P4810 - 50s Sci-Fi, 80s Mixtape

So here it is. I've been working on this for the past few months, with no clear objective in mind, other than I wanted to finish an album of original material, with the tools I had available to me. 

Everything was recorded in GarageBand, on iPhone 4S and iPhone 6, with some of the synths and beats being played in iKaossilator, which is a really good kaos pad app by Korg. All the guitars are real ones, recorded using an iRig plugged straight into the phone. Most of the guitars are done in one take, and for the most part improvised, which inevitably means there is the odd mistake here and there, but I wanted to capture the essence of the improvisational way that I play, rather than restrict myself to clearly defined parts, which I have a tendency to mess up anyway. 

The vocals were recorded (with varying success) using the mouthpiece on a set of standard iPhone headphones, and then mixed in GarageBand. The overall mix was also done in GarageBand, using the same headphones as monitors. As such, the mix may be a bit odd if you listen on speakers, but if you listen on headphones you'll probably get a better understanding of what I was going for. 

I chose not to restrict myself to any genre, and instead just recorded whatever I felt like doing at the time. Some of the electronica was driven by the fact that I find it the easiest style to do on my phone, and it's also an increasingly large percentage of what I listen to when I'm out and about, so its influence trickles inevitably in. 

I'm constantly learning with GarageBand, so I'm regularly finding new ways to do things, and new things to play with, which often influences the direction a tune will take. I think in terms of "what can I do with what I have?", rather than setting out to make something specific. So I'll start by choosing a tempo, a key, and a set of chords, and then after I've put down a basic beat as a guide, I'll play around within the parameters I've set. Once the first instrument is down, I think about what will work well with it, and will often record several completely different parts and then choose one that works better than the others. The spare tracks are then muted, and sometimes chopped down and re-used elsewhere. 

It's not a professionally produced, expertly mixed album, it's a collection of thoughts and feelings captured over time and assembled in a way that makes sense to me. I hope some of it makes you smile. 

P4

I love words

My instinct today was to write about Terry Pratchett. He's been one of my favourite authors since I was in my early teens, and I've read more books by Pratchett than any by any other author - in part because he's written loads more than most other authors. I really don't know what I'd say though, that hasn't already been said better, so instead I'm going to write more generally about something that he helped inspire in me - the love of words, and the desire to use them and to write them down. 

Words are unfathomably versatile. They all have distinct character and definition, but it's only when you put them together that you really start to see their potential. You can ask a hundred people to write a hundred words about a specific event, and every one of the finished pieces will be different, even though many of the words used are likely to be the same. 

Each of them will be infused with the experiences, personalities and agendas of their respective authors, yet because of the way we use and learn language, each of those hundred people will be able to understand the context and meaning of their peers' creations. Words allow us to convey our opinions, to explain concepts and teach skills, and to do it in a way that is entirely personal, but which can be universally understood. 

Words are magic. The way that one person describes an event can influence how you feel about something that you yourself didn't witness. You have an emotional response to news stories you read, despite them being someone else's experiences. You can convince, and be convinced of things without any direct contact, just by the use of words. 

Terrorist. Guerrilla. Freedom fighter. 

They all describe the same person, but from different perspectives. In spite of the fact that we all load our words with our own biases, we are often oblivious to it when we read someone else's bias-fuelled words, and we read the words as fact, rather than opinion. We can be convinced of something even when the visible evidence contradicts it, by well selected words. 

And irrespective of that, we have a tendency to use them completely liberally, without any thought given to the consequences. We use them to hurt, to confuse, to indoctrinate, to assert untruths. We take them at face value when they are used to mock, to castigate, and to undermine. 

And yet, if something is worth saying, it's worth saying well. With the right words, you can be a force for change, a force for good; you can inspire, reassure, empathise; you can teach, inform, and entertain. 

Words are powerful. They hold a power that each of us has the opportunity to control. And we each choose whether to wield them as a weapon or to apply them as a balm. 

Terry himself said "No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away" (Reaper Man).

So choose your words wisely, and with care. Words well chosen, and carefully placed, can allow you to achieve an immortality of sorts. And what greater power can there be? 

Oneironaut

I dreamed I was a robot

Part One - Oneironaut

It was only on reading the brochure that Isaac realised how experimental the procedure was. Of the limited options available to him, this was the one the oncologist believed had the greatest chance of success, so he'd at first thought it was a cruel joke when, on asking to see a brochure, he had received by way of an indifferent courier, this mess of notes and diagrams. Almost exclusively hand-written, apparently by a lunatic, and seemingly never copied, the manuscript made immediately clear to Isaac, just how desperate his situation was. He began for the first time to realise that of the ever decreasing number of options available to him, none was the right one. For the time being, the easiest option seemed to be avoidance - an option Isaac fully embraced, as he increased the level on his morphine drip, and swiftly felt the welcome disorientation of opiate-induced sleep. 

The confusing familiarity of dreams reassured Isaac. The lucidity convincing enough to feel real, while the unconsciousness coupled with the drugs allowed him to forget his current predicament. 

With no clear destination, Isaac began walking along the path at his feet. In the distance, silhouetted in front of the setting sun he saw the ruins of a city that triggered vague recollections and feelings of nostalgia, but distracted by the spectacle of the sky on fire, he could not place it. 

He suddenly became aware that the music he had thought was in his head, was actually emanating from just over the next hill. Following the sound, he discovered two robots apparently deep in conversation. As Isaac raised his hand in greeting, he noticed that he was himself almost entirely mechanical, and realised that that must be the reason why he no longer felt the pain that he only now realised was missing. Isaac heard himself asking the question, before he even realised he was thinking it. 

"Why do you employ melody, and harmony in your communication? There are much more efficient, more mathematical ways to convey ideas". 

The robots conversed briefly, in their melancholy accents and then replied to the human: 

"Because it's beautiful"

Looking from the robots to the iridescent sky, and back again, he felt the wave of calm wash over him, as he fell deeper in to sleep, and was aware of nothing more. 

It was the pain that eventually roused him. Sitting up he became simultaneously aware of the burning inside him, and the immense calm that came with his decision, and the realisation that there had only ever been one real option. 

I was wrong. I'm sorry. I will try to learn from it

There are few words a person can say to me that will make me respect them more. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone acts at one time or another in a way which they would find unacceptable from anyone else. The ability to acknowledge a mistake, is something which we should be instilling in our children from the day that they make their first one. 

Nobody likes to be wrong, but more and more, we are perpetuating a blame culture. Fuelled by the sensationalist press and media, we have become a litigious society of finger-pointers, to the extent that attributing blame and deflecting responsibility has become second nature. 

We see it everywhere. We vilify celebrities for their errors, we shame politicians into resignation for misdemeanours completely unrelated to their ability to govern. We focus on accountability to the extent that the result is countless cover-ups far more damaging than the indiscretions they aim to hide. We put people in positions where they are destined to fail, and then we all but crucify them when they do. 

How would society look if we instead encouraged honesty? If we demonstrated the value of humility? If we taught our children to expect respect rather than punishment when they make mistakes?

Our instinct is to be defensive. To shift blame. To find a way to do anything but take responsibility. The really bizarre thing about that is that there really is nothing more disarming when someone points out your error than to say "actually you're right. I was wrong. I'm sorry. I will try to learn from it". 

Granted, when someone makes the same mistake time and again, when they show an inability to learn from their mistakes, there comes a point where denying them the option to make the same mistake again is the prudent course of action. 

And yet if we can build a culture of humility, where admitting mistakes, respecting the ability to acknowledge them, and demonstrating that we can learn from them, become more important to us than finger-pointing and retribution, maybe those mistakes would be far fewer to begin with. 

If we all went into any venture knowing that mistakes are learning experiences rather than opportunities for humiliation and denigration, and if we spent time helping people learn from their mistakes rather than punishing them, maybe we could make some real progress, and reclaim the press and media as news outlets, rather than outrage pedlars.  

Why don't we know everything yet?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson said:

"As I galaxy-gaze through time upon their diversity of colors, shapes, sizes, brightnesses, and structural detail, the boundary between knowledge and ignorance calls to me. When I reach for the edge of the universe, I do it knowing that along some paths of cosmic discovery, there are times when, at least for now, one must be content to love the questions themselves"

In attempting to answer life's questions, we inevitably reach a point where we can't find answers, and all that we have is speculation. The more we learn, the more we hypothesise; the more we test and prove those hypotheses, the more questions we answer, and the more new questions present themselves. With each iteration we have greater knowledge on which to base our speculation, but always there remain things we don't know. 

Through accepting this, and through constantly learning, and correcting earlier assumptions, I have concluded that there are three things which must be the foundation for my journey along the mortal coil:

1. Everything I believe might be wrong.

2. I believe what I believe based on evidence, and will change those beliefs if presented with evidence which compels me to.

3. Anything can be explained by science. Anything for which humans don't have an explanation, it is because humans don't yet have sufficient understanding of the science involved.

It's not uncommon to assume that anything which we can't prove scientifically cannot be proven. In fact, based on what we know thus far, it's likely that anything which truly exists can be proven by applying the scientific method - we simply don't yet have sufficient understanding to apply it. 

Everything we know - the full extent of human knowledge, has taken thousands of years to accumulate. It's also all based on data we have either acquired on or very near to earth, or which is millions of years old. There's so much of the universe that we haven't even seen yet. And what we have seen probably looks vastly different now, as the light it gives off takes so long to reach us. Many of the answers may depend on concepts that don't even exist in our corner of the universe, or that we simply aren't yet able to comprehend. 

Carl Sagan said:

"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars"

We've evolved all the way from amino acids in primordial soup to thinking, feeling, space-faring, sentients, but we still have a long way to go. The answers are all out there. By the time we run out of questions we may have evolved so far as to be unrecognisable as the descendants of these "ugly bags of mostly water".

It's the questions that will lead us there. It's the questions that will continue driving us to improve, to explore, to discover. We don't know everything yet. Maybe we never will. But we can learn to love the questions. And maybe we can be content with knowing enough to not destroy ourselves. 

International Women's Day. It's not just for women

In a society that allows there to be more CEOs called John, than there are CEOs that are women; that allows there to still be a massive discrepancy between wages for men and women doing the same jobs; where "women's" magazines consistently serve to undermine and demoralise women, rather than empower them (as they purport to); where girls' toys are invariably pink, how can we begin to balance things out and move towards actual equality? 

We can do it by being examples. By being conscious of the biases which are so ingrained as to often be subconscious. By accepting and acknowledging that we have been conditioned to think in certain ways that inherently devalue women and girls. 

From an early age we are taught to accept without questioning - to accept that there are boys' pursuits and girls'. That there are acceptable career paths for men, and different ones for women. So much of the time we don't even realise it. When we reach that age where friends start producing progeny, we instinctively buy blue for boys and pink for girls. We push identities on to them based on factors that have no basis in logic, and no relevance in the society we live in. We encourage boys to be doctors and girls to be nurses, because a hundred years ago we didn't know any better. Now we do know better, but the mindset continues. 

Every one of us has women in our lives who are important to us: our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, friends, colleagues. They all have to work much harder than their male counterparts to achieve the same recognition. 

All women face unfairness on a daily basis. They are seen as weaker than men, less able (or more suited to "traditionally female" roles), they are judged on appearance, by both men and women. We live in a society where the gender of the person carrying out a particular role is completely irrelevant, yet we are conditioned to accept these biases without a second thought. And it's bullshit. Anachronistic, irrelevant bullshit. And it's holding us back. 

If everyone could be aware of this kind of thing happening, and conscious of it, and actively try to prevent its perpetuation, if we could actually encourage equality of sex and shun the outdated myths of male superiority, rather than allowing the scales to remain weighted by tradition and paranoia and bullshit, it would make an immediate and noticeable improvement to the whole of society. 

In many roles, even when women are able to succeed in spite of the inherent culture of oppression, it's often only by trying to fit in and be "one of the boys". Equality isn't about encouraging women professionals to be more like men, it's about encouraging and supporting them to show their own talent and innovation. So many industries are built on archaic, testosterone-controlled hierarchies and infrastructure, and we tolerate it because that's how it's always been and we are often terrified of change. 

The way to evolve and thrive as a society is to allow every individual to shine and excel in their own chosen disciplines. If boys want to play with dolls and girls want to play football, encourage them. A great way to set someone on the path to failure is to try and push them into a particular direction for which they aren't suited, and in which they have no interest. This obviously applies outside the confines of gender equality, but nowhere else is it so prevalent, so ingrained in our collective consciousness. 

We need to recognise and champion the fact that empowering women empowers everyone. Encouraging girls and young women to pursue the things they're good at, rather than the roles that tradition would have us believe they're more suited to, leads to a future workforce of real balance and efficiency. It leads to a better, more caring, more productive society. How much further would we have progressed if we hadn't spent centuries telling women that they can't be scientists, or systems analysts, or authors, or doctors? How many discoveries have we missed out on because women were expected to be home-makers? 

The spread of the internet has started to give women a voice that they never had before. A forum to discuss things and share things that they could hitherto only dream of. The world now is a completely different place to the one I spent my childhood in. Anyone with an internet connection and something worth saying, can make their voice heard. We can read the opinions of real people, not just journalists. The concepts of viral media, blogging, youtube, Twitter have given us the power to tell things as we see them, and to not rely on the likes of Murdoch to effect change. But it's still not enough. Not yet. 

For so long the plight of feminists has been a battle. Women have had to fight for rights that men take for granted. And the fact that it's always been almost exclusively women fighting the battles and making the sacrifices has only served to perpetuate the status quo. Even when they realise what's going on, it's been hard for men to stand up for women's rights because of the inevitable ridicule from their male peers, propagating ingrained misogyny, often without even realising it because of the extent to which we've allowed it to continue unchecked. 

Being a real man isn't about being the alpha male. It isn't about earning the most or being able to drink the most. It isn't about belittling and undermining women. It's about taking the privilege you have always had, solely because of your gender, and using it to empower those we have for so long oppressed. It's about standing up to those friends you think will mock you for being a feminist, and pointing out how neanderthal their views are. It's about having the cojones to recognise and challenge the status quo. It's about respecting women because they *are* equal, not because you want to be seen to be doing the right thing. 

The fact that we still need an international women's day is indicative of how far we still have to go to achieve equality. But the sooner we can all have the balls to openly challenge the current inequality, the sooner we celebrate the half of the population that has had a bum deal since time immemorial, and the better off we'll all be. 

I am P4-810. I am HeForShe, and I believe in a society where we can all pursue our own dreams and goals, and where we can all benefit from the equal opportunity to pursue them. 

Evolution of Morality

"If the truth can be told, so as to be understood, it will be believed" Terence McKenna. 

As an atheist I have often encountered the viewpoint that without belief in a god, there can surely be no morality. To someone of faith, their belief in their god is so woven through every aspect of their life, that it must be incredibly difficult to imagine a concept like morality as a separate thing. 

Often the response by atheists to this assertion is mockery, but I honestly don't think that helps either side. It is human nature to mock something which we see as foolish, but I think that for the most part what we perceive as foolish is simply a lack of knowledge. Not knowing something does not make a person foolish, it simply means that they have never had the opportunity to learn whatever it is that is being discussed. The fact that once I did not know that Earth revolves around the sun does not mean that I was a fool not to know, just that I had not yet encountered that knowledge. So I think the way to tackle this lack of knowledge is to enlighten, rather than mock. 

For my own part, I believe that everyone is capable of morality, and indeed that everyone has their own moral code. Where the disagreements arise, is from the fact that morality is entirely a personal thing, based on personal experience, based on things we are told by those who we look up to, based on the laws that we live under. So what is morally right or wrong varies from person to person, even within groups of like-minded individuals. 

One person will judge another as immoral for smoking cannabis, because it is against the law, but that same person will happily break the speed limit while driving, without a guilty conscience. If you've never had an accident while speeding, you can rationalise that the law is unnecessary, and your morality adjusts to allow for this concept. You can argue that the sale of controlled substances funds other crimes, but while that may be true, the actual act of smoking pot on your own at home, harms no one, yet the current view of our society is that it is morally wrong. At the same time, speeding can, and often does, cause harm to others, yet we have reached a point where it is seen as acceptable - at least to the point that myriad people do it every day. 

It was once considered morally correct to stone someone to death for adultery. We still hold the moral view that adultery is wrong. You choose a partner, you stay with them. We still feel that it should not simply be allowed to happen, and that when people commit it, it should not go unpunished. Nowadays we punish them by divorcing them. By them having to suffer the social exclusion of being labelled a cheater. But we don't (as a general rule) kill them for it. And the reason for that is that morality, like society, evolves. Some aspects of morality remain the same. I think we'd struggle to find anyone who thinks that killing or stealing are right. But that's part of why we stopped killing people for adultery. We learned that the punishment should fit the crime, so we adjusted our laws and stopped (in most cultures at least) killing people for adultery. Our morality evolved. Right and wrong didn't change, but our definitions of them did. 

Morality is a personal, individual thing. There are aspects of it that are pretty much universally agreed, but then there are other aspects that are more fluid. And we each decide what we believe to be morally correct, based on our own experiences. We learn that when someone dies, their loss causes great pain to those who loved them, and so we establish that to take a life is wrong. 

Gravity is indisputable. You can't choose whether to be affected by it. It can be explained and measured. It might be changed over time, by environmental changes, but we can't change it by simply ignoring it. And a personal experience won't change the extent to which it affects you. Morality though, is an abstract. You can't define it absolutely because it means different things to different people. In some cases we take the moral choice of "an eye for an eye". In others we choose to "forgive those who trespass against us". The important thing there is that it is a choice. Unlike gravity, we choose whether to be affected by the consensus opinion of what is right or wrong. Most of us believe that killing is wrong, and so we don't do it. But some people still do. If those people chose to disagree with the laws of gravity, they wouldn't simply float away. 

So what of the morality of faith? Having been raised with Christian values, that's what I'm most familiar with, so I'll use that as my example, though with the caveat that I don't pretend to be any kind of authority on it, and the knowledge that other faiths work in similar, but not identical ways to install their followers with a moral code. 

The bible has a lot of guidance and advice, for many things. A lot of the advice in there is perfectly sound, and as relevant today as it was when it was first written down. But a lot of it is contradicted by other passages, so we see people quoting only the passages that demonstrate their personal moral code, while ignoring those which contradict it. Conversely, much of it is not contradicted within the bible, but we find that people don't follow it because we now know more about the human condition than did the people of 2000 years ago. Our group morality has evolved. It has changed, and so we change our behaviour accordingly. 

Part of the problem with quoting any individual passage, is that a lot of it is about context, and much of it is open to interpretation. It's all translated, through several languages, and in some cases the translations are disputed. One individual passage is interpreted one way by some people, and a different way by others. It's not a set of rules, it's a collection of advice. And that advice is based on the personal experiences of those who wrote it down. 

But it's also anachronistic. It's often giving a viewpoint that few would share today, because it goes against what we now consider to be morally correct. Our morality has evolved. 

What you find in any faith-based text, or holy book, is not answers, but guidance. Advice. You might, as a result of that guidance and advice, *find* the answers you're looking for, but the answers themselves are not there. You find the answers in your interpretation. 

Some years ago I came to the conclusion that I am an atheist. I reviewed my own experiences and realised that the fundamental message of Christianity (the faith I was raised in), as with all religions, is essentially common sense. If you don't like being treated a certain way, other people probably don't like it either, so you should "do unto others...". Having a moral code, treating other people fairly doesn't require the existence of a creator. It just requires that you think sensibly and rationally about how you behave. 

I choose to follow a moral code not for the promise of reward in another life, but simply to improve the lives of those I share my life with right now. I don't do it to avoid going to hell, I do it to avoid other people feeling like they are in hell right now. Part of it is undeniably out of selfish motives - I want to be treated with kindness too. Though I don't think it's unfair to say that acting a certain way to ensure passage into heaven is also to some degree a self-serving viewpoint. 

The idea that *any* book could contain the answers to things which are subjective and personal, seems to me to be remarkably short-sighted. That the book is thousands of years old makes it seem unfair to expect that every part of it is still relevant and appropriate. In those thousands of years, we have learned so much, some through discovery, some through learning from mistakes. It's inconceivable to posit that all of that experience and learning is rendered irrelevant because of one book, written before the advent of scientific discovery. Yet this is the foundation for the morality of so many, who find it incomprehensible that without it, one can have any kind of morality. 

So how do we proceed? How do we reach a point where, rather than arguing about whose morality is superior, we instead work together, from the points where our moral codes overlap, to be a force for what we universally agree is good? 

Once you start down the path of being adversarial, there is little either side can say that the other would be able to truly take on board, we need to begin a discussion where each party respects the right of the other to have different views, even if they do not agree. 

Dealing with unwarranted aggression

Being a particularly sensitive (oftentimes hypersensitive) being, this is a quandary which I have spent a great deal of time thinking about, because no matter how much you prepare yourself for an encounter with this kind of dickholery, the way that you respond to it comes from the fight-or-flight instinct, and it kicks in before you get a say in the matter. 

So the first step, for me, was acknowledging that in this scenario  it's reaction rather than action that you have control over. You can't stop someone being a dick, but you can condition your reaction to be less damaging to your mental health. The key word being condition - choosing a strategy and then consciously reminding yourself of it until the strategy becomes instinct. 

I think that people who are consistently tools spend the majority of their lives in fight-or-flight, because they are emotionally underdeveloped - they live in constant fear of not being the alpha, without ever realising it. They don't have the intellectual or emotional experience to conceive that their actions affect others because their permanent state of fear prevents them thinking about anything but their own survival. Once you can recognise and acknowledge that, it's a small step to actually pitying them. They are, in essence, a frightened animal. A dog that bites you because its life thus far makes it think you are going to beat it rather than pet it, will calm down only when it sees you aren't a threat. 

So make allowances for it. Instinct pushes us to think "why should I? Why should I go easy on them when they are such a dick?". The answer is simple, though hard to digest: you should because no one else ever has. You should because when they see you aren't a threat they have a chance of emerging from fight-or-flight and seeing things rationally. Assess the situation and find a way to make *their* life easier and you will find that, with very few exceptions, making *your* life easier is a happy by-product. And as a bonus, you leave the encounter with the feeling that you may just have helped someone who has never actually seen compassion, rather than feeling you've just gone ten rounds with Tyson

How a Bond movie would end in real life

Bond gets locked up with the villain who appears to be setting up an elaborate timed device to kill bond. Bond tries to engage him in conversation but gets only monosyllabic answers. Villain then eventually says, you think this is the bit where I, unable to resist bragging, tell you the genius of my evil plans, then leave you in here alone with the almost-certain chance of death, but leaving you a small window of opportunity to escape and thwart the plans I've just told you in great detail?

Bond replies: well that is normally how things go, yes. 

Villain: ah. Yes. Easy mistake to make. No, this is just the coffee machine 

Shoots bond dead. Fills coffee cup. Rules world