November 2019

If a person eats too much, we don’t say they have a plate, fork and knife problem. And yet when people spend too much time on their phones, it’s a ‘device’ problem. We have the bizarrest set of ideas around technology.

At trivia!

People are increasingly joining the dots I think. Power. "You do see these vast protests which evolve into nothing because there’s no organisation behind them, and everyone thinks they’ve done their bit,” Stears says. “What you really need is people who can sustain months and months of action. Unless you do that, you’re not going to make concrete changes.”

The seductive danger of lenses. A metaphysics was added to lenses that has created all sorts of confusion. People started to believe that the things they could now see were a different level of reality. It's the same illusion of the 'bird's eye view', the belief that you see more if you zoom out - the 'big picture' - and if you zoom in you see the 'parts' that make up that big picture. But a lens just removes some details and foregrounds others, there are no levels.

Bruno Latour has been attacked for 3 decades for making this point. To many he was 'undermining' science. Which shows that the 'modern' world is this same de-animation. That was what has driven the rush to fantasy in our times; the wrong sort of re-animation I think, leaving the world de-animated but injecting a bit of spirit or New Age 'metaphysics' into that de-animated world. "We risk only having respect for things insofar as they resemble human experience and characteristics,” writes Anna Grear, among the best analysts of this movement. “The law [instead] needs to develop a new framework in which the human is entangled and thrown in the midst of a lively materiality – rather than assumed to be the masterful, knowing centre.”

This is the Katy freeway, in Texas, 23 lanes wide. It now takes 51% *longer* to travel this stretch of road than when it was 8 lanes wide. This to me is the problem with supply and demand thinking, the same is now happening with water. Building dams has increased supply (short term), which in turn has dramatically increased demand, with large numbers of new irrigators. I don’t think we can solve difficult problems without dealing with ideas. The truth is rarely what we call common sense, code words for laziness and ignorance.

I’m really curious about everyday ideas of vision and lenses. For example, with a telescope people say they see things ‘far away’. But how does that work? Obviously you don’t move a millimetre with a telescope, and it doesn’t either. And neither of you is going over ‘there’ to get the image and bring it back ‘here’. The image was here the whole time.

Imagine if trains, buses and planes ignored rules. It rarely happens, those forms of mass transport are strongly regulated in multiple ways. 95% of drivers I see on the road ignore speed limits and other rules all the time. As a mass transport option, cars and motorbikes in their current form are on the way out, I think this sort of stuff is just fiddling at the edges.

Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes of the US, has been granted legal rights in the way a person has. You can see the algal blooms that are part of its current problems. This is what climate change really means, I think, the rediscovery that 'nature' is not a container we sit inside. Things have agency, not just humans, because ‘life’ doesn’t have clear boundaries.

We have an unfortunate and inexplicable tendency to imagine everything unknown to us as homogeneous. Gabriel Tarde

More vision stuff. We don’t see the world, like looking through the eyes as windows. What we see as ‘images’ is our possible action on the world. A blindfolded person will tend to put their hands out like this, to feel their way, showing what the real function of sight is. Blind people don’t, blindfolding is not a simulation of blindness. Something that ‘looks far away’ is not actually far away, the image is our relative action on that thing. It’s so habitual to feel that vision is just ‘looking’ though. I think our ideas around vision shape our ideas on just about everything else, ideas matter.

Happy birthday Donna! Party hard :)

Happy birthday!

If you’re not familiar with tensegrity structures, here are some examples. (These are interesting because it now seems most living things are structured in this way.) What makes them unique is that, unlike in other structures, none of the structural members bend; everything is axially loaded, in engineer’s speak. Because our bodies are tensegrities, this means we can change shape as a whole without imposing any localised bending forces anywhere in our bodies. Which is why we can be weightless, even here on the ground (weightlessness is the absence of unbalanced forces caused by contact forces, like the ground).

We’re born alone. We live alone. We die alone. Friendship and love along the way don’t change that, we are fundamentally alone with our friends and with our lovers too (entering friendship and love from within that absolute alone-ness enriches them beyond measure). Rather than seeing that as a negative message, maybe it’s the explanation for the epidemic of ‘loneliness’. We don’t know how to be alone, and it infects everything, including friendships and love, which become co-dependencies.

I think the success of science is down to one thing mostly - it focuses on properties, not essences. Rather than try to define what something is, it defines how it relates to other things - its properties. Einstein of course made relation famous with his relativity, but all modern science is about relations. The numbers on the Periodic Table are properties, weights for example. The truth of something is always contextual, and relative, outside science as well as inside it. Anybody who says otherwise is trying to steal your money.

One of the weirdest ideas for me is that politicians are ‘in charge’. It’s why people protest to them, for example, to ask them to change decisions. But at the same time, we see how absolutely obsessed politicians are with popularity and opinion polls. That to me shows really clearly who is in charge. Us. The belief we aren’t is self-fulfilling.

This is the sort of ‘moral’ thinking that seems pretty common. I think it’s rubbish. Any categorical statement will turn out to be untrue, in some important ways, morality for me is not blanket righteousness of any kind. For example, there are profoundly moral reasons to lie. But I think we lack the thinking skills to really embrace the case-specific events in our lives, so we fall back on these greeting card absolutes.

I think the fact people often fall to the ground when somebody takes a chair away as they’re sitting shows something important about how we use our bodies. Even in this drawing, you can see the sitting person is way off balance as they’re going to sit, their centre of mass is significantly behind their supporting surface - their feet. People tend to fall into chairs, rather than simply change shape and remain supported the whole time. And when they go to get ‘up’, they try to get from from their seated support to a standing support immediately, rather than again simply changing shape and staying in support the whole way. The ‘effort’ they feel has nothing to do with their weight, but with protecting them from falling.

Research published in 2017 showed that people who reported having sore or stiff backs very rarely had actual stiffness in the back, when measured. The research is showing that such body stiffness is very often a perception generated by the body itself to prevent further movement in a way that might cause damage. Another example of the bad guide common sense usually is. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09429-1

Some of the ideas I post here derive from the ideas Einstein used. For example, location words like up, down, near, far, there, here, before, after - all of those are words with relative meanings, not absolute meanings. ‘Far away’ has no absolute meaning at all - 100 years ago London was far away from Sydney. Now you can be anywhere in the world in 24 hours. Similarly people use their bodies as if it takes effort to get from ‘there’ to ‘here’, or from ‘down’ to ‘up’, without realising that here is already part of there, or that their bodies are already down when they’re up. Etc. None of this is just about the meaning of words, the meanings translate across into real physical effects in our lives.

"If this parliament looked like deadlocked purgatory, the Commons has rarely better reflected the national state of mind. The country is split, conflicted, afraid to defy the referendum, to revoke it or carry it out. That is who we are: angry, anxious, stuck. But a “firm government” with only minority support would be no answer." Politics is us. Polly gets it.

Is a 'hole' a thing? Or the absence of something? To extend this one, is a pipe actually just an extended hole? I think so. Pipes work by creating a hole and then extending it across a distance, to allow what the pipe carries to continually fall through the hole.

Ideas and bodies. “I’ve been on my feet all day.” You can’t stand on your feet, what would you stand on them with? Just a figure of speech? I don’t think so, it’s an entire mental framework that sees your feet as bearing all of your ‘weight’ when you stand. How you then act with your body will be shaped by that framework.

The single biggest misunderstanding about gravity I think is that you can feel it. You can’t. What people think is feelings of weight in their bodies is not their weight - you can’t feel your weight either. Gravity never ‘weighs you down’ - these astronauts have pretty much full gravity acting on them. What we experience as weight is contact forces with surfaces we come into contact with. And yet many go through every day ‘fighting’ gravity, thinking they have to hold themselves up against it.

When HIH collapsed it lost just over $5 billion. Some of its senior managers went to jail. ScoMo spent over $150 billion to boost the economy. It failed completely.

Internal combustion. We gave fire a home inside, unregulated by the other elements. In engines, furnaces, boilers etc. Now the world is baking and on fire. I don’t think this is only a metaphor: earth, air and water are all critically damaged, because fire seduced us.

I think stairs are one of the best examples of our bizarre ideas about gravity. Going ‘up’ stairs is often seen as hard work, people strain to do it, or take the lift. Going down stairs people often fall onto each step, you can hear the clomp clomp clomp as they descend. In both cases the person tries to get to the upwards support of the next stair while they’re still being supported by the stair they’re on. Going up, most of your mass is well above the level of the next step already, all you need to do is shift your support gradually to that next step, rather than try to ‘lift’ your entire body. Going down, there’s no need to shift your mass so abruptly to the lower step, so you fall onto it. You can use the support of the upper stair to gradually transition between the supporting surfaces. Once you get used to gentle transitions in support, there’s no more effort going ‘up’ stairs than going ‘down’ them.

The science has been in for a while on this one. That energy in - energy out ‘common sense’ idea? Complete bollocks.

Something that changed my life. What we call outer space begins right here on the ground, you don’t pass some threshold and suddenly you’re ‘in space’. The atmosphere thins, but gravity doesn’t, or much more slowly. What this means is, when you’re on the ground, you’re a floating astronaut who has had a planet come *up* underneath you. You can feel that directly, the ground stops feeling like something you fall down onto, and starts to feel like a massive rock coming up under your feet every moment, as you float.

The Block is good drama. It’s also a window into Casino Oz. Capital gains on housing are the engine room of the Oz economy. Really it’s just a fancy word for gambling. The trick is flogging off a place for zillions more than it actually cost, and calling it ‘what the market will bear’. For any other product it’d be illegal, adding a coat of paint and selling on for several hundred percent more than you paid for something. Look at the faces here, like they won the lottery. This is the Australian Dream. All economic armaggedons start in this exact way.

The average (median) age of workers in Australia is about 40. If you’re uncomfortable with immigration, look at that number. Somebody has to do the work. Boris Johnson has just announced huge importing of health care workers for their health system, for the same reason. Western societies are old, immigrants are the only hope they have of survival. Also political trends are copied around the world. After years of ‘austerity’ in the UK (cutting public services), the latest election is being fought around who can borrow the most to spend the most on public services. I think you get to a point where the reality swamps the bullshit.

Straya is topping the world! Personal debt champions. Some of that personal debt is public services outsourced to you and me to fund ourselves. It balances ScoMo's budget, and screws you and me.

Australian scientists have discovered that beneath the sea bed around the world, there may be up to half a million cubic KILOMETRES of fresh water. That’s about 100 times as much groundwater as we’ve extracted since 1900. The water entered the sea bed as rain when the sea levels were much lower in the last Ice Age. (All sea water was once fresh water too, I don’t remember learning that at school.)

Breathtaking, click and see the wonders of this farm. We’re so convinced humans are superior and create the sophisticated things in the world. But take that vanity out of the picture, and this happens. It’s not a ‘greenie’ message either. This farm is now super profitable. We’ll need far fewer farms, freeing up so much countryside to return to rich landscapes.

One of humankind’s greatest mysteries still is - how were plants and animals domesticated? Nobody knows. It’s also not clear that humans did it, animals and plants may have domesticated us. We may be the domestic species serving certain plants and animals.

One of the greatest illusions, I think. If you zoom out, human societies are very simple patterns. The reason we think humans are the most complex things on Earth is because we see them up close. Everything is more complex, the smaller you go, and simpler as you zoom out. The reason we seem more complex than a rock is because we’re WAY zoomed out from the trillions of particles that make up the rock. Even amongst what we call living things, the more you look through a microscope, the greater complexity life will show you. Humans themselves are just ‘zoomed out’ bacteria.

Happy birthday! So disgustingly young;)

Happy birthday buddy!

Opposites are the in thing. Left and Right, city and the bush, quiet Australians and noisy Australians, etc. I think it’s worth trying this thought experiment with all of them. Hot and cold is a good example. If hot really is the opposite of cold, at what point does one turn into the other? Ditto for Left and Right, if they’re really opposites, where does Left become Right, or vice versa?

So it turns out staring at their phones all day is actually making young people smart. I’m sure the boomers can turn it into a tax concession for themselves, of some kind.

The problem with hazard reduction burns? 1) They won’t stop these fires. 2) They increasingly turn into bushfires themselves. 3) They swap one hazard - destruction of a handful of homes - for a much, much bigger hazard - toxic wood smoke that can kill thousands. Straya is famous for many things. Thinking isn’t one of them.

The anger people feel for institutions is raw. In this case none of the institutions being blamed have actually done a thing wrong. But it’s pretty standard, and I think why around the world populism is winning. Extremely dangerous to have incoherent rage driving the bus.

Try this reality filter. Can you think of a single thing you do, think or feel that isn’t an imitation of what somebody else does, thinks or feels? That question can be upsetting to some, because we place such negative connotations on imitation. But if you put that to one side, I will bet there isn’t a single thing you or I do or think or feel that isn’t an imitation in some way of what somebody else does or thinks or feels. (The implications of this go way beyond what people often expect, I think. The idea of us being originals creates all sorts of mess.)

I reckon teachers understand power better than anybody. You can’t just give people orders, it doesn’t work. Power is granted to you, by the people you lead. It’s a contract, a provisional agreement. Nobody ‘has’ power, you can’t wield it or hold it. Nobody is ever in charge. Not politicians, or generals, or managers. Nobody.

I’ve still not heard a definition of love that doesn’t define it as something else - affection, caring, selflessness etc. What I think people mean when they say they want to be loved, is that they want to be recognised for who they are, rather than as some variation on everybody else. They want their individual nature, their essential aloneness, to be recognised.

Happy birthday Shaz!

The politics of words. DROUGHT. Drought suggests that lack of water is due to lack of rain. It's a concept used a lot because it puts the blame on weather, rather than on anything humans do. One of a politician's genuine skills (not criticising them) is in framing ideas in words. 'Quiet Australians' is another; that one is sinister. It means "Australians who don't criticise the government".

“...when you pick a partner, you pick a story, and then you find yourself in a play you never auditioned for.” Esther Perel

Perel on love is so interesting because she understands that love is essentially selfish, and should be. For example, this insight on infidelity: “They often stray not because they want to find another person but because they want to reconnect with a different version of themselves. It isn't so much that they want to leave the person that they are with as much as sometimes they want to leave the person that they have themselves become”.

Something about the sound of male voices all singing together is a bit spine-tingling

Socialism or capitalism? The UK invented both, and its next election is going right back to basics.

The same pattern repeats. Inspirational leaders don’t change things, only organised daily action does. If the Left would re-join bloody unions, it might win. It won’t do that, it’s too pure, organised fights seem frightful to it. And so it loses, over and over again.

In Extinction Rebellion camps, they have health activities that are straight out of the 1960s. A whole range of New Age therapies. ‘The system’ is the enemy. By disrupting everyday life they feel they’re disrupting the evil system. In other words, like the 1960s, the attack is on society itself. Down with the establishment. The 60s crowd who believed all this crap went on to become the richest people in history, fattening themselves on the wreckage of society.

Happy birthday :)

Grateful we bought the air con units that double as air purifiers.

Chloroplasts turn sunlight into energy. Chloroplasts were built by bacteria, swapping genes and other bits and pieces. We humans aren’t so clever. In fact we were built by bacteria too, they mastered nanotechnology billions of years ago.

When you remove human skin, isn’t it obvious that the human body is really just a big spring? Look at all that elastic tissue. Even the bones are tissues.

I’m quite partial to cruises. But I’m not sure the facts about them are widely known. They’re scary facts. Travel again, a deeply compromised cultural obsession.

The Skwish toy is often used as an example of tensegrity. As a structure it just sits there, in any orientation, without strain (in a body you’d call strain ‘effort’). You can imagine your body like that, as a single integrated suspended structure. (That is what your body is.) It can change how you do everything, no need for strain or effort, just effortless suspension in space. Floating.

The trick is cool. But I mostly love the husband and wife dynamic here, very true to life ;)

Why ideas matter more than actions, I think. If you think about it, all disagreement and violence begins with clashes of ideas. Those ideas can either be resolved by each person, or ignored and transformed into slogans between warring groups. Which means times of peace between groups are usually times of high anxiety for individuals, dealing with the clashing ideas themselves. And vice versa.

I hope he can pull this off. The one thing he might be overestimating is peoples’ appetite for conversation. In my experience it’s virtually zero, for a whole range of reasons. The appetite for social comparison though is unlimited. That’s what drives a lot of the problems on social media.

Anybody you argue or disagree with had a first argument about the topic, with themselves. They weighed up the pros and cons of their belief before debating it with others. I think disagreements, right up to fights and wars, aren’t between people - they’re between ideas.

Line of the day, from work. “So, today is International Men’s Day”. “What do you fellas have planned?” “Um...” “Figures.”

Ideas are my passion. Not least because I think they’re the most dangerous things in the world - they determine everything that happens. Avoiding them just allows bad ideas to win. Most commonly we’re told to ‘just do it’, to stop thinking and start acting. Problem is, all action is driven by ideas - you can’t do ‘it’ without an idea of what ‘it’ is. G.K. Chesterton saw the danger very well: “Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.”

Who hasn’t met one of these boastful ‘practical men’? They usually talk a lot about ‘common sense’ too, meaning 2 or 3 ideas they know that they mistake for themselves. Once you see it, that ideas are the raw material of reality, it changes how you see everything I think.

A lot of people resist the idea that non-human things have agency. Signs like this in law are said to act as ‘remote supervision’, meaning that when they’re in place they act as delegated supervision by the authority in charge.

More on ideas. What are technologies made of? Ideas. From the materials they’re made from to the expertise in putting them together, it’s all ideas. I don’t think we often see ideas as material things. That pink car is a bundle of ideas, driving around.

Life is the purgation of desire.

The PM says Australia doesn’t need to do more on climate change because Australia is only 1.3% of world emissions. Australia takes 1.3% of the world’s refugees, and has spent well over $10 billion so far managing refugee intakes.

Jeremy Corbyn is described as ‘extreme’ because he advocates returning basic public services to public hands, and taxing the well-off to fund those services. You can see just how deep the opposing conservative stories are in our psyche that these seem radical acts. I doubt he’ll win, Shorten tried a similar platform. Too many of us now are ‘aspirational’, meaning we bought the lie that common-wealth is some evil commie plot.

Conservatives like to paint the ‘we’ as bureaucratic nanny state interference. The Left likes to paint the ‘we’ as the greater good. Both of them are arguing inside the same framework of ideas, separating ‘I’ and ‘we’. All battles - every single one - are battles of ideas. This idea is the root of all of our current political problems I think. Until we get back to ideas and question basic assumptions, like I and we being separate, nothing will change.

"...the infinitely minute...everything that constitutes the visible universe, the universe accessible to observation, proceeds, as we know, out of the invisible and inscrutable - out of a seeming nothingness - whence all reality emerges in an inexhaustible stream...we shall be astonished at the strength of the prejudice, both popular and scientific, which regards the infinitesimal as insignificant, that is, as homogeneous, neutral, and possessed of neither soul nor individuality. How persistent this illusion is! And it is all the more inexplicable because, like everything else, we, too, are destined soon to return, through death, to this despised infinitesimal from whence we are sprung - which may be (who knows?) the real beyond, that haven in the hereafter, so vainly sought for amid the infinities of space." Gabriel Tarde

In Germany the transition away from coal is going much more smoothly, because unions and business there work in partnership, putting the interests of coal workers right in the mix. Here the government just tries to smash the unions. Beautiful example of how unions are key answers to some of our most difficult questions.

Another example of why ideas matter. The ‘environment’ as an idea is the problem, not the answer. This mythical environment is trying to kill us right now, it doesn’t need protecting - it doesn’t exist. Well-meaning people campaigning to ‘save the environment’ are rehashing a 50+ year old idea that never worked, because it simply didn’t describe anything real. We can only think our way out of trouble, all this modern meme-politics is pointless.

I did some research with Professor Alan Bain about why ideas about education never improve education. The results can be applied to any part of life. Ideas will only change things if they ‘fit’ the actual reality in front of people. They must create ‘workable distinctions’, ways to directly understand a situation and how to change it. Overwhelmingly education, and most of society, uses ideas of huge generality, like a badly-fitted suit.

The gooseneck, another classic suspension design. Elasticity at work. In the body the muscles would be analogous to the central spring, and the fascia and other connective tissue would be the soft outer covering to maintain stiffness. The result? We are effortlessly suspended in space. Floating.

Good luck Greg. Centrists are the true extremists. Their cowardly desire for a peaceful life is what created the extremes they hate.

I walked past a woman in the supermarket yesterday who was sub-consciously humming the tune the supermarket had playing. An ear worm, the song ‘stuck in her head’. What fascinates me is that ideas work in exactly the same way. They’re not ‘our’ ideas, they occupy us, seducing us. When we watch the political battles of today, we’re not watching people arguing, we’re watching a handful of powerful ideas slugging it out, with people as their pawns. We need to stop fighting each other and start fighting the ideas.

Freddie Mercury’s love songs were always very dark, hidden by the beautiful music. One of the artists to explore how dark love really is. Love Kills, one of his other love songs, turned out to be prophetic.

One of the sad things for me about modern life is how it’s framed as either fact or fantasy. We’re taught to believe facts tell us how the world is, and fantasy is pretending reality is something else. You know what goes completely AWOL in that framework? Possibility, potentiality. The part of reality where ideas and facts change into each other. Reality changes all the time, from potential ideas into things, and vice versa. It’s alive.

Right now both ScoMo and Boris are pushing new union-busting regulation. Both say unions get in the way of the ‘economy’. You know what gets in its way, really? People have no money. They have no money because they’re drowning in personal debt. They’re drowning in personal debt because of predatory banks. Banks in both countries were found to be committing industrial-scale corruption. Anybody see a bank-busting Bill before parliament? No?

Another reality filter. Everything we think and feel ultimately can be traced back to an idea or ideas. We often miss that I think because we mistake ideas for the people who adopt them as beliefs. (It’s literally an adoption - the ideas are not ‘theirs’.) Once you start looking you can see all of society as the play and fight of ideas. I’d be interested if anybody can find a single thing in society that isn’t ultimately an idea at work.

I’ve spent a lot of time working in universities. What’s the function of a University? Actually I think it has only one true function. To teach people to tame ideas. Ideas matter because everything we do is an idea. Without training in ideas, they’re incredibly dangerous. Look at any evil in the world right now, and I guarantee at its heart is a noxious idea that hasn’t been tamed.

No need to travel to Australia. We’ll come to you.

If you work in a frontline public service position, it’s scarily obvious that Australians are now flipping from the easygoing, unthinking ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, to explosive rage in the face of emergencies, like running out of water. Emergencies caused by their unthinking she’ll be right attitudes.

In Straya, you can underpay workers, send in the federal police to raid journalists, let banks rob millions of people, spend billions managing 1.3% of world refugees, and use taxpayer money to fund private insurance. But come between a Strayan and a glass of anything, and all hell will break loose.

I dug back into the crap thrown at Tim Flannery by Straya's culture warriors a few years ago. Flannery predicted dire shortages of water and rain. The crazies were outraged, as in this article below. There are now over 40 areas with critical water supply problems, towns already out of water or about to be (including major regional centres), and it was revealed today Sydney will be at emergency levels by May, without further rain. If you listen to lunatics like Jones, Bolt, Blair, Murray, 2GB or anybody in the LNP for your info on this emergency, you might get a temporary boner for giving the 'greenies' a hard time. It won't make it rain.

I loved Clive James, read a lot of his work, loved his wit and TV. He was an extremely clever man, but I don’t think he was the giant he’s being described as today. Not to disrespect his memory, but to make it real. Much of James’ work seemed driven by a deep need to show-off, he seemed very vain. And maybe the best test of his greatness as a thinker is - did he ever offend or surprise anybody? Not really, Clive’s main desire was to to be admired. But we’re lucky to have had him.

Another reality filter. When humans disagree, it’s easy to miss I think that each person argues from a whole worldview that to them is a harmonious way of seeing everything that exists. So what we see as conflict between people is actually a clash of harmonies, of whole worlds. Everything is big picture, there are no individual ideas.

Ideas are more important than exercise - exercise is really just a set of ideas. People correctly say that your centre of mass/gravity needs to move upwards to go up stairs. But they try to 'climb' stairs as if they have to 'lift' that centre of gravity from one step to the next. The problem is - you can't lift yourself. You are yourself, you can't step outside you to lift your body. If you can do any activity as the whole of you at once, you will feel no effort - not one tiny bit. But our ideas divide our body up into bits, and we try to move those bits separately, which ties us in knots (literally). We then feel those knots as 'weight' and 'effort', when they're nothing of the sort - they're us acting against ourselves.

The tractor and plough after WW2 stripped the landscape of all life. Including people, and including most farmers. It may be what destroys our entire civilisation.

All male choirs, goosebumps. A Welsh classic, beautiful. I love that Welsh men love to sing. Real men sing.

The Name of the Rose. A murder mystery set in the Middle Ages, but with multiple interwoven themes. Eco shows us a world when people lived and died by ideas - the centre of the story is a Library built as a labyrinth, and the death and even Inquisition around certain ideas. It's our world, but today the fact ideas are at the centre of everything is much more hidden. William of Baskerville (Connery in the superb movie) is the hero, who fights by always testing the ideas. And ultimately fails. The Library burns. A handful of dogmatic ideas triumph - the same pattern repeats over and over in history.

Happy birthday Eva! 80 years young.