The world's simplest religion?

A few years ago I was with friends on the Isle of Man and was impressed by the ruins of St Peter's church in Peel. It struck me that the shell of the church, rather than fetishising the works of man,  simply drew attention to the world around it. As one thing leads to another I found myself coming up with a simple liturgy to go with it.

Priest "It's God what done it"

Response "Enough said"

Priest "Whatever"




That's it, the entire liturgy. It doesn’t attempt to define the nature of God, nor does it claim to be able to speak on God’s behalf. It simply acknowledges God’s existence, be it singular, plural, corporeal or mystical and his/her/its responsibility for stuff that happens to happen. That’s it. No second guessing as to purpose and certainly no claim to know what he/she or it might say about anything.

Do I believe it? Could I imagine believing it? Is there any point in believing it? No I don’t. I suppose I could. There might be a point, but I doubt it. Indeed, I suspect that believing it would actually be an act of irresponsibility. Bad stuff happens. Never mind it’s God what done it. He/she/it is responsible and its nothing to do with me.

I’m writing this in a public library. The hushed quiet is augmented by the hum of PCs and the tapping of a keyboard at the Enquiries Desk. Alongside, by chance, is the Philosophy and Religion section of the reference library. Of the 10 feet or so of shelves, over a quarter is taken up by an Encyclopaedia of Religion. Words, words more and more words. All of them about stuff that nobody really knows but of which somebody somewhere is doubtless convinced.
Just where does this conviction come from? Is it the same sort of conviction as that possessed by several million Americans who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens? Is it the sort of conviction held by a few Stockport County fans when they sing that they’re the best team in the land? Is it a delusion or just a way of fitting in?

Whatever…..

A redacted abuse of power

In the past few years I found myself working on behalf of a company accredited by the UN to audit Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects. Since this is all about giving credits for reducing greenhouse gas emissions this process needs to be trustworthy. The body which has the final say on whether projects are approved, and whether a company can be accredited to act on their behalf, is the Executive Board (EB) of the CDM.

What follows is a redacted account of fairly recent goings on.

In late spring last year the EB approved a change in the management structure at xxxxxx xxxx that left xxxx xxxxxxx as not only the majority shareholder but also the CEO and Chairman. In addition it turns out that under local laws he's also the sole company director. The risks of this concentration of power strike me as obvious but apparently weren't to the EB.

Since its formation appointments to xxxx xxxxx were made on a personal basis by the CEO or on direct recommendation from one or two other colleagues. This meant that everyone in the Company, myself included, was in some way directly beholden to the CEO for their position and continued employment. The obvious side effect was for people to keep their heads down.

Later that year xxxx xxxxxx  had its first working site visit by the Accreditation Team (led by xxxxx xxxxxxx supported by xxxxx xxxxxx). Cutting a long story short, during the build up to this visit I witnessed attempts by the CEO to get admin staff to fake clients signatures, I discovered that Perfomance Reviews (the responsibility of the CEO) had been faked and that people's signatures had been used without their permission. I was also able to confirm that the CEO was still using fake professional qualifications (A Bachelors degree, a Masters degree and a PhD all from the non existent Middleham University)

I was extremely disturbed by these findings and, had the management structure been different, would have taken them to the Company Chairman. Instead, after consultation with a small number of colleagues, I decided to try to warn the approaching Accreditation Team so that they could uncover things for themselves without implicating any of the existing, and vulnerable, staff. I did this by writing to the Vice Chair of the EB. I've had confirmation that this letter was received but have never had any response.

By the time of the actual site visit I'd seen even more of the abusive way in which the company was being run and found myself in such an agitated state of mind that when the lead assessor happened to ask me a question about xxxx's qualifications (he was interested in what was meant by a degree by correspondence and had asked me because the qualifications were from what appeared to be a British University) I found myself blurting out that that particular institution didn't exist.

As you can imagine, this disclosure didn't go down particularly well with xxxx and, having repeated my allegations about other fraud in front of both members of the Accreditation Team as well as xxxx himself, was relieved to be able to leave xxxx xxxxx that very evening. As was to be expected I have been dismissed.

Since then, I've been waiting for painfully slow due process to take its course. My chief regret on leaving xxxxx xxxxxx wasn't for the loss of income but the knowledge that I'd probably lose contact with the many decent and committed people I've come to know through my involvement with the CDM.

I'm lucky that I can live comfortably without a lot of money, and am hardly destitute, but there was something exciting about engaging directly with the wilder world whilst at the same time sitting at my kitchen table and looking out over the Scarborough skyline.

From my very first involvement with xxxxx I always knew that he cared far more about money than the environment but I also knew that, despite probably being a bit dodgy, he possessed the kind of energy and personal commitment that would be needed to get a company like xxxx xxxxxxx off the ground. However, being the right person to get something going doesn't necessarily mean you're the right person to run it when it is. Had anyone else in the Company behaved as he did then they would quite rightly have been dismissed. If nothing else, the CDM is built upon trust and in my naive way I think that you can only trust a company if you can trust it from bottom to top.

xxxx may be the majority shareholder but 45% of the shares are in other hands. It now turns out that these other shareholders have been sent legal letters warning them off attempting to interfere with the Company. After  I left a number of employees asked me if I'd be a Skype contact. They've now been told that this is a disciplinary offence.

I'm expecting the xxxx xxxxxx case to be considered at the EB meeting in March 2013. My initial thoughts were that they'd have no choice but to say that the couldn't accredit the Company as long as xxxx played a role in its day to day management. Given the obvious desire to have an accredited company in its particular part of the world I think it likely that they'll do a disservice to the region by not expecting the same standards of governance as they would elsewhere and will brush the matter under the carpet. Let's hope that I'm wrong.

it's not much of a story that "Businessman abuses power over employees" but "UN is complicit in the abuse of power" may be.

UPDATE March 14th 2013. The EB has spoken. New post "Power speaks to power"

+ I know the title doesn't quite make sense in that its the story that's redacted not the abuse of power but if I change the title then the link will change and I've already posted it to too many people.

sniffing out litter

I'm one of what appears to be an increasing number of people who've taken it upon themselves to pick up litter. Sometimes I've deliberately gone out to clean up a particular patch of park but usually I just do it casually basis when walking the dog. While she sniffs I spot, pick and think.

Once you've got an eye for litter its hard to ignore it. You get a sense of what it is, where it is and how quickly it accumulates. Here are some observations in the order in which they occur to me.

Litter attracts litter. Clear up a patch and, for a few days at least, it tends to stay clean. Once there's more than a few bits of litter the rate it accumulates shifts back up.

Some things are destined to become litter from the moment they leave the shops (and retailers ought to take a bit of responsibility). As soon as it starts to warm we'll be into the ice-pop season. No child is likely to put a sticky strip of plastic in their pocket and take it to the bin. Neither are they likely to keep hold of the little plastic straws that once contained sherbert.

Cigarette packets are harder to carry empty than when they contain cigarettes. This may be because they actually weigh more empty (the cigarettes being full of phlogiston) but more likely their previous keepers simply can't be arsed to carry them when they no longer hold the prospect of a short term fix for a nagging dependency. 

If there is a group of young people the norm of behaviour is set by the most slovenly. This is a little bit like the dietary effect of living in a shared house with just one vegetarian. Once one member of the group starts to drop litter then its unlikely that there'll be anyone else in the group that's brave enough to challenge them. Even putting their own personal litter in a bin could easily be seen as implicit criticism. Indeed, it has been suggested to me by a fellow picker that  the adult criticism of littering has lead some young people to use litter as a way of marking territory. 

The rate of deposition of dog shit along a nearby 500m stretch of old railway was at least 6kg per week on at least one occasion. My partner's Nursery School were planning an outing along the track. She was concerned about the little people becoming too intimate with dog muck so I offered to get out first thing and clear that stretch. Having done this one week it occurred to me that if I waited a week I could get some idea of how quickly it got deposited. So, I went out with a few plastic bags and picked up all the new poo. To weigh it I used a broom handle, some kitchen weights and a tape measure and applied the principle of moments. It came out at about 6kg. This does not take into account any drying or any decay. Hence the "at least"s.

I'm glad white cider doesn't come in glass bottles. There's been a noticeable shift away from cheap alcohol in bottles towards cheap alcohol in cans. It doesn't make the containers any more likely to make it to the bin but it does cut down the number of punctures.

The last cm of lager in a can is undrinkable. Cans of cider or soft drinks are usually completely empty but there's nearly always just enough lager left in a can to satisfy 4 or 5 slugs. I did talk about this phenomenon to someone who looked like they knew and it turns out that the blast cm does indeed taste "mingin" because of the accumulation of spit from previous gulps. This is particularly true for Carling Black Label.

It's not just the poor, or the young, who drop litter. I used to regularly cycle a route to work that took me along a long stretch of empty country road. There was plenty of litter in the verges.Mainly cans cigarette packets and fast-food cartons. These had all been thrown out of car windows by people keeping their personal space tidy at the expense of everyone else's.

Since we all went on-line there's hardly any pornography in the hedge rows. Nuff said.

Dogs' brains have loads of space devoted to sniffing while ours have loads for colour vision. Whilst this has enormous evolutionary value in helping us to spot ripe fruit it also means that the unnatural colours of litter can't help but stand out against a natural background. Therein lies the offense and, by picking it up, therein lies the resolution. When asked by a group of 10 year olds why I was doing it the simplest, and most acceptable, answer was "well it looks better doesn't it".

Blowing in the artificial wind

Wandering down through the Glen this morning I met the park keepers with their leaf blowers. Not quite as annoying as strimmers but close. These are petrol driven devices which emit CO2 and therefore make their own little contribution to Climate Change. A few years ago while researching for a slightly tongue in cheek book "Fifty ways to stuff the planet" I did a bit of research. What follows is the 41st way to stuff the planet.

41: Rake space for a leaf blower.

Autumn, a time of mellow fruitfulness, my arse.  All those bloody trees scattering their knackered old photosynthetic units all over the place. Once upon a time you had to get out the rake and shift them by hand. Nowadays you just strap a leaf blower to your back and blow the buggers away.

What’s the damage?

For a mere £254 you can buy a Husqvarna 145BT with a 40cc engine and an output of 2kW. It chucks out air at over 160mph, uses about 1 litre (0.74kg) of petrol an hour and, in doing so, produces 1.71kg of CO2.

In a typical year you might use the blower for about 10 hours (half an hour a day for about three weeks) and emit 17kg of CO2. To absorb this you’d have to plant about 110 square metres of woodland. About two squash courts worth.

But, even if you did do this, it’d just give you more excuse to go and do it again next year.

Can I be arsed?

Leaves are a bloody nuisance. They sneak in the back door, block up your drains and, if you live where they use the third rail system, stop your train running on time. 

Plus, if you leave them alone all they do is sit around making soil.

Wind-up-ability

This is where your leaf blower really scores. If you wanted to make a noise nuisance then a small petrol engine would be a key ingredient. Just the job, in fact, to take the “quiet and leafy” out of the suburbs. 

I was too lazy to ever try to get the book properly published, though it is available from Lulu.com, but despite that it did get a lot of vitriol out of my system; if only to make room for more.

The ubiquitous Brian Cox

Until this afternoon I'd found myself resisting Brain Cox's new series Wonders of Life. The synergistic combination of BBCiplayer and an i pad came to its own when I prepared tea and listened/watched the first episode all at the same time. The  resistance comes out of vague annoyance at his current ubiquity catalysed by jealousy of what he gets to do..

He obviously likes getting out and about and whilst his illustrative examples were well chosen part of the wonder of life is that amazing things are right on your doorstep. If he'd been talking on Radio 4 to Melvyn Bragg he could have done the same job in quarter of an hour and saved most of the budget. But television demands images, it needs glamorous wall paper to carry us between profound statements. And therein lies a problem.

I used to run a  "Science in Society" AS level course at the local Sixth Form College. It did pretty much what it says on the tin. Back in the days of video recorders I recorded loads of science and technology programmes off the telly. Numerous editions of Horizon and Equinox as well as the full set of a personal favourite, "The Secret Life of Machines".  All the video tapes were catalogued. Students could borrow them for research and from time to time we'd watch one in class. To make sure that attention was given where attention was due we'd watch a programme and write note and to keep myself busy I'd write notes too. In the early 1990's a single Horizon would generate 3/4 sides of closely written A4 notes. I'm not sure I would have got more than a page off Brian. I suspect that this reduction of content has become a general tendency. I know that I keep finding myself urging modern day programmes to hurry up.

Television is primarily a visual medium and as tellys have got bigger there's an even bigger need to keep up the flow of images. For a programme dealing with natural history or geology the images can directly illustrate an underlying argument but, when dealing with more abstract subjects, they can seem contrived, often break the flow and take away the opportunity to develop an extended argument. 

There are some topics that can work on the radio but don't stand a chance on the telly. I once heard a series of interviews with paedophiles on Radio 4. On TV there would have had to be pixelated, or otherwise disguised, pictures of the contributors. Unlike on the radio, where you couldn't tell that these weren't otherwise normal people, there would have been no choice but to see them as somehow strange.

As for Brian, it turns out he's alright. One little scene summed it up for me; swimming in a salt water lake with millions of golden jellyfish he simply remarked "Don't think I'm being hyperbolic but this really is amazing". He just is the sort of person who would use the word hyperbolic in ordinary conversation and if he says things simply that's not because he's talking down to anyone but because that's the best way to be understood. Like David Attenborough, you can tell that he's not just delivering a script. 

The only little thing that I think he might have been slightly unhappy about were the graphics which gave different animals' typical energy consumption to silly numbers of significant figures. When the caption says 3.871 joules/sec does it really mean somewhere between 3.8705 and 3.8714 or are the extra figures in there just to make them seem more authoritative. I'd have preferred "about 4 joules/sec" and as a physicist I'm sure he would too.

Optical flow

The late James J Gibson, an American psychologist, developed what he called an ecological theory of perception based on the key concept of optical flow. When you're moving forwards there's an optical flow away from a point in the direction you're aiming and the relative speed of this flow can tell you whether or not one thing is in front of another. The nearer the object the faster the flow. 

He used this to analyse various forms of animal behaviour. For example when a sea bird dives it has to choose the point at which to pull in its wings. Too early and it loses control over the latter bit of its flight, too late and it runs the risk of damaging them. It turned out that the faster a bird was diving the higher above the sea it would pull in its wings. Since the rate of optical flow gets bigger if you're travelling faster or if you are closer, Gibson put forward the hypothesis that the bird simply pulled its wings in when the rate of flow reached a critical value. Now, whilst this matches the observed behaviour it doesn't necessarily mean that this is what the bird is doing all it means is that the hypothesis can live to fight another day.

Another more familiar example concerns a driver's braking behaviour in a stream of traffic. How does he or she judge how quickly to slow down so that they end up a not unreasonable distance behind the car in front. Gibson's argument here was that if you took the car in front's brake lights as a reference the entire behaviour could be explained as simply adjusting your own braking so that the rate at which the brake lights appeared to get further apart was held constant. Until you've stopped of course.

Allied with the concept of visual flow was the more ecological concept of an affordance. When a bird is flying through the world it needs to know where the gaps are that it can fly through. Since the background behind a gap is further away than the things around it the optical flow shown by that gap will be slower than that of its surroundings. Hence the bird knows  that that's where it can go. These different rates of flow offer clues about the opportunities afforded by the environment. Is it a gap I could fly through is it a perch I could land on? The more general idea is that the value of perception is in showing you what possibilities, affordances, are available.

Most recent references to optical flow are in the field of computing and image generation but there has been recent academic research that supports the idea that optical flow is important for balance when we're walking. Supply people with images where the optical flow doesn't quite match their motion,as perceived in other ways, e.g. through their sense of balance, and they feel very uneasy and may even fall over.

My own , and so far untested, hypothesis is that optical flow is something that we've evolved to enjoy. Even though we're not as fast as many other animals we are capable of keeping going for much longer and were able to pursue our prey until they got too tired to continue. Hunters who enjoyed being on the move were more likely to be successful and hence more likely to pass on their genes. 

Perhaps this is what explains our love of speed and why the motor car, in particular, has been so successful at invading our culture. What it presents is a hyper real version of what we've already evolved to enjoy. Unfortunately, by disconnecting the experience from any significant physical activity we're now at increasing at risk from diseases of physical inactivity.

Luckily, hyper motion can be achieved whilst still being physically active. All it takes is a bicycle.

On the defensive

When I trained as a Further Education teacher in the early 1980's you were strongly encouraged to go into the classroom with a lesson plan, one that had a bit of variety. Going in without having much idea what you were going to do really wasn't a good idea and variety was needed to stop students getting too bored. It was reckoned that a typical attention span was about 10 to 15 minutes and so an hour long lesson should contain at least 3 or 4 different phases. So far so sensible.

At around the same time the then Secretary of State for education, Kenneth Baker, began to go in for a bit of traditional teacher bashing. This reflected the establishment's view of teaching as a profession that you only entered if you really weren't good enough for anything else as well as providing convenient scapegoats for wider policy failures.

Of course, those of us in the profession knew that some teachers were really good, others were good enough and some were a bit crap. Those who were having real trouble didn't need telling they just needed an honourable way to get out. This was not, however, what they were likely to get. 

I'm sure it would do most graduates good to teach for a while and early enthusiasm would carry a lot of them through the first 4 or 5 years. But from then on, the pressure to be upfront and available, to keep your temper while those around are losing theirs', to give your attention to students at the same time as responding the demands of management, can all get a bit too much. This doesn't mean that there aren't marvelous people who are able to carry on indefinitely but I have little doubt that they are a minority and that the rest struggle on as best they can.

The response to the "poor teacher" problem was to introduce more and more bureaucracy. It wasn't enough for just probationers to have neatly written lesson plans, these had to maintained in minute by minute detail for the rest of your career. Gone was the trust that allowed a head teacher or college principle to make an appointment and then let you get on with it. The decision had to be continuously validated by a stream of documentary evidence. Gone was the spontaneity that made the occasional great lesson; the one where a student comment or query is picked up and developed there and then without worrying about deviation from the plan. 

Whereas previously the task had been to do the job as well as you could, it now became one of demonstrating that you weren't doing it as badly as you might. The emphasis shifted from the positive to the defensive. Some teachers liked this but many others didn't. They felt that their autonomy, and hence their professionalism, had been undermined and that things about the job they liked, the contact with students and the sparks of understanding that they generated, were no longer as important as covering your back. 

Its probably no surprise that I no longer teach full time. I still get called back occasionally, but that's because they know I can pick things up at a moments notice and apparently still make them sort of interesting; though I doubt I'd be so interesting if I was there all the time. 

Nowadays, I try to get things done in the public realm and have a fair amount of contact with local authorities. This doesn't mean that I've escaped defensive management. Often, instead of making a decision, which might turn out to be wrong, they either commission consultants to produce a report; so the outcome becomes a wad of paper on file rather than an actual something on the ground, or they adopt a decision making procedure. 

To give an example, I was part of a group who helped draw up our Borough's Cycle Strategy. The authority had decided to give scores to all the possible schemes based on several different criteria each given different weightings. These were presented to us as scores out of 100 "to two decimal places". At the mention of two decimal places the numerate people in the room began to giggle, to the evident mystification of the official who'd thought we'd be impressed. But, even though none of us felt that the scheme at the top of the list was the most important, without getting involved in the minutiae of the criteria and their weightings, there was nothing we could do about it. The decision making procedure had spoken and, because they'd followed the procedure, no blame could be attached to the outcome. Yet another victory for the defence. 

Living in the real world

I once gave a talk to the local Rotarians on the history of the concept of energy. Not an obvious topic for an after dinner speech but it turned out to be mildly provocative; which I suppose was the point.

It began with the physical concept of mechanical work. Push a supermarket trolley and the amount of work you do depends on how hard you push it and how far you push it. That's it. Push it twice as hard, or twice as far, and you do twice as much work.

This led onto the concept of energy. If something's got energy you can get it to do some work. The amount of energy its got is simply the same as the amount of work it could do. So, use a pulley to connect a falling weight to the supermarket trolley and you can get it to move. The weight, before it falls, must have energy. In this case gravitational potential energy. You can also show that although energy can be converted from one form to another it can't be created or destroyed; the principle of the conservation of energy.

Finally, I must have got around to the concept of power which is simply the rate at which something can do work. More powerful things can simply do work more quickly.

So, if you speed something up by applying a force then you're doing work and the thing you've speeded up acquires  kinetic energy. This can then be used to do work when the thing slows down. If you apply Newton's Laws of Motion it isn't hard to show that the kinetic energy of a moving body depends on the body's mass and on the square of its speed. The classic formula is KE = 1/2 x mass x velocity^2.

Now, the first serious application of Newton's laws was to calculate the orbits of the planets around the Sun. Because these orbits aren't completely circular the planets speed up and slow down as they move closer or further from the Sun. All that's happening here is that gravitational potential energy is being swapped for kinetic energy and vice versa. So, for example, the quantity (1/2 x mass x velocity^2) had been used in calculating the details of the orbit of Mars but there wasn't anything else you could actually do with it. There wasn't any way to get Mars to do any useful work.

And here we get to the bit that was supposed to interest the Rotarians. The concept of energy might have been useful as a calculating device, but it was only when James Watt and Matthew Boulton began trying to sell their steam engines that it became something that was treated as though it had a real independent existence. Their selling technique was a bit like the present Government's New Green Deal. They demonstrated how many horses the engines would replace, or how much less coal they'd use than the earlier less efficient engines, and then offered to sell them at a price that mean the purchaser was bound to be better off. 

But to do this they needed some idea of the power output of a typical horse and decided that it was equivalent to lifting a weight of 33,000 lbs every minute through a height of 1 foot. In current units this is about 750 watts. No prizes for guessing who those are named after.  

So far so vaguely stimulating. You'll appreciate that by modern standards 750W is not a great deal of power. It may be more than can be produced by fit cyclists, and even then not for long, but a typical car produces at least 50 times as much. 

Apart from bringing the concepts of work and power down to Earth as it were, the steam engine liberated us from renewable sources of energy. Up to that point it was either biomass to feed draft animals or renewable energy in the form of water wheels, wind mills or sails.

I then pointed out that  for the last 200 years we'd been using fossil fuel resources about a million times faster than they were laid down. i.e burning up a million years worth of dead plants and animals every year. I didn't say this was wrong, I didn't have to, but one response was revealing and this was "This is all very well, but you're not living in the real world"

Let's hope that there's a real world out there where natural resources really are infinite and where we can choose whether or not the laws of physics apply. It looks like we might be needing it.

At the centre of things

The prime spot for a group photograph of the great and good is the one in the middle. When our whippet jumps on the bed while we're in it there's only one place she can possibly go, in the middle. When Galileo suggested that the Earth went around the Sun he laid down a challenge to God's status. He was no longer in the middle.

Whenever I visited a new part of the country one of the first things I'd do was to get hold of an Ordnance Survey map. Spread it out on a table and you can find where you are, what's around and where there might be a good walk or bike ride. One of my minor fantasies was to have a wall large enough to be able to stick up the full set. 

My attachment to the 1:50000 maps in particular was such that I used to use them to navigate across London. Unlike the A to Z you could see where you were, where you were going and what happened all the way in between. No need to shuffle back and forth between the pages trying to work out which road on one page matched up with which road on the next. 

With paper based maps it was only by accident that you found yourself in the middle. Always seeming to be on the fold in the middle is probably one of those tricks of selective memory. Nowadays, its no doubt far more common for people to look at maps on their mobile phones. This not only gives a much smaller window on the world but, because you they often automatically put you in the middle, there's no longer any need to read the map to work out where you are. 

Galileo's new perspective removed us from the centre of the Universe and relegated us to a place that's of no particular significance other than that we find ourselves here. On a small planet orbiting a mainstream sort of star along the billions of others in a galaxy which, in turn, is only one of billions of other galaxies. Paradoxically, the modern view of the Universe places us firmly back at the centre. Only now we're not at the absolute centre of the Universe, which its agreed doesn't exist, but at the centre of the observable Universe. And, just as each of us sees a slightly different, and therefore personal, rainbow, so each of us is at the centre of our own observable Universe. For example, if my head is 20cm from yours then it takes light just over half a nanosecond to travel the extra distance and so my Universe is displaced by about half a nano light second from yours. 

Even if we've got less idea of all the other places we might be, and of what might lie in between, the fact that Google puts each of us in the centre of the map is at least consistent with modern cosmology. 

Useful work

I went to work in the woods today, thinning out trees with the local Conservation Volunteers. Not paid, but still work. Whether it was useful depends on your perspective. Our aim is to let in more light so that more plant species might grow in the undercover, along with the birds and animals that live on and off them. This won't make anyone any money, the effect won't be noticeable for a couple of years and in the long run it may do very little to hold back the global tide of environmental degradation.  So was it useful? We'll just have to wait and see.

The particular woods represent a fragment of ancient woodland that was preserved from the axe precisely because they were useful. In this case for providing timber to make charcoal for the pre-industrial production of iron. Hence the name, Forge Valley Woods. Indeed, it appears that a good deal of England's remaining ancient woodland owes its continued existence to the need for a steady supply of charcoal to make iron and steel. So, one of the side effects of Abraham Darby's work in Coalbrookdale, where he worked out how to use using coke from coal instead of charcoal, was that the remaining woods came under increasing threat. 

As a youngster I was deeply impressed by W G Hoskins' book "The making of the English landscape"; if only for the reason that I learnt that in England at least there wasn't any such thing as a natural landscape, all of it bore the marks of human interference. The last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago. When the trees came back they ended up covering over 90% of the UK. That figure is now down to the less than 2% that I've spent the morning fiddling with. 

I'd like to think that most work I've ever done has been useful or at least, in a generalised version of the Hippocratic oath, not harmful. As a Physicist this steered me away from the arms industry, speculative trading in the City and the countless other things that I saw people doing which, though they made money, would have left the world a better place if they hadn't been done. Instead I was drawn to research, education and the sort of voluntary political activity that gets up people's noses but points at how we might lead lives which don't  trash the place quite so thoroughly. 

As a student I had Trotskyist friends but never joined any of the parties. They kept asking me for reasons why I didn't join rather than give me reasons why I should. and this only served to bring out the obstinacy in me.  Why should I do all the heavy lifting as it were. However, one idea that did take root was the concept of a transitional demand . Put it simply these were demands that on the surface felt entirely reasonable but which actually provided a fundamental challenge to the existing capitalist system. For example, a typical demand at the time, in the face of rising unemployment, was "Job sharing with no loss of pay".

Who would have thought that the current "transitional demands" that I'm working on would centre around improving facilities for cycling. They may not seem that transitional to you but the establishment can make them seem so unreasonable that I guess they must be.

In Physics, with its simpler and more precise definition of work, useful work is simply that which doesn't end up as heat. So, is this sound and fury useful work or not? If the aim was to make the world a more disordered place then I could hardly avoid playing my part, but that's entropy for you. If all these words do is warm a few computer screens across the world then I guess it isn't useful work. But if they move someone to do something then I suppose it might be. We'll just have to wait and see.

Getting it wrong part 1: The age of leisure?

It seems that those of us who had our formative years in the 60s and early 70s were more likely to want to make the world a better place, and less likely to be motivated by money, than those that followed. One reason for this I suspect is that our personal economic futures felt secure. Modern industrial society was clearly capable of producing more than enough stuff to go around, the problem was working out how to get it fairly distributed. 

The general growth in productivity and, in particular, the advent of computers was widely forecast to result in an age of leisure. I was reminded of this by a recent article in the  Guardian in which I was surprised to learn that even in the 1930s the economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that 

"leisure would increasingly oust work from the centre of our lives" and that "as societies got richer, the exemption from toil {would spread to more and more people. Leisure would increasingly become the meaningful core of life; and work, in the sense of working for a living, would increasingly become a residual."

Well a good number of us got that one wrong, but at least it turns out we were in good company.  We should have known that Capitalism really doesn't know when enough is enough and I suppose it was extremely naive of us to imagine that it might. 

Now, whilst I'm not too bad about getting on with things where I can see there's a point, I'm not really much of a worker. More of a daydreamer really. When asked what I do the best I can manage is "Oh you know , a bit of this and that" and, apart from 13 years teaching in Further Education, I've never managed to stick to a career. This isn't to say that "this and that" doesn't bring in anything at all, but its quite modest. Instead I usually find it easier to avoid spending money that to make it. I know that I'm lucky to have the choice and I'm lucky to have a partner whose regular, and worthwhile, work keeps us well above the bread line. 

But I also know that there are people on more money than us who feel hard up. By any historical standards they've got more than enough. They've got comfortable housing, they can afford to eat well, to keep warm, to travel, to go out a couple of times a week, pursue their hobbies and have a big telly, yet still they feel they haven't got enough.

For some of us there's a disconnection between the things we need, for shelter, food, clothing and social contact and those that can only really be classified as wants; a newer car, a smarter phone, a second skiing trip, a bigger caravan... 

It seems we underestimated the power of the advertising industry to keep us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction. We underestimated the ability of consumer capitalism to alienate us so much from each other that we end up relying on empty cultural signifiers, like designer handbags, to demonstrate our social status.

I'm often walk the dog and get to know the other dog walkers. To most of them I'm just Poppy's dad.  One day I met Fudge's mum. We both enjoy walking and got into conversation about why some people didn't. Her view was that when you walked you couldn't help but think about things and that the reason lots of people didn't walk was because they weren't comfortable with their own thoughts.

I know that for mathematicians, such as Andrew Wiles, one of the most important things they can have is somewhere to walk and think. A curious conclusion might be that if you want good mathematicians you need good quality public space. However, for those who aren't mathematicians or philosophers and whose mental space has been hi-jacked by the virus of consumerism, where making a decision is synonymous with deciding what to buy next, you can see why they might be wondering why they're  walking when they could be earning or spending.

In the early 1980's I lived and worked in the United States as a medical researcher, if you must know, making electrical measurements from mouse eggs, and I remember an advert for the Sunday edition of the New York Times. It showed a young couple having breakfast in bed along with the magazine section of the paper. The copy said "You work six days a week and on Sundays you decide what you're working for"

Dispositional or situational

Apart from walking, my everyday means of transport is a bike. In the UK I share this habit with less than 3% of the population. We're in such a minority  that we invariably get described as keen.

Whether keen or merely habitual we definitely form a distinct sub group of the population. A sub group with its own social identity. Way back in 1997 the Transport Research Laboratory produced a report called "Attitudes to Cycling:a qualitative study and conceptual framework". Among other things it looked at the ways in which our social identity, in this context our social identity as "cyclists" or as "motorists", influenced our attitudes towards each other. (Do bear in mind that each of us has far more than one social identity; I'm a cyclist, a Leeds United supporter, a scientist.....) In particular, the TRL noted that within our car dominated culture "cyclists" had low status and "motorists" high status. This diagram from the report illustrates this.

But, and this is now getting to the point of this entry, members of each particular group, lets call it the in group, tend to treat members of the other group, the out group, in a fundamentally different way. 

Those who identify as motorists tend to apply negative qualities to all cyclists; they're always going through red lights, they don't obey the rules of the road, they're self righteous, they don't use lights, they cycle on the pavement. Now of course, some cyclists do behave in these ways but by no means all of them. 

When it comes to the behaviour of fellow motorists, this tends to be explained in terms of the situation that they find themselves in; they were going too fast because they've got a sick child in hospital, they parked on the pavement because they were in a hurry and there wasn't a space nearby.

What's happening here is a tendency to see members of the out group's behaviour as a disposition on their part (that's what cyclists are like) and that of the in group as a result of the situation they find themselves in.

Of course, this doesn't just apply to us as cyclists, motorists, heavy metal fans or members of the Bullingdon Club. We tend to treat members of the in group in terms of the situation they find themselves in and members of the out group in terms of their general disposition. 

Perhaps it time to remember that there are 7 billion intersecting stories out there and if someone doesn't behave as you might wish it might be better to assume that there's a bit of their back story that you're missing rather than just assuming that that's what people like that are like.