What makes humans different from animals

I recently have got a copy of Against the Grain by Richard Manning, which covers some of the same questions that I studied at university.

What is it that makes humans so different from other animals?

Obviously we enjoy uniquely adaptable bodies, with skillful hands, a highly mobile head, and the ability to manipulate and focus effectively on objects close to us. Within that body, we are capable of making use of the benefits that derive from a larger brain. However, I think that the ability to pass information across your own generation, and down through other generations is vital. It meant that individuals were no longer limited by their own experience, they could draw upon the collected wisdom of their species. So although we consider ourselves as individuals, our real role, as with ants, is merely as a small component of our generation, collating and passing on our understanding.

Passing on your understanding is much quicker than trying to evolve your way out of a problem. It gives us an edge in unpredictable times. And in a competitive situation, an edge need not be large to be significant, when it comes down to it, the one with edge wins.

It would be interesting to study the proverbs, sayings, beliefs, religions, customs, of different peoples, considering them as cultural adaptations to the environment that they faced. What do these things tell us about peoples that are no longer there, how did they cope with their environment.

What is our cultural toolkit now, and what does it begin to tell us about ourselves?

And when I am gone ...

• what will make them think of me

• an empty desk

• an ugly cacti that no one else wants
• some wooden woodwork planes left on my desk
• my handwriting when they see it

• what will make you think of me
• our old gray dog that I picked out at the pound
• The General with Buster Keaton
• places where we walked together
• the songs of the Mountain Goats
• what will make her think of me
• the old jokes that we shared together
• the chew of fresh rolls from the corner shop
• jam from the autumn brambles we gathered together
• the tug in the calves upon climbing the hills
• what will make you think of me
• all those fruit trees I planted over the years
• boxes upon boxes of old 2000ADs
• the house we chose together
• Aberdeen
• and when I am gone, you will look at our daughters, and think of me,

On Bramble Picking

Things that you learn from picking brambles

• keep moving - there are always more bramble bushes to be found
• don't get bogged down finding the last bramble on the bush
• don't stretch or reach too far, better to keep moving
• over stretch and you can spill the lot
• moving position will change your perspective, and you will likely see more
• as you start to pick, you will likely see more
• where there are some brambles, there are likely to be more, once you settle down to look for them
• seeing a bramble bush is not the same as seeing brambles for picking
• with practice you can get plenty of brambles into your hand
• take out the stalks as you go, don't leave it for later
• pick good brambles, mushy brambles or part ripe brambles are not worth the effort
• passers by will always offer advice, but they won't help and they don't pick
• there were always more brambles last week, will be next week, and used to be twenty years ago
• brambles stay ripe on the bush for quite a long time compared to most soft fruits
• a great bramble shines
• start recognising that brambles come by the branch, find a good branch and harvest that
• start recognising that brambles come by the bush, find a good bush and harvest that
• brambles vary enormously, but are pretty constant over the same bush,
• too small and too much effort, too large and prone to over-ripeness
• when they are ready - they come off with minimal effort
• pick them before Michaelmas, when the devil spits on them, and they are not good afterwards
• the more sun, the quicker they ripen
• some open spots are very slow to ripen or poor to fruit
• brambles on second years growth perhaps?
• learn your area, where the bushes are, and the sequence they ripen in
• get some bramble bushes you see everyday, to act as your calendar for when you need to go out more widely for harvesting
• if there is not enough for a jam, wash, crush, seive the juice, leave to set for a night, to make jus for adding to plain ice cream
• picking needs a special sort of patience
• there will always be brambles left over
• there are usually brambles to come back for
• you never find them all, first time around, come back along the same path, and you will find lots more
• we were made to pick brambles
• all year round a bramble is a nuisance, and then, come autumn, it feeds everyone
• patience and effort will prevail when you pick the right time, and the right place
• picking brambles means scratches and stings
• a bramble bush in a hawthorne tree is the perfect option for picking
• hedgerows and the sides of paths make for good picking
• avoid roadsides, and too obvious areas
• there will always be brambles
• there should always be someone to pick them
• it is food for free, but it is the process that is importance
• picking brambles connects you to the seasons and the land, in a way we were built for
• picking favours the long armed and long legged
• wear long trousers or gaiters so you can wade in fearlessly
• watch where you put your feet, it is easy to step on a promising branch or two
• with an open mind, you can learn from anything or anyone

perhaps we are all nomads

One of my old bosses used to say, if you keep doing the right thing, things will come right.

The point being that you might be unlucky, and other folk might be lucky, but in the long term consistency and effort will win out over luck.

After a few weeks at work, where things were becoming rather alarming, things are now starting to fall into place, and I can once again see a way forward. I am repeatedly reminded of the value in doing things properly as you go along, rather than just cutting a lot of corners. Cut corners simply come back to haunt you.

Likewise with my voluntary work, things are once again falling into place, after a few alarming developments.

The garden is winding down for the winter, though now that it is too dark in the evenings to spend any time in it, I'll need to concentrate my efforts at the weekends.

Likewise this website is starting to take shape - though it has no clear role, or purpose, beyond giving me a chance to play with RapidWeaver, and the various add-ons that I am building up. Fortunately the structure is pretty simple, and one that I can add to. If it had simply grown like topsy, with mess of pages, it would be more of a worry.


I suppose that now is a time for re-appraisal, to look over things and figure out what my priorities and goals are.

It is too easy to substitute the feeling of buying something, for the effort of doing something. The most lasting benefits we experience are as a result of our efforts, but buying something is the easier option. There was an interesting article somewhere about how we think about our possessions. It makes the point that if you were the only person in the world, then you would not own anything. The idea of owning things is just a construct. Obviously it is quite a useful one, but when you think about it, it is pretty meaningless. Philosophically there is no particular quality that an item possesses that marks out who it belongs to. The object itself has no memory. I suppose that owning things only has meaning to the extent that they are useful or give you pleasure, or even both. Accordingly I derive pleasure from owning good woodwork tools, some I use, some I don't.

However the pleasure of owning things, needs to be differentiated from the momentary pleasure of obtaining them. I suppose as foraging hunter gatherers, we are programmed to enjoy the acquisition, the caveman feels pleasure at killing his mammoth, his family are impressed and grateful that he has brought home this mammoth, and they eat well, though after a few days they would probably be looking for some condiments. We get bothered about a turkey hanging around till New Year. They were probably eating the mammoth for months.

We are target orientated, we fixate, we hunt and chase down, then acquire, and bring home our prey. We are wired to think like this.

But in modern society, this wiring simply does not work. There is no particular skill or ability in spending money, you have money, you spend money, you acquire. If it was food, we would realise that we were buying more than we were eating. But much of the spending is for stuff that meets less obvious needs. You can always find room for more clothes, or books, or records. You do not generally need them in any sense at all. You simply would like to have them.

As in so many other things, our hunter gatherer wiring is poorly suited to modern life.

All that said, my understanding is that the wealthy traditionally saw little need to display their wealth through acquiring things, I suppose when you own a stately home, there is relatively little to be gained from a trip round IKEA. It is not going to make you feel better about yourself, that you now have an extra coffee table.

My argument forks here, I could examine what must motivate the wealthy if they are not prone to simple impulse purchases, or I could examine the desire to collect, or even how we use possessions to define who we are now. We define ourselves, the tribes we feel we belong to, by buying stuff. Even absurdly the desire to green consumerism, when the real green option is to make do and mend.

But I would like to finish this entry by reflecting on my time as a nomad, during the summers I used to go from archaeological dig, to archaeological dig. All you had, you carried. So more was not better. You bought a book, you gave away an old one. In such a situation you look very differently as possessions, you don't stop spending, but you do spend differently. At heart we are all simply nomads, traveling through, and we will take nothing with us when we go, perhaps it is better to travel lightly.

PS wedding anniversary weekend !!

The Mountain Goats

The Mountain Goats are my current all time favourite group. But rather than write about what they are like, I have simply embedded a couple of YouTube videos.

This is probably their best known song, and has a very fine video to boot



This is a splendid and silly song, the original is by Ace of Bass, but its not a patch on this. The hand signals have a strange magnificence.



The current benchmark I apply to buying any music is, wouldn't I simply prefer to buy something else by the Mountain Goats.

Long Weekend

It has been a long weekend, we had a half day on Friday, which I supplemented with a half day of annual leave, which meant I did not have to go into work at all, and today is a public holiday.

Accordingly it has been a double weekend, though having more time has hardly translated into getting more done. In fact looking back, I don't really know what I've done.

I have done a bit of pottering in the garden, a lot of pottering on the computer, reading though the papers for a change, drinking tea, the usual sort of stuff that you enjoy doing at home. It has been nice to have the time to do this or that, as the mood takes, rather than needing to pile through a great long list of stuff.

Also a weekend of being the Tech Support for the house. Trying to figure out how to do stuff with RapidWeaver and the growing host of plug-ins and themes that I am building up. There is a limit to how much you can do by just playing around, after a while, playing around has to be supplemented with some actually reading the manual.

I have also bought QuickTime Pro, on the basis that it was only twenty pounds, and should be useful. I will however be dis-chuffed if I need to re-purchase soon to cope with an upgrade somewhere. Purchasing QuickTime Pro let me download Soul Train by Swansway to my iPod, and just as I loved it on vinyl, I love it on iPod too, what a splendid track.

I read somewhere, that one of these football games is being given away free, but you pay small transaction costs in the course of the game. There is a certain psychology about pricing stuff so that it qualifies as an impulse purchase, and gets past your parsimonious and sensible side. There is also the psychology of building up relationships with customers, who are then more likely to purchase stuff. A lot of my spending is now online, and I am gradually buying software online. I cannot imagine that I would pay £500 for DreamWeaver, but buying the odd addition to DreamWeaver seems entirely okay. I suppose some of the major software packages were already doing this years ago, and it also happened with the sale of fonts, etc.

I also got the girls started using iMovie, with some encouragement they are now making a video. Even with software this easy, it is amazing how much support, encouragement and prompting is required to get them going. It has been sitting there ready to use, for as long as we have had the computer, but they have never experimented. Likewise with Garageband, they have never really got into that either.

They are now however embarked on a movie making career, so I suppose they will find plenty of use for the computer once it transfers to their room, even without a broadband connection. Making movies does rather stretch the computer, not impossibly, but the usual mantra of save often, and let it take its time, applies. Much work got lost following a crash, but having posted a message on a forum, got some advice on how to recover the situation, and the prized work was retrieved.

Also on the IT support side, my 1998 Bondi Blue iMac has expired. Nothing more than a slight hum when the power key is depressed. Another posting to the Forum suggests that it is not worth repairing, the money could far better to put towards something newer. I suppose it has served us well, and in depreciation terms, it has now depreciated away to nil value!

All the same, I have looked after it, and I cannot quite bring myself to binning it. Although now useless, it is an attractive lump of glass and plastic.

Also much work on my website, although in a non-linear tinkering about sort of way, rather than a rigidly project managed approach to development. Now set up a blog for the garden stuff, and some pages for garden stuff, and used some more of the YourHead plug-ins which seem to work very well indeed. However I will need to get to know them better to use them to best advantage, as with RapidWeaver itself.

I would not say that there is a steep learning curve, with either RapidWeaver or the iMac itself, but the sheer range of what you can do on your computer nowadays, does limit how far you can go without ever reading a manual. Simply having the time to play around and experiment is invaluable.

I should really be writing up minutes and cleaning the toilet ...

I should be knuckling down to write up the minutes from yesterday's meeting, but playing with my blog instead. I should also be far more upto date with the usual dull chores, as I even had a day off this week, but knocked a bit sideways with a bit of a headcold, so taking it easy, and not being too bothered about it.

Pleasant enough day off, doing heavy work in the garden, getting rid of the sweetpeas, which were still thriving, and full of flowers, but I needed to make room for the planters that I was putting in.

This year I have grown,
teasel and wormwood from seed, and chamomile from little shoots. I did try feverfew, but it never sprouted. I do however already have plenty in the garden, so it is not a tragedy of the first magnitude.

Anyway, the chamomile and wormwood, were getting a bit unhappy in their pots, so having turfed out the sweetpeas, I put in some large plastic planters, filled them with soil, and put the chamomile in the outside two, and the wormwood in the middle. The wormwood is supposed to like rocky soil, so I topped off the planter with some rocks and grit, and it does look quite atmospheric.

Some other work in the garden, and spent a fair bit of time doing the watering, as it is all so parched. Concerned to find that I might be losing a blueberry to the dreaded dog pee.

After a week of all meetings, last week was a bit quieter, but it will take more than a relatively quiet week to put that particular world to rights. There is a vast amount to do, I probably need to plan more and delegate more. Just being very busy is not the answer. Also having to revisit decisions that were made before I took over, which is taking time, and will hopefully be for the best in the long run.

I am enjoying various forums on the internet, particularly now that I am setting them to log in automatically, and putting the links on my toolbar. With broadband they seem to load pretty fast, and a lively forum is the quickest way to find out stuff. Also intrigued by the ecosystem that is developing on-line. For example with RapidWeaver, the web design software, you can get software for layout - Blocks, by another developer, but even on top of this, you can get an enhancement to that add-on by yet another developer. So you have layers upon layers of independent development. There has probably been shareware as long as there have been PC's but now that e-commerce is so easy, you can buy and sell software without a lot of hassle. So for low volumes it is now worth the trouble. Accordingly, I don't imagine that many of these developers are making a huge living from this, but presumably it is worth their while. Another aspect of how this is an ecosystem, in addition of the interdependence of various developers, is the inter-relationship between developers and customers. Many will have a sustained relationship with their customers, via forums and blogs. That way they can draw upon the experience of customers to improve their products, and hopefully purchase up-grades over time. When you are talking about software costing a tenner here, a fiver there, then it does get to be a bit of an impulse purchase.

I am surprised now, by just how much of my spending is shifting to on line. In addition to the usual iTunes, there has been RapidWeaver, a growing collection of add-ons for that, as well as Amazon, and the Apple Store. A lot of the impulse purchasing is shifting onto the internet, and I do tend to use the internet as a first port of call for researching larger purchases too.

Just yesterday, I added QuickTimePro and some fonts to my wishlist, though not sure that I can justify the expense of any of them.

what's cool on the web

Cool stuff that is on the web

the MP3 for one of my favourite songs ever, so out of print, that you need not feel guilty listening to it for nothing

Swann's Way singing Soul Train

http://www.scarlet-fantastic.co.uk/mp3/soul_train.mp3

FontShop - browsing fonts, and the I am Font - project. A cool idea for graphic designers, or just to make you think about design and fonts.

http://iam.fontshop.com/

The advert for the new shuffle, featuring a wonderful video by Feist, which is well worth downloading. Downloadable via i-Tunes, though like everything else it probably appears on You-Tube too.

http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/ads/

The alternative Kitchen Garden pod-cast, which has some splendid stuff, as well as just reminding you of contented garden pottering. One word of advice though, listening to the pod-cast while pruning is not recommended, you might, like me, just find yourself cut off unexpectedly, with a snipped pair of headphones round your head!

http://www.coopette.com/akg

Fonts - names for imaginary fonts

I've been browsing FontShop and decided to come up with a list of names for imaginary fonts,

as a starting point, these might appeal to Rian Hughes, who is strong on the whole comic book - science fiction ethos, but others are just plain evocative names

zarjaz
straphanger
otto von
steam punk
teleport
jaunt
rocketship
starship
raygun
third empire
infinite vastness
a larger perfection
IT Dept
Alien Crew
point three recurring
Starboard Home
Ship's Crew
Departmental
Insanity brake
puns r us
diddlysquat
art statement
blue light
shuffle
zeppelin
airship
Montgolfier
gopher
veneer
plug n play
one click shopping
@home
goodison park
virginia waters