Diamonds

So many people measure success in terms of monetary or material ownership. Those that have the most seem to be celebrated and looked up to, while those who have least are looked down upon and are not valued at all.
We own nothing. None of us owns a thing. We have temporary custody of all those things that we strive to gain and that is all.  Take away the material wealth and we are all the same; fragile and temporary biological entities, subject to the basic drives that make us survive and breed, thus ensuring the production of further generations.
I am nearer the end of my life than the beginning, and know that anything that I own will be passed on to my children or their children, should there be anything other than money, that they want.  Most of what surrounds me, will, like everyone elses' posessions be consigned to black plastic bags. The most valuable things, and really the only things that we can lay claim to, are our thoughts and memories. Inside my head is a catalogue of my life and all that is me. That is something that is hard to pass on and most of it will of course vanish in the same instant as my last breath. By writing this blog, I can at least set down some of what I have inside, and perhaps one day someone will read all this and wonder why I bothered.

Clubs

In Afghanistan, and I would guess other countries, it is illegal to abandon your religion.  So we have an Afghan who has abandoned Islam, claiming asylum on the grounds that he will be criminalised if he returns to his own country.
Imagine if we insisted on our children believing in santa claus and fairies and then in later life criminalised them for having rational thoughts and rejecting that belief.  Some may think that this is not a fair comparison, or that I am being flippant, but the point is a serious one.
Most muslims have no choice about being a muslim. It is the way that they are brought up and the way that their parents and those before them are raised. Indoctrination from birth has powerful influence, and of course most muslims remain as muslims so that they can pass it on to their children. The same is to a lesser extent true of other religions, though apostasy in Catholicism is not normally punishable by death.
Surely, any club worth joining, can retain its membership without the threat of persecution from within.

Waiting for Godot

Probably my favourite college drama production was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  Classified as theatre of the absurd, his play is described as a tragicomedy in two acts. It has also been described as a play in which nothing happens - twice.  It is true that nothing really happens to the two vagrants that meet and spend their days hoping that Godot will arrive.  The characters do go through  a whole gamut of emotions, from ecstasy to despair, but the play ends on a low key of helplessness and hopelessness. There are lines that stay with me after all these years and recently having seen Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan performing it on stage, the times and circumstances of that college production came flooding back.
What got me onto this was a walk with my grand daughter this morning. She needs her nap and I need some exercise and coupling the two is a joy for me.  We have a circular route along a woodland path, and by the time we are less than half way, she is usually asleep.  Like most urban areas the place is well provided with litter bins and bins for the deposition of dog turds. It is illegal to allow your pet to poo in public places and responsible dog owners carry plastic bags to pick up the nasty stuff, and most either take it home or place it in the bin provided.  However it seems that however the community makes provision to assist people, there are still those who prefer to do things their own way. What makes people think that it is a good idea to festoon hedges with little bags of dog shit? What do they imagine becomes of them?  Are these the same people that throw empty bottles and cans around the streets, or vandalise public places?  Maybe they think that their behaviour is acceptable, not having any sense of community or even decency.
There are elements of our society, who, in true Thatcher style, are totally selfish. For them, there is no such thing as society or if there is it is not one that I'd want to be part of. We are fragmenting, of that there is no doubt and there is a whole generation growing up without criticism or the experience of failure.  The media suggests that the only worthwhile people are ephemeral pop stars and football players. Sucked in by celebrity, eschewing learning and knowledge for its own sake, people are, in Beckett's words, bloody ignorant apes.

Memories

I have never had a very good memory. Maybe the truth is that I have always been too lazy to actively assign events or whatever to my storage device. I know that there are methods that can enable a more functional memory, and one that intrigues me is the memory house. In this, one holds a three dimensional image of a house, palace of whatever you wish.  Once this model is stored, then items can be allocated to rooms or locations within that place. The theory is that recall is made so much simpler as one has a concrete filing system to search.  I confess that I have not tried this, as the effort involved would be daunting and besides, I don't really have much that I need to remember these days. There is a calendar in the kitchen and significant events are recorded there.  My passwords for virtually everything are stored in my very smart telephone, so all I need to recall is the passwords for the phone and for the password file.
I was reading the other day about people that remember numbers, in particular the digits following the decimal point in Pi. I can remember 3.14 and that is about it, but there are some out there that can remember hundreds or even thousands of decimal places.  For the life of me I cannot see how a memory palace will help there.
Years ago, I was keen on amateur dramatics and took part in a number of plays. Learning lines was always tricky but now and then I did manage it. I went to a teacher training college and became friends with those who were on the drama course. As a result, I got co-opted into a number of their productions. One notable play was Sheila Delany's A Taste of Honey. I had a fairly significant role in that one and tried very hard to get to grips with the script. By opening night however I was far from word perfect but managed to muddle through somehow.  I wasn't alone in my incompetence though. The worst moment came when we, the two leading characters came on stage for act two,  and Vicky(sorry Vicky) immediately launched into her opening speech for act three. It might have been doing the audience a favour had we carried on, especially as she was blissfully unaware, but I managed to communicate to her that she was  "in the wrong bloody act!" and we ad libbed our way back to where we should have been. It was a very uncomfortable moment and probably worse for the producer, whose assessment was based on the performance.
I am of an age now when the whole memory thing is getting worse. I know that my short term recall is declining and that it is unlikely to improve. As my next door neighbour, many moons ago, used to say - "Old age does not come by itself."

Climate change

I am sure that many of us are sick of the weather right now.  In the UK we are beset by strong winds and torrential rain, whilst over the pond, our North American cousins are experiencing unprecedented low temperatures as an arctic winter is taking hold and reaching as far as Florida. There seems no doubt that our climate is changing, and we are told that we can expect more of the same and that possibly worse is to come.
One possible cause of climate change is rising levels of what we call greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and yet I am sure that the quantities of these materials has always been in a state of flux. Our atmosphere is probably cleaner now than it was in the nineteenth century, and every volcanic eruption will produce far more carbon dioxide than human activity tends to.  However, human activity does make a significant contribution to the state of the atmosphere, that cannot be denied and yet the numbers of people continue to rise inexorably.
Even in the 1960s there was a great deal of concern about the burgeoning population, and yet since then it has more than doubled. People are living in areas that cannot sustain current numbers and yet aid pours in, feeding those people and encouraging further expansion, leading to greater poverty and  more need for aid.  In the developed world, technological developments mean that people are living longer, again putting more strain on resources and so it goes on.  There is a struggle for survival, but this is no longer a driving force for evolutionary change, it is the species that is in trouble. Environmental change is usually slow, thus giving organisms a fighting chance to evolve, however rapid change as produced by catastrophic events leads to extinction on a vast scale. We are sitting on a time bomb, or even several time bombs if we include the super volcanoes and the possibility of asteroid collisions, and yet the things that we could do something about are largely being ignored in the hope that they will go away. This is not about saving the planet, the planet takes care of itself, it is about saving the human race if indeed there is anything left worth saving.

Competition

In the natural world, (and I ask rhetorically if there is any such thing as an unnatural world?), organisms struggle to compete for more or less everything. Space, resources, mates, you name it, and in this struggle for survival, lies the mechanism for change that we call evolution.

Many schools and indeed many parents think that competition is a bad thing, and increasingly, competitive sport and competition within the classroom has been eliminated in the name of equality. We bring up children without the experience of failure, and yet for many of us it is failing that teaches us. We pick a fight with someone and we lose, thus making it less likely that we will do it again. We play games and someone always has to lose, learning how to do so gracefully is an essential part of growth. We also need to learn how to win gracefully too, but because of the way that the real world works, everyone has to face competition sooner or later.

Children are brought up to think that everything that they do is wonderful and amazing, however poor or mediocre it may be. So many children are never or rarely criticised or confronted about the way they behave and the consequences for the future remain to be seen. Everything seems child centred and the idea of children behaving as adults would like them to is seen as old fashioned and inappropriate.  It seems that many parents now do what the child dictates.  Schools and parents no longer have adequate sanctions for dealing with bad behaviour and many have no incentives for academic success.

Successive governments tinker with the education system on idealogical grounds whilst the majority of our children flounder carelessly in a sea of trivial information that will be of no use to them whatever.

We need to think long and hard about where we are heading; the Asian world seems to be taking over in so many ways and much of their success lies in their attitudes to the young.

Creationists

I just listened to Ken Ham defending his position as an ardent creationist.

 http://dangerousminds.net/comments/get_your_popcorn_ready_bill_nye_the_science_guy_to_debate_idiot_creation

I'd not usually respond to such clap trap but it struck me that all of the creationists that I have had dealings with have something in common. Apart from the obvious belief that the Earth and all of its attachments were made by a divine being a few thousand years ago, they all seem to totally misunderstand the process of evolution. The creationist idea of evolution seems to be based on lego. They seem to imagine that evolution involves a bag of lego bricks being shaken up and by sheer chance, complex models emerge.  Now I am familiar with the idea that given infinite time, and infinite bags of lego, that anything is possible, but anyone with half a brain will realise that evolution has not had infinite time or infinite resources and that it is not a random process.

There is much to reproductive processes that are random of course. In the production of eggs and sperms, the chromosomes and the genes they carry do get reshuffled to the extent that each germ cell is genetically different, and there is a randomness in which sperm fertilises which egg. The result of this is of course variation in offspring.  The reshuffling referred to though has rules, and it is only similar genes that get swapped, fundamental body plans are consistently maintained, otherwise outcomes may be chaotic.

There is always variation in any sexually reproducing population and some of those variations will be advantaged in the conditions in which they find themselves. It is environment that determines what or who survives and goes on to breed.

It seems that this fundamental process is totally misunderstood, or even ignored by Mr Ham, who dismisses evolution, a process with an evidential observable base, and yet embraces creationism, a process not supported by evidence or even logic.

It is tragic that in this day and age, people are still led by the nose into believing fairy stories written at a time when knowledge was limited, and used as a means of controlling the population.  Creationism is being taught is many schools in the United States as the truth, while evolution is seen as atheist nonsense.

People like Ken Ham are dangerous, as they appeal to, and lead unthinking and ignorant people along a path that will return them to the dark ages.