As Brian walked deeper into the caves, I saw...

Belatedly catching up on Brian Cox's Human Universe (I got rather annoyed with the first two, but I'll write about that another time) I came to episode 5

We started in the El Castillo caves of Cantabria, Spain, which I rapidly remembered as one of the oldest cave art sites in the world.  Prof Cox described the caves' usefulness for shelter and safe haven, then took us on.  As he walked into the darker corridors I knew we were going to see bison and other animals on the walls and wonder at the dedication and perhaps belief that had led to their painting.

As Brian walked deeper into the caves, I saw...

The cave art was just round the corner, but what do you see?

I know this is pareidolia, but spooky, don't you think?

Rochester and Strood - oh bloody hell

I write a couple of hours after the declaration of the results of the Rochester and Strood byelection and in a negative mood I can't really label.  UKIP have won their second seat in the Commons, Labour managed to snatch outrage from the jaws of being considered the irrelevant third party and I shudder to imagine what new, self-defeating idiocy Cameron will be driven to today.

There will be those spluttering on Twitter that the "natural Labour voters" who supported Mark Reckless "don't know what's good for them," but neither, it seems, do Labour.  The abandonment of working class communities in ex-industrial and seaside areas has not just been a feature of Conservative spells in power.

"We can't out-UKIP UKIP" has been the mantra for both of what will still, precariously, be labelled the two main parties.  Yet both compete to present their own, rather similar versions of UKIP-lite on immigration.  Meanwhile Farage and his cronies still manage, apart from the odd embarrassing slip, to keep control of the battles between UKIP's electables and its headbangers.  Their manifesto for 2015 may not look much like the one from 2010, or even various public pronouncements from as little as a year ago, but it will be "respectable".  And anyway, who reads manifestos?

The vagaries of the British electoral system and the compound incompetencies of the more traditional parties will produce a result in 2015 which will almost certainly make it hard for anyone to construct a convincing or manageable government.  I will not attempt a prediction, but I fully expect Labour and Tories to be battling to draw together DUP, LibDem and SNP groups into some kind of whole.  And UKIP will either be there as a handful, protesting the unfairness of first-past-the-post or tipped over into a fourth significant bloc vying for the big boys' attention.

I'm sure my thoughts will settle rather further from depression later in the day, perhaps after I actually get some sleep, but I'm not looking forward to the next few years.

Pain and pleasure

As an aged person I have trouble keeping up with new music, though it is one of my main interests.  So when I pick up on somebody I like, I try to follow their progress.  Some of them go from strength to strength, some hit a plateau, some crash and burn (or - worse - crash and fail even to burn).  Here's a small progress report on some of my pet projects.

Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six - beloved singer has been ill and is unable to perform, but the band is touring as well as contributing massively to Manchester music.

Civil Civic - barbarian Aussies who place nice tunes - touring the world and threatening to self-destruct at any moment.

Moulettes - folk, jazz, sod the genre - they play a violin/cello duet then a romp with bassoon bass.  Touring, recording, succeeding.

Help Stamp Out Loneliness - I love to add an extra vocal harmony line.  They play infrequently and admit to drinking too much.

More pleasure than pain, really.

Euro-madness

I remember a session led by academics from Cranfield University.  It would have been 1998, in the run-up to the introduction of the euro, and my enlightened employer wanted an arbitrarily selected group to learn about world economic conditions.  It was made plain that the UK was in a reasonable position to join the euro, and certainly in a better position than some of the countries which were actually signed up to do so.

If we had joined in, and the weaker currencies had not, we would have had some uncomfortable moments as we aligned our cycles but would probably have gone on to reasonable success.  Adopting the euro along with the southern basket cases, given the observable unwillingness of all countries (including France and Germany) to follow the rules of the club, would have been very silly.

Letter to Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary

Dear Mr. Hunt,

Rupert Murdoch is a man who will change his citizenship to gain a business advantage - not a toehold, as an immigrant might do, but a dominant position.  He will kowtow to Chinese suppression of freedom to gain market share in Asia.

Now he wants to take full ownership of BSkyB - News Corporation is a large entity, but it is still a very personal fiefdom - and is wondering how much he will have to give for that.

He has come up with a proposal to separate himself formally from Sky News, thinking that this is the kind of small price that the UK will be satisfied with, and you have recognised that the letter of the contract does offer  some kind of protection.

This is a small price to pay.  UK media law does not allow TV news organisations to take positions, so the provision of a respectable news service - a necessary commitment in the early days to gain Sky's general position and licensing - can be supported by means of an arms-length body.

He would not accept the same separation from the Times or the Sun.

The current move to take over the whole of BSkyB may not - on the face of it - constitute an increase in his control of British media outlets.  My argument is that his control is already too great.

The current scandal of phone-hacking and its latest development with the Milly Dowler case is the first time Mr Murdoch has shown any sign of vulnerability.  So far he has been beyond any but the minor criticism of the courtiers in the PPC - the weight of News Corporation silences or sits upon business and political attacks.

I understand that you have been painted into a legal corner concerning the grounds on which you could refuse the current application, but I cannot believe that it is impossible to stop the process in the light of new developments.

A news organisation which apparently behaves with impunity while flouting the law should give you pause.  I am amazed that they have not already started briefing against other papers - the fact that they have not suggests to me that News International's culpability is so massive that they dare not.

Mr Murdoch's control over the British media is already disproportionate in percentage terms, but the major factor is the cold weight of control - not just power, but deadening influence.

A judge-led inquiry into hacking and its relationships with police and politics (just to begin with) should be established immediately.  And an organisation which is under such scrutiny should not complain if other processes that it is involved with are halted.

Ed Wilson

A boring old fart protests

Syrian authorities demand the facebook and gmail passwords of arrested protesters. Twitter is the backbone of revolutions.  White-hat hackers work on firewall busters to support Iranian demonstrations. The internet is a force for freedom.

Well yes, but...

We have electricity, water, internet... it's just another utility. And, just as our electricity is run by French and German companies, the big net services are served from the US.

There are plenty of email services, but every pensioner directed towards internet literacy is presented with a hotmail or gmail address. Facebook and Google may have achieved an unassailable critical mass in their fields. We talk of hoovering, and now we talk of googling.  And all of these are American companies.

So what?

Google and Facebook make billions from selling information about us without our informed consent, but even that's not the problem.

Does the world need more than one Facebook, one Google, one Ebay, one Amazon, one Twitter, one Blogger? Does the world need more than one GPS? Is the world outside China going to be run on Californian servers?

I use these services. I like them (mostly - watch it Zuckerberg). I am not anti-American. I am anti-oligopoly. It may be too late to think of an alternative but, if it is, "too late" suggests a power we have relinquished without thinking enough.

I fear I have offended someone tonight

Every Tuesday evening a dozen or so of us gather to discuss literature, our own literature. Plays, poems and stories we have written and which we would really like to see gaining a wider audience. It's a writers' group, a workshop ( http://manchester-writers.org.uk/ ) and it seems to improve our writing even if most of us remain unpublished.

In recent weeks we've tried a new technique. Rather than reading your own stuff and then looking up expectantly for helpful comments, you ask somebody else. You can select a reader or accept the next random volunteer, and you have to listen to your own deathless (or lifeless) prose while you watch the faces of your audience.

Another kind of artificiality you might say, but I've learned a lot. Think about the way you read a book.

The first time you see a page is almost always the last time you see it. You make just one attempt to read it, and if the intended meaning doesn't come through that one time, it's the last chance the writer has. And I've seen evidence here and elsewhere that some people don't get much out of reading - looking ahead, interpreting the syntax and punctuation as you go, are all unused skills.

The offence I may have caused came when I said that I could have read my chapter better than the person who took that responsibility. I know what it's supposed to say, how it's supposed to be read.  I could perform it on stage or on radio.

But if all that isn't actually on the page, then either I'm not doing my job properly as a writer or I have unrealistic expectations of my readers. I can't judge how much of each is true, but it makes me think.

My brain bits move in mysterious ways

I'm writing a novel. Number seven as it happens, and it'll probably join the others on that great unpublished shelf in the sky. But I've also been reading, and listening to podcasts, about the way the brain works, and my writing "technique" seems to offer persuasive evidence for the idea that various parts of the brain work almost independently of each other. Each one goes its own sweet way, occasionally coming up with an idea, a decision, a bodily movement... Many of these are actioned, some of them actually come to the notice of the conscious part that we tend to think is the "real" me, and some come as complete surprises.

You'll hear authors (if you have any interest in listening) saying things like "I don't write the story:  it writes itself" or "then this character did something I wasn't expecting". I've used those lines too, and recently came out with "my main character hasn't told me what the story is about yet". Some of this is affectation, but it is surely a gloss on the feeling we have that the mental wheels keep on churning whether we are aware of it or not.

An idea comes to the fore - half-formed, fully-formed - and you find yourself typing it in. Sometimes it's a second or two before you realise what is coming out. Sometimes it's as if that idea "has always been there". It's because you have more than one pair of mental hands at work all the time. You're not on your own in there.

Electoral geeks are among the worst, but...

Why will I vote Yes to the Alternative Vote system?  For my own reasons.

1. We should establish the principle that things like this can change.  It would be good for us.
2. AV is a bit better than first-past-the-post at reflecting voter intentions.

But it's only a bit better. Some people, including me, would prefer a more proportional system, but my main objection is that both AV and the common forms of proportional representation depend on the idea that the least popular candidates are eliminated one by one until someone crosses a numerical threshold and gets elected.

That means that the second choices of the people who vote for the least popular candidates are taken into account when most people's other choices are ignored. That is the only logical justification I can think of for the No campaign's assertion that AV helps extremists - the BNP will be eliminated, but its supporters may have their votes counted again and again.

So my own geekish proposal is that every choice expressed by every voter should be taken into account right from the start:

• a first choice vote counts as 1
• a second choice vote counts as 1/2
• a third choice vote counts as 1/3
• etc

If there are four candidates, and you use all your choices, ranking them 1, 2, 3, 4, then you have 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 votes. Candidates get whole votes, half votes, etc and they are all added up, and the person with the highest total wins. It doesn't have to cross a notional 50% mark, just come top when everybody's choices have been taken into account.

Have I woken the sleeping geek within you?

You lot out there frighten me

Pollsters announce (or rather they occasionally let slip) that a large proportion of the adult population of the UK don't know that a referendum is to be held to decide on voting systems  for general elections.  Of those who do know, a large proportion don't intend to vote and another large proportion (not necessarily the same people) don't know how the Alternative Vote system works.

Rather than go off in a middle-class strop about the stupidity of the masses and "if they can't be bothered to understand they shouldn't even have the vote"...

I have some idea of how stupid I am, and who among us has never voted on something we don't fully understand?

...I will simply make a few observations.

• Some people somehow contrive to be unaware of even the headlines of current news.
• To some people, politics is somewhere between a criminal racket and a game which is of no interest to them.

Put like that, it's easy to understand.  I have no idea what's going on in the world of reality television and I consider investment banking to be somewhere between a criminal racket and a game which is of no interest to me.  My interests are obviously the right ones and other people's are simply depressing, but I have no right to criticise.

"I'm an American too"

I used to work with a man who was profoundly deaf.  When it came to meetings he needed a signing translator, and his usual helper was a Canadian (who must have had amazing stamina to do things like full-day conferences on his own).

On several occasions the translator objected to people's use of the word 'America' to mean 'USA'.  "I'm an American too,"  he protested.  To some extent, this was just an assertion of Canadian separateness, but to some extent also it was still a real point.

That was thirty years ago, and US ubiquity and hegemony is even more fully established today, to the point at which I can hear on a BBC news programme a reference to 'south and central America' meaning Alabama, Louisiana etc, rather than Mexico to Chile.