Andrew Kennedy and a working life

A new kind of kitchen

2011-11-21T03:37:00.001-08:00

Some time ago, our small family had to move out of our flat for a while. We moved into our office just a short step away. I put some wooden tables taken from re-cycling into a very small back room and on them placed a rice-maker someone had given us, an electric kettle and a single free-standing 1000-watt induction cooking plate. I bought a small old second-hand fridge with great insulation, placed a basic microwave with a grill on top of it, and then paid a local plumber to connect a free-standing stainless steel sink a short distance to the services. There it was, our kitchen. At the time I had never used a microwave or even a rice-maker but I soon learnt. But I learnt something much more interesting as well - a different way of being in the kitchen. I would never willingly spend expensively on what is called nowadays a 'fitted kitchen' ever again.

With these simple and inexpensive tools, I learnt to cook roasts, cakes, scrambled eggs, pizzas, soups, all manner of potatoes, rice and pulses, and every kind of vegetable there is. I made jams, compotes and chutneys. In short, I did all the cooking I will ever do in a tiny, easy to clean space, with very economical devices. The induction pad is a revelation. Heats a pan up in seconds and will efficiently fry up at a reduced power without setting its surroundings alight or even getting them hot. I had never realised how useful it is to have a rice-maker prepare rice ahead of the time you want it, and I found, too, that the microwave is actually a versatile cooker.

My time in this kitchen showed me at least three important things.

1. Investing large sums in a kitchen is not necessary.

The massive installations of standard kitchens are excessive (obviously this does depnd upon your hosting intentions). Who ever needs really needs a 4 ring cooker and oven wired up to a dedicated 3000-watt circuit? Melanine cabinets are massively heavy, cannot be properly cleaned in and around them, end up rotting with damp and infected with mould. Who needs double sinks as well as a dish-washer? Think of the house space taken up with kitchen devices. Fridges do not need to be large. Have a freezer compartment by all means - frozen vegetables are as good sometimes better than fresh - but there is no need to keep every single food item cold in the temperate zones. Old fashioned larders were just cool aired rooms with netting on the windows and around some food items, and did a perfectly good job of long term storage. Vegetables and fruits rot in fridges just the same because they sit on plastic trays and are not bathed in drying air currents. Filling a fridge with stuff forces it to work harder. We are three and wash up what we use straight away. A wipe down of surfaces with vinegar, a sweep under the free-standing tables and the kitchen is clean and what's more, it's open to inspection.

2. Efficient and healthy cooking.

Eat your food as you buy it, Cook only what you are going to eat. Don't create left-overs and don't be seduced into storing quantities of foods for so long that they decline in quality. Filling a fridge with left overs is uneconomic in energy terms as well as unhealthy. Storing stuff outside a fridge forces you to buy food in smaller quantities and thus forcing a higher turnover of use which is all to the good.

Microwave cooking allows you to make use of a much larger range of vegetables than one might ordinary use since cooking them to any desired consistency is easy, and it wastes no heat whatsoever in boiling masses of water you may use on an ordinary stove merely to cook a carrot. Our overal electricity use turns out to be much more reasonable than when we lived in our house.

3. Cook less but more frequently.

Our eating habits have changed. No longer do I make a large dish for a big meal. Rather, I tend to make small delicious things several times during the day. This actually frees my time up and also frees up muenu ideas. I can produce something quick within minutes and there is less of a need to rely on starches for bulk. Meals become part of the free-flowing time we have rather than inhibiting fixed points in the day.

What is revealed in our accidental shift in household habits is how much of a tyranny the kitchen can be, not simply as a space given up to one activity, but as a sink of investment and energy. It is no accident that one of the ways women are enslaved is through the culture of cooking. Pretty much all cuisines we admire, like those in the East, for example, have traditional household meals - and I have cooked some of them - that take hours and even days of preparation. I know, as a writer and default cook for a small household, there is almost nothing that can inhibit individual progress more than the tyranny of household obligations and duties.

What you can do with a Kindle (3G) on your travels - Again

2011-11-17T23:53:00.001-08:00

I am not a gadget freak by any stretch of the imagination but I have one gadget that has really entered and improved my life - the Kindle.

I took an emergency trip up to France last weekend and took a Kindle (3G) with me in the car. I plugged it in to the car stereo system and caught up with my podcasts, having downloaded them into the device from my computer. (Requires finding the iTunes podcast folder and then dragging the latest dated podcasts into the Audible directory on the Kindle). After a while I got bored with podcasts and switched the Kindle into playing the music that I had loaded into the device bit by bit over the last months. Then I realised I had some 'homework' to do and switched the Kindle into reading Darwin's autobiography for me. (The voice is fine for anything but conversation. It only needs to pause a little more on paragraphs to be a good experience. Should be easy to fix.) I pulled into a hotel for the night, settled into the downstairs bar where, worried by events in Italy, I took the Kindle and read the BBC news web site. Then I took a quick look at my email. I then opened a text file I had previously emailed to the device that was the French text of some poems that I am translating for a project a few years hence. I browsed to www.wordreference.com (a terrific language translation site) to look up some French phrases and then annoted my text file for later review. I searched wikipedia for some information before going to the Kindle store to buy the next installment of Percy Jackson for my daughter who had just finished the first one in the series. She has the Kindle program on her computer and is connected to my account, so she reads her books on her computer whenever I am using the Kindle. Then I settled down to continue reading my current book.

It was a 12 hour day and the Kindle's battery survived continual use for that day and into the next. I don't believe there is a device for the price anywhere that can do these 10 functions so economically without a wifi hotspot anywhere in sight: Audio books, music, reading aloud, newspaper, email, notetaker, dictionary, encyclopedia, purchases, reading.

Yes, there is no video; yes, it's all in black and white; yes, there is no selection of music tracks; yes, clicking around a web page is clumsy. But, you know, it doesn't matter.

Learning to fix one's stuff: Macbook and the inverter cable

2011-11-17T04:42:00.001-08:00

I'm feeling very pleased with myself, thanks to the web and the free-flowing advice on almost any subject that one can tap. My three year old Macbook was down for the count. The screen would go dead whenever I opened the lid. After some trawling through forums I came to the conclusion that the inverter cable was the most probable suspect (cable gets pinched by the hinge and then one of the strands breaks). My local Apple store wouldn't quote for a repair until they had done a diagnostic but I would be looking at a probable €200 minimum. I searched on-line vendors for a replacement cable, having pinpointed precisely my particular version of the Macbook - older and newer models do not have compatible inverter cables. The UK prices varied between £45 - £65. US prices were around $105 but shipping - where the vendor would ship to Europe - was around $35. On Ebay, however, I found a vendor who was a front man for a Hong Kong based supplier selling the cable for my model for $18 plus reasonable postage. It took 3 weeks to arrive.

In the meanwhile, fed up with trying to install all the programs I needed on my daughter's XP netbook, I bought a mini DV to HDMI converter for the Macbook at a specialist computer parts shop who charged half the AppleStore price along with a male-male HDMI cable and set up a small flat panel TV on my desk to use as a monitor. I connected the Macbook to the TV HDMI slot, lifted the lid the one inch that would still show the image on the LCD screen and peering at that tiny angle, went into Preferences and selected Displays. I clicked on Detect Displays and two windows come up - one for your LCD screen which you should leave alone, and one for the TV. I selected the parameters for the TV display that most closely related to the LCD resolution (1280 x 800 probably). I didn't see anything until I clicked on Mirror and then then the screen's image appeared on the TV. So I was back to working with a screen. It is not ideal by any means. The TV screen is nothing like as sharp as the LCD given that the image is blown up to fit the larger screen, but at least I could work.

When the cable arrived I went into www.ifixit.com and printed off their guide for how to replace a Macbook's screen or inverter, and set to work with my Phillips screwdriver, an old credit card, a magnetised continuity screwdriver and an old file with a flat blade-like plastic handle. Be warned. Those darn screws are tiny, fiddley and all different sizes. When I got the cover off, I drew a rough map of the innards full size on a sheet of paper and stuck with tape each screw I undid on the plan at it's location. Even so, I ended up losing one screw somewhere (still haven't found it). This was in case I got interrupted half-way through and forget where every screw came from and how each wire was placed. Someone on a forum recommended egg boxes in which to keep the screws, but I defend my method as being more sure to recover if you have to stop half-way through.

To anyone who wants to attempt such a job, I would definitely encourage him or her to do it. The guide was confidence building and very clear, but still left a few things to experience: like the tiny shaped white plastic pieces that fly off when you lever the hinges away from the body. Beware here! Never use too much force, and take your time. Remember, every piece is designed to connect. If something doesn't click in, STOP, and reconsider.

The whole point, though is that such a repair is perfectly feasible and, in a political way, a necessary response to the problem. Learning to fix one's stuff; being in control of what you have, is a political act. Thanks to all those at Ifixit.com and the others who scouted ahead and who left their knowledge for the rest to use.

A kind review of the Kindle 3 - the iPad's not for books

2011-03-17T08:52:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

A kind review of the Kindle 3 - the iPad's not for books

I admit to surprise in finding myself reviewing (favourably) Amazon's Kindle. I had my doubts about system-specific e-readers in general and Amazon's offering in particular. I felt that no e-reader seems to offer anything like the book reading experience I had loved since childhood. And they were far too expensive for what they actually were in essence. I had felt that wifi and 3G capability was a red herring.

The Kindle has changed my point of view in almost every particular. It is not a book and does not deliver that book 'feel'. To expect that is wrong-headed. What the Kindle does, and does very well, is deliver all the types of reading material to your hand whenever you want it and pretty much wherever you are.

We are a family of two writers and a teenager with fervent reading habits. We were running out of space to keep books, and travelling together meant carrying a lot of manuscripts and books around. I was getting tired of my anxiousness over book storage. The prospect of moving house fills me with dread. A book was no longer a thrilling innocent, a new soul, to taken under one's wing and lovingly guarded but one quickly soiled by over population and economics. Books in their printed bodies became sinners in our peripatetic life.

Three things about the latest Kindle version drew my eyes down from bookcases to the Amazon pages: its experimental web browser that allowed for some primitive web interactions, its ability to convert PDF files and its free 3G capabilities. Suddenly a life of letters found a parallel universe in the pocket of a coat or an outside pocket of a bag.

The Kindle 3 is the right size. I don't know how long it took Amazon to settle on these dimensions but they are exactly right. Other readers are too thick, too heavy, too long. The iPad has exactly the wrong footprint for me: you cannot hold it in one hand or put it in a large coat pocket, and slim though it may be, it's still too heavy to feel as free as one would like to feel.

I like emailing documents to it. If I am out and about and someone wants to show me something, they can email the document to the Kindle. No need to lug a computer about. Since I read a lot of classics which one can find for free all over the Internet, the free conversion service is a dream. The web capability is primitive but perfectly functional. The Kindle web browser will not do pop-up windows or have more than one window open so doing your social media or shopping with it will not really work. One has to physically tab the cursor around the web page to highlight links and entry fields, and I can see this will be disconcerting to those who are used to touch screens, but the point is, as a fall back service it does work. A quick news check or weather report or even a google map are all there to be had. While the Kindle's own internal dictionaries are very useful too and easy to use; just highlight a word and you can see the quick dictionary definition immediately or click a button and go the in depth article, you can also search Google or Wikipedia. Great stuff.

The print is easy to read although it should be made clear that the display is not black on white but rather black on grey, and is impossible to read in low light conditions, but to read this in full sunlight is a joy. This to me is the principal boon. When laptop screens and mobile phones vanish into the light, the Kindle display is even better. There is simply no reason to use an iPad to read when you can only use it indoors. I think recent statistics are bearing this out. Fewer and fewer iPad uses use their device to read.

The second boon is the battery life. I have been weary beyond words for years at the continual need to charge up appliances. To throw the Kindle in my bag and take off without even wondering if it has a charge in it, is a simple but profound delight. In this respect too, the Kindle warns you to re-charge long before it actually closes down. Like a good reservoir tank gauge it tells you in good time - flick off the wifi and 3G at first warning and it'll last you another day. Without wifi and 3G on, it will last you a month. That is just the right kind of appliance lifetime one wants.

There are drawbacks of course. The page forward and back buttons are on the edge of the device so it is quite easy to handle it and flip through several pages by mistake. If you happened to have the 2,500 books Amazon says you can load into the device, you'd have to use a search to find any book. The contents listing is on a fixed font size and only gives you 10 items per page. SO finding something, even if you use place them in 'collections' or folders may end up taking some time. There's no desktop to help you navigate. But that's a theoretical gripe and not a problem I've yet reached. You can list items by title, author, collection and most recent first, which is decent enough.

Within any text you can jump to the beginning or the end, to the contents list, to the cover, to page and location. Jumping to page numbers doesn't seem to work in any of the books I've been reading, and one can understand why. The page numbering must necessarily change with your layout choices. If you are searching for where you put a note, you need to remember the layout settings you were using when you wrote it otherwise yo will never find it with page number. However, your note is stored (in My Clippings) along with its Location in the document, which is the thing you need to use, because locations are fixed places in the document regardless of page layout.

You have 8 font sizes and can toggle between condensed, sans serif and regular. You can also set small, medium and large line spacing as well as words per line so your text display permutations are really quite generous.

I wasn't even aware that you could rotate the screen. I cried with joy when I discovered it - very good for web browsing. It plays mp3 music while you read (if you are that sort of multitasking person). It can speak text when you tire. This is the very familiar Norwegian-like computer voice that I have on my macbook. Perfectly good for science texts, newspapers and periodicals. It can't speak fiction to save its life; it sounds like gobbledygook. But who really wants it to anyway.

the keyboard covers a small area and the buttons are small, but it turns out that my finger nails have grown just enough to make typing possible - a whole lot easier that texting on a phone. Writing short notes to oneself is feasible. They are linked to the text where you wrote them but are also saved along with the reference to the document and page number that they belong to in a single folder called My Clippings in which you can browse.

Looking at the unit, there seems to be a small hole between ear-phone plug and mini-USB socket. I wonder if this is not a microphone or where a microphone will go one of these days. If it is Amazon's plan to upgrade these Kindles with a voice recording / phone function then I cannot see any reason why you would not want one. A Kindle that can act like phone? Now there's the kind of product up grade that is truly interesting. Much better than a phone that tries to be an e-reader.

One gripe is that the Kindle texts are too expensive vis a vis the price of a new book. I don't see those prices holding, however.

There's more to talk about but I will leave it there. A charming and useful gadget that I am very happy owning.

I'd like to hear from nuclear engineers one more time why Nuclear Power is safe

2011-03-16T13:58:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

I'd like to hear from nuclear engineers one more time why Nuclear Power is safe

Stimulated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis, echoes of a rebellious sixties have flooded my mind once again. I am sure that nuclear engineers are among the brightest and best humans there are, but I want to hear from them one more time just why it was better to place this nuclear power plant not just at the coast but actually on the sea's edge in a place known for its earthquakes and tsunamis. Tsunami - after all is a Japanese word so you might think someone would have taken note. I'd like to hear one more time why it was not a design flaw in these General Electric boiling water reactors to encase the nuclear fuel rods in a metal known to react with water at high temperatures to produce a highly explosive gas, hydrogen.

I'd like to hear from these designers of a technology who have the word 'redundancy' tattooed on their hearts, how was it that coolant flow depended upon a single valve. Haven't these nuclear engineers heard of Murphy's Law? (If there is only one valve on which your system really depends, then that's the one that will fail).

I'd like to hear it one more time why backup electricity generation plants could be so easily swamped by a tsunami and why 8 hours of back-up battery were not sufficient to do what was necessary. I'd like to hear why worst the case scenario training did not seem to include the worst case scenario.

I'd like to hear why it's such a good idea to have the cooling ponds to store spent fuel rods actually lie atop the reactor itself. Obviously convenient, obviously a liability when explosive gases build up in the reactor vessel beneath.

I'd like to hear from the Nuclear industry just one more time why they think nuclear power is perfectly safe.

And further, I'd like to hear one more time why it's fair and just to lie about nuclear disasters in the making and deliberately not give the full information to the ones who are going to get in the neck - the public - and to deny them any chance of making their own decisions and handling their own survival.

A solution for pay walls for internet media content: How newspapers can survive the internet

2011-01-13T03:52:00.001-08:00

Somebody has to pay for the gathering of news and the dissemination of intelligent comment. Or does anyone, given that social media are displacing top-down reportage? The Brisbane flood? Just tap into eye witness reports and find out for yourself. Latest cricket opinion. Just tap into a barmy army member's ball by ball report written on a iphone in between pints. Who needs a newspaper? If we need newspapers, then why can't they be free given that advertising can pay for their production?

Well, advertisers need readership: they won't pay for content no one reads. One of the best US papers, the New York Times, made itself into one of the best in the world in only twenty years, has only a million or so subscribers, and it's not enough. There will be a paywall protecting their internet content this month, although quite how the paywall will work is still a secret. The Times, however, tried the paywall and was deserted by on-line readers. Too expensive in comparison to what's on-line for free, even though Murdoch tried to value add content for the on-line readership.

In the days when I bought physical reading matter daily, I would read The Times one day, the Telegraph the next, the Economist the next, the New Scientist once a week, the Prospect now and then, and so on. I would go into a library to catch up on Time and Newsweek. It's out of the question for me and probably for anyone to pay all these yearly on-line subscriptions to get the varied reading experience one wants. A year's subscription up front is too much. Paying by the issue would be fine but the costs of managing these on-line micro payments is too high for both buyer and seller.

So how can newspapers and periodicals charge readers for their on-line editions and still retain them?

The answer is simple. Pay readers for their contributions to the on-line community attached to these publications. I belong to the New York Times network Times People. Suppose I received a micro credit for every article I recommended, every commentary that another reader liked, every new reader I introduced to the network, every review I passed on through Facebook or Twitter. A diligent and thoughtful member of Times People should be able to reduce his or her on-line subscription to the paper by say 50% or 60%, or even by 100% by being a participatory reader. If this were in operation for all on-line media content, I am much more likely to opt for a subscription to anyone of them. That way the peripheral cloud of information surrounding on-line news and opinion might actually be worth more to the paper than it is now.

Does this sound like a solution? Let me know.

Despicable Me and 3-D.

2010-11-29T01:50:00.001-08:00

Referring to Mark Kermode's opinions on 3-D in films and to the 3-D debate in general I would like to throw in my 10 cents worth based on my viewing of Despicable Me in 3-D the other week with my 11-year old daughter. My only experience of 3-D up to now was of the old-fashioned 1950s black and rouge effort, The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The 3-D effect then was momentarily entertaining but hardly mindblowing and I don't think there was anyone of my generation who could believe that 3-D would go any further.

I am a cartoon fan, but there are things I like about them and things I don't. What I don't like about them are the flatness of the colours and lack of believable contrast. Watching who killed Roger Rabbit that combined the human and cartoon worlds exposed these deficiencies most clearly. What I do like about the old fashioned cartoon experience is the way in which you get more movement and more space for a particular action. It is one of the reasons for their grace and lyricism: more frames than our eye would normally follow. In the old Disney style, you were led through the extended gestures from beginning to end, drawing you into the strange world and making its physics understandable. The modern 2-dimensional age of animation comes upon us with things like Ice- Age in which the frantic pace and energy comes from removing frames from the movements so that they become mere staccato flashes on the screen without logical connectivity between the beginning and the end. A gesture is there now there now there, like quantum energy jumps.

3-D in cartoons, however, opens out the frame, brings in more space and light and demands once again that movements have a middle; becoming comprehensible, and by doing so, becoming more emotionally involving. A genuine emotion for the story becomes possible because some of the necessary components are in the 3-D image. So I found myself approving of this 3-D process as exemplified in Despicable Me.

Before the movie showing, however, there was a 3-D trailer for a film with humans in it. It was clear immediately that 3-D added nothing to the humans in the frame at all. If anything the humans floated in the frame unattached to their environment. They were no more real and possibly were less real with the 3-D process, and the freedom of the extra dimension on its own gave was simply not capable of greater emotional scope than normally exists in film. Nothing was added to the film experience. So my feelings agree with what one actually might expect from pondering what the 3-D process can and cannot do in a film. It improves the fake but not the real. Our minds do a much better job of combining images from our eyes and making physical and emotional sense out of 2-D projections than any film process trying to improve upon it.

The religions debate - inspired by the Economist debate: this house believes religions are a force for good

2010-10-07T02:06:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

The religions debate - inspired by the Economist debate: this house believes religions are a force for good

Religion is an unholy mix of many very human desires. The principle purpose of religion, however, is politics by other means. Religions want to organise society, control behaviour and distribute resources (let us not forget they move billions of dollars around the world every day). The fact that they also provide rituals that deal with the human blues just confuses this principal function, and many thinkers over the centuries have been confused by the mix as are philosophers of today. Religions exist to organise society. The difference between a secular and a religious organisation has nothing to do with the false dichotomy between science and faith but simply that in one the authority for action comes from humans, while in the other the authority for action comes from god. Since god doesn't appear to speak with a language readily understood or even heard by most people, the arbiters of a god's authority are usually self-selected message bearers who have contrived their role through several techniques but mostly by threatening the people with either their particular god's powers of harm and retribution or cajoling with their particular god's promises of benefits - both familiar, I might add, to students of the political realm. By looking at religions first as political organisations we can see that what distinguishes them is not their vision of god but their vision of the day-to-day. All god's have preferences for their supporters as long as the supporters comply with certain tasks or rituals, sometimes big ones like going to mass on Sundays or praying 5 times a day to the east, or little ones like proscribed foods. As long as people comply, the god will (in his way) take care of them. Since it is not credible that an all-wise creator cares one way or the other about these rituals, and unbelievers certainly don't care, most are clearly designed to separate religions from one another (as well as providing ammunition to manage its members). For tasks read policies and bingo! the political nature of these religions is apparent. As political parties, they choose their leaders carefully to maintain control over their human members, though, historically their policies have evolved in response to social conditions and economic freedoms - or lack of them. If we keep the mantra in mind - religion is politics by other means - then the Middle East dispute clarifies itself. It is a dispute between political parties who want to establish fresh and Earth-based political arrangements in the region, without the final recourse to human authority. We can also understand how the perception of Islam as a threat to parliamentary democracies in Europe arises.

Because they are predominantly political entities, religions fail, interestingly, in several important areas. They do not have useful explanations of the universe and how it began. They do not know what happens after death. They do not know why the world is violent or why Nature is manifestly unfair. They have little useful explanation of why humans behave as badly and as well as they do. They do not have durable morals except in simplistic actions. While religions may claim murder is wrong, for example, none of them condemn war and all permit violence with varying degrees of qualification. When individuals are faced with difficult moral choices all religions readily duck them and make the final arbiter the individual's conscience; religions' codes are incapable of deciding (or unwilling to decide) many moral issues in the human sphere.

SO what of religions' spiritual aspirations? So what, indeed! Everyone speculates about the mysteries of life and death, the paradoxes of fate, good and evil in life, and morals in society. These are not the preserve of religions and the answers religions give to questions arising from them are not exclusive, and many of them are bizarre to say the least. Religions spectacularly fail to live side by side with each other which is puzzling if you think they are spiritual entities grappling with the same creator for everyone, but not puzzling when you see them as political entities first.

And so to the proposition before us: This House believes that religion is a force for good. As political entities, religions have uninviting leadership structures and decision-making apparata since they always deny human argument at the last step. Social representation always fails. Because of this the good they do is accidental, while their capacity to do evil is unlimited. I vote against the proposition.

Social media, social cohesion, banalities and love

2010-07-24T23:28:00.001-07:00

From Evernote:

edinburgh alumni full discussion

Social media investigation.

There is a general view that social networks are exciting even risky places where pooled intelligence is enabling individuals to find like minds, to explore themes, to mine the collective knowledge and to extend their experiences. These are bold claims and I wonder if they are true to any major extent, though they may well be true for a small sector of society. My question is 'do they reflect what people are actually doing with social networks, rather than what people merely hope social networks can do?

Sometime ago, on a whim, I joined my recently created University Alumni group on Linkedin. The principle discussion among this group was, 'What was your favourite student bar in Edinburgh? http://www.linkedin.com/e/vwy60p-gb1ggz9q-1z/ava/17730010/74624/EML_anet_qa_ttle-cThOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA/

It was a sleepy group with infrequent and brief postings of mostly brief mentions of bars and clubs in Edinburgh enjoyed by the poster every 3 or four days or so. This group contained 154 postings at the point at which I decided to shake it up a little and drop this stone into the calm waters:

This kind of thread is a classic example of the 'enabling mediocre'. It has been well noted that in committee meetings, there is likely to be more discussion about whether to have ginger biscuits or chocolate cookies for the break than there will be on the agenda itself. Anyone can jump in on harmless and irrelevant conversations and make themselves felt without controversy. Hence twitter et al. Social media actually contains very little hard core information other than the aforementioned 'enabling mediocre' and the generally observed posturing to gain a social presence.

1.It's taken a while to realise that social media networks are mostly about bonding not about discovery. Hence the proposition that 'mediocre' remarks are more 'successful' in the doing the job of bonding than critical or confrontational ones, For example from posting 158, 'It is good to see so many comments which says we all like to belong to this group and now we feel included.' and this from posting 159, 'We've gone to high-brow philosophical responses for a harmless thread', and this, '...How lovely that across generations and geography we can be joined in a common theme...' (164)

To make a challenging remark about the group is to severely disturb the 'comfort factor' of the network. You might think that such a remark not having anything to do with the discussion about bars would be simply ignored. Not a bit of it. Even a sleepy group like this has boundaries, defences and self-appointed defenders. The average rate of new messages to this topic ran at a little less than one every 3 days, as can readily be seen on its Linkedin page. The moment I posted my remark, it took only 17 mins for the first four responses to appear, reacting strongly to my comment. E.g. posting 160 '...Someone should buy Andrew a drink at the next reunion...' Posting 163 '..."Enabling mediocre" - what a load of p*sh...' After the first 4 the next 4, were posted around midnight. Ending with this complicated insult from posting 166 '...At any student do there is always someone standing in a corner smoking a Gauloise and pretending not to enjoy themselves. Occasionally they say something philosophical, it sounds good, but it was pinched off George Bernard Shaw on the whole...' So one can see that even with a 'harmless thread' (159) and one that '... brings a smile every time someone mentions a bar not yet in the thread...' (163), there was a high level of concern about thread content in spite of a) the normal infrequent posting rate, and b) the genuinely banal content.

Social media networks are clearly defensive. You might think, since they are generally open to new members (and by member here I mean a subscriber to a theme or a process) at any time that these networks are outward looking and welcoming, but actually no, they are tightly focussed on the internal cohesion between members.

45 minutes after the defensive 'action' came the reestablishing action. A posting about a bar. 6 more followed that morning. It was like a system re-set. After this, I reacted as if the defence mechanism had worked and made an abject apology citing poor judgement. No one commented and the mundane postings settled down to the infrequent rate of more innocent times. 'Thank god we're back on track, for a moment there I started picking the fluff out of my belly button...' (170)

I was interesting to see the defence mechanism in action.  It was not something I might have predicted in such a mundane discussion. It suggests that social cohesion is the most likely core purpose to all social networks and the strength of which is probably related to the controversy rate of discussion.  The more argument there is in a thread the less loyal the individuals are to it. Which is probably fair enough.

However, there is another possibly more chilling fact about the this particular discussion which many of the its members may not be aware of. How 'innocent' is it?  Linkedin is a social networking site designed for business people. SO it should be expected that anyone posting on it will also have some kind of business profile.  This particular discussion was initiated by Sharon Lorimer, who is according to her web site, a photojournalist, a writer and businesswoman and founder of doshebu, a consultancy business dedicated to helping people settle in new countries.  At the time of posting she was organising a webinar on the Top 10 bars around the world.  So it is easy to see the hidden agenda behind the thread. Registrations for the webinar on her web site opened April 22.  She opened the thread on the Edinburgh Alumni linkedin page on April 22nd. By virtue of this post and by keeping up with it, she maintains her visible place as one of the 'top influencers' in the Linkedin group. This comment is not a criticism of Sharon in any way - this is the actual point of these networks even if the users are less conscious of it.

The Twitter and Facebook models are much more explicitly designed to facilitate selling, and I would expect most users to be aware of such a purpose.  Had everyone been aware of extremely low key Alumni discussion founder's hidden business agenda, would the discussion have continued?  Would there have been as many messages?  Would the users have felt more or less bonded? It suggests something about human behaviour and the market place:  That approvals and disapprovals do not have similar weights when it comes to making decisions.

So, why are users apparently less conscious of the selling purpose of these networks? It is, I suggest, that our ability to relate to people is connected to perceived 'equality', so we have a tendency to the mediocre in order to search for equality in partners.

Which brings me round rather too quickly to other intersting questions about personal relationships.  Is love better maintained through banalities or through controversies? Is the critical mind the most unlovable of all?

Hate Facebook? You're probably already on it.

2010-05-07T01:24:00.001-07:00

The news just in that Facebook members make up the 3rd largest country in the world. And it's growing.

Can't understand the fuss? Despise it just a little? Happy to turn your back on it?

It doesn't matter. The chances are you are already on Facebook, tagged in a photo as a father or a mother, as a brother or a sister or uncle or cousin, grandparent or grandchild, spouse or ex-spouse, school mate or fellow undergraduate, audience member or crowd participant, holiday lover or trek companion.

You may be listed in someone's list of people they admire or want to get to know. Even if your actual name is not mentioned on a Facebook page, a link to your blog or web site or business is probably posted by someone somewhere. If you have recently published a book or an article, someone has left a reference to it on someone's wall. And once out there, your name becomes the tiny key that can unlock all your secrets.

The reach of Facebook is truly frightening. And still the question has not been answered. Why do we do it? Why do we lay our hearts out on the table for everyone to see? Why do we publicise our histories, our loves and hates, our intentions, our intimate desires, for anyone to peruse?

This question was brought home to me in a dramatic way. I began a Facebook page out of curiosity, thinking vaguely that writers are supposed to help publicise their books this way. But I found the Facebook page strangely confusing and let it languish for several months. It wasn't easy to put up on my home page stuff that I wanted to 'showcase', and I didn't really understand how to use its functions.

What is showcased on a Facebook page is stuff other people put on your wall, mingled with transient remarks of your own, and the names of other people who might want to be your friends, but little of you is up front.

One day, I looked at my page, and, in the little box to one side where names of people who might want to be your friend pop up, up popped the name of my brother. I clicked on the link to admit him as a friend. Within a few minutes there were half a dozen photos of me as a child, old photos of me as an adolescent with my brothers and sisters on my wall all linked to his page. I was appalled. Because my brother has these photos on his site all neatly tagged with my and my siblings names, they were immediately linked to me, and anyone who viewed my home page would see them. Luckily I was on-line and I discovered I could delete them from my wall, which I did and then cut the connection with my brother. Phew! I wiped a hand across my brow. Saved in the nick of time, I thought. I spoke to my brother later who good-naturedly promised to de-tag me from any photos he has on his site, but still, he was mystified at my protest. Isn't this the point of Facebook? he observed.

I shouldn't be surprised. After all, I wrote the book about the Landscape, the social reality formed by our evolved personality fundamentals, explaining how we have this drive to not only connect with our community but to be defined by it. Our social status is not a simple static definition of where we are positioned in this community, but a living breathing real-time assessment of how others position you, and are positioning you right now. I don't believe the creator of Facebook consciously realised this when he produced his first draft of the network at Harvard. As we understand the story, the founders wanted to facilitate the frantic need of youth to be in on whatever is happening, to be in on the fashion, to be in time, at the place, on the curve of cool. In the parlance of my TO8, Facebook began by recognising the sunrise component of the Landscape; what the best people buy, where the best people go and what the best people think. As Facebook grew drawing in those who were not young, not students, not fashion followers, not creatives, but family people with dispersed relations, personalities and stars, decision-makers and political parties, threaded through with marketeers and taste gurus, it headed for the sunset region of the Landscape, where the jostling for a place in the ever changing arbitration of the crowd informs us of our social worth.

By laying out our 'wares' as it were, we hope we are freeing ourselves up to be recognised, accepted and have our standing in the community realised. But the danger is, of course, that the more there is of us the more reasons people can have for not liking us, not choosing us, not appreciating us. In the hubbub of social reality, it's easier to deny , to criticise, to dislike, than it is to approve and accept. The more you throw yourself up on the screen, the more you are opening yourself up to a downgrading, to a dismissal.

This stuff we hand over to the public gaze is the stuff by which people draw up opinions about us. Yes, we have experiences unique to us, and yes, we are unique hubs of connection by which we can share the world we inhabit with others, but in doing so we also become cut down to size, our selves graded according to fashions well beyond our contributions and control. More insidious perhaps is that by exposing our connections with the general and the ordinary, we weaken our powers to come out of the darkness and the unknown to challenge and to excite.

Facebook, at least for the moment, is existential. It is about the actual things of our personal world: the people we know, the things we like, the places we have been. But who will help us when it gets inside our minds. Already, social media has the capacity to oppress by way of gossip and personal criticism. When the means becomes the purpose, when the access becomes the content, then its effects will be merciless. Already, school children and TV Soap stars have been hounded into suicide by it, quite unable to simply cut out the connection, put the phone down, as it were. Social media has force and presence; it is real in the way that both its critics and perhaps some of its users fail to realise.

This is why I de-tagged myself and upped all security levels to 'myself only'. I do not want to give up my right to define myself as I wish to be seen, as I wish to be seen now. I don't want photos of me as I was: that child was long ago and in another country. If I reveal anything of me, it will be as I am now, as I am aiming to be next week. My thoughts evolve, my understanding evolves, my loves and hates evolve. I want Facebook to maintain the evolving record of who I am, not to fix me and my characteristics in time solely by the glimpses others had of me at other times of my life. But more than anything else, I do not want goods marketed to me just because an enterprise infers my interest in goods that someone else has bought simply because I know them. The available homes for those who do not want to be typecast are running out. I am reminded of Bradbury's Farenheit 451 where those who wanted to remember what humans had discovered and recorded in books were the outcasts of a manufactured present led by media commerce and social conformity.

SO there are privacy concerns now. Well, there always will be. We forget that Facebook makes its money by selling your network and the preferences that underlie it. You are what Facebook mines. With complete privacy, Facebook couldn't make money for its investors, in the enterprise for at least $700 million by all accounts. The more you wear your heart on your sleeve in your Facebook pages the more you make money for the enterprise. Facebook is not going to allow you to prevent that .

A little bit about sleep and insomnia

2010-03-31T04:43:00.001-07:00

There's a more obvious interpretation of why puzzle-solving improves with REM sleep, and why the mania of those who don't have REM sleep can't seem to shift easily into their own personalised, independent ways of thinking. During the day we are constrained mentally and physically by the orthodoxy of the social reality ( I wrote about this 'Landscape' of activity in my book, Essential Personalities, and why ....). During REM sleep, only about 80% of which, incidentally, can be associated with dreaming, the body is cut-off from this orthodoxy and starts to re-establish independent thought. It's not that we are more clever after REM sleep, it's that we are less inhibited.

There's a good clue that REM sleep embodies rehearsals of waking activity: the body becomes rigid, while remaining open to sense data. This rigidity would be required to prevent the REM sleeping person from acting out his waking activities as his brain re-capitulates them, and at the same time remaining alert to problems in the environment.

I'm not at all sure that sleep researchers are really moving in the right direction when they concentrate on cognitive features at the expense of personality. Sleep-deprivation causes more personality disorders than just about anything else. It is more clearly connected to the juncture of our overal personality with the social world in which we are embedded.

Interview with whohub

2010-03-04T04:34:00.001-08:00

Kind of fun to do.

Read my interview on Whohub
Ask my opinion about something:

On sex differences between men and women

2010-02-23T01:06:00.001-08:00

from the notes to Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents
ISBN 9780954483142
Gravity Publishing
Amazon http://tiny.cc/paeGD

"The sex differences between male and female brains are getting harder to define. Women are as good or better than men at mathematics at school and college. The US National Science Foundation has found that in all science and technology fields 51% of Bachelor degrees were awarded to women in 2005. Researchers at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and Public Health found in 1998 that women cause the same amount of car accidents as men. In popular culture, women now drink and get drunk like men (for example, the British National Office of Statistics reported that in 2006 the rate of mature female deaths by binge drinking had doubled, in line with the same increase in male deaths - though still half that of men in numbers of deaths). They fly supersonic fighters and the space shuttle and have ambitions to be astronauts. (Even in traditional Spain in 2007, a woman, Carmen Guerra Garcia, graduated a brilliant first in the elitist aeronautical engineering school in Madrid out of 198 graduates, of whom 58 were women, and wants to be an astronaut.) They even play poker as well as men: Annette Obrestad, a nineteen year old Norwegian woman, beat 362 poker masters in 2007 to win the World Poker Championships. Men are not even the brightest: among the highest IQs on record is that of a female mathematics columnist, Marilyn vos Savant (228 the Guinness Book of Records once reported though this is now disputed). In 2008, 3 nations of the European Union had women as heads of government or State; 3 nations had a majority of female ministers in government and most others had over 20% female ministers. An avowed lesbian now (2009) heads Iceland. In an interesting role-busting move, Spain appointed a very visibly pregnant women Minister of Defence in 2008. Around the world, women also head governments or states, and the most powerful country in the world, the US, is contemplating electing a women as President (though didn't in the end). The triumph of women in occupations that traditionally require so-called male brains is growing. Among US women soldiers, who make up 14% of the active force of ½ million and are still barred from direct ground combat roles (in 2008), 21 of them are generals (out of 321). Even women's roles are taking on new meanings. It's worth noting that an atypical entry in the 2008 Miss England beauty pageant was Katrine Hodge, a member of the British armed forces, sent to fight in Irak aged 18 and decorated for bravery there. Miss Sukhinova, the Russian beauty who became Miss World in 2008, was a university student studying engineering."

Red Planet - high up on my B-movie list

2010-01-26T00:49:00.001-08:00

Red Planet - High up on my B-movie list

I never saw this in the cinema, but the other day I was given a DVD of it and I watched with something approaching delight. The film goes awry in several places: passages of clunking philosophical dialogue poorly delivered by veteran Terence Stamp (although conveying the right message), lots of random and unconvincing switch flicking in crippled mother-ship - also depicted as hugely spacious and as empty as church: some small plot errors, dodgy science thinking (e.g. a curious inability of Earth to determine oxygen levels on Mars when surface sensors have failed) and one glaring science error (geneticist listing the wrong letters for the DNA amino acids). These are quibbles only. What sci-fi film does not suffer similar problems? There's a long list of these even for Avatar. But all in all, the film delivers an interesting plot - how to get back home when everything has failed. Van Kilmer turns in a muted performance but a convincing, and even charming, role as systems engineer who's more more able than you might expect, reminding me somewhat of the astronaut Gordon Cooper, who was looked down upon by the test pilots of the first Seven because he was in Engineering, yet triumphed amid the mounting difficulties of the final Mercury flight. The deserts and vast canyons of Mars are presented well, and the director keeps to short clips of them so that they are never boring. The dialogue is curiously natural (I hope by design rather than accident) and homely for such an epic theme, drawing you in to the strengths and flaws of each character without big arrows pointing you in their direction. The robot Amee is perhaps the most convincingly done of any I have seen, as too was the final take off. While the mother-ship set design and special-effect driven events owed less to science than to B-movies, the handling of the smaller set pieces was excellent. Carrie-Anne Moss playing the role of Navy officer in charge of the mission well conveying the sex-equality in the armed forces that we are coming to expect and gives authority to the physical tasks of saving the day. This movie has little things to enjoy as much as the satisfying working out of the plot, easily outweighing the less successful elements. A pleasant surprise. This movie has found its way high up on my B-movie list.

Can we choose who we love?

2010-01-26T00:37:00.001-08:00

Hi Marcus,

First let me say I'm very impressed that you can write so much on an iphone (The message is tagged at the bottom as 'iphoned' - I assume that's right). Being slow to take up the new technology, I never realised that you can do such work on these new phones.

You've put your finger on a number of interesting things that I cover in the book you are about to get. Although I don't go into full details on every aspect of this issue because a) the book is an introduction and b) matters of space, it's great that we can fill in gaps via these messages. While I talk about monogamy from the point of view of why it has evolved, however, I didn't talk about polyamory, except only in the sense that polygamy is not evolutionary favoured, so I am interested in your thoughts about it. I am fairly convinced that most men or women who habitually seek other lovers do so from the protection of a background relationship which they seek to protect. In other words far from being secure, the many-lover individual is insecure and trusts little in what relationship security he actually has, which is often why he appears so successful; his partners believe he is in the market for stability and so are prepared to spend time on a relationship that, from the outside, doesn't look so promising. Few individuals are like Casanova. And even Casanova was not like Casanova. The real life man was frustrated in relationships as well as in his attempt to find patrons for his inventions and creations.

The need for security as a driving force in relationships needs to be broken down a little. I think for most of the time we interpret our seeking for a partnership as a search for security when really it is actually a search for liberty; a search for the environment in which we can be ourselves. When we have true liberty then we can make relationships with confidence and that is security. Of course, being free is not easy, and sex is fun. It is a simple matter to turn our chains into pleasures. But those who do so, and they have done throughout the centuries, never quite give the rest a trustworthy model. The majority do not take up the example of the polyamory, the Casanovas, because they instinctually look for the natural means to make relationships which we now have at our disposal - the systematic base to their personality that humans evolved to make longer lasting mating bonds and as a consequence longer-lived involvement in offspring.

Taking very large steps through the issues:

1. The physical chemical approach to love says a lot about us, but it also misses rather a lot. For example it does not explain -
why sex- obsessives are not relationship obsessives and do not seek long term relationships (even in the background),
or how love can be maintain through absence for years,
or how (as you have mentioned) people fall strongly in love by words only or why they commit themselves to stars they have never met,
or why people commit to love even under threat of physical pain or death (this doesn't make much evolutionary sense),
or why old couples still in love claim that they are just in love as they were at the beginning,
or why there is a direct relationship in culture, in literature and by tradition between love and children rather than love and sexual behaviour…..

The chemistry of love is interesting and certainly it does seem to play a role in maintaining attractions over time, but not even basic arousal in men and women is properly understood, and there is still the puzzle of initial attraction before any physical intimacy takes place. How are we attracted to individuals before things like oxytocin have been generated? How does love at first sight happen under this chemical scheme?

2. What everyone conveniently puts to one side in the desperate rush to corner the market in love drugs and similar is that love exists within a social context for a purpose. That purpose is to further our genes. In this day and age with much sexual activity downplayed to mere pleasure, studies of sex-based strategies of making partnerships can get confused with patterns of sex addiction. This is like studying human behaviour in
deprived urban areas without taking into account behaviours arising from drug use like gang violence and robbery. Although I will say that pleasure can play a role in female choice but more about this below.

3. You can't further your own genes by yourself. So the evolutionary origins of human mating has to involve a social component. What is that social component and how has arisen? I'll jump straight into the 'provider' question.
Principally, living in groups means that you give up some of your autonomy to the group, which means that your decisions about your life are not your own. Not only do your personal decisions play less of a straight role in your survival success, you run the risk of losing everything and your life to someone else's decisions. In the early hominid societies 'providing' meant playing a communal role in the efforts of the group to provide for everyone. In other words you being a provider is intimately bound up with your success not as an individual but as a team player within the social group. Furthermore, sex undoubtedly occurred before the individual (the male) was fully realised as a community member playing a significant role in the group providing effort. So in what sense does the provider scenario actually tell us anything about furthering our genes?

4. Is it all up to women? Female selection has been proposed by many, even Darwin himself, though many studies, and especially arousal studies clearly show, to me (this is my own interpretation, it has not been suggested by anyone that I know), that women may prefer not to make that decision; prefer not to have it be left up to them which man to choose, whether or not he may be a provider. This may even be the origin of the alleged rape fantasy that some women have reported. Because choosing a mate is difficult and one needs as much information about the other as possible, and that studies which don't include all the important information about a mate with which we like to make our decisions give slanted results.

5. So what could that important information about prospective partners be? Now we can get deeply into altruism, empathy etc. But to keep things short I will state that empathy as normally described does not exist. How can we understand another individual with a distinct set of chromosomes? We should be very dissimilar to one another, yet we are not. We are limited in what we can and do express and these limitations do not appear to be related to particular genes. We vary as individuals in ways not predicted by genes. What are these variations? They are variations in how we coordinate minds and actions; they are variations in how we make decisions and to what we like to strive. So, given that we are variable at some higher level than the physical, how do we make come to an understanding of these variable humans? We put ourselves in another's shoes and then adjust for the variation. The person we understand the most easily is someone like us, indeed our twin. Other variations react to us and we to them in systematic ways.

6. This set of systematic variations in the human personality is what make big social groups possible. Before it arrived, humans groups were small and in-bred. Variability in type over and above genetic make-up is what lets us escape the close kin-related groups and allow us to fall in love with foreigners and outsiders, and thus enhancing the health of the group as well as creating a wider sense of kinship.

To summarise. Both male and female select mates through similarity, through health, through social competence, through kin. If the choice can be made in this order then we prefer to do it that way.

Andrew

Empathy does not exist

2009-12-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

Empathy does not exist.

Part of my thesis (Essential Personalities ISBN 9870954483142) about the human personality rests on the idea that empathy, for many evolutionary reasons, does not really exist. We understand others by first putting ourselves into the same situation and then performing a 'type' conversion. Personality types do the work of assessing what a person is going to do. Here below is some little bits of evidence against empathy truly existing in humans.

These notes are borrowed from the Michael Shermer 's ' Skeptic' column in the Scientific American, May 2006, entitled The Enchanted Glass.

'In one College Entrance Examination Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, less than 1 percent rated themselves below average in "ability to get along with others," and 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent.

In one study on Stanford University students, when asked to compare themselves with their peers on such personal qualities as friendliness and selfishness, they prerated themselves higher. Even when the subjects were warned about the "better than average" bias and asked to reconsider their original assessments, 63 percent claimed that their initial evaluations were objective, and 13 percent even claimed to be too modest.

In a second study, Pronin randomly assigned subjects high or low scores on a "social intelligence" test. Unsurprisingly, those who were given high marks rated the test as being fairer and more useful than those receiving low marks. When the subjects were then asked if it was possible that they had been influenced by the score on the test, they responded that other participants had been far more biased than they were. In a third study, in which Pronin queried subjects about what method they used to assess their own biases and those of others, she found that people tend to use general theories of behavior when evaluating others but use introspection when appraising themselves. In what is called the introspection illusion, people do not believe that others can be trusted to do the same: okay for me but not for thee.'

It is really the absence of empathy rather than its presence enables us to be fairer and more generous towards people than we should be given our self-interest. Invoking empathy as the tool with which we can form larger and larger community groups doesn't really work if we are all unique individuals. The mental processing required is too great. Whereas imagining what we would do in the place of the person, and then tweaking it according to clues about their type works better. Of course, there have to be types to begin with. So what would contribute to the creation of human types? See next instalment.

keywords: empathy, personality type, introspection

Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren - What are they really like? Their personalities in the TO8

2009-12-12T06:01:00.000-08:00

I should explain a little more what the lines below represent. I know nothing about Tiger Woods except what appears in the golfing news from time to time. I don't play golf and have no interest in it. When Woods' story broke people who know me and my work asked what was going on since his behaviour seemed very much out of sync with what people though they knew about him.

It turns out that his public profile was very much a manufactured by the commercial interests who were very keen to present Woods as a clean cut golfing machine. Continually surrounded by the sponsors entourage, Woods rather cynically allowed his sponsors to hide his behaviour not only form the public but from his wife.

Trying to delve beneath the surface, I assembled some thoughts from my book in order to show in an abstract way what Tiger Woods is likely to be like in reality, and if it all sounds after the fact, it is only because you, the reader, now know more about his real behaviour than you did before. ( In fact, I wrote this blog last week before the news of his break from golf appeared but only sent it on-line at the weekend, when everyone knew his - predictable from my point of view - decision.)

The point of my work is precisely this: to discover the natural underlying trends and behaviours in individuals. When the public face does not fit with the truth, the deception - pretty unimportant in the case of a golfer - can turn rather more unpleasant in politicians and those who govern us. Because personality deception in a democracy serves only dominant interests and ruins effective representation.

Well, OK, here are some personality secrets as a seen by the TO8. I've kept to an overview and to sketching out the architecture of decision-making for the general reader. There are other things to say, but that's not my brief here.

Tiger Woods was born in California on 30 december 1975. Although the cusp between TO8 Days 52 and 53 occurs at around 08:00 hrs local time, his birth at around 10:50 pm makes him definitely a Major 7 and a Minor 5.

Let's consider the Major first of all.

A Seven, at the fertile pole of the axis of self-realisation, always has the makings of a person of destiny. The forces of cultural history and the sense of the inevitable progression of events can easily penetrate a Seven and energise the spirit. Once gripped by the perception of destiny the only important decision for those of this type is whether to fall in with the destiny at all costs or to reject it.

Whether or not those of the Major 7 have woken up to or are ready to accept the idea of their personal destiny, they respond to the idea of playing the long game (sic), and are more interested in where life is taking them than in where they are now. (Golf, though tame, is an existential analogy to this process. Since I don't know the game, I was rather unaware of how closely these words apply to the game of golf itself. But it's fun to follow it through (sic)) They are buoyed up by the continual activity of chance and are certainly seduced by the impersonal nature of accidents introducing new options, taking the rough with the smooth with equanimity. Even so they accept repetition as long as they do not also feel they are being held back from the flow of events by it. Sevens are sensitive to be being 'washed up' or excluded and lack of forward progress will inevitably put them into ruts, straightjackets, or depression. Though, in the end they are irrepressible.

Sevens like to accept and enjoy people for what they are and have little interest in criticising or controlling them. They readily feel a sense of brotherhood with fellow travellers, and individualists who break the trust of such groups will make them angry. Indeed, any kind of personal criticism coming from selfish interests easily breaks their momentum.

Major Sevens are driving onto the Landscape of social reality governed by 1 - the dawning of new ways and means, restlessness, change and the beginnings of journeys. Whereas Threes, at the potent end of the same axis, will use anything external - even to the extent of manufacturing their own pathways - to lever themselves onto the Landscape and become engaged with its reality, Sevens put into use their inner resources, their aboriginal energies to follow any opportunity they feel will justify their lives, which means that although they are content with repetition, they will suddenly jump tracks or reverse expectations.

Sevens' intelligence will initially follow precedent and habit without fuss, but with an ability to see the full reach of problems and the ability to use tools and ideas that seem oblique to the point to others but which will turn out to be just what is needed. At some point, if the return they expect from their labours doesn't come, they will change tack, which is as likely to take them away from solutions as to find the creative answer they are looking for.

Sevens are personality-rich individuals, seeking frankly what they want, often colourful, with appetites for humour, wit and the chance developments of contact with the shakers and makers of society, relishing deep friendships of those like themselves. But Sevens have reserves of anger which either eats them up unexpressed, or they direct unpredictably towards demolishing the defensive attitudes of others. Attack from a Seven is most often for the purpose of occupying the high ground. If they transgress the laws of life they tend to seek forgiveness not from whom they've hurt particularly, but by paying a sacrifice of what they hold in high esteem.

Now, the Minor 5

Those with the Minor 5 are sociable, human resource people, oriented towards community solutions and solving problems people tend to have with the conduct of their lives in their relations at work and in the political conduct of the society in which they live. They make friends easily among their equals and neighbours and are attracted to competent socially mature individuals who know what they want out of any situation. Minor Fives like decisions made and speculation and doubt swept away. They tend to trust more than they should, expect more reward than they often get, and can be manipulated face-to-face more easily than they want. They tend to appease rather than insist on their rights, and lose respect for individuals who act selfishly. At the same time they miss out on expressing their own desires sufficiently. They place emphasis on background and on status, and do not readily listen to strangers or inferiors as they go about their daily business.

What themes are emphasised for Tiger Woods at this moment depends on his age. At 34 years old he is about to enter his personal developmental phase of 7:1 (occurring on or around Dec 15th). Since his Resolutions are 1:1 (both his 7 and 5 resolve to 1) it would seem that Tiger is enter a point of extreme, where the attractions of change and new adventures may overwhelm his life.

What is especially interesting about the situation is that his wife Elin is exactly the same sign. She, born 1/1/1980, Stockholm, is also a Major 7 and a Minor 5. They are a perfect match in every respect except in their personal developmental phases. At age of 29 she is currently in 6:2 (which she entered on or about Nov 17th), the axis of independence, resources and duty, where 6 antagonises the deep-seated drives of 7. Although they are precisely similar people and are likely to have a lifelong loving bond, Tiger and Elin also need to be aware that there is a longer wave of disharmony between them in the background, where notions of independence and self-reliance will affect both her and Tiger from time to time.

Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents

ISBN 9780954483142

Gravity Publishing, UK, 2009

+44 7092 119084

see it here on Amazon http://tiny.cc/paeGD

or read the beginning chapters here on Scribd

you can Twitter Andrew Kennedy here

or read his blog here: http://ankank.blogspot.com

Do we need a new parenting framework?

2009-10-20T01:28:00.001-07:00

These comments were inspired by Drexler's book Raising Boys Without Men.

I'll level with you. I've not read this book, but I am very familiar with the argument. I wrote a book myself http://tiny.cc/paeGD about why we become parents, and why monogamy has evolved as the parenting option of choice for humans. Certainly no one could deny that being a single parent is task for heroes, and that to be in that position by choice rather than by accident demands a huge amount of self-knowledge and self-belief. But that is far removed from any kind of proof that the single parent option is just as good as the traditional version. It is different, that is all.
To find evidence that the dual parent monogamous option is still the more natural choice, you only have to see or to ask what children themselves want, and to consider how they behave when they have that option and then have it taken away from them by separation, divorce or death. Children want the father and the mother, and if only cultures did not distort the roles that each parent adopts within the parenting framework, I think we would see quite clearly the kind of balanced acquisition of world knowledge that two parents bring to the family. Tell lone parents to do without anything related to the other 'half' of the mother/father pair and they will laugh loud and long. Lone parents spend a lot of time trying to surrogate the input of what's missing. Why should they bother? Because the instinctual balance is a definite construct in our social reality. Humans evolved monogamy because it worked better. The longer lasting and more profound relationships that mates learned to enjoy had small but distinct survival advantages over early humans who were most probably what we might term autistic in their social behaviours. It was only after the human personality changed sufficiently for individuals to find and make relationships with equals outside of their kin-based social groups did humans acquire the social cohesion that gave us our cities. The mother/father basis for family is why humans are successful creatures. Even homosexual couples, unconsciously or not, often mimic both aspects, and while humans may evolve a different or more productive framework for the family in the future, here and now, both children and parents prosper within the fertile mother/father umbrella. I say, both children and parents prosper, because I believe this to be so. Parenting is for the parents as much as it is for the children. We cannot have a liberal and creative society without the profound reproductive act and all that it requires providing its gravitational centre. The problem, as always, is how to find the appropriate partner, not to do away with him or her. Making a stable and long lasting mating relationship is a political act and to deny it is a revolution in the wrong direction.

Why royalty payments for electronic texts should rise dramatically

2009-10-16T05:32:00.001-07:00

In response to the announcement by Google of its up and coming sale of e-books.

The problem for all authors is royalties on these e-books. Publishers grab the electronic rights of authors - aware or not - while there is no attempt on publishers behalf to clarify just when and how the royalties for these rights are to be collected and paid, nor do they clarify the territories and the rights of those respective territories in which downloads are made. I doubt a single author has seen any royalties from purchases for Amazon's Kindle nor will they have seen the numbers of downloads over any accounting period. Amazon keeps this information to itself. The more widespread e-readers become and the more territories merge into one great sea of activity, the more writers will loose on the income due to them.

In the old days, a royalty reflected the cost of a physical copy of the author's work, and was generally low in relation to sale price. In the days of electronic copies that cost almost nothing, the author's royalty should vastly increase in relation to sale price since there is no cost to the publisher. It would be fair if authors and publishers shared the income equally. Do we see this trend?

I would not advise any author to cede their electronic rights to any organisation, be it Amazon, Google or any other publisher, unless and until these publishers declare transparency about come clean about royalty payments for all e-texts, and their necessarily increased value to the author.

to talk memes we need to talk personality

2009-08-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

In response to Susan Blackmore's article in the New Scientist at http://tiny.cc/fjpfO

I would like to make some observations about the over-rated idea of memes.

Memes are an exciting idea, but, as an analogy to genes, the idea is often driven far beyond what sustains it. Memes can be any language sentence, or the accent it is spoken in, any group noun, or indeed any name, any encapsulation of activities, any cultural definition that another person agrees with, any object or image. A meme is anything that can be reproduced.

Professor Blackmore, who has made a career out of memes, thinks of them as a new kind of replicator, and that they function, or will function eventually, as additional agents of human evolution along with genetic reproduction. Because, however, it is unclear what a meme is, there is often confusion between whether people like Professor Blackmore are saying that brains use memes to further their interests or whether memes use brains to further their interests; just as 'selfish genes' do. Sometimes it is said that memes are all we think.

Just as there is a confusion about what a meme actually is, there a confusion in seeing how it is transmitted, and specifically between the meanings of replication and reproduction. Viruses replicate their entire gene set in their 'offspring, but humans do not replicate theirs in sexual reproduction. There is a touch of the self-serving convenience when memes are claimed to live on by doing (at least) both. So when Professor Blackmore talks about replicators, in the context of memes, what form of transmission is she really talking about?

As memes are imprecise constructions, so too is the idea of the individual upon which they (eventually) act. Even if memes are cultural entities whose first medium of effect and replication and/or reproduction is broadly cultural, they must eventually descend into the human being host for their continued life. Again we find a certain confusion over the meme's life-cycle. Memes not only enter the brain, they are also created in the brain. Memes not only stimulate change and evolution in themselves and in collision with others, they negate, nullify and otherwise destroy memes as well. When commentators describe the life of a meme there is a sense of circularity about it which is not at all the same thing as a cycle of birth and death.

Not only does the concept of memes suffer from a lack of a medium of transmission independent from it, it suffers greatly from a lack of understanding of the individual on whom they are supposed to work.

If, before we embrace an assumption about culture and its memes dominating human mental life, we consider a further dimension to the evolution of the human personality, we can give the notion of memes a more solid foundation and understand more clearly its medium of transmission. If it is the case (and I argue this in Essential Personalities, and why humans discovered love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents, UK, 2009, ISBN 9780954483142) that an individual's principle evolved task is to find an appropriate mate with whom to raise it's offspring, then memes, if they can be said to exist at all, can be determined more by the shaping given them by individual brains than by culture, and rather than being whatever we want them to be, memes become clearly divided into types that have real lasting impact for the individual, and types that exist only virtually with brief lives and no repercussions for individual survival.

Thus, we should be able to find transient 'false' memes, generated by cultural purposes for the benefits of power sources, and whose existence is merely a matter of definition, and 'true' memes whose existence further individual interests. In this sense, the 'third replicator' sought by Professor Blackmore lies in whatever generates our personalities and not in the envelope of culture.

The US Astronauts and the Apollo 11 team in TO8 terms - landing on the moon with a Four

2009-07-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

I looked back at my files and have taken this excerpt from a paper I wrote for my web site in 2002. In it, I analyze the US astronauts. Here is a section on the Apollo 11 moon landing team.

"Among the total of 36 astronauts chosen for the three US flight programs, the Minors represented were: Twos – 10; Eights – 7; Fives – 6; Fours – 4; Threes – 4; Ones – 3; Sevens – 2. No Minor Sixes at all. Not really surprising since 6 is antagonised by 5 and thus likely to lead to a little too much vocal criticism at the expense of the team dynamic. The Minor 8 was initially well represented, but two of them didn't fly a mission (Slayton, See) and a third, Aldrin was an 8:8 and thus his Minor 8 was more like a Minor 7. So only 4 true Minor Eights flew a mission. 8 is the Antagony to 1, but the team dynamic of 1 is more about the synergy of parallel paths, so the effects of the antagony of 8 to 1 can be overcome relatively easily in the intellectual plane inherent in 8. All the same the paring is unstable, and in fact NASA paired a Minor 8 with a Minor 1 only once in the 20 flights. No Major 7 was ever picked, and only two of the 36 had the 7 Minor.

The dominance of the Landscape Majors

Overal, the Landscape Major signs predominate. We might expect 25% out of a random selection. But NASA picked twice as many: 56% in the Gemini, 50% in the Apollo. Obviously you want quick rational minds who can fulfil a plan, follow instructions, keep their minds on the practical issues and are team players. Powerful and energetic and rational Threes, who resolve to the Landscape sign of 5, are also strongly represented. Ones, Fives and Threes commanded every mission in the Gemini and Apollo programs but for three flights out of a combined total of 20 (and two of these were commanded by the same man - Neil Armstrong), and half of all flights were commanded by Ones.

NASA's preferred Major and Minor combinations among the astronauts were: 1:2 (six selected) then 6:4 (three ), then 1:8 (two), 3:8 (two), 4:8 (two), 5:2 (two), 5:5 (two).

In the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs out of the 15 astronauts who flew more than once, 9 had a Landscape Major ( 1or 5), and two had the Major 3 (resolving to 5) :
Four Flights:
John Young - 5:3;James Lovell - 1:4
Three Flights:
Thomas Stafford - 5:2; Wally Schirra - 1:1; Eugene Cernan - 1:2; Charles Conrad - 3:8; Dave Scott – 3:8
Two Flights:
Frank Borman – 1:2; Virgil Grissom – 1:5; Gordon Cooper – 1:8; Richard Gordon – 5:5; Neil Armstrong – 4:3; Michael Collins – 6:2; Sam Shepherd – 6:5; Buzz Aldrin – 8:8

The Apollo Flights

If we look at the Apollo flights where the crews were made up of three astronauts the picture is even more clear. NASA's job was to find, out of their already selected group of astronauts, crews who could best fulfil the flight plans for each flight.

Apollo 7 – first Apollo space flight in Earth orbit. For the crew of any first flight, there is a tight schedule, checking the basic systems, being alert to errors and with a courageous but pragamatic attitude to the new risks of the new spacecraft. This was a relatively long stay in space (10 days, the length of time of the planned Moon missions) with a full program of testing to be done. There was also the testing of live TV transmissions so a certain amount of personableness and ability to communicate was probably a factor to consider. NASA selected a 1:1, 3:3 and a 1:2. No Major Antagonies and while a Minor 2 might antagonise a 3, the double 3 in this crew has a Minor more like a 2 than a 3.

Apollo 8 – this second flight went to and orbited the moon. In this mission, the first manned flight to leave Earth orbit, all the mechanical and support facilities had to be critically tested, along with additional techniques of navigation and communication. NASA chose a 1:2, 1:4; 6:7. It's worth noting again that none had a Major antagony with another and that there was no Major or Minor 5 to antagonise the 6.

Apollo 9 – Another long flight in earth orbit testing all the flight hardware and techniques for the full Lunar mission. The Lunar Module was flown for the first time and tested, clarifying the full range of roles that each team member had to fulfill. Again, energetic and critical minds were needed to follow the strict program of examination and testing. NASA chose a 3:1, 3:8, 6:1. The two Lunar Module pilots were the 3 :1 and the 6 :1 – perfectly compatible.

Apollo 10 – This went to the Moon in a full dress rehearsal of the Moon landing procedures. A complete simulation of a moon landing was done in Moon orbit. This was to be the final flight before the actual moon landing, so all systems had to be examined for any potential pitfalls. NASA chose a 1:2, 5:3, 5:2. In this case the Lunar Module pilots were the 1:2 and the 5:2. Again, perfectly compatible with eath other, although the commander embodied an internal conflicts with his Minor, making him naturally suspicious of the arranged flight plan and ready to let a function drop if it conflicted with the fundamental goals of the flight.

Apollo 11 – I'll discuss this unusual flight at the end.

Apollo 12 – After the success of the moon landing, this flight extended the mission parameters. NASA chose 3:8, 5:5, 1:2. As an interesting aside, the reason why there are few pictures of the surface activity was that Al Bean (1:2) accidently pointed the video camera at the sun, burning out the tube. He subsequently left the Astronaut corps to become an artist, painting imaginary pictures of astronauts on the moon.

Apollo 13 – was to have gone to hilly country for a geological mission. NASA chose a 1:4, 5:7, 6:4, replacing at the last minute a 1:2 (neatly compatible with both the 1:4 and the 6:4), with a 5:7. The recent film Apollo 13 quite neatly expressed (by accident perhaps) the Antagony of Swigert (5:7) to Haise (6:4)

Apollo 14 – A great deal of rock gathering and instrument setting. NASA chose a 6:5, 4:5, 5:2. The LEM crew where the 6 :5 and the 5 :2. No doubt there was a certain amount of critical tension in the air between them all. Shepard, the first American in space, a 6 with his own internal conflict with 5, would be antagonised by the 5 of his LEM pilot. The Command module pilot was a 4, with his own internal conflict with 5, and who would have antagonised the Major 5. The 5:2 would have spent many 'happy' hours finding ways (through his Minor 2) of diverting these conflicts and making them work for the team. This mission, Apollo 15, and Apollo 13 were the only times NASA produced a team with a Major conflict. And it was the single time that there was a Major conflict between those on the Lunar surface.

Apollo 15 – Greater scientific payload. Stayed twice the length of time on the moon as previous missions. 3 EVAs. First use of the electric cart to roam the moon's surface. NASA chose a 3:8, 1:2, 8:3

Apollo 16 – with more experiments to be done and a long surface stay time, NASA chose a 5 :3, 1:2, 5:5, with the energetic duo of the 5:3 and the 5:5 as the LEM team.

Apollo 17 – the final mission and the longest stay time. The team ranged over 30 kilometers. NASA chose a 1:2, 6:4, 3:5. The Lunar excusion pair were the 1 :2 and the 3 :5

The First Moon Landing

Apollo 11 – For this adventure into the unknown, where the moon landing and take-off had never been attempted before, NASA chose a team that stands out above all others. There was not a single Landscape Major or Minor in it. The landing, on 20 July 1969, took place in TO8 Day 24 which is the time of a 4:8, the axis of conceptual thought and spiritual identity. One could hardly ask for a better time in which to realise an action out of the soul of Man.

Never before or after did NASA choose a team that had no Landscape signs in it. But for this one exceptional mission, attempting what had never been attempted before, they chose a team that was neither rash nor bound by any rules of precedent; a team that could be intellectual and creative where necessary; a team that would be quick to react to the unusual and ready with solutions but one that would not be distracted by the exceptional or drawn into false trails and conclusions. The situation was no longer a limited experimental one that simply required experienced test pilots. Landing, performing tasks, launching, rendevousing, was a complex set of activities and routines performed as it where in a public theatre. There were, suddenly, many more dimensions to the adventure. NASA chose:

Neil Armstrong (commander and first man on the moon)– 4:3, Michael Collins (Command module pilot) – 6:2, Buzz Aldrin (LEM pilot) – 8:8

Armstrong
In spite of his occasional irritableness and sparks of curious reasoning, Armstrong's internal conflict reduces the likelihood of him giving rein to power plays as mission commander. His Minor 3 gives him mental speed and energy to see through to the solutions to any problem at the moment they are required, and it keeps his imagination in check, requiring him to find solutions through rationality.

Fours, anxious about doing the wrong thing in many everyday situations and about their place in the world nevertheless have a disregard of visceral fears normal to most. They are familiar with terrors but they are not disabled in any way by fears. They have an almost child-like trust that the outcome will be all right.

Armstrong's four gives him modesty in, and a certain amount of awe of, his role of the first man on the moon. The Minor 3 would help to counterbalance anxiety about his exposed position with self-belief. He may have been modest,but he would also have been satisfied. Even so, he still fluffed his important line - a very 4 trait. He meant to say 'that's one small step for a man..." You can hear the pause while he ponders about correcting the error. Fours have a tendency to over do, which, coupled with his Minor 3, would give Armstrong an extremely controlling attitude to his work. He would have been able to take any of his team's roles and fulfil them completely. He's extremely visual, with an uncanny ability to see through illusions to what things really are. Nevertheless, he would sometimes be apt to be more definite about conclusions than the evidence warranted. During the final stages of the descent to the moon, Armstrong took manual control of the LEM and moved it forward out of the large crater that the landing program was taking them into. He landed with only a handful of seconds of fuel left before he would have been obliged to abort the landing. Hence the remark by the Capcom in Huston after Aldrin (the LEM pilot) had announced that they had landed - "..You've got a bunch a guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again.."

NASA must have recognised his tendency to leap to conclusions, for on his previous Gemini flight they paired Armstrong with a 3:8 (who won't take any overbearing attitudes to data or to conclusions). The flight ended in near disaster shortly after their craft had docked with an Agena rocket. Then, Armstrong had to take manual control of the uncontrollable spinning capsule and make the first emergency landing of a US spacecraft. Later, on Apollo 11, NASA balanced Armstrong with LEM pilot Buzz Aldrin (who had on an earlier Gemini Mission flew with Jim Lovell, a 1:4).

Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin was the only 8:8 ever chosen, but the perfect adjunct to Armstrong. An 8:8 would have put all emotion behind him while he focussed intently on mental calculation and precision of action. An 8:8 would never take anyone's word for anything, and prefer to look over and correct all data given to him, and to ponder all instructions for faults. At the same time, the double sign would give him a sense of awe and wonder at his mission and the at the mystery of the human experience that created it. He would be self-conscious about trying to find a place for that experience alongside his need for peace and contentment in his private world.

Aldrin, living an intense life of the mind, would feel wholely responsible for the consequences of his every action, and alert to false readings and other signs leading him astray from the objective. But his double sign nature would make him perfectly accepting of the structure of the flight and the parameters within which he would have to be working, even though they would have decided elsewhere.

Collins
Michael Collins was a 6:2, embodying the complimentary axis to the 4:8 that united Armstrong and Aldrin. An organiser, filer, critic, keeping the external connections with the team balanced, Collins would have tended to be the day-to-day spokesman of the group and self-appointed diary-keeper, keeping tabs on the agenda and making sure the team had all the resources they needed. (It is worth remembering that although Armstrong was the mission commander, he had been a civilian test pilot , and there may have been good reasons for selecting him as the first to set foot on the moon, while both Aldrin and Collins were Air Force officers). During the moon landing, the image of the 'father' staying aloft in space keeping an overal eye on things while his 'children' headed off to explore was probably not far off describing the inner personality dynamics of the team.

Commentary

All three were born the same year (1930). Aldrin the eldest (b. January), then Armstong (b. August) then Collins (b. October). During the Moon landing there are some interesting points to make about the Essential Year for each of them.

Aldrin would be in the period of 5:4, while both Armstong and Collins would be in 5:3. While the TO8 period during the mission was 4:8, the personal dominance of 5 in their Essential Year's would foster a sense of communication, team spirit and belief in the outcome, but, at the same time, intensifying their perception of the individual roles each of them had to play. But 4 antagonises 5, so Aldrin's mood, however, would have been tinged with private concerns about his contribution and status within the team, and his feelings of self-reliance would have been taking a knock.

Certainly, as an 8, Aldrin would have been less than comfortable with the media circus in the flight's aftermath. The idea of roaming around the world on show, especially cooped up in the quarantined caravan, must have been a nightmare for him.

Collins, on the other hand, a 6 (resolving to 8), would have taken to the publicity whirl with a graveness that belied his joy at the recognition from all and sundry. He would have been able to place the mission in the grander scheme of things for Mankind and to accept his role as a participant. The mission would have marked a change in style for him (he grew a moustache in quarantine), and make him almost breathe a sigh of relief that he had got such an achievement under his belt and that now he could concentrate on a more personal agenda.

Armstrong, similarly, would have been quietly happy to accept the praise as his due, and he would no doubt think of the mission as a culmination of one phase of his life. His internal conflict would change over in the years to come (resolving to 6:5), and where he might have been worried about faults in his own character and work, he would, within his own discipline, become more of a critic of established ways and means. From here Armstrong would go on to teach astronautic engineering, no doubt giving his pupils some sparky opinions on the engineering that had got him and others to the moon and back."

Armstrong retains his internal conflict as he resolves to 6:5, so it is not surprising that he keeps retiring from the public attention. I saw Neil Armstrong in person in 1971. He came to Edinburgh University to give a talk about the future of engineering in Space. I sat on the steps of the crowded lecture theatre in front of the lectern not more than five or six feet from him. His internal conflict appeared to be evident even then: a desire to stand out and a desire to conform to the community dynamic.

The TO8 theory can be found in my latest book:

Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents

ISBN 9780954483142

Gravity Publishing

see it here on Amazon http://tiny.cc/paeGD

also at Waterstones

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/simpleSearch.do?simpleSearchString=essential+personalities%2C+and+why+humans&searchType=0&Image1.x=9&Image1.y=12

or read the beginning chapters here on Scribd.com

and you can Twitter Andrew Kennedy here

or read his blog here: http://ankank.blogspot.com

The best dating strategy for everyone

2009-06-26T02:02:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

This blog was initiated by Jay Cataldo (@JayCataldo on twitter). Jay has done a great thing in inviting others to contribute to his dating blog. He has been warm and generous with me especially when we probably don't agree that much about some matters, but to those readers new to my blog let me introduce myself.

I am an independent researcher into the human personality, as well as a qualified shiatsu practitioner. I've just published a book about my scientific and sociological look at how the human personality might recently have evolved, and it has led me to some interesting conclusions about how we mate.

Before I describe more about the book let me cut to the chase. The topic of this blog is to answer the question, What's the best dating strategy? I'm talking heterosexual here. We'll come to homosexuality in a moment.

According to my studies, the best dating strategy for both sexes (individual tactics come later) may not come as a surprise to many, and certainly not to your grandparents, even though it runs counter to the received wisdom of the day. But putting it into practice, beware. We have evolved the personalities we have because we are all designed to be parents in long-term stable partnerships. So with a successful dating strategy, the idea of children naturally follows. If you just want fun and to stay unreproductive, then anonymous orgies where no one leaves their telephone number behind are probably the best option for you.

Your best partner in every sense, soul and sex, is your personality 'twin' (who your twin is, we'll come to later) On average, you need just to meet more than 60 people of around the right age to stand a good chance of meeting your best partner, though there is a sliding scale from best to worst, and best in a theoretical sense doesn't mean that good relationships of all sorts cannot be made with those who are not necessarily your theoretical best. It's just that numbers count. We need to met a lot of candiadates to stand any chance of meeting our best partner. We should date fervently but mostly platonically, reserving sex for candidates who strike the same familiar chords in us as our own memories. Date as many people as you can one time only. Do not go steady over a long period with anyone, even platonically. Even the ones you like best you should see intermittently. You need to get involved with as many people as possible to increase the likelihood of finding someone like you of the right age, and who is available. The right in this context is someone less than 6 years difference in age or more than 12. Age differences count because personality evolves over time and asynchronous evolution may play havoc with the development of the relationships. Pay special attention to those who respect this strategy, since anyone who starts making demands on you and your time is unlikely to be your best partner. Using my book will considerably shorten this search time and entertain you at the same time.

For homosexuals, the above also applies, though the following provisos should dominate their strategy. Don't date (or at least consider as a potential long-term partner) anyone on the margins of society, who is especially iconoclastic in outlook or who talks his or her own language or who has particular and special demands of the social reality. Look more for those engaged in the community or with extended kinship groups, or who are engaged with the trends of social movement and change. This is not to say that you cannot have exciting even satisfactory encounters with those not in principle suitable for you, but if you are looking for someone to settle down with then you need to apply yourself to the strategy, because the disappointments damage clarity.

Now, the discussion.

What's the book from where this discussion is taken?

Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents

ISBN 9780954483142

Gravity Publishing

will be available from the 1st June 2009

see it here on Amazon http://tiny.cc/paeGD

or read the introduction on scribd.com here

http://tiny.cc/uYNm2

or read his blog here: http://ankank.blogspot.com

http://tiny.cc/vIdDf

Why can't we make it with just anyone? You'd think we could easily make a go of a relationship with anyone of the opposite sex and get our genes into the next generation. And yet look at what happens. At least half of us get it wrong judging by divorce figures. Is this really the best evolution can do?

Suppose we were all born with our private relationship-making gene. Think how confusing that would be. Each person having their own particular idea of who might be attractive, who might constitute a potential mate, and how to conduct themselves in a couple. It would be chaos. Even supposing matings took place anyway, since people would probably get their sex even amid the chaos, bringing up ones offspring would be highly problematical.

Moving out of Africa, early humans found themselves under a great deal of environmental stress. Ice-ages, and especially the 1000 year-long winter caused by a vast volcano erupting in Java about 70,000 years ago (the Toba event) put humans on the brink of extinction. A subtle change in his mating behaviors led to improved survival rates. What was this change?

We started to separate more clearly into types, and certain types became more attractive than others. We found strangers and those outside of our extended kinships possible mates, leading to greater health and general productivity for the group. Where before humans groups tended to be isolated by genetic and cultural factors, after the personality adaption arrived, separate bands of humans could more easily interpenetrate and merge. The survival rate improved; human numbers started to grow rather than remain hovering between growth and extinction in various ecological niches around the planet.

So what was this adaption? It was the creation of systematic personality types, where your personality 'twin' was the most attractive to you and someone who was more likely to stick with you. And so monogamy arrived, or rather, long term mating partnerships that saw offspring through to their own productive matings became more prevalent. We started to prefer making relationships with certain types of the opposite sex. We started to fall in love and stay with our mates.

So how do you find your personality 'twin'. Well you could read the book, or you could wait for the next installment of this blog.

ank

The social reality, tipping points, marketing, the TO8 Landscape and the creation of an entirely new social class

2009-06-10T04:30:00.001-07:00

In my book Essential Personalities http://tiny.cc/paeGD I examine the social reality in which our lives are embedded. I call it the Landscape in an analogy to the physical landscape out there. It embodies what humans actually do and it is the reference against which we 'measure' human types. We all have a drive to belong on the Landscape or react against it. Some types are more 'Landscape' than others.

I read with interest that the Harvard study of Twitter revealed that an actor has the most followers - over 2 million. Can it really be that these 2 million are hanging on this actor's every word or is something rather simpler happening? The Landscape drive makes people join a group or repeat an action simply and solely because others do it and no other qualitative reason. The knowledge that one person has so many followers is the draw that brings others in in precisely the same way that higher lottery prizes bring in more ticket buyers even though the odds generally get worse (depends on what lottery system is in play). To be part of what others are part of is incredibly strong. Landscape people go to some kinds of new movies simply and solely because they are popular - that everyone is talking about them, and that everyone they know has seen them or intends to see them. Hype about any action on the Landscape can work well when it gives the impression that 'anyone who is anyone' has done it or intends to do it.

A tipping point á la Gladwell describes the density of spread of something new at which joiners appear to become an avalanche. Marketeers search for tipping points in the sale of new goods. But they need to remember that the social reality contains non-Landscape elements as well as Landscape elements and these need to be taken into account if there is to be a genuine and deep take up of something new by a population. There are still those who resist mobile phones - I'm one of them. If marketeers want people like me to get one, then they need to assess off-Landscape needs, such as the drive to iconclasm, critical sensibility, non-orthodox usage and so on. Which, it has to be said, they beginning to. Apple saw the need first, others have followed (this is true of their iphone but also of the computers. I had no fun with my computers until I bought a macbook). Soon a full active life within society will be impossible without one. Then the mobile phone will be part of the fabric of Landscape orthodoxy, and not to have one means marginalisation and reduced rights.

The underlying needs of the Landscape to communicate one's place in it to others don't rely on any one process. The most broad-reaching method will win out, so each current method runs the risk of being replaced without scruple The risk that tipping point marketeers run is that the reverse is also true. Market something solely to feed the Landscape drive to adopt, and there will also come a point of accelerating decline and rejection - how quickly the old season's fashions are binned.

The moves of modern marketeers to deepen early adoption in new technology is aided and abetted by the social networking of the Internet, and I see, not exactly a disenfranchisement coming, but a distancing of many from the main lines of development, because of its emphasis. We are creating slowly but surely an entirely new social class. Neither slave, working, middle, upper, or aristocratic class, but one, living like a ghost in the social fabric, that denies the urgency of social interaction, refutes the common sense of the crowd, works often in solitary pleasure, follows its own pathways to happiness and watches at a distance the antics of the community.

In some ways this class lives analogously with the bums and hobos on the margins of civilization, but I think it will more closely resemble that community the Whole Earth Catalogue once spoke to - the self-resourceful. The members of this class will not be down and outs living in poverty. They will have resources and will interact on their own terms with the orthodox. But they will not be part of it and may well be the reservoir of important ideas about human life and the concepts by which humans live. They will have little marketing clout, and no one is going to produce goods or direct sales campaigns with them in mind. Yet they will be there like a conscience dropping in and out of view while the rest twitter to each other and shop for status.

Social networking, the human Landscape and cultural memes

2009-05-23T02:09:00.001-07:00

When I first started writing about the human Landscape and the social reality that binds us all together, social networking via the Internet did not exist. As the web sites came on stream I kept a cursory and mostly it must be said, derisory, eye on them. I didn't really see how a network could be formed without having a network to start with. Even though one's friends have friends, the fact that you could link through to those remote friends through your friends did not make them your friends and never would.

The Publisher of my book Essential Personalities http://tiny.cc/paeGD insisted that I join a social network like Twitter, which I did reluctantly but also out of curiosity. What would happen if I just began a Twitter account without making any connections at all? That is what I did. I invited no one to follow me and twittered away in obscurity. And guess what? I have no followers. Well, actually I have 6. 3 of those are businesses trying to sell alternative medicines. I twitter away regularly but no one comes to the source. The core of any network that I might make on Twitter is the network I already have by other means. In order to gain a network I have to implore people who already have twitter accounts to follow me (and most of my normal network do not have these twitter accounts or indeed any interest in them), or I have to follow others in the hope that they, out of curiosity, will follow me. In other words, the network that I could build would actually have nothing more driving it but a little curiosity, or at best some transient interest in what I say. My followers would not be linked to me by any other 'kinship', lasting bond, duty or need.

This makes me think of the notion of 'cultural memes' and how misapplied it is in the realm of social networking. What we have, expressed so neatly in Twitter, is a an analogy with force not with genes. In order for my tweets to be read I am obliged to read the tweets of other. My followers read my stuff and I read theirs. Forces in nature exist by exchanging particles. The social cohesion we find on the Landscape (my definition) of social reality is formed by the necessary exchange of little pieces of communication. The content of the communication is pretty much irrelevant since it is continuously replaced by fresh input: it is the fact of the communication which creates the cohesive force.

Twitter is a system of exchange, but there is an imbalance to it. Almost everyone follows more people than follow them. Look at Stephen Fry. An immensely popular intelligent and amusing character who draws over half a million followers but who only follows a tenth of that. He is a strong attractor. In the sense of force, he is a magnetic pole. Communication theory looks at him in the sense of a network node, but this is an incorrect view. He is, I think, a stabilizer in the social reality we belong to. It is the strong attractors like Stephen Fry who maintain the fabric of social reality and keep it (small c) conservative. Where there are few strong attractors there are fewer sources of the social force and hence social cohesion.

Thus social networks contribute to a well-defined Landscape and a social reality that may be strong but is also ultimately more conservative. The mavericks will be lost, shunted to one side, made impotent and market force, and the status that comes from knowing your place will triumph. If I were to be gloomy about the future, I would admit that this Landscape emphasis will end badly for us. I see it as laying the basis for a fascist future, not a liberal or socialist one.

Re: Request for a review copy: Briefing Leaders, by Andrew Kennedy

2009-05-11T07:33:00.001-07:00

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your message and your interesting comments, and I think you are right. Funnily enough for me the oracle had fallen by the way side. I think I OD'd on it. But your interest has revived me. There's just one thing I'd like to follow up on: the real-life occurrences. I reproduce a press release that Stella issued when the book was published. No one came forward at the time. It would be very interesting to hear about your own experiences and those of anyone you know who is a regular user of the oracle of readings that stand out.

A good question you made about births of boys and girls. As it happens, Boys are 30% more likely to be conceived, though they abort more often so the excess of male over female births is about 5%. Though more males than females die at almost any age under about 90 years old. I know this because I've been writing about it in another book.

25/01/2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BEGINS

HEADLINE: Heads up users of the Chinese oracle the I Ching. Are you one of 7 in a million?

Gravity publishing would like to hear from any user of the I Ching who has cast the rarest hexagram of the oracle, hexagram 2, The Receptive Principle, with all moving lines.

With his latest analysis of the I Ching, Andrew Kennedy, author of the new title, Briefing Leaders, to be published 30th January 2007, analyses the true odds of consulting the oracle by the traditional yarrow stalk method and concludes that hexagram frequencies are overestimated.

As a consequence of his analysis, the rarest Hexagram 2 with all moving lines appears to be even rarer than expected.

Anyone that consults the oracle once a day with the yarrow stalks should cast the rarest hexagram about 7 times in a million years. As a consequence, Kennedy says, that for the person concerned, '...To have a situation where all 6 yin lines were changing, moving, developing, would suggest that something really extraordinary was going on.'

As I Ching users are aware, there are several different ways of consulting the oracle, but none have quite the same probabilities as the traditional yarrow stalk method.

Kennedy says, 'Even for someone using the three coins method to cast the hexagram, this rare version of hexagram 2 would turn up only every hundred years or so. For it to appear in any one person's lifetime would be unusual.'

Gravity Publishing would like to hear from anyone who uses only the yarrow stalk method regularly if this hexagram has appeared in their castings, what were the circumstances of the casting and whether the readings helped to guide the questioner in resolving their problem. Email the publisher at editor@gravitypublishing.co.uk

ENDS

NOTES FOR EDITORS: Gravity Publishing is a publishing start-up aiming to develop its innovative e-reader and e-book publishing model as well as to publish a varied list that ranges from new reference works to fiction from the pen of Trevanian.

CONTACT: Please contact Stella at

editor@gravitypublishing.co.uk; tel: 07092119084

SENDER: Stella Whitaker, Editor, Gravity Publishing

#####

best wishes

Andrew

on 11 May 2009, at 15:20, Steve Marshall wrote:erHi Andrew,

I don't think my mind is yet made up fully on the question of Yijing probabilities, so always interested to read fresh ideas on it. I think it's important for people to realise that the yarrow method we have now, though yarrow is earlier than coins, is not necessarily the way the yarrow rite worked originally, since this is a misunderstanding that needs to be cleared away as it leads to people saying that the Yijing consultation method is meant to be asymmetric, when actually we can't be sure.

On the other hand, looking at it from your point of view, it is equally a good argument to consider that some hexagrams must necessarily be rare in arising (leaving aside the thorny issue of what 'chance' actually is). I have mostly used coins for a long time and overuse of the oracle has ensured that there's no line I haven't received many times (or, at least, such is my perception, I never find myself thinking, 'Oh, I haven't received that before'). So for me it is interesting to try to recall a time in my own experience when I was getting certain patterns for the first time.

Of course, from the argument that the oracle works by magic you simply get the hexagram you need and probabilities don't come into it. From this point of view discussion of them is misguided. But since we can't be sure it works that way either this discussion can never be ruled out.

It is always interesting to see someone attempt something different. No idea is completely wrong. Originally they weren't called yin and yang lines, they were 'yielding' and 'firm' (or soft and hard). So the baggage of yin and yang may not have applied so much. You make a good argument for why probabilities could differ, on the basis of feeling for yin and yang, and I can appreciate it. But how much is seeing a 'fit' because it's desirable to have one? It's difficult to take subjectivity away. I don't know whether girls have less chance of being born than boys, for instance, but it might be a place to start if one wanted to draw this kind of correlation. But then we have girlish boys and boyish girls, so the system isn't very exact and is always merging and blending (one of its qualities).

I don't know whether there will ever be a conclusive answer on that, but what I do know is that the heads side of a coin looks very much like the tails side of a coin, and any 'qualities' of yin and yangness I ascribe to it are in my mind. So..

all the best

Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew
To: yijingdao (a) googlemail.com ; Andrew Kennedy
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: Request for a review copy: Briefing Leaders, by Andrew Kennedy

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your message. Briefing Leaders is being re-printed this month so I'll make sure a copy gets to you. At best, I hope it will induce a wry amused smile since I know from your very fine web site you don't think there's much point to discussions about the probabilities of the Yijing, at worst, I expect your scholarship level to dismiss it as trivial and juvenile. The work unites two essays I wrote a long time ago, and no doubt needs some serious revision. If it had not been for a supportive friend, it may never have emerged into the light of day. Whether it should have done is up to people like yourself. Do I want to know? Mm...Yes.

In discussing the coin method, where yin and yang occurrences are equal, you make two points: they should be considered as equal (the presence of one implies an exactly equivalent presence of the other), and that to think that Yang should be more dominant is merely Western and a symptom of paternalism.

Reflecting on both points together, I think it is 'western' to see yin and yang as representing divisions of male and female in any sex sense. They are descriptions of energy states with analogous sub-sets (like female / male) attributed to them. Yang is ethereal, rapid, tenuous, comes and goes inexplicably; is the flash of inspiration and the unconscious creative act; is the higher actions of the mind (shen) and the corporeal souls. It is much more on the side of that very mysterious intuition or direct perception we tend to ascribe, in the western world, to the female. Yin on the other hand is the energy of containment, repetitive, regular, stable; an attraction to which all energy tends; it is self-ordering and spontaneously self-healing. These two principles are not, in my view, equal and opposite (a very western idea). Though they unite to form the created whole, it is yang that supplies the necessary push for change, while yin provides the substrate to which all energy returns; it is yang escaping from its containment and then returning to it that forms the tao. Unlike the coin method, it is the yarrow stalk method which appears to fall in line with these notions: giving the various occurrences as (rounding down) 44% for yin as it is, 5% for yin in motion, while yang as it is and yang in motion (a supercharged yang) are fairly similar namely, 29% and 21% respectively (according to my analysis which differs from the orthodox through the meaning of zero).

If we think of the yang in motion as being more likely to show the path, then the interpretations of the moving lines of the yijing become much more significant. The probabilities become an integral part of the readings.

best regards

Andrew

On 11 May 2009, at 09:43, editor wrote:

Begin forwarded message:
From: Steve Marshall <yijingdao (a) googlemail.com>
Date: 11 May 2009 06:06:32 GMT+02:00
To: <editor@gravitypublishing.co.uk>
Subject: Request for a review copy: Briefing Leaders, by Andrew Kennedy

I have just become aware of your title, 'Briefing Leaders'. As you may or may not be aware, Yijing Dao is the leading website for reviews of books on the Yijing/I Ching. You can check us out here:

http://www.biroco.com/yijing/

As you will see, it is an extensive website with in-depth reviews of books on this subject. I would very much like to review 'Briefing Leaders'.

all the best

Steve Marshall
Yijing Dao
http://www.biroco.com/yijing/

Coming to a book store near you, Essential Personalities...

2009-03-29T05:34:00.001-07:00

All about a method for understanding personality and the evolution of the parenting bond.

Well, the publication date of my book is finally settled: 1st June 2009.

Essential Personalities, and why humans discovered love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents. ISBN 9780954483142

I've taken some time to get to this point. The foundations of this book were written in the 1990s but few people understood what I was on about. Nowadays research into the human personality and how we make our partnerships is everywhere. There's hardly a popular science magazine that does not have an article or two on what makes love happen or on how much of our personalities is inherited. We are still locked into the idea that a bundle of genetic traits all mutually interacting cause personality when there may be other systems in the brain modulating how we are more strongly and coherently. One of the key theme of my book still remains unaddressed. Why do we stick in there as parents when almost every evolutionary biologist will tell us that men are born to spread their genes around and women are born to sneak in strong genes for a child or two under the noses of their protectors? When these beliefs are written as baldly as that, most people will murmur, Well wait a minute... And so they should.

I have surprised even myself by coming to the realization that personality cannot be analysed without considering this key theme of human relations. Even though it must be obvious that evolution has designed us to be parents, parenting gets a bum rap, as they say. Sociologists tell us that parents are off the hook when it comes to bringing up their children. Parents can do anything and it will have no lingering influence on their children. The older children get the more they become like themselves and the less what is going on in their surroundings plays a role. 'You have to take what you get.' one friend advised when I talked to him about having a child.(This was a from a repressed father who sat in the house all day smoking and watching television, and whose only idea of quality time with his son was to watch documentaries with him.) When we fail to agree with parents of my daughter's peers about how awful the current generation is, they mock us and ignore our opinions because we are, in their words, 'lucky' to have such a well-behaved child, and don't know the reality of it.

Do these parents really see their results as down to 'luck'? My wife and I consciously set about the job of parenting like a job, and devoted time and what's more an effort to find the 'right' answer to every problem. The result is a healthy fit child who eats everything, is never burdened by homework not done, can apply herself, accepts changes in her life with equanimity and has seen something of the world and the differences that can be found within it. This is not down to luck; it's down to parenting. 'Ah, you had it easy.' Really? Not that easy. It was a difficult birth. My wife breast-fed for a year which meant continual sleep deprivation for us both. Living in a tiny place far away from any family, and with only two grandparents living who for reasons I won't go into could not offer any time to us, we had no free outside help and no budget to pay for any. We didn't get a night out for two years after the birth, and that was something of a joke since we could hardly stay awake and were home long before mid-night. We tried not to fall into the allopathic medical traps set about children on every side from an early age. We spent agonizing hours buried in bureaucracy to find a local school she would be happy in, made friends for her, taught her imaginative play, dealt with her challenges to our authority with humour and good sense. We had such an equal presence that our daughter would call out to either of us a single word, made up of mama and papa together in any order. Mama-papa; she had no preferences. This did not happen because of luck but because of parenting, and we are now enjoying its wonderful rewards while other parents stand both mystified at their own 'bad luck' and dismissive of our effort.

'You have to take what you get!'

This is a cop out! This belief makes little sense both in the reality I experience with other people's children and from an evolutionary point of view. Yes, you have to pay attention to each child as they are, but a parent is not helpless. If parenting didn't matter, then all those teachers in class rooms around the world would not be tearing their hair out at the violent, disrespectful and disinterested children they have to teach everyday. Our own experience tells us that even among deprivation and the ghetto, parents or their surrogates can make the difference between survival and escape or not. Parenting is not a trivial matter. Even if the effects of parenting 'wear off' in later life - and I'd be the first to say that they should and will, if it's done right - it certainly works in early life when its effects on home life and by extension the community in which it is placed are so crucial.

So why is so difficult for scientists to find the evidence that it matters? Well, there is certainly a practical sociological reason. No one looks for evidence that might deny a social strategy demanded by economic circumstances. It is important for our society today, in the Western World, to remove guilt from parents who both may be obliged to work. We in the West devote more resources to 'forgiving' working parents than we do in helping them out with the difficulties of handling parenting and working. We prefer to say, for example, that women can have children and careers as long as bringing up those children is severely downgraded with respect to a career, while we say nothing about the father and his need to combine work and parenting.

Another reason for the lack of evidence is a good part found in the belief of unique individuals. Because individuals are considered unique then what they do in forming relationships is unquantifiable. They are always going to be doing strange little things that can't be expected, and every relationship would be a test bed for a new kind of relationship effort not precisely seen before. Concentrating on the genes, the traits they generate and the behaviors they imply can be dealt with by statistics. The failures of parents then are lost in the broad ranges of statistical variation.

We haven't yet got around to convincing people that every phase of parenting is both parent's job, and 'mam-papa' should be the true name of either parent to a child. But that state is so far from where we are. We so underplay and undermine the role of the father, and intensify and mystify the role of the mother that our work is really cut out trying to re-categorise parenting. It is so astonishing to me to hear fathers so readily patronising themselves by saying the child must have it's mother, when there is no evidence whatsoever that a child needs a father less than a mother. The only reason, it seems to me, that parents are so separated in the parenting role by their sex is because they are divided in their own relationship. Society approves this improper application of parenting attitudes because its cultural and economic forces tend to swamp the efforts of men and women trying to be really happy with each other and it has no other means to help them.

So this is where I am. Trying to understand how individuals can be happy with one another sufficiently well to make a parenting an effort that will add to their happiness.

Again, I have to emphasise, I didn't expect to get here when I began to look at human personality. But my discoveries of the patterns to human personality have forced this outlook. We have evolved a way of making deeper and better functioning mating relationships because that is how we increased the survival of our genes. We upgraded the 'software' of our minds without having to change the underlying hardware. It was this change, fairly recent, in my estimation, between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago that led to the explosive growth of humans over the planet. Suddenly humans found themselves more attractive to each other, more ready to mate with strangers and outsiders and to take on new cultural settings. As a result more humans mated. and more children survived. It doesn't take much increase of survival compounded to get to the 300 million or so estimated world population at 1AD, but without this move into essential personalities it seems likely that Humans would still be hovering on the brink of extinction because the climate had begin to seriously interfere in almost all his habitats.

Each of us has one of these Essential Personalities. If you want to find out which you have, well order the book from Amazon.co.uk. If you have any questions then leave me a message. I'll try and answer it.

29/3/2009

What's Wrong With the Kindle

2009-03-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

I don't own a Kindle, and I've never even seen a one in the flesh, but
I don't like it for the reason that book lovers won't like it. You
don't physically own your Kindle books.

I've never seen this criticism in print. Reviewers of the device may
simply not be aware that this is the case, or they are aware but don't
think it's a problem worth mentioning.
It is worth mentioning, however, and reflecting upon.

But first a preamble. A few years back I was involved in an e-reader
development project called Lector. Our goal was to produce a system of
distribution that prevented copying but enabled
purchase and use of books exactly like that of physical books. You
could buy and read a book from almost anywhere, and charge up your
reader with magazines and newspapers
from internet enabled vending machines. The KIndle has followed this
plan only with a wireless network as the distribution method.

So now the problem. You don't own your Kindle books. Sure you have
bought them. But you don't own them physically. They reside at
Amazon and you can only access them with your Kindle.
They are not things you can take anywhere or pass on to your children.
`your library exists just for you and no one else. Should Amazon
decide to charge you for use of the wireless network, you will be
paying a fee every time you browse your library.

A book is open to anyone who can read its language. This is not so
with the Kindle. The book is in a code that only the machine can
translate for you. Other books in different codes cannot be read.

Far from keeping reading an open accessible experience for all, we are
creeping back to Feudal times where the proprietors of the 'networks'
managed your life from start to finish.

We have entered the era of the resource proprietor, and that
everything we do will be rented and not owned and at a cost related to
our usage. Spontaneity and serendipity will things of the past.

20 March 2009

Joining PDF files on a Macbook

2009-03-17T12:52:00.001-07:00

Task: Join two PDF files together.

I was puzzled about this for a while, and ended up searching through
forums looking for an answer. I even experimented with Automator and
managed to produce a script that did the job (you have to use the
compression routine in order to save the merged pdf file). However, I
was not convinced that the resolution of the resulting PDF files was
the same as the original. I even downloaded a widget (PDF+PDF 1.2)
for the Dashboard that invited you to drag and drop pdf files to it's
interface and then merges them to a named file. How you actually drag
and drop files from Finder to the dashboard was not explained since
there is no cursor in Dashboard for moving things about. Cut and
pasting did not work either.

I then went back to Preview and trawled through the help files and
discovered an answer. To merge two files. Open both files in
Preview. Set each window to show the thumbnails. You can then drag
and drop pages from one thumbnail window to the other. To merge two
whole files, select all the thumbnails of one and drag them to the
last thumbnail of the other. Save the file. And there you are: a
new file with the additional pages tacked on. Beautiful.

17 March 2009

Why a shiatsu session from a trained practitioner is different to massage

2008-12-17T09:01:00.001-08:00

A client arrived at my consulta last week surprised to find Shiatsu did not involve a table, a bare torso and jars of fragrant oils. Later, out of curiosity, I googled shiatsu in my city and the first page of search results listed call girls advertising shiatsu as an erotic massage. My wife recently bought a session as a present for a friend at turkish bath here in the town and found shiatsu massage at a higher rate than a basic massage in the services offered. I saw a shiatsu practitioner leaflet pinned up in a telephone booth describing shiatsu as a 'therapeutic massage'. Beauty salons offering techniques of body toning and face massage now used the word shiatsu as if it were a discovery of beauty science.

Does associating shiatsu with massage devalue the technique? After all what is the definition of massage? 'Finger pressure' n(the English translation of the Japanese word 'shiatsu') undoubtedly falls under any definition one might make for massage, and the word massage is a quick and easy image for the general public to seize upon. Perhaps it is good for shiatsu to keep such company. On the other hand, massage is not shiastu for reasons I shall go into below.

The word shiatsu is also fashionable. It's a popular buzz word often used by those who have no real experience of the technique. I have seen chiromasajistas and beauticians who have merely done an introduction course in shiatsu go on to offer it as one of their techniques. Is there anything wrong with this? Should the general public care that those who have a very limited experience of shiatsu give some type of massage and call it shiatsu?

Well, Homeopathy, Acupuncture, Reiki, Alexander Technique, Iridiology, Reflexology, T'ai Chi, Yoga, all seem to have their own identities. No one confuses these techniques, and they are not devalued by their use in the wrong context. But what is Shiatsu's identity? There will be many opinions about what shiatsu is, and many ways to describe what it does, but clearly, what separates the technique from others and which especially divides the practice of the experienced from the inexperienced is the diagnosis.

What masseurs and shiatsu beginners do not do is diagnose the whole person and place him or her in the context of his life and loves, of his work and and play, of his elemental balance and inherited energies. You go to a masseur and say to the masseuer I have a pain in my neck. Neck? he says. OK. The masseur gets to work on your neck. There is no consideration of the gestalt of the client. A shiatsu beginner may well be talented in following the sequences he has learnt; he may well have intuition and empathy towards his client, but will that client have received all of what shiatsu has to offer?

From the point of view of traditional chinese medicine, the zen shiatsu practicioner sees lesions in the emotions emerging from the interior to attack our defenses and alter our behaviour, while the external influences of the elements or pathogens attack the defenses and invade the organs. Similar symptoms may have very different causes. It is only by examining the life that an individual lives can the experienced practicioner begin to see from where the external attacks may come or why there are long term disharmonies in the emotions. Identifying the correct patrons of disharmony, and helping the body reject them on the way to re-establishing its fundamental harmony is the true role of zen shiatsu, and this is only possible with the understanding of the whole person and his history. The final goal is a well-being that stays, a feeling of contentment that sticks with the person as his or her life proceeds.

So, to advertise shiatsu as massage surely undervalues what shiatsu tries to do. Certainly it is not surprising that the general public is confused not simply about what a shiatsu practicioner can offer but also about the differences of effect between a feeling of well-being and being well.

Letter frequencies and a dirty keyboard

2008-12-01T02:24:00.001-08:00

Judging by the dirt on the keys of my macbook keyboard, it seems the most popular letters in my world are, in order of dirt:

h,g tie for second place

t,d

k,l

The shift and enter keys are not clean but they are not as dirty as one might expect,

Here are some letter frequency lists taken from www.deafandblind.com

Letter Frequency in the English Language
^{e t a o i n s r h l d c u m f p g w y b v k x j q z}

Letter Frequency in Press Reporting
^{e t a o n i s r h l d c m u f p g w y b v k j x q z}

Letter Frequency in Religious Writings
^{e t i a o n s r h l d c u m f p y w g b v k x j q z}

Letter Frequency in Scientific Writings
^{e t a i o n s r h l c d u m f p g y b w v k x q j z}

Letter Frequency in General Fiction
^{e t a o h n i s r d l u w m c g f y p v k b j x z q}

Letter Frequency in Word Averages
^{e t a o i n s r h l d c u m f p g w y b v k x j q z}

Letter Frequency in Morse Code
^{e t a i n o s h r d l c u m f w y g p b v k q j x z}

Non-Plural Word Letter Frequency (18584 Common Base Words)
^{e a i r t o n s l c u p m d h g b y f v w k x z q j}

Plural Word Letter Frequency (45406 Common Words)
^{e i s a r n t o l c d u g p m h b y f v k w z x j q}

We can see that 'b', for example, my dirtiest key, is way down on all these lists. Since the dirt frequency on my keyboard bears no relation to any use frequency of english letters it may indicate something more interesting.

1. I'm a three fingered typist, which is true, and my typing patterns are thus non-standard, and which connects with point 2.

2. Dirty fingers. The letters used are mostly typed with my first two fingers. The 'e', usually listed as the most frequently used letter is about as weakly tainted as the 'w' next to it and I use my ring finger mostly for them both. The first two fingers are those with which we do most tasks. The ring finger is used the least in almost every action we perform with our hands so perhaps it's not surprising that 'e' is relatively clean. Probably the most pristine key is the right hand shift key, which I am never aware of using.

2. The pressure with which I hit the keys. The first two fingers are a great deal stronger than the others. So I'm probably using more force to impact dirt on the keys.

or, 3) letter frequency lists bear little relation to keyboard life. Discuss.

Macbook battery life

2008-11-03T02:15:00.000-08:00

Macbook battery care

Like many publishers, I use a Mac. After hardly two months of use my new MacBook battery run time was half what it was at the beginning.

This is what I recommend to anyone experiencing the same.

When the time on the battery reduces to half what it was, that is the time to condition the battery.

Un-plug the power supply. Run the computer down completely, saving your work at the last moment and letting the screen go black. Let the computer rest for at least 5 hours.

At your next work session, plug in the power supply until the battery is fully charged and then repeat the steps above.

When you want to boot up again, press the power-on button for at least 5 secs. This should re-set your power management settings. Put in the battery, plug in the power supply and boot up.

From time to time unplug your power supply to see what kind of life the battery is giving you. When it is down to about half what it was for the same work pattern, repeat the conditioning process.

You can work on the battery and then plug in the power supply many times in a row, but never plug in the power supply when the battery is running on reserve. This will reduce the battery capacity very quickly. If you need to keep working on the power supply then take the battery out. Then insert it when you are finished, unplug the power, and let the computer run down to the black screen

PLEASE NOTE, without a battery in place, the MacBook runs at about half its normal speed. Don't ask me why, ask Apple.

When you quit for the day, un-plug the power cable or take the battery out. Letting the computer sit plugged in overnight ruins the battery life.

This regime has kept my Macbook battery power around the 4.5 hrs it came with after several months use. It also improved the maximum 13 mins battery run time of an old ibook up to 2 hrs.

Let me know how you do.