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My best friend's loss

[3 minute read ]

A long time ago, on a lonely planet in a quiet solar system where all the other planets had died, Maureen Lipman said, 'It is good to talk.' This was a time when talk was not about the moon landing only a decade ago. Instead, it was about the BBC MIcro home computer and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (which had a Zilog CPU chip of 1 megaHz). My ten year old, cheap lap-tops have dual core 233Ghz CPU chips, which by today's standards is fast enough for me, but still incredibly slow by modern comparisons. 

Maureen Lipman was advertising the only land-line telecommunication system in the UK. It was B.T. which later became O2, the mobile service provider. If memory serves me right, it was the break-up of the monopoly that B.T. had on telecommunications that gave us Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile on our Nokia 3310 'bricks'. I didn't experience that break up; I read about it.

It is good to talk. A conversation I have been having with a linguistics professor has pretty much run its course on a topic we settled on. Don't get me wrong; I should very much like to continue comparing ideas with her but, as with every conversation, things come up as meaning develops, and there comes a time when we start to pull up the drawbridge to our castle of personal privacy. Yet, it is not personal privacy that I am thinking of, because I have a myriad of safety protocols that I can implement whenever I choose. No, for me, on this occasion, I am sealing the castle because, I have to stop myself giving away a crucial aspect in a particular story format that is developing in my mind. Interestingly, the professor thinks that if this aspect in a fantasy world is called upon the readers would get lost. I, however, wholeheartedly disagree; I see it as integral to a plot.

Yesterday, I talked about how we set a Table of Contents for our day, first thing in the morning. The difference between me and the professor is, she is an academic writer, teaching an M.A in English, and I am about as far away from academia as you can get. My first thoughts are not at all linear, and there is no introduction or conclusion that I care to write. There is no goal or end-strategy to consider. In fact, my first thoughts today were about what happened yesterday, which, once I encapsulated the day, I will use as a template to throw over today, except without any torn bits. Of course, I have tasks to complete but they are fairly routine and mun-nal and ba-dane.

Even writing about writing, about my garden, gave enough time for dendrites to form in my brain; and the links gave me sufficient motivation, in the form of reminders, to replant some hedge and accelerate my crop growing activities (I planted some garlic) and I briefly thought about digging up some strawberry plants so the Muntjac deer don't dig them up before me. They really are poor gardeners and leave them uncovered.

Just when a subject gets interesting I have to withdraw from it. It seems then that I am interested in the fine detail, and all the arguments I have on people with PhDs are arguments against myself.

Yet, the Linguistics professor thought that the fine detail I proposed, in a story, would lose the reader. Is there anything else more desirable than to fall into intrigue, and an idea that we have been given an exclusive free ticket to secrets and intimacy? Are we not jealous if our best friend has another best friend, or a new romantic partner that draws them away from us and less time is spent with us? Don't we want to belong to something?

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

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[ 6 ½ minute read ]  195 words per minute

Spirits unite against Laws of Physics

A placard I saw in a dream of a protest

A fun conversation I saw on an online learning platform is on researching fantasy. I noticed a comment that mentioned that the commentator is an academic writer and wonders about researching fantasy, ostensibly to assist her in writing fantasy novels. A while ago, I wrote a short story, on the fly, with almost no editing, as is my style. It was about visiting the spirit world. It never occurred to me that I might do any research before I wrote that.

It is easy to assume that one is fey or in some way connected or directly associated with some kind of spirituality, even having a direct link with a supreme being. It is not for me to make any argument as to whether anyone does have a link or is fey. I recognise that when we are alone in the dark and things rustle in hedges we might not be rational and momentarily think that it is a spirit or ghost or something. We might assume it is a rabbit or badger or rats. But, it is not rational to assume. Making assumptions is really using heuristics as adults, summing up blocks of acquired information to make a decision; which I suppose, is why the younger that children are, the more nightmares they have; they don't have enough experience to have built enough mental tools to allay confusion and fear.

It crosses my mind that as adults we might never see fairies and only see faeries. Good luck is much harder to discern than bad luck. While some of us might arrive at work early and cognisant that all the traffic lights were green, most of us, I believe, will only recognise that all the lights were green because we arrived early. If we are running late, and before we arrive somewhere, we tend to notice every red traffic light in real-time. My point is that we notice bad things more readily than good things. Finding a one pound coin or a dollar, is less impactful than losing one and not having enough to pay for our shopping. But, the thinkers among us will notice that there are other factors involved. In economics, the missing pound may have more value than an extra pound (its 'utility' is different). Not only that, green traffic lights have no impact on our driving, we just keep going, whereas red traffic lights have a consequential pattern of action that needs to be performed at every single one of them. Being early to work has little impact on our lives, but being late means having to catch up, or explain ourselves to someone (which means weakening our position).

Fantasy stories, I concluded from the safe discussion elsewhere, still abide by the Laws of Physics we are all aware of. When Superman punches a super-villain, the punch connects with a body of mass and force is definitely obvious as the mass hits a solid building; bits fall off the building. Flying without wings, however, means that there is either no mass or very little mass. When something with very little mass punches something else Newton's Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, tells us that the body of low mass should move away from whatever it has punched. Superman does not move away; so, the Laws of Physics are suspended. 

The spirit world, I suggest, is nothing like what we assume it to be. Even if we don't know, or have never heard of Newton's Third Law of Motion, we all know that there will always be consequences for everything we do, or don't do, and these go right down to every decision we make. In marketing, I came across a paper that stated that we make a decision about half a second before we realise we have, and we actually tell ourselves that a decision has been made. It is somewhere in one of my laptops and since I am not trying to convince anyone of anything, I am not going to hunt for it in order for me to cite it or reference it appropriately. However, a very quick online search gave me a paper in which the abstract matches my statement. I have set the link so it opens in a new page:

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10001129/1/Wiliam2006Half-second71.pdf

Telling ourselves we have made a decision half a second after we have made a decision would fit into a fantasy story. A whole half a second to interrupt the message is a really long time to act. (Such is my wont to not edit, I am leaving the tautology of having a whole half right there). But interruption isn't outside of the realm of possibility in today's technological world; perhaps eye movement gives clues as to the decision-making process. In a fantasy story however, telepathy might be used to prevent a purchase being successfully conducted. 'No decision has been made!'

In Contract Law, there is an offer and acceptance. If the offer is made there is still half a second before the person selling something realises they have made a decision to accept the offer. If we sum the transaction up in terms of available time for thought interference, a nefarious entity would have a whole second to play with, to prevent the transaction being finalised. 

       'Hmmm, I don't know' while standing before a display of clothes in a clothes shop doesn't necessarily mean you haven't made a decision; it means you haven't told yourself that you have made a decision. If you are delaying in making purchases for too long (is there 'too long' in retail therapy?) you might want to look around for someone staring at you; but then you might not see something with no mass. It might only be a disappointed wisp that fell from someone who lost some money, who passed you by earlier. Their decision to buy, thwarted by the physical inability to complete a purchase.

From psychology: cognitive dissonance is the feeling we experience when we have bought something and are, quite soon after, disappointed by its use or aesthetic value, its utility. It is less valuable to us then we first thought it to be. 

Not being able to buy something because we thought we had enough money and then discovering we do not (disappointment), mirrors cognitive dissonance in that, from economics, the assumed utility (value to us) of the contents of our purse or pocket is less then it really is (we are disappointed by the utility of our available money). Because money is money, a single unit of currency can buy a number of things, so its utility does not change. It is when it cannot buy what we desire that its utility is considered to be inadequate. £10 (ten GB pounds) buys less than £9 (nine GB pounds), so it is the sum of the money and its utility that changes and not the individual unit of currency.

The indecision to buy something comes from experience of being disappointed and we use heuristics to help us decide what to do; in this case, empiricism. A young child sees something and buys it because they like it without knowing that they could be disappointed. How many parents notice that their children played with something for an hour and then never again? Young children, I suggest, find disappointment and cognitive dissonance difficult to process, so they make decisions to buy quite readily. 

Initially, I thought that the academic people who professed a desire to research fantasy [stories] were on a fools errand, but now I am not so sure. I can't decide.