Along with a lot of other people, I’m a big fan of cephalopods. I’ve dived with squid and cuttlefish and have watched octopus while snorkelling. I particularly remember following one cuttlefish across a reef in the Philippines, watching its mesmerising pattern display, until it got bored of the clumsy and noisy thing with too few appendages plodding along behind it and made off for deeper water.

Octopus, in particular, are smart little critters. One of the saddest things I’ve ever read was a section of a book about octopus physiology¹ that talked about the effect of certain nervous system lesions on the behaviour of octopus – these were lesions induced by human experimenters, of course. The writer talked about how the cephalopod victims cowered at the back of their tanks and clearly were less than keen on being used as experimental subjects. It stuck in my mind as the only place in the book (otherwise a good and thorough treatment of octopus physiology) where the author seemed tempted in any way to anthopomorphise or to ascribe emotions or feelings to the octopus. That’s why Octopus vulgaris is the only invertebrate protected under the UK’s animal experimentation laws…

Anyway, octopus are very cool and a fascinating model for non-human (and non-vertebrate!) intelligence. A recent article in Orion magazine does a great job of getting across just how amazing these creatures are. Go and read it. If they lived a bit longer and could be trusted not to molest the dog, I would love to have an octopus to live with us. Alas, I don’t like to imagine what would be the result of Winnie versus a Pacific giant octopus. Messy, for sure.

I’ve been thinking for a long time, mostly privately in my idle moments, about the sort of house I’d one day like to build for myself. I have some ideas that I think are pretty cool: multiple small wooden buildings, connected by walkways, with the main building on a slope with a stepped living area; a separate Japanese-style bathhouse; an octagonal library/study with windows all around; a cellar dug into the side of the hill.

Of course, all of this is nothing more than idle daydreaming. Recently though, Rita sent me a link to some pictures of cabins (sheds, huts, that sort of thing) that capture a lot of the spirit of what I’ve been thinking of. You can see them here (yes, the link is safe!). Some of these places look heavenly.

Uh-oh. Getting a bit behind on this 30-day challenge. Time for some shorties…

Not really a “past life” as such, but something interesting I did a while ago that was brought back to mind by the Costa Concordia cock-up. I’ve not spent a lot of time on big ships, indeed until 2007, I think the only larger vessels I’d been on were ferries, cross-Channel or around the Greek islands.

In April 2007 though, I went to Canada for a big trip, mostly to visit some potential future places to live and work and to attend a workshop at the Banff International Research Station. I flew out to Vancouver, took a ferry to Vancouver Island where I visited UVic (ended up working there for a couple of years afterwards), then travelled east by train. I made it as far east as Halifax, Nova Scotia, all by train. That was a pretty cool experience in itself, but I’d had a wacky idea for how to get home from Canada to the UK. It’s possible to book passage on container ships under some circumstances, which I decided to do. It’s a tricky process, not super cheap, and the logistics of making the rendezvous with the ship turned out to be a bit more “interesting” than I expected.

At this time, the M/V Flottbek was sailing a triangular route between Montreal, Liverpool and Antwerp, so my plan was to meet the ship in Montreal and spend a week travelling to Liverpool. Four days before the ship was supposed to sail, I called the port agent from Halifax, letting him know who I was, that I was sailing with the Flottbek in a few days and asking what to do about getting to the ship. “Eh, if you’re sailing on the Flottbek, you won’t be sailing in a few days! You’ll be sailing tomorrow. She’s loading in Montreal right now!” Oh dear. Massive panic. Ran to a travel agent, luckily got a ticket for a flight back to Montreal that evening, taxi to airport, flew back to Montreal, six hours sleep then presented myself at the gates of the container dock in the morning (after a complicated explanation in French to a Québecois taxi driver that yes, I really did want to go to the container port).

I spent seven days on the Flottbek, under the capable care of the German master and chief engineer and they Philippino crew. It was a very interesting experience, though the life of a crewman on a container ship isn’t one that I would want to share any time soon: 9 months on, 3 months off for the men, or a generous 3 months on, 3 months off for the senior officers. Being away from home for that length of time, all the time, sounds more like something out of a Patrick O’Brien novel than real life. Still, for seven days, in spring, with calm seas and beautiful sunsets, it’s something I’d recommend to anyone who has the time.

Everyone on the Flottbek seemed extremely competent and the captain was a serious serious man who’d been a seafarer all his life, having grown up on Heligoland and having a little boat of his own as a boy. I can’t, not in a thousand years, imagine him or any of his crew doing what the master of this Italian cruise ship did. The Flottbek had run aground once, on a shoal in the St. Lawrence River, on the way from Montreal to the open sea, but that was the fault of the Lawrence River pilot (thankless job: shifting shoals and big ships don’t make for a stress-free life).

I’m a sucker for nature photos. One of our annual outings when we lived in Bristol was to the Nature Photographer Of The Year exhibition at the city museum. Going by the crowds there, we aren’t the only ones who like this stuff.

So, here’s some eye candy.

Mt. Cain, Vancouver Island. New Years, 2010/2011.

Speedy Dog goes where she likes!
Well, maybe not any more, little girl…

Yesterday evening, we had a meeting with Martine, the dog behaviourist who’s helping us with Winnie. Winnie has come a long way from the terribly frightened little dog that we picked up from the animal shelter four months ago. She’s no longer terrified of everything in sight, she runs around with her tail up, likes to play with other dogs, likes to sniff in the bushes, likes to run crazily through the fallen leaves in the forest. She’s still jumpy and easily gets scared of people in the street or sudden noises, but she’s come a long way.

Unfortunately, we might have taken the gently-gently treatment we were pursuing to help her stop being so fearful a little bit too far. She doesn’t come when called, unless it suits her, and we had been escalating the treats we offered her to a slightly ridiculous degree. Time for a slightly stricter regime, to let her understand her position in the household. In the long run, it will be better for all of us: no more frustrating walks in the park where she won’t come back, no more worries as she wanders off for 15 or 20 minutes at a time, well out of sight, and safer walks near the road. She has no idea at all that cars and roads and human things in general can be dangerous, and will try to bolt into the road if she sees something really scarey, a bin bag, for instance…

So, we went to a nearby park with a dog area and let her run around with Jedi, Martine’s “regulator” dog-in-training, who is a beautiful Staffie cross. Martine’s diagnosis? Laughing, “She doesn’t give a toss, does she? She just doesn’t care! She’s a confident little dog. She thinks she’s the boss!” We tried walking around the park and hiding behind trees to see if Winnie would notice the absence of her human protectors and come looking for us. Eventually, eventually… Once she had exhausted the sniffing possibilities and was wondering why it was so quiet, she came looking. But not enough.

The prescription is Puppy Purgatory for 10 days or so. No talking to her, no cuddles, no games. Commands, OK. Praise if she comes when called, OK. Day-to-day chat, incessant “Good girl!”, belly rubs, tug games, no. Not for a week and a half. It’s hard. Harder for us than for her, I think. She just doesn’t quite know what’s going on, but we have to ignore her soulful eyes and wagging tail.

But hard as it may be, it seems to be paying off a little already. We’ve only had one day of this regime, and Winnie is already showing more interest in us, at home at least. I did a little bit of clicker training with her in the flat after dinner, and she was doing sit-stay-come pretty nicely: quite a bit better than usual. We’re going to go for a walk in the garrigue near Martine’s house next weekend, and we’ll see how much better Winnie is in terms of recall and staying near us then.

In the meantime though, Puppy Purgatory for all three of us…

I’ve been very lucky so far in my life, and have had many opportunities to work and study in interesting places. I’m not sure I’ve made the best use of those opportunities – there’s much that feels unfinished or that didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped it would – but these “past lives” have given me a lot of experience working in different fields, living in different places, hanging out with different kinds of people.

Blogging is inherently self-indulgent: you have to assume that someone out there is interested in reading your maunderings. (Not really. Honestly, I do this for my own amusement.) The ultimate in self-indulgence has to be autobiographical blogging and reminiscing, where some old fart bends everyone’s ear about the “good old days”. Anyway, since this is for my own amusement and for a bit of writing practice, I don’t really care. I’m going to be brazenly self-indulgent and start writing “Past Lives” articles to see if I can dredge up any interesting memories.

In 1998, the mathematical physicist David Ruelle wrote an odd little article, entitled Conversations on Mathematics with a Visitor from Outer Space, which appeared as a chapter of the very interesting looking book Mathematics: Frontiers and Perspectives, published by the IMU in 2000. I’ve not read the whole volume, although I think I’ve read at least one of the other chapters as a preprint. Most of the 30 authors seem to have written more or less “straight” articles, but Ruelle’s is different. He wanted to explore the constraints imposed on human mathematics by the structure and capabilities of the human brain. Perhaps constraints is too strong a word – “predispositions” might be better: human mathematics is necessarily tied to human brains, and human brains have evolved to their current state to solve problems that are quite different from the problems encountered in mathematics. One might thus expect human mathematics to have followed the “fault lines” in the Platonic edifice of Mathematics that are most easily appreciated using the mental tools that evolution has given us.

To explore this idea, Ruelle introduces the conceit of a visitor from outer space, a “galatic mathematician” pursuing doctoral studies investigating the nature of human mathematics. She describes some of the characteristics of the human mental apparatus that are relevant: limited short-term memory, and hence inability directly to execute complex algorithms; predisposition to see symmetry and pattern; human brains operate very slowly, even compared to human computers; the importance of geometrical and visual reasoning; and so on. Ruelle comments that despite our limitations, humans have managed to do some fairly complex mathematics, but the question is always: how much further could we go if we could transcend the limitations of our history?

A couple of more substantial (in length) books I read over Christmas were Neal Stephenson’s latest and the first of Tim Powers’ Fisher King series. I liked them both.

I was born in the UK in 1972. The “world leaders” who defined my youth were Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev. This may have something to do with why I am so bitter, cynical and generally misanthropic nowadays, although the star turns we’ve seen in the US, UK and former USSR since then may have helped too.

Before Reagan, there was Jimmy Carter. I remember him from the TV news at the time only very vaguely. Since missing re-election in 1981, Carter has worked on a vast range of issues, mostly to do with disease eradication in developing countries and election supervision in fragile democracies. That his name can send the US right wing into a frothing ball of fury seems to indicate that he’s been doing good things.

A recent interview in The Guardian brought home just what a great man he is. The description of his house and his manner make me think more of a Greek senator elected by lot than a modern American politician with all the schmaltz and money that goes with it. He’s a humble man who has lived his beliefs. That deserves a lot of respect.

The other thing that comes across in the interview is his intellectual engagement. I loved the story from his chief of staff that he only once was able to tell Carter something that he didn’t already know. If you have any sense, you don’t choose a leader you’d be happy to have a beer with (don’t know if Carter even drinks); you choose a leader who is intelligent, motivated and honest. Carter is all of those things.