequality adversely affects the lives of the rich as well as the poor.

So, we need to look at what things actually contribute to leading a fulfilling life and begin to make these the key elements of our political and social aspirations. For example, the American car based model of urban development is clearly well past its sell by date. Allegedly when Gandhi was shown a rather fine Humber motor car he couldn't help but reply "But what if everyone had one?" So, our model for development here might be that of some of the more enlightened European cities where people can walk or cycle to work, school or the shops and longer journeys can be made by high quality interurban public transport.

In the developed world, environmentalism is often portrayed as wanting to take us back to a pre-industrial past, but there's nothing hair shirted about wanting decent energy efficient housing, clean water, nutritious food, well maintained public spaces, ready access to the natural environment, universal access to high quality health and education....

In dealing with climate change, the necessary degree of agreement among nations has so far been lacking, but there is nothing to stop us, as citizens, working out for ourselves what really matters and deciding on a common target. One that is equitable, recognises that we live with finite resources and doesn't set one part of the world against a another.

For one slice of cake to shrink while another grows we need to develop common aspirations.

Ask a pejorative question

In the past I've asked grown up pavement cyclists "Why are you riding your bike on the path?", in the foolish expectation of getting a straight answer. The politest response has been "get a life", I'll spare you some of the others. There are some questions that the very act of asking can't help but sound judgmental.

In the light of this experience I realised that in some contexts it just isn't worth asking the question. For example, a group I chaired once tried to conduct a survey among public sector employees about how they currently undertook short journeys. We tried to keep it as value neutral as possible but the simple act of asking meant that we were clearly coming from a particular perspective. Some of the group's members wanted to ask some direct questions about why people didn't use bikes for short journeys but I resisted this on the grounds that I knew what answers we'd get: It's too hilly, the weather's too bad, there aren't any changing rooms at work... All of these could be correct (i.e true) answers from someone who'd actually tried it for a month or so but, in the context of the rest of the questionnaire and its implied criticism of not walking or cycling, I knew that all we'd get were conventional excuses.

Now it turns out, from research done by people who are better at getting straight answers, that the initial barriers to getting more UK citizens on their bikes are social. When most people see a grown up on a bike it seems that their initial assumptions are that the person is a) too poor to drive , b) making a lycra bound statement about their athleticism or c) just plain eccentric. When I put these finding to fellow cyclists they were usually happiest with being just plain eccentric.

So, one of the challenges facing those of us who want to get more people on their bikes, for the sake of their own health as well as that of the wider environment, is to make it normal.

Now I've had a surprising number of dealings with fairly senior police officers in recent years and can honestly say that, for the most part and probably thanks to the Open University, they're a much more enlightened bunch than might be expected. Whether the same can be said for the ranks remains moot. So I was surprised to read that comments of the Chief of the Metropolitan Police in the light of the recent spate of cycle deaths in London.

As reported in The Guardian

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe initially told a radio show that while he understood why people cycled if they could not afford to drive or use public transport, it would not be his preference.

"Of course some people don't have the choice, economically it's not easy you know. If you've got someone who can't afford to take a car into the congestion zone – if they did, you can't park it anyway," he said.

"Some people, they've got limited money and they can't pay for public transport. I understand why they take the choice. It wouldn't be mine."

The comments were widely criticised, prompting the commissioner to release a statement later "clarifying his position". He said he had expressed his "personal view as a non-cyclist".

Meanwhile I shall continue to imagine asking my house mates "why don't you just put a bit of water in the greasy frying pan and then put it aside to soak rather than dunking it in with the rest of the washing up so that it can spread its grease more evenly over everything else?"

Boris and "people riding bikes"

During the past fortnight 6 cyclists have been killed on the streets of London. The growing popularity of cycling in the UK, particularly among the young and educated, has meant that this has prompted widespread public debate; notwithstanding the fact that during the same period 3 pedestrians have also died on the street.

30 years ago things were slightly different. I lived in London at the time and would commute by bike from Hackney to Maida Vale. Even though this was only a journey of about 10km I once counted that I went through 46 junctions. Those of us who cycled in those days were a far more marginalised bunch than they are now. We learnt that to be safe you needed to be assertive (not to be confused with being aggressive), not to get sucked into the gutter and to expect not to be given due consideration or attention. I'd wear a bright orange tabbard not because I necessarily thought it would get me noticed but so that in any post accident legal wranglings it would be harder for the motorist to claim not to have seen me. I soon realised that shouting at people who'd put my life in danger didn't actually do anything other than stress me out, so I began simply to mouth obscenities, without vocalising and usually in French, and let the miscreant's sense of  guilt make of it what they would; though I did end up being chased by a tipper truck all the way across Camden for something that I'd literally never said.

When the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, came to power he inherited a cycle hire scheme from the previous incumbent, Ken Livingstone. Since Boris rode a bike himself and cultivated an image of amiable eccentricity these bikes soon became known as Boris Bikes rather than Ken's Cycles. Now one of the few areas of public life where the Mayor of London actually has any power is over transport. He's the head of Transport for London. As well as the tube and the buses this also means that he has responsibility for facilities for pedestrians and cyclists and one of the things he established were a number of bicycle Super Highways. Being neither super nor highways, but mainly just strips of blue paint waiting to be ignored, these routes at least reflected a desire to make things better for people on bikes even if they are woefully inadequate.

If you look at the sorts of accidents that get people on bikes the pattern is glaringly obvious. It isn't the young reckless males taking their lives in their own hands, it's older people and women who find themselves stuck up the inside of lorries and buses that are turning left. 

Of course, the mainstream motoring population has gripes about the behaviour of cyclists and readily fall into an in-group out-group mentality. These bloody cyclists, always going through red lights, never using lights at night, riding on the footpaths, not paying road tax... This is all to be expected.. What's surprising has been Boris's response to the recent deaths. Instead of talking about the actual causes of the accidents that have actually happened he's gone on the offensive against the victims. Paraphrasing "Cyclists need to obey the rules of the road and they should be banned from wearing head phones ...." This has been followed up by a Police response not of targetting truck drivers but of pulling over people on bikes and strongly suggesting that they wear high visibility clothing and helmets.

Now we've become used to our Government blaming the poor for their poverty. They're lazy, feckless and lack aspiration. The other side of the coin to blaming the poor for their poverty is to see your own wealth and success as a result of your own virtue and certainly not as a matter of simple good luck. So what's clear here is that whilst Boris is prepared to have his bike riding seen as a loveable eccentricity, he's not at all inclined to be identified with cyclists or, as we prefer to call them, "people who happen to be riding bikes"

A pissing while

A few years ago I watched a documentary by Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame. He was looking at how lives were actually led in medieval England and recalled research that they'd done for the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". As well as avoiding the cliche of showing peasants with blackened teeth, which in the days before the widespread use of refined sugar simply wasn't the case, he also looked at our changed relationship to time. In the pre-industrial era jobs simply had to be done when they had to be done. Fields ploughed, weeds weeded, cows milked, sheep sheared and crops harvested. The rhythms of life were simply set by the daily movement of the sun across the sky and the annual progression from one season to another. This meant that for good chunks of the year there wasn't actually that much that needed to be done and there were far more "holy days" then than there are now; including the ad hoc St Swithin's Mondays that would follow overindulgent weekends. Whilst the days, months and years were natural units of time for longer intervals there were also ways of talking about shorter periods such as "a pissing while", which I hope is self explanatory.

The demands of industry and, in particular, of industrial machinery put paid to this lacadaisical attitude. The machines demanded that the people who'd operate them turn up on time. The bells that had previously rung to draw people to prayer now turned into the factory hooters that marked the changing of shifts. It's no accident that the working class version of rugby football, Rugby League, still uses a hooter to mark the end of a match and also no accident that the traditional gift on retirement was a clock; the worker was being given his time back.

Much more recently my attention was drawn to a kettle that can be switched on over the internet. Predictably named the i-kettle, its inventor makes extravagant claims about the amount of extra work that could be done by remaining at work just that few minutes longer. Given that the times when I feel like a cup of tea are precisely those when I need to get away from my desk for a moment and that we're I to switch on the kettle remotely I'd doubtless find myself dragged back into whatever it was I was doing  for just about long enough for the kettle to boil and then cool down again, I shan't be ordering one soon. Indeed, there are good health and social reasons to suppose that the overworked mouse jockey, click worker, whatever, might well be better of getting up and moving around for a bit and maybe even thinking a bit about what it was they were doing.

However, it did remind me of what I actually do during "a kettle boiling while". In the morning I put on the kettle and then go to the bathroom; one of the benefits of a diet rich in fibre being predictable bowel movements. At other times I use it either to get some washing up done, clean up the dogs bowl, or even practice a few scales on the piano. It never feels like wasted time, more an opportunity to think and get some domestic shit out of the way.

A "kettle boiling while" is inevitably followed by a "tea brewing while" where I might sit down and read an article from one of the many bits of print that hang around the kitchen table or wander up the garden with some scraps for the hens. You get the idea.

It's an empirical observation that most animals, small or large, tend to take about the same amount of time to empty their bladders. Recent mathematical modelling has shown that larger bladders are compensated for by larger urethras and, in the case of some larger animals such as elephants, by a bit of extra gravitational assistance. So we now know what a pissing while  is; 21 seconds. 

Unless, of course, you're like me and in the prostate club in which case there always seems to be just a little bit more and you're never quite sure when you've finished.

Ayrton and the vacuum cleaner

A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to seeing the documentary "Senna" about the life of the late Ayrton Senna. Three things really stood out for me. The first was the tremendous on board footage, something we're used to now but which at the time was only rarely seen. The second was  the fly on the wall coverage of the pre-race drivers meetings which revealed their anxious anticipation of what, certainly to them, was a matter of life or death. The third was that there still didn't seem to be a clear explanation of why Senna's car left the track when it did; though no doubt that he probably would have walked away from the accident if the cockpit had been strong enough to prevent a piece of the front suspension from spearing him through the helmet.

One of the changes that were introduced after his death was the introduction of a much tougher cockpit with raised sides to prevent precisely this type of injury. I can remember being taken to the races and from trackside being able to see not only the driver's head but also his shoulders and arms as they worked at the wheel. Whereas Jackie Stewart would go through a series of bends with just a couple of flicks from one side to another other great drivers, such as the late Jochen Rindt, would look like they were in a permanent battle with the wheel. Nowadays we can get some sense of these different styles from the on board cameras but with nothing like the immediacy of the older more dangerous days.

But even though the sport is much safer the same laws of physics apply. In order to go around bends very quickly you need to apply a tremendous sideways force and the only place this can come from is from friction between the tyres and the road surface and this depends on just three things, the tyres, the track surface and how hard the two are pushed together.

If you look at the Formula 1 cars from the Fangio era you'll see that the cars were streamlined so that they would pass through the air as easily as possible. But, in the 1960s designers began to incorporate wings into their designs. Unlike the wings on an aeroplane these were designed to push the car down rather than lift it up. By doing this the maximum frictional force between the tyres and the track  was increased and they could go round corners much more quickly, albeit at the expense of some speed on the straights.

In the 1970s engineers at Lotus began to treat the entire car as an inverted wing and, in particular, exploited what's known as the ground effect. By getting air to travel smoothly and quickly underneath the car you could lower its pressure. This allowed the higher atmospheric pressure on the upper surfaces to push the car down onto the track. Some teams even experimented with fans, to actively suck air out from under the car, and with skirts along the edges to stop the lowered pressure simply pulling air in from the sides.

Some of these experiments turned out to be dangerous, but danger was then part of the appeal and it tended to take serious accidents before regulations were changed. For example, in the 1993 season Williams, the team that Senna was later to join, exploited advances in computing to run a car with active suspension. What this meant was that a computer controlled the suspension so that the ride height remained constant no matter what the driver was doing. This meant that the airflow under the car was smooth and stable and that they could corner at very high speeds without risk of coming unstuck. Partly because of its expense, which the smaller teams couldn't afford, this system was outlawed just before Senna joined the team and Williams had to retrofit the car with conventional suspension.

In the build up to the fateful Grand Prix Senna was concerned about the unpredictable way in which the car was handling on its conventional springs. And when I say concerned I mean really worried. As it was the worst actually did happen and whether a broken steering column caused the accident or was caused by it has never been fully established. What is known, however, is that rapid changes in the ride height, for example caused by bumps, could dramatically alter the downforce and hence the grip and ability to go round corners.

Meanwhile, in a future world, I've been doing my roughly once weekly vacuuming. Paying a little more attention to this task than is usual I noticed that if I did the job more slowly there was greater resistance to motion. Presumably by sucking air out form under the head of the vacuum cleaner is generating groundforce and pushing the rim that surrounds the head of the cleaner more firmly into the carpet thereby making it harder to move. Pushing the vacuum cleaner faster tends to make it bump over the surface and allows air to leak in at the sides. This reduces the groundforce and makes it easier to push. However, it also means that the cleaner isn't doing the job as well as it might and so I've now quite consciously slowed down so that I can, as it were, feel the suck. In this case slower definitely means better.

So, while I don't know for sure why Senna's crash occurred there may be clues to be found in such a humble act as vacuuming a carpet. If education, and in particular scientific education, is about anything at all its about making connections between what might otherwise seem to be disparate phenomena. 

Note to Mr Gove (current UK minister in charge of education) facts have their place as weapons in an argument not just as things to be regurgitated on request.

+ My perhaps surprising interest in motor racing is partially explained in the Big Prize 

The scientific imperative

My partner runs a nursery school and a couple of years ago they were planning to take the children out on a walk which included a stretch of the old railway line which runs nearby. This route is also very popular with dog walkers, some of whom fail to either notice their dogs taking a dump or choose to ignore it. In a typically gallant way I offered to go out with some plastic bags and clear a 500m stretch of track.

A few days after hing done this the scientific imperative struck. By clearing the track I'd established a baseline and so I found myself, exactly a week later, going out and doing exactly the same job again. The only difference was that this time I wouldn't just put the offending matter straight in the bin but would take it home and weigh it.

But how do you weigh a bag of dog shit? We didn't have any bathroom scales so I couldn't weigh myself with and without the bag and work out the difference. It didn't seem right to use the kitchen scales; partly because they only go up to 3kg and the sample would have to be split, partly out of sheer distaste. Instead I found an old broom handle and located its balancing point. Then armed with a bag of kitchen weights, a tape measure and an understanding of the principle of moments I worked out that the bag of pooh weighed just over 6kg. 

Of course, given that some of the pooh must have been deposited a few days not only would it have lost some of its moisture but also our little helpers, the bacteria, would already have got to work, this is a conservative estimate of the total. We're I to carry out the experiment at shorter intervals, or during winter when the bacteria are less lively and the rate of evaporation would be lower, I might have got an even better estimate but any changes here would likely be swamped by seasonal changes in dog walking practices (there's a phrase for the abstract of the paper if it ever gets published).

All this came to mind because I've just bought our first ever set of bathroom scales. Not to weigh myself of course, but so I could weigh my son's new bike and compare it to the fancy one I inherited from a friend. But now that I've got the scales, all I've got to do next is dig out the one remaining mercury in glass thermometer that I know is somewhere about the house and I can finally do the definitive energy efficiency experiment on my particular method of washing up. 

The brief elaboration of a tube

Once upon a time I was a proper scientist. The sort that did developed hypotheses, or went along with someone else's, and then did experiments to see if they worked. Of course, if you're an astrophysicist you can't build a star and then see if it does what you expect it and so, rather than conducting the experiment yourself, you're obliged to look at the evidence of experiments that nature has carried out on your behalf as it were. But it turned out that I wasn't single minded enough, or prepared to work hard enough, to maintain focus on any one aspect of nature for long enough to actually pursue a career in science and instead drifted off into education. 

Along the way, however, I bumbled from physics into biology and the last of my few published works  was a strange experiment that involved poking electrodes into mouse eggs and then seeing what happened when they were fertilised. Put aside the way in which we got hold of the eggs, or even the sperm, the experiment was primarily interesting because it produced a null result. The thing that we'd hoped would happen simply didn't. If it had, then I suspect that we'd have got the work done much more quickly. It's hard showing that something hasn't happened because it doesn't happen rather than because you've inadvertently done something that stops it happening. In this case, all we could do was show that the subsequent development of the fertilised egg was as near normal as you might expect it to be in the circumstances and support this with a new hypothesis which suggested that the thing we'd hoped would happen wasn't necessary after all.

Now when an animal, any animal's, egg is fertilised the first thing it starts to do is to divide. 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells etc. and these cells then begin to arrange themselves into a ball, a blastula. In these experiments this was as far as the ill fated mouse embryos got but, had they been able to continue then they would have begun to undergo what's known as gastrulation. This is when the cells begin to separate into the three layers that will give rise to different sorts of tissues. In particular, this is when the cells which will line your insides become distinguished from those which will be on the outside and those that will lie in between. Insiders give rise to the lining of the gut and other internal organs, outsiders to the skin brain and nervous system and those in the middle to muscle, bone and the circulatory system. 

Now what I find remarkable about early embryos is how alike they all are. There may be differences in scale, but a human embryo looks much like a frog embryo looks much like a chicken embryo looks much like a fly embryo. Now that we know that all life on Earth has a common origin and that the only differences between us are in the details of the code that ends up controlling our ultimate development, its obvious that what works for one early embryo is likely to work for them all with major differences only coming along later in the process. 

During the next phase of development these no differentiated cells begin to migrate and start to form the structures of the adult body. In particular, they begin to form a tube with the inside cells (endoderm) on the inside, the outside cells (ectoderm) on the outside with the middle cells (mesoderm) in between. This tube, the topological equivalent of the hole in a doughnut, will end  up as your guts.

What made me start thinking about all this? Well as usual I was out walking the dog but this time I was wired for sound and found myself listening to "Going Home" by Leonard Cohen. In this song he's singing about his corporeal self from the perspective of his "real/spiritual" self. 

Now in my very first post I questioned the idea that there's a you that's separate from the body that you inhabit, but I have to admit that it often feels as though there is. However, what really hit me in the song was this line "He will speak these words of wisdom like a sage a man of vision though he knows he's really nothing but the brief elaboration of a tube"

Thanks for the context Leonard.

The man with no endorphins

You'll no doubt have noticed that I'm a bit keen on bicycles and at the latest count, i.e just now and in my head, there are now 14 scattered about the house. They aren't all mine, they aren't all fit to ride and some of them are just waiting to be given away when the right person turns up. As I also walk about a lot one of my habits has been to recover abandoned bikes, or whatever good is left of them, and then produce a working bike out of the bits. 

The frame, and most of the parts, of one of these found bikes was recently ridden by my son when, last month, we rode the middle hilly section of the first stage of next year's Tour de France where it runs through the Yorkshire Dales. The bike that I rode to accompany him may legally be mine but I was given it in the will my old friend John Wilson and as far as I'm concerned it's still John's bike. 

We're lucky here in Scarborough to have delightful places to go for bike rides. If I've got a spare hour I often nip up onto Oliver's Mount and ride around the motorcycle racing circuit. The road surface is good, there isn't much traffic and there are plenty of different routes you can choose that either go around the top or up, down and around the sides of the hill.

Now whilst Oliver's Mount is generally quiet, as are most of the roads that lead up into the North York Moors or over the Yorkshire Wolds, riding around town or on major roads is a different matter. Despite a recent increase in popularity, cycling remains a minority pursuit and the attitudes of many other road users often leave a lot to be desired. In one of my earliest posts, Dispositional or Situational, I looked at the role our social identity plays in determining our attitudes to each other. As far as many motorist are concerned people on bikes are not only part of an out group, as opposed to the in group of fellow motorists, but also a minority out group, a group that doesn't fit in with the prevailing social norm. Hence when people on bikes end up in direct conflict with those in cars, trucks or vans there isn't always a meeting of minds*.

However, and this gets me to the point of this post, if or when I've been carved up by an inconsiderate motorist, and actually get the opportunity to let them know what I think about it, it's a stressful situation all round. My heart rate is elevated, there's a rush of fat and glycogen into my bloodstream, all in all a classic flight or fight response. 

In the aftermath of one of these incidents, when I'd been dangerously overtaken as I was coming off Oliver's Mount, and as I was retrospectively rehearsing what I should have said in the heat of the moment, I remembered a book that I'd read many years ago by an American science writer James Gorman. The book was just a reprinted series of essays that had been published in Discover magazine and carried the title The Man with No Endorphins. Now whilst this was about the evolutionary fact that we'd evolved a natural pain killing mechanism, endorphins, for traditional sources of pain such as long distance running or getting bitten by fierce creatures, there was no mechanism for dealing with modern sources of "pain" such as that of a computer that freezes or of getting stuck in a traffic jam. 

So, whilst I was getting an adrenalin rush so too was the driver of the vehicle but, while I was busy working this out of my system with a post dispute burst of physical activity, for which the response had evolved, he was stuck sat behind a steering wheel stewing in a flush of inappropriate hormones. 

*It seems that the drivers of red vans are much more considerate of cyclists than those in white vans. A plausible explanation is that a good proportion of red vans in the UK are Post Office vans and a lot of Post Office workers still use bikes

The exception proves the rule

You may have noticed from a previous post, Sniffing out litter, that I'm not too proud to pick up other people's litter. One of the more obvious observations is that litter breeds litter. Once a space has been completely cleared there's a noticeable delay before litter starts accumulating again. Trying to see if my observations were backed up by hard evidence I came upon a paper published in 1990 entitled "A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct: Recycling the Concept of Norms to Reduce Littering in Public Places" which describes a series of experiments carried out on subjects who'd been visiting a University Hospital and were returning to their parked cars.

On leaving the building the subjects were given a handbill, a potential piece of litter, and their subsequent behaviour was observed. The key variable was how much litter there was in the space between the entrance and the car park. To draw attention to the existing state of the space a confederate experimenter deliberately dropped a large piece of litter in front of the subject. A second confederate then decided if the subject had witnessed this and then noted if the subject then dropped litter themself.

The key finding of this part of the experiment was that if they'd seen someone drop litter into a clean space then this made it less likely that they'd drop litter themself and if they saw someone drop litter into a well littered space then it made it more likely they'd do it themself. The explanation being that witnessing the litter being dropped drew attention to the state of the space and thereby established the prevailing social norm. 

A second experiment simply looked at the space, counted the existing number of pieces of litter, and timed how long it took for the next piece to be dropped. Surprisingly the longest time wasn't for when there wasn't any litter at all but for when there was exactly one piece. The explanation being that a single piece draws more attention to the prevailing social norm than if there's no litter at all. Clearly, the best strategy remains to pick up everything because then the time for the first piece of litter to be dropped gets added to the time from the first to the second.

As a rather literal minded youngster, I was always confused by the saying "the exception proves the rule". To my mind if there was an exception this meant that there wasn't a rule. I later came to realise that all it meant was that identifying something as an exception suggested that there must be a rule for it to be an exception to. 

A few bits of litter are just enough to draw attention to the fact that only a minority of people are dropping it and that therefore the social norm, in this particular place, must be not to.

A poor weather writer

We've had a proper summer for a change. Though why we should call a succession of warm sunny days proper when a typical UK summer has few of these and far more of the damp slightly grizzly days that we've got today I don't know. Perhaps its just that they represent what we think summer should be rather than what we usually get. This is not to complain about the British weather which, as all proper weather should, changes from day to day and often hour to hour, but which I'm actually quite fond of. However, as someone who much prefers to be out than in, the good summer means I haven't spent much time in front of the keyboard and consequently this blog has been somewhat neglected.

This doesn't mean that I haven't had any ideas for blog posts, quite the contrary, its just that none of them have made it past the first few sentences of the unpublished phase. But one of the things that I have ended up thinking about is why we feel the urge to publish at all. Now you might argue that we're a social species and that most of our learning is done vicariously, by watching or listening to other people, and, at a group level, the urge to publish fits in with this rather well, but what's in it for the individual who does the writing? Fame, fortune, influence and status perhaps, but having never been too fussed about money, other than having just enough to not have to think about it too much, never having sought fame, at least not for its own sake, and having just about given up on influence or status, why do I still feel the urge to do it?

The one little introspective thought that I can bring to this puzzle is the nagging feeling that an idea that isn't shared is an idea that's been wasted. Of course, this doesn't mean subjecting everyone else to my own stream of consciousness, they've got their own to deal with, but it does mean making at least some effort to share any "new" conclusions. I say new here in the sense of new to me not new to the world. With the right search terms I expect I could find that someone else somewhere else had said, or is saying, just about the same sorts of things as I am, but not necessarily in the same order or in the same combinations.

A few years ago I got into meme theory, though in an interested by-standerly sort of way not as an academic. The basic idea is that cultural evolution follows similar sorts of rules to biological evolution. In his lovely book "On the origin of tepees" Jonnie Hughes explores these parallels but, whilst I can make sense of the biological urge to reproduce (those that don't have this urge leave few descendants) I never could quite get my head around why individuals had the urge to spread ideas. What biological advantage does this habit give? 

Having given myself something to think about, I've noticed that the sun is coming out again and the dog, a short haired whippet who likes it dry, needs walking (or rather I feel the need to walk the dog). Now if I'd been a proper writer, as opposed to someone simply fulfilling an as yet ill defined biological urge, I suspect that I wouldn't have let the good weather stop me for quite so long.

Racial profiling and guns

The sad death Trayvon Martin has reminded me of two of my own minor experiences in the United States.

Back in the early 1980's I spent a year living in West Hartford, Connecticut. Unlike most of my neighbours I could often be found walking the streets for the simple purpose, not of walking the dog or having a jog, but to get somewhere else; usually the bar where I got my bike stolen (in a land of big vans it's not enough to leave a bike simply chained to itself) opposite the School of Mixology (that's cocktails) On more than one occasion I found myself joined by young black men who'd otherwise be walking by themselves. We'd have a chat about this and that but it turned out that the real reason for choosing to walk with me was that it made it much less likely that they'd get harassed by the police. What would a young black man be doing in this neighbourhood if he wasn't up to no good?

About ten years later, I was with my then young family on a camping holiday in Washington State. Early one morning, at a site half way up the side of Mount Spokane, I eventually lost my patience with the two hippies in a camper van nearby who were playing loud music, of all things The Beatles, and went over to ask them if they would mind turning it down. This was obviously a novel experience for them but the music went quiet and I did eventually get some sleep. Next day I overheard them talking to a fellow camper about this incident. It turns out that in their version I'd been armed. Perhaps this was the only way that they could imagine I'd had the nerve to do what I'd done. I can only be grateful that either they hadn't been armed themselves or they'd shown a certain amount of restraint in the face of my "provocation". 

Traffic and smog masks

The story that I tell of the growth of environmentalism gives a key role to the Apollo space programme. Images of an all too small blue planet couldn't help but remind at least some of us of the fragility of our existence. Since then the challenge has been to find a way to get these ideas taken seriously by the establishment. 

Since we tend to judge the person who's telling us something before we're prepared to listen to what they're saying, it soon became clear that the message was unlikely to get through if delivered by stereotypical sandal wearing beardies. So, for those of us who began to believe that the challenge was as much one of public relations as it was of sound science, we began to adopt three major tactics.

The first of these was, to put it simply, to try to appear a little less weird. Our ideas might have been off to one side of the cultural spectrum but that didn't mean that we couldn't occasionally put aside our beards and sandals and put on a suit or at least a clean T shirt.

The second was to make change seem possible by talking down the scale of what would be necessary. This might be summarised in the slogan "Every little helps". We ended up presenting the challenge as one of simply making a few relatively modest life style changes. We knew that these wouldn't be enough but at least we wouldn't get thrown out of the room for trying and they might just give us time to get more realistic, i.e. likely to be effective, changes onto the menu. A good example of this would be the progress of the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC. The initial aims were modest, nothing like enough to get the job done, but at least there were international talks about global issues. Since then, I think it would be fair to say that the only solid outcome of all the grand conferences has been "at least we're still talking".

The third was to translate things into the currency that every nation and business understands and that's money. Don't talk about carbon emissions that will only make them feel guilty, tell them how much money they'll save instead. 

I think it's now clear that these strategies haven't really worked; though I'm no closer to working out what would. The first perpetuates the least helpful aspects of social identity theory (see an early post Dispositional or situational ). A rapidly changing world needs less conventional thinking and we need to celebrate the cultural outliers rather than oblige them to conform. The second fails to challenge consumer capitalism and its emphasis on growth and consumption. The third simply confirms what business men and most politicians think they know already which is that money trumps everything else.

The end result is that we've failed to challenge the patterns of consumption in the developed world that have brought us to this position. To quote Stephen Emmott from his recent book Ten Billion  

The only solution left to us is to change our behaviour, radically and globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more. 

So, it seems likely that in 500 years time just as our history books look back on Henry VIII they'll be looking back on us. They'll live in a world where there are far fewer native species, where much of the world is barely habitable and where extreme weather is taken for granted. Assuming that there are still some functioning societies, the history books of the future will probably regard us with despair. "They knew that if they set fire to all those fossil fuels it would bring about chaos and destruction but they couldn't manage to do anything about it". It'll be a tale of short sighted greed in a grab what you can world that didn't appear to give a damn about the future, about them. 

Apart from the entirely predictable stuff about mass extinctions and climate change there's one other prediction that I'm prepared to make. That's that one the images in the history books of the future will be a visual representation of pointless self destruction. Traffic and smog masks. 

Man in a suit

A couple of weeks ago I went to a college re-union. 

For many years I never quite felt comfortable going back. Not so much all the mellowed old Cotswold stone more the sense of being surrounded by young folk who thought they owned the place; for the very good reason that they probably did. A bit like a favourite episode of Top Cat where Brain is accused of having an acute inferiority complex on account of his acute inferiority.

This feeling has eased in recent years. Partly because I became reacquainted with the City by helping out in a friend's bike shop (see Football in Space) and partly because I now know that the swaggering sense of self confidence simply won't last.  Even Tony Blair and David Cameron might grow up one day.

Our college was known for its political activism and, in the absence of a proper central students union (not to be confused with the private debating society known as The Oxford Union and which we pointedly boycotted), most of the University's conscientious rebels seemed to hang out in our junior common room (JCR) This meant that the traditional student activities of dressing up, abusing oiks and being manly in boats were things that we actively avoided. Instead we were putting grandiose motions to the JCR (giving our ever so important opinions on world affairs), organising demonstrations, producing pamphlets and, above all, getting stoned and having very serious conversations. I survived, and did what work needed to be done, by using the simple tactic of getting up in the morning.

What this all means is that the invitation to go to a rather traditional re-union, one where you get dressed up in the play wear of the ruling elite, was never likely to be particularly appealing. Never the less, an old friend who's still based in Oxford encouraged me to go and eventually, despite the Black Tie preferred bit of the invitation, decided "what the heck.."

But, whilst I'd been fully intending to simply put on the tidiest and least grubby things I could find in my wardrobe (i.e using the "preferred" opt out clause), my mother got wind of my trip and couldn't but help mention it to one of her neighbours who quite correctly guessed that I'd be unlikely to have the right gear, and also equally unlikely to hire it, but offered to loan me her husband's. 

So, on a trip over to see my parents, both in their eighties but still sprightly in mind if not so much in body, I felt obliged to try on the offered suit and blow me if it wasn't a perfect fit. 

Man in a suit

Those of you who are concerned that I might have completely abandoned my rebellious streak will be disappointed to know that, rather than the preferred summer wear of sandals, I borrowed back the one pair of black shoes in the house from my son and was therefore properly dressed from head to toe. 

In anticipation of the occasion I'd imagined conversations in which success and status were on prominent display but,  to my surprise, that didn't happen at all. Perhaps if I'd gone to a similar event a decade ago it would have been different. As it was, I spoke to people that I'd probably never spoken to at any length before and discovered that, by and large, the prominent motivation of everyone there, no matter what prominent positions they might now occupy, was to try to do the right thing. Of course, it may well be that the truly ambitious had more important things to do than hang around in Oxford talking to people who were probably of no further use to them. We'll never know.

Postscript 1: Before going to the event I popped into Walton Street Cycles and, for those who know the tale, can report that business seemed to be going well and that they'd just got the maintenance contract for Oxford's soon to be launched public bike scheme. Meanwhile the despicable neighbouring venture is going broke and is up for sale.

Postscript 2: The day after I went for a bike ride and pub lunch with another old friend who's a serious academic at the Institute for Environmental Change. I was delighted to be able to reaffirm, at least to my own satisfaction, that I'm not a complete bullshitter.

Above the parapet

An extract from Stephen Emmott's book Ten Billion appeared in last week's Observer. The book looks at the likely impact of having a global population of ten billion and is disarmingly candid about the need to dramatically reduce consumption in the developed world.  I'm sure that he, and the Observer, won't mind if I lift this quote from the accompanying interview. 

"It might be useful to first distinguish between growth and behaviour. The problem is less the current number of us in itself (yet) but more the way the majority of the 7 billion of us live and consume. This is principally the cause of almost every global problem we face. Critically, every one of these problems is set to accelerate as we continue to grow. "Confronting", as you put it, the way we live and consume is not something politicians want to do. Doing so would be immensely unpopular. And politicians do like to be popular. Indeed, our entire political systems are set up for the opposite: to promote and encourage us to increase our consumption and irresponsible behaviour. As for scientists – my colleagues, I should add – the vast majority choose to do what I have chosen not to do; to keep their heads well below the parapet on this lot."

Now I can understand the politicians not wanting to face the consequences but what is it with the scientists. What is it that stops them from stating the obvious? To what social norm are they anxious to conform? Was that a pointed question?

I know that it all gets a bit boring banging on about the environment and eco-systems and stuff, but that hasn't stopped the Today programme running a daily slot on the archane nonsense of the financial markets. I find it hard to imagine that there aren't more of us with an attachment to the natural world than there are who get their kicks from thinking about  the made up stuff of the financial markets. So how about replacing half of these with an update on the state of our eco-services. What's happening to biodiversity in palm oil plantations? Have they identified the coal that won't get burned because we're going to use fracked gas instead? How are the attempts going to uncouple personal status from spending power? 

And when they do the inevitable linking shot during a documentary, the one where the celebrity/presenter drives to the next location, how about putting him on a bike, on the bus or even on his/her own two feet. 

And when the weather report says that tomorrow's going to be rainy, how about showing a picture of someone with an umbrella rather than traffic drowning in spray.

So instead of normalising driving let's normalise walking and cycling and using the bus.  Let's normalise giving a damn. 

If only so that Stephem Emmott's colleagues can start putting their heads above the parapet without feeling that they're boring or weird.

Acceptable passions

About ten years ago the then Regional Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward, launched a scheme to promote urban renaissance. The basic premise was that if the local authority set up a body to consult locals about the future of the town then they would stand a chance of getting Yorkshire Forward funding to put at least some of the schemes which emerged into place. The lure of cash was enough to bring about the formation of what was called Scarborough's Urban Renaissance. Led by a Town Team, originally composed of a selection of the great and good but later by whoever turned up, and supported by Action Groups for things like Arts and Culture, Urban Space and Tourism, we went to work on a Masterplan for the town with our discussions led by, and then turned into pretty plans, a Dutch group of urban designers. All very cosmopolitan.

Now I knew that the original idea for urban renaissance had come from the architect Richard Rogers. His fundamental hypothesis was that improving the urban environment makes a town a more attractive place to bring not only yourself but your business and your money. He was also clear that one of the major failings of UK towns and cities, as opposed to those in more progressive parts of Europe, was the way in which we'd allowed motor cars to dominate much of our public space. In short, we needed to make our towns and cities much more attractive for walkers and cyclists.

This was clearly not on the agenda of the conventional late middle aged men who tend to lead such bodies. What they were really interested in was using the renaissance process as a way to bring forward a few major projects which were already in the pipeline. To get around this I set up another action group, this time dedicated to walking, cycling and public transport. initially this was called the Walking and Cycling Action Group but later it became the Active Transport Group.

We did manage to get a few things done. For example, with support from the local health service we produced and distributed 10,000 copies a map showing all the areas which were within 15 minutes modestly paced walk of the town centre, and I became a member of the grandly titled Renaissance Executive. This body was made up of precisely the same sort of people as were parachuted into the original Town Team and served as the executive body of the new democratic Town Team. In other words, the old power structure couldn't help but reassert itself.

Because we're a relatively small town, but with a strong sense of identity and a tradition of civic engagement, Scarborough's Renaissance began to be seen as a model for similar schemes elsewhere. So much so that a few years later Yorkshire Forward decided to show off the renaissance process with an exhibition to be held in the town and all the action groups were given a deadline to produce a power point display of their work.

As far as I know, we were the only group to produce a display on time and ours took the theme of Active Transport. It began by explaining what it was and why it was beneficial and went on to look at examples from the town of both good and bad practice and ended up with a case study illustrating the institutional barriers that we faced when trying to implement one particular project (the provision of a simple poster telling visitors and residents which bus left from which stop).

Our display was rejected on the grounds that was was wanted was "promotion not education" and they replaced it by a series of generic slides showing people walking or cycling.

I remained Chair of the Action Group but felt that I had no choice but to resign from the Executive. And here's where we get to the point of this post. A few months after my resignation I spoke to a friend who had been there when my resignation was announced. It seems that a good number of them had been pleased because it was obvious that I must have been building a power base..

I can't imagine that you haven't noticed by now that I can become quite passionate about things that I think can make a difference. The first thing I realised from this affair is that people find it difficult to believe that other people might have motives that differ from their own. The second thing was that passion about anything other than money is suspicious.

In an earlier post "When winners write the rules" I considered the way in which the cynical view that all of our behaviour is ultimately self serving and competitive has been imposed upon us by the self declared winners.

Because this is an honestly held belief it means that anyone who "pretends" that they have other motives is bound to be being deceitful and is therefore not to be trusted.

Metagenetics

Putting words in the mouth of the enthusiastic northern Fast Show character "in't life brilliant".

Once you've got a self replicating molecule that can almost always make perfect copies of itself but, importantly, once in a while makes a little mistake, a sea of ingredients for the molecule to play with and a great deal of time, out pops a sentient being that can try to make sense of how it all happened. Brilliant. Oh ..... plus you need a reliable long term source of energy.

Using four letters to write a string of 3 letter codes that instruct a cell how to function; to know what to make and when to make it; to know which cells to get on with and which to shun; to know, in short, how to build a body that can sustain itself. At least for a while....

Each of the words simply tells the machinery in the cell to add a particular amino acid to a chain. Put those particular words in a mouse and they do the same thing that they'd do in a human, a banana or a bacterium  It's a bit like having a bit of computer code that does the same thing in a Sinclair ZX81 as it would in Tianhe - 2 ; though not as fast or as often.

Each of us, and all of the various life forms that surround us, are simply solutions to the same question. Does this sequence of words produce a self sustaining organism?

Now of course, the environment that an organism finds itself in has an effect on its chances of survival.  Put most bacteria somewhere really hot, like a hydrothermal vent, and they won't stand a chance, but some will (or they might if the new temperature wasn't too far from the one they'd grown used to). 

Organisms are able to adapt to their circumstances but they can only do this by changing and they can only change if the instructions change; if every now and then they make a mistake; i.e if they mutate.

A couple of thousand million years after life first appeared on Earth a new way of bringing about change emerged. Sex. Take two closely related organisms, ones which have almost the same set of instructions and then shuffle the pack so that some instructions are inherited from one parent and some from another. You can now get change, and the possibility of adaptation to changed circumstances, without waiting for a chance mutation. Brilliant.

It also turns out that some organisms, in particular bacteria, are able to directly swap bits of code with each other, and some some bits of code, viruses, don't contain enough information to construct an entire organism but simply get themselves copied by an organism that already exists. 

What I find wonderful is that the variety of life that we see around us, including ourselves, all has a common origin and all makes use of basically the same set of instructions.  Despite ever changing conditions this process has kept the Earth fairly well populated with life for over 3000 million years but, in the process, over 99% of the species that ever existed have now become extinct.

What we know from the paleontological record is that after a big environmental change the number of species dips and that it then takes a while for new species to evolve and fill in the gaps.  The speed at which we're changing the environment means that, for a while at least, life will be less diverse than it has been for a very long time.

But at least our children's children will have all those wonderful Attenborough videos to remind them what's temporarily been lost. Most of them seem to be living life through a screen anyway.

Postscript: This post was going to be in response to the UK Environment Minister's recent comments on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) but I really can't be bothered to say much other than beware of big business and take each case by the each. The big issue is probably land management rather than GMOs per se.

Playing on the moon

One of the more easily stated mysteries of physics is the apparent identity of an object's gravitational mass (as measured by its weight) and its inertial mass (which represents its reluctance to change its state of motion). The most obvious way in which this identity manifests itself is the way in which (if other forces such as air resistance are taken into account) all objects fall at the same rate. For moon landing sceptics one of the hardest things to fake would have been the Apollo 15 feather and hammer drop. i.e. for this to happen doubling the inertial mass of an object must give it twice the weight. 

This might also remind you of Galileo's famous experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, though whether or not he actually did this is debatable and the technical difficulties of judging whether or not two different sized cannonballs actually hit the ground at the same time (let alone were dropped at precisely the same time) mean that the outcome would never have been more than indicative. i.e. consistent with the hypothesis but not actual proof. More likely it was a way of illustrating the outcome of a thought experiment. 

Suppose you make the quite reasonable assumption that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, this is consistent with our everyday experience. Then think of a heavy object that just happens to be made of two parts connected by a string. Then suppose that one part is heavier than the other. Using our assumption its clear that the heavy part will try to fall faster than the light part and therefore pull on the connecting string. Similarly the light part will try to slow down the heavy part. The end result of all this is that combined body will fall more slowly than the heavy part on its own. But the combined body is heavier than the heavy part alone so the hypothesis that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects can't be true after all. Our assumption has led to a contradiction. In philosophy this type of argument goes under the glorious title of "reductio ad absurdam".

Now when my boys were little we used to watch the same videos again and again. The most popular were those involving steam engines, with a particularly fine one about the railway works in Swindon, and re-runs of a childrens' programme called Playdays and published alongside the programme was a simple magazine called, you guessed it, Playdays. To my surprise one of the editions carried an item on gravity. 

Now the magazine made the usual mistake of describing astronauts in orbit as weightless (i.e. not experiencing a force from gravity). Of course, since it's gravity that's holding the astronauts in orbit, otherwise they'd just head off in a straight line into space, they're not really weightless, it just seems that way because everything else around them is moving in the same way. I could pass this over without feeling the need to comment but the bit that got me going was the following. There's a picture of an astronaut on the moon accompanied by the following caption. "There isn't any gravity on the moon, that's why the astronauts wear heavy suits to hold them down". Two incorrect facts linked by a contradiction; well done.

In a slightly enraged state I wrote to the magazine pointing out the error and expressing surprise that no-one involved in the magazine's production, from sub-editors to type setters, had noticed the absurdity of the statement. Several weeks later I got what can only be described as a snotty letter in response which basically accused me of being rude and intolerant.

There's a fine line in science between getting complex things more or less right and simplifying them to the point where they no longer make sense. I think what most disturbed me about this, albeit minor, issue was the sheer unthinkingness of it. At its heart, science is about coming up with theories about the world that are then subject to the test of reality. It involves thinking about the world in a critical way and if your ideas don't match reality then they're quite simply wrong.

A friend and I produce course materials for Further Education colleges on environmental themes. We squabble as we do this. I want to aim at the more able students, on the grounds that most people miss a lot of what's being said anyway and they'll ignore the extra bits I want to put in, he argues for simplicity. Because he's the one that sells the courses I tend to give in and what we end up with is something that's as simple as possible but still just about true.

What really annoyed me about the Playdays nonsense was the lack of respect that it showed to the little people who were its expected audience, and it still does.

So, whilst there are some ways in which I am intolerant I think that they were the ones that were rude.

Postscript: The original title of this blog was "Cultural Inertia" and it was going to include ideas such as cognitive dissonance, memes, social identity theory and the second replicator. But when I started writing it I found myself talking about physical inertia and even a brief walk with the dog didn't help me to find a coherent way back on track. I did, however, remember the Playdays man on the moon.