Daybook 12.

Servants.

We say: “you should never treat people as objects”. But really that’s what we all desperately want to do. The ideal we all crave is to live in a country where we are part of a small minority and where the rest of the population are our obedient servants. Servants to be there for our convenience. And the best way to achieve this end is to make sure the servants are very different from you. The distance that this difference supplies helps you to fend off those pesky feelings of concern for the wellbeing of others. For example black Africans in the USA in the 19th century. Or in Russia I think they had serfs who spoke Russian but the upper classes all spoke French. You could improve on these scenarios by making the servants have a different religion too. Different race, religion, language. The more the better. Because the main thing you need is for it to be easy to treat the lower orders like the scum that they are. And it’s easier to do this if they are not like you.

The last minute.

Jack: Answer the phone!

Mary: But it’s not ringing.

Jack: You always have to wait to the last minute don’t you!

Cleverness.

People who ask a lot of dumb questions are often the cleverest people. They might sound dumb but they are just being rigorous by asking all the possible questions. That way they don’t miss anything and their resulting understanding is better.

Against writing.

If I write down information I have to categorise it. So, for example, if I write down a fact about some particular Australian bird species, I could put it in my paper file containing facts about Australia. Or I could put it in my paper file containing facts about birds. Certainly I need to put it somewhere so that I can get it back when I need to. There’s no point putting it in my file containing facts about ancient Greek philosophers, I’ll never find it there! So I decide to put it in my file about birds. But then what if, later, I want to read through all my facts about Australia. Then that fact about birds would have been better being in the file on Australia. — If, instead of all this writing, I decided to memorise everything this problem doesn’t arise. Facts I know in my mind aren’t categorised and separated the way things in writing on paper have to be.

Meditation.

As I understand it this is some state of the mind where it is on reduced activity. When I read about what meditation is I find some disagreement about how this state of reduced activity is to be arrived at. Many sources insist that the state is arrived at without effort. And that if you are exerting effort to get to it, for example by forcing thoughts out of your mind or by consciously resisting the temptation to engage with any stray thoughts that enter your mind then this is not the right way to do it. But surely some effort is required! If you sit down to meditate and don’t make any effort then you just end up daydreaming. - I find that the only way I can make sense of what meditation is, is to think of it as practicing your ability to concentrate. And then you get better at it. Like you might practice throwing a ball into a bucket that’s 5 metres away from you. You keep trying to do it and then you get better. And once you have improved your ability to concentrate you naturally use this in your general mental life. And this makes you more focussed and so less distracted by things that affect your mood. All of this sounds fine. - But if it is all just about improving concentration then why not practice it by trying to do things that require intense concentration. Like playing a musical instrument. Or reading some complicated text. Why do you need to do this thing of concentrating on nothing which is what meditation is.

Mindfulness.

This is sometimes described as akin to meditation. But mostly it seems like the opposite. Meditation is the absence or reduction of mental activity. Mindfulness seems to be intense concentrated activity. More paying attention to things that you wouldn’t normally be paying attention to. The difference between mindfulness and normal mental activity is that the former is very focussed. You are “paying attention” in an extreme sort of way. I think that the thing that is supposed to be so great about mindfulness is that it is all about paying extreme attention to the present moment. Which excludes the past and future. Where thoughts about the past and present are the main source of bad moods. Anxiety comes from thinking too much about the future and what might happen. And depression comes from thinking too much about the past and what it might have been.

External.

You can transfer a mental process like remembering to an external device. That’s what writing something down is. Could you do that with any other processes? Or even all of them? With calculators we have transferred the mental process of arithmetical calculation out into the activities of a calculating machine. In the future some other mental process will be transferred out. Eventually all the processes will be external. And then what will we be?

Understanding.

What if you understood something really important but you couldn’t communicate it. What if I said I could make you understand something like that. Wouldn’t you just say: “no thanks”? Because then you’d know something really awesome. But which you couldn’t explain to anybody else. This would be deeply frustrating.

Knowing.

Suppose there was a test which asked: name three things you must not do to be safe while driving on the road. And your mind might go blank. That doesn’t mean you don’t know all the things that you should not do to be safe. You will still refrain from doing them as and when the situation arises while you are out driving. Just because you can’t recall these things to mind right now doesn’t mean you don’t know them.

Everyday illusions.

Watching a movie with the sound coming from a speaker on the other side of the room. You perceive the sound as coming from the screen, but it’s not really. This is an illusion. Another everyday illusion is how things in the distance look smaller. But they’re not really.

Email.

This hasn’t replaced paper mail. Your bank or medical professional won’t use it. Because it’s not considered secure enough.

Medicine.

There are two sorts of medication. Either it acts directly and immediately but deals with the symptoms and not the cause. Or it acts cumulatively over a period of time and deals with the cause. For example suppose I have some organ malfunction which means I have a pain. The first scenario is that I take painkiller medication which acts directly and takes the pain away but, as it acts directly only, it only works as long as I am taking it. Say one pill lasts four hours. After the four hours are up then the pain returns. So that’s the first scenario. The second scenario is I take some pills which cure the organ malfunction. I need to take one pill so many times a day for so many days. This pill works by restoring the organ function. It takes time because it is somewhat like repairing something that is broken. Unlike with the painkillers the pain symptoms aren’t relieved as soon as I take a pill. But by the end of the course the malfunction will be repaired and so the pain will be gone. At which point when I stop taking the medication the pain does not, unlike with the painkillers, return. ... Note that you don’t get medication which is some kind of hybrid. In other words medication which acts directly and immediately but also addresses the cause. Or medication that acts over time but deals with the symptoms only.

Styles of writing.

What style you use depends on what you are writing. You wouldn’t write an instruction manual in the sort of digressive, effusive and poetical style which would be more suitable for writing about your walk in the forest.

Double negative

A minus times a minus makes a plus. “The reason for this we need not discuss”, so W.H. Auden says he was told! But I will discuss it here. What is the reason? It is very hard to explain intuitively. The best explanation is one I found here:

https://crossedstreams.com/2009/09/19/when-a-minus-times-a-minus-equals-a-plus/

If I had to put this into my own words I would do it as follows. Let’s say the action X is reducing the quantity of P by 10. This means that, taking P to be zero, doing X once has the effect of P being minus 10. If I do X six times the effect is 6 times minus 10. Which makes P minus 60. But what if I do X minus 6 times? What does that mean? Doing X minus 1 time is doing the opposite of doing X one time. So, instead of reducing the quantity of P by 10 it increases it by 10. So doing it minus 6 times is increasing it by 60. This is why minus 6 times minus 10 is plus 60.

Contradiction/unintended consequence.

Say there is a rule in my fast-food business that delivery costs £2 but it is free on orders over £20. But then if a customer is about to spend £19 they will just spend £1 extra for no reason so as not to have to pay the £2. Ie they will pay £20 instead of £21, thus saving themselves £1. But I don’t want people doing that!

The details work out as follows. Suppose my profit markup is 20%. And let’s assume that £2 is the actual cost of delivery.

Customer buys £19 of stuff (and pays delivery charge). I make 3.16 (15.84 + 3.16 = 19.00). And customer pays delivery.

Customer buys £20 of stuff (and so does not pay delivery charge). I make 3.33 (16.67 + 3.33 = 20.00).

But I have to pay delivery so I only make 1.33.

Accents.

Some accents make the speaker sound stupid. For example, in Britain it is the Yorkshire accent and the Birmingham accent that sound awful. Or is it just any strong accent? Anyway it’s all association. If really clever people spoke (and always had spoken for a while) with a strong Birmingham accent then that accent wouldn’t make you sound stupid. — But some accents I find to be quite pleasant. The North-East (‘Geordie’) accent seems very unaggressive to me. I can’t imagine someone being angry in that accent. - The other thing about accents is that place names suit their accents. The name Birmingham sounds like it was made for the accent that people from there speak in. Similarly for Newcastle.

Words.

Disinterested is not same as uninterested. Dispassionate not same as unpassionate.

Filing.

I hate getting documents that have been printed landscape way round. When you are filing them with pages printed in portrait, which way up do you put the landscape pages?

Getting the question.

There is an interesting question: “why does blowing on a candle flame make it go out?”. You first need to understand (admit) that this is a good question. If you just think that it is obvious that blowing on a candle flame makes it go out then you’ll think it’s a stupid question. You will think: well you’re just blowing it away aren’t you! But that’s wrong.

Failure.

I got on a bus and bought a standard ticket and sat down and then about 10 minutes into the journey I realised that I was going to be using the bus again in the evening so really I should have bought a day ticket which would have covered both trips for less than the cost of two standard tickets. And I had that feeling when you are angry with yourself for being such a dope. But then I realised no actually it doesn’t matter because the day ticket can’t be used after 6pm and the evening journey I want to make will be after 6pm. So then I stopped being angry with myself. And then I thought: no I should still be angry with myself because when I bought the standard ticket I hadn’t realised any of this. At that point it was still true that I had failed to take into account the evening journey.

Postage stamps.

This is a way of paying for the service of letter delivery. But it’s an odd way of paying for it. The stamp on the letter means that the cost of delivery has been paid for. Paying for delivery is done by fixing the stamp on the letter. — You don’t pay for any other service like that. If you give your car to the garage to be serviced you don’t stick something on it to show you have paid for the servicing. — What if paying for letter postage was done by taking your letter to the ‘letter posting shop’. You give them your letter and pay them the fee. And then they wouldn’t need to mark the letter in any way to show that postage for it has been paid. They could just put the letter into the bag of letters to be delivered. They would know that a letter’s delivery charge had been paid for from the fact that it was in that bag rather than from the fact that there is a stamp stuck on it. — So why use the postage stamp instead of doing it like this? Is it because you don’t want to have to employ someone to take money off customers for each letter to be posted. But a non-stamp way to do that could be to make a machine. What if you had a machine where you put your letters that you need to be delivered. Like a vending machine for letters. The machine would put your letter in the bag of letters for which delivery has been paid for. But it would only do this if you had put the right amount of money into the machine. — So are postage stamps a sort of mechanisation? Or is it more like as if you put your letter in the machine with some money tied to it. Like if you were to wrap a dollar bill around your letter with an elastic band.

Narrator.

Sometimes in a novel the narrator will switch from first person narrative to the third person but it seems like it should be made clear that this is what is happening. Because otherwise it makes no sense. For example “I was out walking and I saw Mary drinking coffee at the New Street Cafe. She was wearing a green jacket. She looked tired. The previous day she had secretly broken into the house of Jack and stolen some documents.” There then ensues a detailed description of the theft. Is it still “I” who is saying this? How can it be? How can “I” know all of this.

Culturalism.

With mass immigration to western countries from places further east there is some kind of issue about “multiculturalism”. This word is taken to mean some society where people of different cultures are living together and, despite the differences, are associating with people of other cultures as freely as they associate with people of the same culture. But in reality this isn’t what happens. And it couldn’t/shouldn’t happen. Because if your culture allowed this casual mingling to be possible then it’s not much of a culture. Surely any culture worth having (worthy of being called a ‘culture’) should be different and unique and special enough to make mixing with people not of that culture either difficult or impossible and at the very least undesirable or not necessary. So that’s why multiculturalism couldn’t/shouldn’t happen. And, as it turns out, it also doesn’t happen. And what is referred to as “multiculturalism” is merely a situation where different cultural groups live close to each other, like in the same city even, but don’t really associate with each other at all. They are like patches on a patchwork. So that’s that. But note also that, despite the multiculturalism issue being associated with the immigration issue, they are actually separate matters. Because even before the recent historical immigration, society in Western countries was multi-cultural. So for example you had areas distinguished by class. You would have a “middle-class” area of the city which was inhabited only by people like teachers, lawyers, accountants, doctors. All of which normally have a different culture in the broadest sense. By which I mean things like dress, food and what kinds of ‘culture’ they are into.

Living in a city.

I think for most people this isn’t very much different from living in a village. You have your small group of people (‘150’ the Dunbar number) that you interact with and the size of this group isn’t any larger just because you live in a city. To which you might say: yes but in a city the pool from which you can select this group is larger. Which is true. But, at the same time, cities seem to encourage diversity. So while this pool from which you select your group might be larger, at the same time, it is also very diverse and so this restricts the number of people you have to select from.

It’s odd that where I live (a city) there’s so many people I can’t relate to and where they can’t relate to each other. Diversity is good for a system because it need different talents but it’s not good for the individuals? Imagine saying: language diversity is good. But then people can’t communicate with each other.

Strange.

Mary: And then he just left it and went! Aren’t people strange?!

Jack: I suppose they are. (Pause.) Am I strange?

Schadenfreude.

If you are upset because something bad has happened to you. And then you find someone to whom the same (or similar, or worse) bad thing has also happened. Then this is somewhat comforting. Is this the same as schadenfreude or is it something else? - Maybe a better and more exact example would be that you are trying to learn to do something and you find that you aren’t very good. So you feel bad about yourself. But then you realise that everybody else is just as bad at learning this thing as you are. So then you stop feeling so bad about yourself. All of which goes to show that that feeling of feeling bad about yourself is not about how bad you are but about how much worse you are than other people.

Wet.

How many mls of water are there on a wet person?

Eating out.

When you eat out do you go to a place that takes your money after you have eaten or before you have eaten? This is like an important class distinction. Like: do you shower just before you go to work or when you come back from work. (I personally shower in the middle of the day.)

Life.

There are no grounds on the basis of which to choose a life. But everybody has to make that choice. Everyone has to live a life of some sort. You can’t choose to not choose. You have to live a certain sort of life. What to wear and eat. How to relate to other people. What sort of place to live. But how do you decide all this?

Men and women.

What if you lived somewhere where men and women were segregated. Separate but equal. I mean properly separate. Their own countries. And I don’t mean in some dystopic way but where everyone was happy with it like this. Of course they would meet a couple of days a year for the necessary procreational purposes. But apart from that they would be ‘homosexual’.

Elegantly wasted.

Would you rather be exploited or wasted? Imagine you are talented at making ceramic pots. But you can’t find work in that field at the pay rate that people with your level of talent usually get paid. So you can’t exercise your talent which is what you want to do. (Like anybody with any kind talent wants to do.) But then someone says that they will hire you to make ceramic pots but pay you the bare minimum. Or maybe: nothing. Would you do it? Knowing it was either that or nothing else. By the way, in the olden days the word “exploited” didn’t have the strong negative overtones it does now. To exploit some resource just meant to use it beneficially.

Heat flows.

A warm coat isn’t warmer than anything else. I mean if you held a thermometer to it. — A temperature of 30 degrees Centigrade is not twice as hot as a temperature of 15 degrees. With temperature there is no such thing as “twice as hot”. Temperature is more something like ‘heat density’? — If you are outside in a temperature of minus 10 and then it drops to minus 20 does the temperature of you also drop by 10 degrees? The internal core temperature doesn’t drop at all. That is always 37. But that part of you, the being cold of which constitutes you being cold. As in when you say “I’m cold - give me a warm coat to wear!” What part of you is that? Is it the skin? — Did people use to think that food was a fuel? To keep you warm. So in warm weather you need to eat less food? Is this latter true?

Dreaming.

What is a dream? It is a bit like imagining that something is happening. Except that this imagining is involuntary. I can close my eyes and voluntarily imagine there is a cat in this room when there isn’t one. But I can’t similarly voluntarily have a dream.

Knowledge.

Not all knowledge is scientific knowledge. (But maybe most is.) Like I might say that this mountain is so many metres high. Or that this table is so many centimetres high. Neither of these are scientific facts. But they are facts.

Nutritious.

How do we know which foods are nutritious for us? It’s not as if we could (or ever did) run an experiment to find out. For all we know we might be able to live on nothing but peas. Or it might be that if we never ate peas it wouldn’t make any difference. How do we know?

Listening.

I like listening to people give their opinions of things where it is clear that they have spent some time carefully thinking about getting to that opinion. I don’t like listening to people give their opinions when they are just repeating what they have heard elsewhere and took a fancy to it. In fact, in that case, the opinions they are expressing aren’t really ‘their’ opinions at all!

Distractions.

Mary: I want to get rid of all the distractions in my life.

Jack: Why? What are they distracting you from?

Mary: I don’t know. I’ll found out once the distractions have gone.

Don’t ask.

If I ask somebody: am I good at handling criticism? then they will only answer ‘yes’. Either because they think I am. Or because they think I’m not but won’t say so because they know I won’t be able to handle (the criticism of) them telling me that I can’t handle criticism.

Surprise.

People were shocked (year 2011) to learn that (some British) newspaper businesses hacked into people’s phone messaging services to get private information. But when these people were reading stories in those papers which disclosed that private information. Didn’t they ask themselves: wait, how did the papers get this information? And: why are they printing this information which is obviously private?

Out of office.

People set their email away message to say something like: So if Jack is away he will put the message “I am away from the office until 10 June”. But that’s confusing. Because it sounds like he has sent that message: it says “I” after all! As if he has sent the message from some place other than his office. To make it clear really he should use his name in the third person. The message should be “Jack is away from the office until 10 June”.  - And another thing. The “until” in “until 10 June” is ambiguous. Does it mean that he will be away up to and including 10 June. Or does he mean that he is away and he will stop being away on 10 June, meaning he will be back in the office on 10 June?

Trick.

You can’t trick people with clever arguments if they are too stupid to understand those clever arguments.

Gone.

Joni Mitchell said that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. She meant that only then will you know what its value to you was. While you’ve got it you just take it for granted. But it also means that only when something is gone do you understand exactly what it means for you to have that thing. (Regardless of its value.) Which means you can use this ‘gone’ idea to understand things. For example if you want to understand what money is then just imagine a world where there is no money.

Eating out.

Why do people eat out? There are two separate reasons. The first is for the food which they expect to be of a quality far better than what they would get at home. The second is for the experience of eating out, the not being at home and the being with other people and the ‘atmosphere’ of the place. You could separate these two out. You could have a place where people ate out but which did not provide meals of any great quality. They could even let people bring their own which the place then warms up for them. That’s all. The customers are then paying just for the time they spend there, not the food.

Modesty.

Sometimes at work, like after I have sorted out some problem a colleague has with their computer, people say to me “wow, you’re so clever”. And I say (modestly): “Only compared to you, I am. But, let’s face it, that’s not saying very much.”

Fool.

You shouldn’t worry about making a fool of yourself (“in front of other people” or behind them for that matter). The point being you can’t MAKE yourself a fool: you either are a fool or you aren’t.

Miserable.

Saying to somebody “You are so miserable!” is an acceptable casual insult to somebody who is expressing signs of misery. (Similarly it is OK to say “you are so stupid!”) But if somebody who, due to their size, was having difficulty, for example fitting through a narrow doorway on a train. It wouldn’t be acceptable to say to them: “You are so fat!”.

Girlfriend.

Females can refer to their female friends as “girl friend”. But males can not refer to their male friends as “boy friend”.

No-one knows.

There’s a song by the Manic Street Preachers: “Nobody knows what it’s like to be me”. And I am thinking, maybe that’s always true. That it’s never possible to what it’s like to be somebody else? If you ask them what they are like they’ll tell you a few things that occupy their mind like thoughts about their life. But that’s not enough. The same way that it’s not enough to know what it’s like to be in a room just from someone telling you descriptions of a few pieces of the furniture in that room. For one thing there might be items of furniture that they don’t think worth mentioning but which are. In your mind there will be things that seem insignificant but which are essential to the character of your mind. One of which is that thing some people do when they play little internal games. Maybe this is more of a thing that children do. Like not stepping on paving cracks. Or when a group of people walk past you have to count them. — But even if you could do all this even then you wouldn’t know “what it’s like” to be someone else. You’d just be imagining what it’s like to be in their position. When people say “if I were you” they only mean “if I was in your position”. — In general imagining what it’s like to be someone else is not the same as imagining what it’s like to be having the experiences that they are having. Because then you are just imagining you having different experiences. That’s all.

Mnemonics.

How do mnemonics work? Say I want to remember the colour names red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. So I remember some sentence “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain”. But how does that help? I still need to attach a colour name to each of the words here. I understand that the sentence “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” is easier to remember that the sentence “Red Orange Yellow Green Indigo Violet”. Because the first sentence makes sense. But with this first sentence I then have to recall a colour name from each word.

Good luck.

When someone is about to attempt something that requires effort and skill. Then you wish them “good luck”. But this suggests that you think they will fail to exert enough effort to complete the task well. Or that they lack sufficient skill. So they will need the random fortuitous assistance of luck.

Celebrity.

When you meet a celebrity that you know a lot about then it feels as if you are meeting an old acquaintance. But this will be asymmetrical, because they won’t see you in the same way. They have never seen you on TV! So meeting a celebrity is odd. Because normally if somebody is our acquaintance then we are also theirs. The only time meeting a celebrity wouldn’t be asymmetrical is if it was two celebrities who met each other. When two celebrities meet they it will feel like to them that this is two acquaintances meeting even though they’ve never actually met each other before.

Scientific.

The key to scientific understanding is often stated as the repeated asking of the question “why?”. Asking why things are like the way they are and wanting to know how they work. But this is not true. First because scientists, like everyone else, find people who keep on asking “why” to be bloody annoying pests. Second, because asking “why” and having the desire to understand isn’t going to get you anywhere on its own unless you have the mental ability to understand difficult things.

Family.

People defend the institution of the monogamous nuclear family because they think it is essential for the production and rearing of children in the best way. But I don’t think it is. It seems like it is far too precarious an institution to be entrusted with that important function. For one thing it suffers from a lack of economy of scale. As per the saying: it takes a village to raise a child.

Knowing.

The more you know the harder it is to learn stuff. Because the proper learning of something new means checking it against what you already know to see how it fits in with that. In particular to make sure it doesn’t conflict in any way with what you already know.

Memories.

How do you know how old your memories are? If you recollect doing something, for example that time you went to Harrogate. You recall it and in your mind you are then thinking about you being in Harrogate and drinking tea and looking at the flowers. But how do you know when that was? It’s not as if there’s a date stamp on your memories. They just have whatever content they do. — Furthermore memories are just you running through scenes in your mind. But you could run scenes that you have made up. What tells you that they are memories and not made up? Again, it’s not as if scenes in your mind which are memories, and not made up, are stamped to say that.

Unhappy.

We are so prosperous but we are still unhappy. What’s going on? This is a common question that comfortable people in the world ask themselves sometimes. (In those brief moments when they take a break from enjoying their prosperity.) Is the answer that, while we might have become materially comfortable in the past few decades, yet our relations with other people are not any better. We still treat each other as badly as we ever did. For example we often treat people as just means to our ends. (People on delivery bikes for example.) We have achieved prosperity despite (or maybe because) we still do this.

Newspapers.

Jack regularly reads some particular newspaper because, so he says to himself, it, unlike other publications, “tells it the way it is”. What he actually means is that it says things are the way he thought they were before he decided to read that paper. And that was why he decided to read it.

Implicit consent.

If I use something then I am consenting to the terms of its existence. If I go to a store and buy some food then I am consenting to the system by which food is produced and made available to me by that store. But I might not consent! It might be that I don’t consent and that the only reason I am getting my food from that store is because there’s nowhere else for me to get food. — Sometimes a website will say “by using this site you agree to”. And I think: no, because that could have said anything. I might go onto a website which says: “by using this site you agree for us (the website producers) to burn down your house”. At which point it will be too late to back out.

Writing.

“Write it down so you don’t forget.” How does writing help? You just end up with the thing on paper. That’s not memory.

Reading.

I’d rather read short articles on the Internet than a whole book. Ideas are more suited to being expressed in short articles. Books are just a jumble of a lot of ideas with lots of padding to fill it out.

Adult entertainment.

There’s nothing adult about it. It’s very childish actually. The odd thing is that children achieve full rationality at the same point at which they become subject (via adult desires) to distraction from it. Also: using the word ‘adult’ is confusing. If I want online conversation with people who aren’t children I do an internet search for “adult conversation” and then I don’t get what I wanted.

Manipulation.

An authoritarian regime (like an absolute monarchy) switching to a democracy can maintain power if they do it properly. After all they start from a position of strength. They just need to set up a party, fund it (and they’re not short of cash!) and then campaign for that party on an agenda of stability.

Looks.

How come people are the way they look. I don’t mean just “the way their face hangs” but also dress and manner. I can tell instantly what someone is like from what they look like. Maybe it’s because people intentionally dress and groom themselves according to what they are like.

Podcasts.

The good thing about podcasts (which are basically just the modern version of radio programmes) is you can listen to them while doing something else. But then podcast material should be something that does not require your undivided attention. Whereas a lot of podcast output (especially from BBC Radio 4) requires concentration. I often stop listening to some podcast because it requires too much concentration. The last thing I want is someone on BBC’s ‘More or Less’ trying to explain Bayesian probability while I’m washing the dishes.

Trajectories.

Physics can predict exactly when and where some large object will reappear decades into the future. Which seems amazing. Like Edmund Halley did with his comet. But we do better than every day. We can predict exactly where and when a physical body will appear in advance. Where the context is even more sophisticated than interplanetary bodies, which aren’t that complicated. So say that in the year 1972 Jack promised Mary he will be in the park next to the stone lion in the year 1976 on June 23rd at time 13:00. Mary knows Jack keeps his promises and so she can accurately predict (like another Edmund Halley) what will happen.

Gone.

As I walk around I might see or overhear something. I walk past Mary saying something funny and Jack laughing at it. And I think: the fact that that happened is a very minor one. It won’t get recorded in any way. In a few weeks me and Jack and Mary will have forgotten all about it what it was Mary said. Suppose, after those weeks have passed, that Jack asks Mary: “what was that funny thing you told me that day, do you recall?” And she will say, “no, of course I don’t recall that”. So the fact of what was said has become more unknowable than the exact composition of the atmosphere of Saturn. We might not know this latter yet but we can build spacecraft to find out. But we can’t do anything to find out what Mary said to Jack that day.

Daytime.

I once had a part-time job in winter which was for mornings only. So I would start at 08:00 and finish at 12:30. So I would pretend to myself that it was a full-time job and that it was 16:30 when I finished and not 12:30. This felt strange because it meant that it was winter but it was still light at my (imagined) finish time of 16:30. And also it didn’t get dark till about 20:00. And I would go to bed at about 03:00. Get eight hours of sleep. And when I wake up at 07:00.

Something similar is: in Autumn I pretend that is Spring. The weather and daylight hours are often the same (but you have to ignore the leaves on the trees.) So in November I pretend it is February and the days are getting lighter.

Self-help.

Why are there so many self help books. Saying different things. Doesn’t this show that they don’t know the answer! You don’t get lots of textbooks on physics saying different things.

Social life.

People don’t really want Jack to attend their social gatherings and neither does he want to go. But they invite him because “it would be rude not to”. And he goes for exactly the same reason. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Sensation.

Is a desire just literally the same as a sensation? I feel the sensation of being hungry and I have a desire to eat. But could I have that sensation and yet not the desire? Or vice-versa? I’ve never taken opiod painkillers but I’ve heard it said that they don’t take away the pain sensation, they just take away your desire to rid yourself of that sensation. In other words you still feel the pain but you just don’t mind.

Cinderella.

Not being invited when everyone else has been is not nice. Cinderella was deprived the fun of the party. But also she had the feeling that she was missing out. If nobody had gone to the party then the first of these things would have still been true. But not the second one.

Cars.

I don’t like cars. Sometimes I laugh at how ridiculous they are. (How I laugh!) People tootling around in their little glass and metal boxes. In summer they are awful to be sat inside.

Mystery and the mundane.

People say that factual science is bad because it takes the mystery out of the world. For example, walking in the woods with their parent, some children hear the noise of a steam train in the distance. They ask the parent what it is and the parent says it’s a dragon. And the children squeal excitedly. They are enchanted by the very idea. If you had told them the mundane fact that it was a train that would be less enchantful. But, on the other hand, once they’d seen the train they would be amazed. Amazement due to an actual thing is better than enchantment due to an not real thing. — I think the idea is that the sense of mystery (of not knowing what something is or where it came from) is a good thing to have but if you are constantly explaining everything then we will have no sense of mystery left. And I think: I’m not sure the sense of mystery is so great. And even if it is there will always be plenty of it left even after we have done lots of explaining. And also you can always create mystery if you run out of it in the real world. Just write a mystery novel. — Another thing going on here is the caricaturing of what scientists do as a rather cold, heartless and mirthless activity. Who are failing to appreciate the value of mystery. The lovers of mystery don’t ever think that maybe they are the ones who are failing to appreciate something. Namely, the scientists’ connection with their work, which can be as profound as any ‘sense of mystery’. So the lovers of mystery are doing the same thing they are accusing scientist type people of doing. — Understanding the world the way scientists do might diminish mystery but it can be (and is) a very spiritual and emotional experience. — Often in fiction (like that movie ‘Dead Poets Society’ I think) there is an opposition presented between, on the one hand, the life of art and make believe and fun and, on the other hand, the life of the practical doings of work and facts and analytical understanding. As if these two were mutually exclusive. But you need both.

Alone.

Lacking any sort of interaction with other people is seen as a very undesirable state to be in. But what if it was just social pressure? For example, in many societies, not being conspicuously wealthy is seen as an undesirable state to be in. If you are not wealthy then you are a low status person. So what happens its that people acquire wealth and stuff but they don’t really want to. Some other people resist the pressure. Maybe having lots of friends is the same sort of thing. People have lots of friends because they don’t want to look like a loser. But, other than that, maybe they would be perfectly fine if they never had any friends or even if they never spoke to anybody at all. They only do all this because they feel they have to.

Dead.

What if everyone died at the age of, say, 82. Nobody died earlier or later.

Love.

Sex and romantic love seem obviously different to me. I don’t see how from loving somebody I might want to do sex with them.

Correction.

I saw a movie poster which said “The notorious true story of the Kray Twins”. And I thought: that’s not right it should say “The true story of the notorious Kray Twins”. It’s the twins who are notorious, not the the story! And so I felt pleased with myself for having noticed this. But then I thought: don’t be so vain, OK you’ve got this right but what about all the times you screwed up.

Positive thinking.

What if you were positive all the time. You believed that all the problems you have would resolve very soon. And you continued to believe this despite it failing to be true over and over again. At first you might think this kind of positive attitude would improve your situation because you will be in a better mood and so be more active in improving your condition. But on the other hand, given that you think everything’s going to be fine you might do less than you would do otherwise improve your situation. You will have a “false sense of security”. And so will your condition will be worse.

Workers.

I hear people say things like: “we don’t like this education system, it’s only concerned about producing happy workers for the system - obedient, useful functional people. It ignores the whole person, the imagination, the soul.” But when these people want their car fixing then they rely on good functional productive obedient car mechanics. They wouldn’t take their car to the garage where the mechanics are inept from having spent their youth studying Romantic Poetry instead of how to fix cars. Note that I do not at all mean that I don’t think poetry and art has any value. On the contrary I do. But being useful to others is equally important. And the education system should focus on the latter. Because the education system is a collectively created institution and so is about promoting what we can do for each other. People developing their own souls is something each person does for themselves so the educational system needn’t get involved. — I think people talk like this less than they used to. I get the impression it was more some kind of 1960s and 70s trendy left-wing speak. When I was at school in the 1980s this attitude was still there. When someone left school age 17 because they had found a job it was like they had betrayed us and sold out. Of course this attitude to work makes no sense at all. — Similarly people say: “oh, I don’t want to just do a regular 9 to 5 job”. As if there’s something about working fixed hours which is objectionable. But it depends on what you’re doing for those hours. If you like it does it matter? Would they be happy with a job that wasn’t 9 to 5 but they hated?

Universe.

If you are a misfit or an outsider of some kind then you don’t share the outlook on the world and the ways of doing things that the people around you have. But you can’t live without something to take the place of those things. In effect you are confronted by the mammoth task of creating your own version of them. It’s like you are creating your own world.

Aliens.

I don’t share the enthusiasm which many others have at the prospect of contacting aliens from other planets. What’s the difference between meeting up with some alien beings and just meeting up with some more different human beings on this planet that we haven’t met yet? They’re all beings after all. And we’ve got plenty of beings on this planet we haven’t met with yet. And who we don’t understand very well and don’t get on with. Why would you want some more of those? Haven’t we got enough of those already? (Because, it’s certain that we’re not going to get on with any aliens we might encounter.) We already don’t get on with other humans on this planet, why would we want some more beings we don’t get on with?

Communication.

Written words are an evil because they give the impression of communication when there isn’t any really. For example I see a sign at the Skipton train station saying: “The mayor of Skipton welcomes you to the town of Skipton.” But the mayor doesn’t really do that because they’ve never met you, and, furthermore, they are utterly unaware of your existence. It makes no sense! Similarly if you read an old book and there is a sentence: “dear reader I hope you are well”. That sentence can’t be saying what it seems like it’s saying. If Mary reads a book by Jack in which it says that Tokyo is the capital city of Japan. And someone asks her later “how did you find that out?” and she says “Jack told me”. That wouldn’t be right.

Marriage.

Sometimes you hear about interfaith marriage. And I think: how is that possible? If my wife is Catholic and I am Protestant then she believes that when I die I will burn in hell forever. Why would I live with such a person, never mind get married to them?

Documents.

More than once (by which I mean: twice) quite recently it has happened to me that I have signed a document at a bank and they have taken a copy and given me the document with the original signature and kept the copy. And they have done this intentionally and not by mistake. This makes no sense to me. But maybe it does make sense somehow. Who am I to question it?

Workers.

I see men doing physical work digging up the road. Quite often they do not look at all suited to the task. They are overweight and they smoke cigarettes. Really it should be those men who go to the gym and build up their muscles who should be out here digging the road.

Working.

I wouldn’t want to work at a job making something (expensive) where that job that didn’t pay me enough to buy the thing I was making.

Stupid.

Saying “stupid woman” suggests she is stupid because she is a woman. The same does not hold for “stupid man”.

Confidence.

You’re more likely to lack confidence to do X where failure to do X results in bad consequences for you. Suppose Mary gives Jack some task which is difficult to do. Like climbing a steep hill. If he has safety ropes he will feel more confident than if he doesn’t. Is that right? But by ‘confident’ here I mean something like: ‘more willing to (less fearful of) exercising his abilities’. If Jack has ropes he is more likely to try that higher rock face.

Speed limits.

On a road it says you can’t go faster than 40 mph. But then, really, it also must be saying that that you can’t go at less than that speed either. Because if you do then drivers behind you will be constantly having to overtake you. So this means you can’t have a minimum speed which is different from 40 mph. Why would you do that anyway? Everybody has a car that can do 40 mph. Why would you want to drive at less than that speed?

Unincarnation.

Some people believe in the opposite of reincarnation. Reincarnation says that one individual person persists over subsequent bodies. The opposite is to think an individual person doesn’t even persist in one body. Over time it’s a different person in that body. For example if someone acts out of character in a fit of rage then it’s not really them that did that. So it must be some other person. Also over time new people occupy the body. The previous person dies. We interpret this as somebody’s personality changing over time.

Voltage.

What is the difference between the electricity in a circuit of 5 volts and the electricity in a circuit of 4 volts? All other things being equal. — Suppose I had a circuit with 4 volts over a resistance of 1 ohm which results in a current of 2 amps. If I increase (double) the volts to 8 volts I will get 4 amps. What if I wanted to increase the voltage to 8 volts and have the current to stay at 2 amps and the resistance at 1 ohm. In other words to increase the voltage without increase the amperage. This should be possible given that voltage and amperage are two different things. — Higher amperage at same voltage is a higher speed of current. So higher speed of current cannot be what higher voltage is.

Domestics.

At any given time do you know what the exact contents of your fridge are? Without going and having a look.

Killing.

Does killing someone harm them? Say if you did it without them noticing.

Economy stupid.

The economy can collapse even though there’s nothing wrong with the components. So the people have as much skills as they ever did and there is as much production infrastructure as there was before the collapse. But how is that possible? If people suddenly forgot their skills or the production infrastructure was rendered inoperative then it is obvious that the economy will collapse. But I don’t see what it means for a collapse to happen with all these things intact.

Roots schmootz.

I once tried to found out what “roots need doing” meant. I did an internet search and found lots of references to it, people talking about doing their roots. But not anything that said what it was. Even when I did a search for “what does “roots need doing” mean?”. I had to find out by asking someone. So, does this mean that, despite the heaps of information on record about life today, future people will still have problems understanding our lives the way we do the lives of people who lived hundreds of years ago?

Coffee shops.

People go to these to drink coffee usually with other people who they also interact with socially. But that idea might seem strange. Suppose Jack opened a coffee shop.

Jack: Do you want to come to my new coffee shop?

Mary: No, why would I go there, I can make coffee at home.

Jack: But at my coffee shop you can meet up with your friends for a chat.

Mary: I can do that at home too I can invite them round or they can invite me round to their houses where they also have coffee.

Jack: But at my coffee shop you can meet new people.

Mary: Really? do you have a rule that says that anybody can start talking to anybody else and the other has to join in?

Jack: Well, no.

Mary: So then I can’t meet new people then!

Properties.

Oxygen is atomic number 8. But what is it about the atomic structure of oxygen that means oxygen has the properties it does? The answer has to be informative in the same was as this: “this mug doesn’t break easily because it is made of metal instead of ceramic”. (By the way this reminds me of once when I was at school. I was about 12. And there was another boy in my class who was a bit of a science geek. (As was I but less successfully.) I don’t know if I’d call him a friend, certainly I wanted him to be my friend. Once he memorised a big chunk of the periodic table and recited it during a class. And the teacher looked at him and said dismissively: “totally useless!”. I felt at the same time both angry and embarrassed on his behalf.)

Poor pay more.

The poor pay more because they can’t afford to buy quality items which last longer. So, they need some shoes and they buy the cheap £20 pair which lasts only three months and so then they have to buy another pair. Again at £20. They are spending £80 per year on shoes. If they had £80 at the outset then they could have bought a quality pair of shoes which would have lasted three years at least. I suppose they could have got £80 at the outset by saving. But they don’t earn enough to save. They spend everything they earn. To save £80 for shoes they would have to save their £20 per three months four times, which would mean going without shoes for a year. The only other alternative would be to borrow £80 but then they would definitely be paying more as the lender would charge them a massive amount of interest. — Another way in which the poor pay more is that they can’t afford to buy labour saving things which would leave them more time to maybe work more. Labour saving things like washing machines and such like. (All this applies less so now, more applicable in 1960 I guess.)

Escape.

People take holidays to escape their everyday life. What? Their life is so bad they need to escape to some foreign country? Maybe they ought to do something about their life so it’s less hateful. Like spend less hours working at that job they hate. They would earn less money but that would be fine because they wouldn’t need money to spend on expensive foreign holidays.

Code.

Why are app settings not just code? Instead of clicking on settings. So in Microsoft Word each document could come with a box with code which describes document formatting. If you want to change formatting you just change the code in that box. Instead of clicking on menu options.

Correcting people.

If somebody is doing something wrong, like they are walking along the wrong road to get to Harrogate. Then they are happy when I correct them. But if they are doing the wrong things to get salvation for their soul and I correct them about that then they get very cross.

Court lawyers.

The job of a court lawyer is often to persuade. In court they persuade the judge and jury that their client is innocent. And these lawyers earn a lot of money. Is this second thing caused by the first? Because they must have used their persuasion skills to persuade people that they are worth a lot of money.

Faith.

Somebody once asked me what do I really hate. I said being lied to. The other thing I hate is when people don’t do something that they said they would do. Failing to keep promises. I don’t know what the word for this is though. It can’t be ‘faithless’ because that is already used to mean something slightly different. I think it is mostly used to refer to the disobedience of wives or servants. (By the way, refusing to make promises is the same as making them and not keeping them.)

Reticence.

The one thing I notice when I talk to people is that people don’t talk openly and sincerely. There is a certain reticence. Maybe out of politeness. People won’t say: “oh I’m bored with this now” even though they are. This means there’s so much that’s left unsaid. I want people to say everything. Bring everything out in the open.

Believers.

Intellectuals make out religious belief to be more common among the ignorant and uneducated. But the actual content of religious belief is often quite sophisticated. Which means that stupid religious people are either not really stupid or they are not really believers.

Explanations.

What counts as an explanation? First it can’t be circular. For example:

Mary: Hey Jack, what’s a force?

Jack: It’s something that causes motion.

Mary: And what’s motion?

Jack: It’s something that is caused by a force.

Second it has to be thorough.

Mary: Hey Jack, why are these pebbles here in this water yellow?

Jack: Because they are in the water?

Mary: But these other pebbles are also in the water and they aren’t yellow.

Thinking.

Sometimes I want to know what the date is going to be exactly four weeks from today. If I wanted to know what the date was going to be exactly one calendar month from today that would be easy. If it’s 18 November now then one calendar month from today is 18 December. But to find out what the date is four weeks from 18 November I have to look it up on a calendar. - So I try to design a mental trick which will allow me to work out the date without having to use a calendar. If the four weeks date is within the same month then I just add 28. But, of course, this will be rare. More likely it will trip over into the next month. So then the trick is to minus 2 or 3. So the rule is: go to the same date as if you were doing a calendar month on. Them minus R-28 where R is the number of days in the month that you started in. So if we start from 18 November and want the date exactly four weeks from then. So first we go to 18 December and then we minus 30-28 days. So we minus 2 days to get to 16 December.

Fools.

Some people are rude. Like you’ll ask them to repeat something and they’ll say “what are you deaf?”. And they’ll shout at you for any tiny fault in anything you do. These are the people who say that they “don’t suffer fools gladly”. But they are the fools.

Writing novels.

Why don’t you get more novels produced by a team the way films and TV shows are. All films and TV shows are collaborative! For example US sitcoms are often written by a team of writers. (I’m not sure exactly how that works in practice, I suppose they have meetings and such like.) And films scripts are written and then rewritten by different people. So that’s one sort of collaboration. A basic version of collaboration applied to novel writing might be just to have a group of people and each member writes one chapter. But I was thinking more like the way films have lots of different people with different roles: director, producer, editor, cinematographer. For novels you could organise the production similarly. So you would have one person who does the plot. Another the scene descriptions. Another the dialogue. You would get a division of labour the way you do in the production of movies. People who are good at writing dialogue but bad at creating plots would just write the dialogue.

Courage.

A dictionary definition of courage is “the ability to do something that frightens one”. But what if someone does something that doesn’t frighten them but it would most people. Suppose Jack rushes into battle where others don’t. But that is just because he isn’t frightened. Would we still say he was ‘courageous’? Oddly, the word ‘fearless’ is a synonym of ‘courageous’.

Nice.

Are we nice people? We think we are. Nobody thinks they are not nice. But are we really?

Rain.

Millimetres of rain makes sense but it sounds like it shouldn’t. It doesn’t sound right to say “12 mm of rain fell” as if rainfall had a length the way a piece of string does. It is right though because it’s a measure of volume of rain that falls into some unit of area. In other words it’s volume per area. And volume divided by area is length.

The Answer.

When seeking an answer to a question it’s important to know, understand and to be able to exactly state your question. If you can’t do that then, no matter how clever you are, you will never get an answer to that question.

Dinner.

Jack: Hey Mary, do you want to go out to dinner tomorrow evening.

Mary: No thanks, I’m not hungry.

Jack: But by the time we get to tomorrow evening you will be.

Mary: Oh, OK then.

Accident.

If somebody gets blind drunk and drives recklessly down the highway causing a crash. We still call it an accident. But it’s not really.

Storyline.

The stories in TV dramas are often very complicated. With lots of twists and turns in 40 minutes. For example in episode 2 of the TV series Suits, Mike fails to submit a client’s patent for a satellite phone on time and so someone else beats Mike’s firm to it. Mike then swaps this patent job with a colleague (to offload it onto him?) but he is tricked because the colleague’s job is a lot more effort. Meanwhile Harvey tries to get a judge to reject the other firm’s patent but the Judge doesn’t because he thinks Harvey had an affair with his wife, although this is not true. Then Louis tells Mike that he failed a drug test and blackmails him (threatens to reveal this information) to force him to persuade some sportsman to become their client. This persuading involves socialising with the sportsman and smoking weed. When Mike comes back to work stoned Harvey is angry with him. Then we find out that Louis was lying anyway and Mike had not failed the test initially. And so on.

Elected.

Suppose Mary suggests some clearly good policy that ought to be implemented and which would be good for the people. Like it would make their life easier or something. And she is frustrated because no party is proposing it. And Jack says: “why don’t you get elected and make the change?”. But there is something about this that doesn’t make sense. “No!” Mary should reply “the system should be designed to find and implement good ideas without me having to go to all the effort of getting elected”. A democratic system should be one where there is some process whereby policies are implemented according to what the people want (and/or what is the best for the people). This process shouldn’t rely on the initiative or motivation of individuals. First because you can have people with good ideas but zero motivation to get them implemented. Second because if you made implementation depend on motivation then implemented policies will consist of only what the most motivated people want. Which will not reflect the population as a whole. - One part of a good process would be compulsory voting. (Note that completing a census is compulsory but voting in an elections isn’t.) By the way, getting policies that are in accordance with what people want doesn’t have to be via elections. You could use more sophisticated methods than that. Like complex opinion polls or mind-reading equipment.

Good for you.

To continue from the previous. When I say “what people want” what I mean is “what they really want”. So “what they really want” might be different from “what they want”. You might end up giving people “what they really want” and them complaining and demanding “what they want”. So we will have to force “what they really want” on to them. It’s only when they choose (under compulsion if necessary) what they really want that they are free. So, like Rousseau said, we will have to force them to be free.

Plagiarism.

I recently thought up an amusing remark: “Everybody has got a novel in them. And that’s where it should stay!” And I congratulated myself on my wit. But then self-doubt get the better of me (doesn’t it always!) and I did an internet search which revealed that my remark has been said before by many other people. Therefore I can’t publish the remark without being accused of plagiarism. Plagiarism is repeating something that you know has been said before. The internet has increased the range of what I can know about what has been said before.

If there had been no internet then I could have published even though it was still the case that other people had said it. Because there would be no way for me to know that they had. It’s the fact that now I can know which means I can be accused of plagiarism.

Which seems odd, because the value of the fact that I thought of it myself is the same regardless.

Maybe the main point here is that others can’t make the distinction. If I say write something that I came up with myself but which has also been said before. Then others reading what I wrote don’t know if I came up with it myself or whether I found it on the internet. So plagiarism is not so much “repeating something that you know has been said before” but “repeating something that you CAN know has been said before”. If I can know it then others have to assume that I do.

Division of labour.

This can yield great efficiency but not if you end up wasting time and energy constantly arguing and bickering about who does what in that division. So what I mean is: yes have a division of labour but only if the population are mature enough to use it well.

Deciding.

I wonder how things happen. Like when they decided to build the underground rail system in London. But who are “they”? And how did they decide that’s what people wanted? What if later it turned out nobody wanted it. One group would say to the other: “I thought you wanted it!” and the other would respond “Well no I didn’t, I only put up with it because I thought you wanted it!”. Then they would have to dig up the underground system and construct something that everyone really wants. Like those giant flying ice-cream machines.I wonder if there is a term for this? That thing where nobody says anything because they think everyone else is OK with it because they aren’t saying anything, but actually nobody is OK with it. I think it’s the “Abilene Paradox”.

Writing.

When I write in a Microsoft Word (or similar) file and then click to close, it asks me if I want to save what I have written. And I think, yes of course I do! Why else do you think I wrote it. When I write on a piece of paper and then put that paper away I don’t get anything asking me if I want what I wrote on that paper to remain on there! So in Word it should just save automatically. If I accidentally make a change I don’t want I always have the undo function. Maybe the “do you want to save the changes” was from before the undo function. - I expect my bafflement here is based on me missing some point. But, while I’m on this subject, it reminds me of how once when Word kept saying to me: “do you want to save the changes” even though I had just opened the document to have a look at it and then was trying to close it again without making any changes. The whole thing was really bugging me. This was years ago when a quick internet search to solve the puzzle wasn’t really possible. Anyway it turned out that what was happening was that the document included a date tag. Which was automatically updating to today’s date when I opened the document. Thus making a change to the document without me realising that that was happening. Even now I can still remember my joy at getting to the bottom of this mystery.

Missing out.

When it’s good weather outside but I have to be inside doing something I find myself wishing it wasn’t fine outside because then I wouldn’t be missing out on anything good. But this makes no sense. I’m being very selfish to all the people who can be outside.

Dropped.

Whenever I drop a small object. Like a clip or a screw. It always rolls away and finds the darkest and/or hardest to reach corner under some furniture. Sometimes this is because it hits my foot at exactly the right angle for maximum further projection. This happens to me like EVERY time I drop something. (And I’m quite clumsy so I drop things a lot.) It’s like I drop something and it just disappears. As if I was a magician doing a trick! I search around on the floor everywhere and I can’t find it. And then I start thinking: did I imagine dropping it?

Funny.

“I don’t know much about art but I know what I like. Biscuits.” (Victoria Coren in the BBC Radio 4 show ‘Heresy’.) This joke depends completely on the precision of the pause between the two sentences.

Renting.

When you pay rent for where you live it’s not like paying to be in a hotel room where everything is taken care of. But neither is it like living in your own place where you have to take care of everything.

Interesting.

Jack: Can I tell you something interesting?

Mary: Yes, sure.

Jack: OK, when I think of something interesting I’ll let you know. 

Tiredness.

Suppose you suddenly felt tired for no reason. This would be an illness and you could phone work and tell them you were sick. But if you are tired in exactly the same way because you have been working hard you can’t go home sick. Similarly if you did something intentionally in the full knowledge that this would make you sick. Like say you go out drinking. Then you could phone work and tell them you were sick. That would be true.

Ignorance.

So, I got a new debit card from my Bank. But whenever I tried it at the card reader the contactless function wasn’t working which I found baffling. And so I asked someone at the bank and they said: oh, you first need to perform a transaction using the PIN code once. It’s only after that that the contactless function starts to work. So I checked but I couldn’t find that this was explained anywhere on the letter that the Bank sent with the new card and neither could I find anywhere it was explained on their website. And yet when they told me the fact, they told me as if it was common knowledge. So this means that other people must just find out this stuff in some other way. I find this happens to me a lot. That other people just magically know things. And I think: did I “miss the memo”?

Doppelgängers.

These are normally physical but what if you met someone who didn’t resemble you physically at all but had exactly the same personality as you. They didn’t look like you but they had the same beliefs, sense of humour, habits of thought and outlook on life.

Affordable.

I hear the phrase “affordable homes”. The government is concerned that there are not enough affordable housing being constructed. But can’t we just leave that to the builders? It’s not as if they are going to build houses that are not affordable. Any more than people who make furniture are going to make furniture that is not affordable. I imagine some building company thinking: “shall we build affordable houses? no, let’s build unaffordable houses and then they can just sit there because nobody can afford to buy them!”.