The Cheerful Insanity of Me

I seem to have been scooting around the country quite a bit already this year, and although it's nice to get up north or into the countryside (and even better when you can do both), there's still something magical about London that you don't find in places like the Peak District (where I was last weekend).

This city is like one big vat of cultural soup. You've got all different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, hair colours, shoe sizes, etc, etc all in one place, and other than a few nutters who want to rid the world of all the people who's toe nails are too long, everyone gets on fairly harmoniously.

However, this doesn't stop us getting all protectional about any other cultures coming into the soup, as they might steal our jobs. Strange really, as I've never met anyone who's owned a job, only people who get paid for doing them.

This evening, I wandered over to a debate on "Capitalism vs Socialism". The Capitalism side was given by someone from the Adam Smith institute with the SPGB arguing for Socialism, so it was more "this capitalist system is pants, what's the more ideal theoretical alternative free markets or common ownership". One of the arguments came down to which would be more efficient at providing aid to the third world.

Certainly one of the major problems of the world inequality of wealth, especially between nations. While it's nice that everyone has been enthusiastic about sending aid to Haiti recently, there's always suffering and those worse off than us even when it's not hitting the news headlines.

However much we try to do things like growing crops in the desert, we are always going to be in a situation where some places have more abundant supplies of certain resources than others. If I'm hungry in a room with a buffet at the other end, it's going to be far more effective for me to go over to the buffet to get food rather than for others to bring it to me.

Come winter when food becomes short, birds don't lay down in their nests and have aid flown in from their friends on the continent to help them survive. Instead many of them fly south to where the food is, but then they don't have to worry about passports, visas and immigration controls.

It's good to provide aid to these places, but if you truly want to give them equal access to the resources we have, the only way to do this is to give them the access to come and get them. Then the fundamental issue of a system based on competition such as capitalism, whether or not you have free markets, is that competition isn't about being equal anyway. Who plays games aiming for a draw?

Is capitalist competition necessary to drive our development though? I'm not convinced. OK, you get product innovation from companies trying to get one step ahead of their competition, but you've also got things like free software. OK, some of these have more than a little capitalist input, but you've also got the millions of little applications written by people tapping away at their computers in their free time in the middle of the night (who know why they do it, but they seem perfectly happy). Many of these may be pretty much dead, only going ping if your really lucky and poke them enough, but in amongst these you get Goliath programs that can sort your entire life out, whilst creating world peace and making the tea.

Even if you put the equality issues to one side, you still face the fact that, if you drive the production-consumption flow from the production end, then you will end up with people consuming far more than they actually need and place a greater burden on the world's resources. If you buy the top of the range mobile phone one week, there is really no need to upgrade to the next model the following week just because it's got an extra pixel in the bottom right hand corner, but the producer will try to convince you otherwise as it's in their best interest to do so.

I still remain unconvinced that the world's problems are solvable within a capitalist system as it seems to push us in the entirely wrong direction no matter how you tweak it.

Dana Centre plans for this month:

9 June - Move Me On - Curious idea getting a scientist and choreographer to work together. I'm fascinated to know what the result is and what they say about the reasoning behind it.
11 June - Season of Life - Seasons certainly seem to effect our general feelings,etc, but other than the obvious I don't know a lot about this.
17 June - Dinner@Dana: Deciphering the Cosmic Number - Must admit I don't find 137 anything special, but fascinated to find out why Pauli and Jung thought differently
18 June - Economy and Me - I'm not convinced capitalism is a good thing (but am failing to see what viable alternatives there are given the number of other systems which have been tried and failed).
30 June - Carole Dane is Sexually Selected - The science of sexual attraction seems an excellent subject for comedy.

If anyone fancies joining me at any of these, they are free, you just need to email tickets@danacentre.org.uk to book a place.

Also, there's this one a Gresham college, which I'll probably aim to go to:

22 June - London's Lost Rivers: The Hackney Brook and other North West Passages - I've posted about the lost rivers before, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say about them.

More interesting talks at the Dana Centre next month.

These were the ones that caught my eye:

• 5 May - Interior Traces - The more performance based events I've been to have been some of the more interesting ones I've seen, especially when it comes down to a question of morals
• 6 May - Rewired Teens? - Interesting topic that gets a lot of press coverage given how much society has changed as computers have become more household items, would be interesting to see what they say about how it affects upbringing of teens given how controversial it can be
• 13 May - Social Surveillance - I'm not overly protective about a lot of my personal data (although I'm admittedly more careful about things like bank details than I am about my address which in turn I'm more protective about then what I had for breakfast for example), but there seem to be plenty of people out there who seem to be ultra-protective about their data, so it begs the question about where the sensible balance lies
• 26 May - Designer Seeks Scientist - now this just sounds silly...
• 27 May - Physics of the Impossible - oh look, all the cool things that we're supposed to be able to do soon according to the books, but can't yet
• 28 May - I Am Nesia - I forget why this one caught my eye

As, always, if anyone fancies joining me at any of these, you just need to email tickets@danacentre.org.uk to book a place.

So, a little over a fortnight ago (I'm getting worse at this...), I went to an evening of music inspired by nematodes (small worms) at the Dana Centre.

The Nurrish Lab in the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at UCL are using nematodes to model brain activity, more specifically the affects of serotonin. Unusually, for a science lab, they've had a composer in residence for the past six months, Keith Johnson.

Although the evening did include a brief discussion of the research in the lab, the main focus was Keith's work (just mistyped that as worm, obviously got them on the brain now).

On arrival their was a pianist (Philip Howard) playing Keith's "A book of mutants", which Keith then went on to discuss during the talk. This was inspired by the lab mutating the worms to study what the seratonin affected. In this piece Keith has produced 18 mutations of Prelude No. 1 in C Major from Book 1 of The Well-tempered Clavier by JS Bach. Rather than just being a straightforward variation the mutations involve systematic changes to the music, such as removing repetitions (which obviously became less recognisable as it went on), swapping the notes played by each hand (which was recognisable, but in that "there's something not quite right here" way) or keeping the musical structure, but replacing all the notes with notes from a completely different piece of music (the example played was the Beatles, but I couldn't figure out which Beatles song).

After that there was a performance of 2 of Keith's other works "Porous with travel fever/PMA and serotonin" and "Still ist mein Herz/Aldicarb" and a piece by Paul Whitty, "...I was bored before I even began..." by [rout].

Keith's pieces were based upon combining the final section of "Der Abschied" from Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler and "Hejira" by Joni Mitchell. The combinations were both put together by looking at the data worms activity, so in the first piece for example, the amount of Mahler was governed by serotonin which causes the worms to be still, while the Joni Mitchell is governed by PMA which causes the worms to move more quickly.

Paul's piece was, unconnected with worms, but was based on the sounds from the pick ups on the instruments rather than anything being played by the instruments themselves.

There are some MP3s of Keith's work and a blog discussing it at www.wormusic.org (lj feed of blog: wormusic)

Rosie, pointed me the direction of some more interesting talks, this time at Goldsmiths' Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, which I think I'll probably aim to go along to:

• Do psychology and Philosophy Need Each Other? - 3 March - I don't know a huge amount about either subject, but find both fascinating, so thought this might be interesting


• The Real X Files - 10 March - I hadn't even considered the fact that the UK MoD would have a UFO policy (it's normally the US and Roswell, etc that get mentioned when talking UFOs)


• Can Science Accommodate Psychic Experience? - 24 March - It will be interesting to hear how he feels these experiences fit with modern physics

Looks like you can just turn up to these without booking in advanced.

Also, have just booked a ticket to see Traces, which looks amazing.

So, on Wednesday evening I popped over to the Dana Centre for a talk on The War of the Sexes.

Bit of an unrepresentative title as the most of the research discussed was to do with inter-gender differences rather than cross-gender ones.

In short the findings of the research covered suggested:

- Men are generally better at whole arm movements then fine hand and finger movements and can generally work better with objects in far-sight.
- Women are generally better at fine hand and finger movements then whole arm movements and can generally work better with objects in near-sight.

It was speculated this was due to originally being hunter-gathers. The male hunters would need whole arm movements to use tools for hunting and defending and would generally be looking at distant objects. The female gathers would generally be using fine finger movements to pick, gather and care for the young and would generally be looking at objects close by.

There was no discussion as to how the ranges over-lapped for men and women though.

- People colour preferences can be measured as a combination of a red-green and blue-yellow scale. Women generally have a preference for the red end of the red-green scale, but the same is not true for men.

This apparently showed up in cultures where there wasn't such a strong social connection between pink and girls. Although, it was speculated that this explained the pink for girls, blue for boys thing, there didn't seem to be any strong preference for blue in boys, but then thinking about our culture the blue for boys thing doesn't seem as strong a cultural norm as the pink for girls.

It was once again speculated that this was down to our hunter-gather origins and the need for gathers to pick out red (e.g. berries) from green (e.g. leaves).

- If you put a child in a circle of toys they tend to play more with the ones stereotypical for their gender.

It was clear how much cultural expected impacted on this though. However, it was apparently also true to an extent for monkeys with female monkeys tending to play more will dolls and male ones more with cars. Obvious maternal instinct was speculated as the reason for the dolls. Apparently they had a habit of turning them upside down to find out what sex they were.


All in all it was an interesting talk, but wasn't quite what it was advertised to be. I got the impression there were a lot of people there who were expecting to be able to discuss how much gender difference should influence roles in society, which this didn't even touch upon.

There certainly didn't seem much here to argue for the traditional partitioning of roles between the genders, especially when most modern roles require less manual labour and are more service based.

This evening I wondered over to the Dana Centre for a talk on DNA Testing. The discussion was focus on the services of companies like 23andMe who will analyse your DNA and give you details of illnesses you are genetically more/less prone to.

It was interesting, even if the debate was a little one-sided. They had one speaker from a company offering these services, but they were on video link from California, so only gave a brief presentation followed by questions and answers and weren't involved in the rest of the discussions.

There was a random man in the audience who tried to claim that genetics wasn't science, which was unusual, but he seemed to be the only one with that view.

In short, I didn't really have any desire to have my DNA tested, other than pure curiosity, before this evening and as there wasn't really a strong argument to suggest I might these views haven't changed.

Having not been for a while, thethirdvoice and I went to the Dana Centre twice this month. The first time we saw a stand up comic talking about man's journeys into space.

On Tuesday we went back for a talk on gadgets. A bit of a big subject really and as such the talk ended up a bit woolly, especially as one of the speaker's spent the whole time promoting his book every other sentance.

There ended up being an interesting discussion on environmental issues, as the speaker who had come to focus on this part was a bit more vocal in her views than any of the others. However, she didn't really get her points across very well.

All in all, it was an interesting evening, but I don't think I learned any thing new.