Sunday 29-Apr-12 Part 2

29/04/12 15:50
Anyone looking at my website colinbrough.co.uk at present will see the following image in January 2009:

I have been able to retrieve the full version from DVD backups I made in those years gone by, and this has suggested to me that I ought to be making monthly backups to DVD now, instead of relying (as I had come to do more and more) on backups at only one remove - and therefore preserving nothing as an archive - from the hard disk on whatever computer I am currently using to alterable media, that is either a memory stick or a plug-in hard drive.

I say whatever computer I am currently using to indicate that when I am travelling - to see Dawn, mainly - I use a small netbook computer whereas when I am at home I use my Irish Vaio laptop which has fuller functions.

Sunday 29-Apr-12

29/04/12 07:47 [Sunday]
Yesterday in the course of a shopping trip to Stourbridge I returned to the location I referred to, to take this photograph:
(I cannot discover how to get this image round the right way.) 

The thoughts that occurred to me the other day when passing this poster started by noting that the artwork has a naiveté which originates from the use of different fonts, different colours and different underlining styles for the four words distinctly. Ordinarily through the use of parallel structures - even simply underlining styles - different parts of an ensemble are linked and shown up as in truth parallel this forming what the other day I called ‘larger-scale structure’. Just as here HOLA and ADIÓS are self-evidently parallel and this implies that the subsidiary text entries FRESCA and THIRST are too, so in a report the parallel between paragraphs or entire sections can be - usually is - pointed up through the use of identically styled headings (this something made easy and encouraged in Microsoft Word).

To be able to make sense of this - something as the word naiveté suggests children cannot do but most adults can do - the mind/brain has to unify the subsidiary structures - which as I say may be several paragraphs of text - and treat them as single entities. The unification of subsidiary structures arises from propagation of dopamine, causing one part of the structure to suggest or ‘prompt’ the other parts. Also necessary however is a top-down organising principle - this a function of the more frontal parts of the brain - which marshalls and keeps ordered the possibly numerous but distinct subsidiary structures.

A simple example of this is given by the words in a sentence. When written the words are nowadays separated by whitespace, but in spoken language they are run together. The brain has to hold together the components of each word - making the words entire - but it also has to marshall the different words in a sentences as units in separate relation to each other.

I will say that in conventional schizophrenia the ‘prompting’ due to dopamine - over-transmitted dopamine in the schizophrenic case - causes one concept to so powerfully and immediately lead to other concepts that the overall top-down structure falls apart. My case although diagnosed as schizophrenia is not exactly this.

Revolving the matter in my mind I can see that in my case the overactivity - no doubt it was overactivity of dopamine - led to my rushing from project to project without taking time to consider overall probabilities, in formulating explanations why things might be, for example. Because my computer got infected with malware I concluded without sufficient ‘testing against reality’ and even without sufficient pause for consideration of subsidiary explanations (that is how it might have been perpetrated): I concluded based on powerful structures already in my mind from years gone by that it must be spyware designed by the Department of Health.

And reverting now to powerful structures in my mind from years gone by, I can’t help but feel that had Armond not miscalculated, that is had he treated me with mild dosages of dopamine-blocking drugs - even the drugs then available - instead of with massive dosages, my life might have gone very differently and much better. (I remind readers that Armond is Anthony Dew Armond the NHS psychiatrist I had for about two decades.)

Friday 27-Apr-12

27/04/12 14:08 [Friday]
With this Smartphone device I can set down my thoughts on topics which come to my attention; however I need to keep my wits about me when it comes to snapping photographs. As it is I am going to have to return to a location to take a photo to make sense of what I am going to write. Ah me.

Tuesday 24-Apr-12

24/04/12 08:24 [Tuesday]
This morning larking about with my new phone I changed the setting for input from Swype to keypad. Now I am finding it much easier to input text, especially as I have also turned on predictive text.
24/04/12 09:55
I’ve discovered how to sync photos with my PC (and contacts and a few other items) but how to capture these notes I am making I am not quite sure.
24/04/12 11:04
I have found the Scottish National Portrait Gallery but I’m sure it’s different from how it was in 2003 when I last visited. I think it must be the same building but they have done up the café (which is as far as I have penetrated so far).
Speaking of making brief notes - these are memos but quite whether it is the correct medium to be using of all available on this new device I’m unsure - I can’t help but feel the modern trend of ‘tweeting’ does not represent a desirable thing as surely larger-scale structures get lost by the wayside as they must do to a degree also in collaborative working which is all the vogue these days. Perforce I am led to and do believe because there are so many ‘structures’ in the modern scheme of things that even an Isaac Newton could not cope single-brained.
24/04/12 12:38
(I cannot discover how to get this image round the right way.)

Having left the National Portrait Gallery I have come to the Princes Mall where I have had a lunch from Harry Ramsdens. I set all this down having in mind that in my younger days I used to think in terms of experience I had being lost forever if I did not record it. I used to believe recording my doings preserved my life in a sort of immortality. I still record my doings not to canvas some response from or effect on friends and family but rather so that they can live on in the minds/brains of miscellaneous readers.

24/04/12 13:22

If I email these notes to myself they are automatically backed up online and in the process are retrievable using a PC for checking and editing. I don’t think I would trust myself to upload stuff directly from my phone to my blog. Still I need to find out how to copy and paste from the memo notes I have been using thus far as my format.

24/04/12 14:19

I have discovered how to copy and paste but before finding out that I discovered you can send memo notes via email, that is as an attachment. This has the advantage that timestamp information is retained, but on the other hand whether a Windows PC can read the .vnt files I do not know.

(I cannot discover how to get this image round the right way.)

24/04/12 16:26

As we are presently between Berwick Upon Tweed and Newcastle Upon Tyne my thoughts are reverting to the same locus as when I was close to Newcastle before. What I was asking myself on that occasion a few days ago was why the Industrial Revolution did not happen earlier in history. If it was advantageous to run things by steam and people were clever enough to think how at the time they did, why did nobody think things up a century earlier, or earlier than that?

Before locomotives ran by steam (this in my mind as I was travelling by train) engines were developed for static purposes. At the Black Country Museum in Dudley there is a Newcomen engine and I think they tell you this was the first industrial steam engine (I say ‘industrial’ because there was a steam engine invented in Ancient Greek times, by a man called Hero, but it had no practical power). The Newcomen engine had the purpose of pumping water out of mines so the origination of it was deep-shaft mining. Therefore the Industrial Revolution was originated by the need to dig or anyway the occurrence of digging coal out of the ground. This is not back to front because before coal was dug up for engines it was dug up to keep people warm.

The conclusion is that the Industrial Revolution came about due to population density: at a time there were so many people in habitated cold places - notably Britain - that cutting down trees was an insufficient resource for warming them.

Monday 23-Apr-12

23/04/12 05:33 [Monday]
I have woken up early with a bit of an upset tummy, asking myself if the tummy upset is related to my prostate problem. I do tend to look for common explanations for things and try to simplify all causes down to a few all-inclusive causes, and I may be over-doing it here. After all, Dawn very often has tummy upset and in the female case it is not going to be related to the prostate. It is only a mild tummy upset anyway and perhaps will clear now I have been to the toilet: a possible explanation is that I am making too much of nothing due to the responsivity of my dopaminergic systems, causing an effect of amplification I mean.
Some of the symptoms I had before I was on this Risperdal medication were related to having insufficient sleep and lately the times I have woken up around 5 am later in the day I have found myself nodding off especially on buses with the rocking as the bus travels along. In the years before 2011 I used to imagine things went on when I nodded off in the daytime, along the lines of me being spoken to - on buses say - with ‘hypnotising’ words. In fact I used to imagine things might go on whenever I was unaware, that is including in the nighttime when I was getting my few hours of sleep. This led me to try to develop detection devices to record what went on (in the nighttime specifically) for example by logging the amplitude of any sounds detected (thinking sounds at night might represent the speaking to me of ‘hypnotising’ words).

I am in the Travelodge Edinburgh Rose Street - on my own as Dawn didn’t want to come - drinking a morning cup of coffee. I ordered a breakfast bag (as they call them) for 6 am being pretty certain I would be up early. Evidently Travelodge has gone down the route of paring costs to the bone - not supplying shower gel or toothpaste for example - and charging for extras such as breakfast and WiFi. I think this is a good thing myself as if you can resist the extras you can get a bed for the night very cheap, especially if you book the Saver Rate in advance and risk not being able to travel in which case you lose your money. Those with money to spare though - or those whose companies pay - would no doubt want to pay for fuller service elsewhere, but I am a great believer in the provision of a multiplicity of offerings to suit all tastes and all budgets. When I was writing to Tory MPs (in the years prior to 2011) I often went on about the desirability of pluralism (as I referred to it) and my belief is that it is philosophically a good thing. Socialists might wish to reduce every provision to a common denominator but sensible people approve multiple choices which gravitate through the market mechanism to match the things people want (because those in an initially random mish-mash of provision that people don’t want to pay for fall by the wayside and indeed very many new businesses do fail in the first year or two).

Speaking of things the Travelodge does not supply: I have brought a toothbrush and toothpaste but have left behind my deodorant. And I have not been able to resist some extras you pay for: I ordered a cheeseburger muffin last night (which they rustle up in a microwave in two or three minutes if you go and ask at reception) and as I said a breakfast for this morning. The girl on reception duly noted down my purchases on my account even though I paid there and then, so plainly Travelodge retains statistics of spending by guests so it knows which guests to plague with offers and inducements for the future. I am joking about this in fact as I believe recording such statistics is a way provision can be efficiently matched to what customers want, and (I presume) one can always unsubscribe from emails sent by Travelodge.

I had thoughts yesterday on the train in the region of Newcastle Upon Tyne about what I may subsume under the heading King Coal, but I shall (as in times gone by when despite my symptoms I enjoyed life) defer writing down those thoughts as breakfast should be here by now.

23/04/12 11:44

I am presently sitting under the Scottish National Gallery, outside the Garden Café, and as it’s started to rain can say no more.

Sunday 22-Apr-12

22/04/12 16:25 [Sunday]
I am on a train to Edinburgh and it is quite like old times: that is the escapism of travelling to distant places. I decided to go to Edinburgh when I found I could afford to do so relatively easily through discovering in travelling between Birmingham and Doncaster that it is true one can save money on the fare by booking in advance. Whenever in the past I have tried to do that all I have achieved was to pay the same fare online as I could have got at the ticket office on the day of departure. However one of Dawn’s sisters put me on to the idea of booking stages of the journey separately, so that I now travel when coming north: from Birmingham to Derby, from Derby to Sheffield and from Sheffield to Doncaster. It is a help to the train companies that people pick and choose to travel on less busy services (which I automatically find by choosing the lowest priced fares) because they are thereby using capacity better. This idea of a price mechanism for seats would not have obtained before Mrs Thatcher’s Government privatised the railways and while I don’t often mention political points on my blog I will say that the Labour policy of making prices for train travel the same whether you book online or at the ticket office is backward looking and inefficient. By booking online you are doing more than half the work of the booking clerk so as well as the mechanism of supply and demand driving down your fare if you choose a service helping towards efficiency (one fewer other people want to use) you deserve a reward for doing that work.
However in the case of Doncaster to Edinburgh I booked weeks in advance and got a cheap fare for the whole journey as a single trip. I think for certain very popular routes - like the East Coast Mainline or more generally trips from or to London - cheap fares are released for quite long journeys and not simply for single stages.

Monday 09-Apr-12

09/04/12 09:03 [Bank Holiday Monday]
I am presently using the ‘Pink Vaio’ laptop which now belongs to Dawn. I feel I ought to report events which have caused me frustration (by interrupting what I was doing). The true reason is they rise so powerfully in my mind so that I feel an urge - as I did yesterday with the ‘interesting’ notice on the train - to set down an explanation in words. I don’t know that it does me any good exactly to set out my explanations via the internet, but - who knows? - the explanations may find readers who feel kin to me in the experience because they have suffered similar frustrations. I suppose exchanging explanations of things is all to the good and is a natural function of human existence.
What happened was the computer unexpectedly shut down and then re-started, while I was in the middle of accessing internet sites using Chrome. This I thought can’t be right: even if the computer is set to install updates (and someone has set it to download and install updates even though this is a more noticeable cost when using a dongle than when using WiFi) surely it shouldn’t just shut down: surely it should ask the user first, to give him a chance to save his data. My initial guess was that the culprit was Vaio Updates, the reason being I have such a high opinion of Microsoft. But after the re-start a notice came up saying Windows had finished installing updates: in other words Microsoft are to blame. I have now reset the settings to ask before downloading updates.

Saturday 07-Apr-12

07/04/12 11:36 [Saturday]
I am sitting in the Caffè Ritazza on the concourse of New Street station in Birmingham thinking this is just like old times. The thing is, something cropped up on the train from Stourbridge which engaged my interest leading me to want to set down my thoughts in explicit language (and I thought of my PDA before I thought of this netbook computer but the PDA is not charged up).
The greater interest I find in things which arise in my mind - greater than the average person - is a function of the high level of dopamine transmissions in my brain (or more properly stated the high level of responsivity of dopaminergic neural systems). If the greater interest goes beyond bounds, as it did when I was not on any dopamine-blocking medication, I come to believe such things as that events around me have been specially designed to engage my interest: for example that the people around me are actors set on to entertain me (or that they are set on to accompany me for some other purpose although I was never able to concoct a believable theory why it might be).
All that happened on the train from Stourbridge was an automated announcement and corresponding words coming up on the electronic screen mainly used to show the train’s destination and calling points: Please be considerate of other passengers, do not put your feet on the seats. What engaged my attention was the mistaken punctuation in the typed version. Other thoughts followed along the lines of pondering why it is people cannot use English properly these days and whether most teachers would use the correct version.
To report my thinking on the correct version: if there is no relationship between considering other passengers and not putting feet on seats it should read
Please be considerate of other passengers. Do not put your feet on the seats.
If (as is more likely) we are enjoined to be considerate through the mechanism of not putting our feet on the seats it should read
Please be considerate of other passengers: do not put your feet on the seats.
I am pleased (having discovered that Blogger reports statistics) that I get quite a few readers for my blogspot blog, so I am trying to put all my new stuff on that. Before I can put this on that though I need to catch up by putting up (in arrears) the diary entries I have written in March and April so far and put (so far) on my own website colinbrough.co.uk.
07/04/12 13:20
Continuing that theme: I have been trying to upload a diary entry from 26-Mar-12 to my blogspot blog but I have got nowhere because I am on a train and keep getting cut off (trying to use a dongle). I am not certain the ‘3’ software was not infected with a virus, because it said it was connected to 3 via a 3G connection but still when I tried to start my Chrome browser it said there was no connection. Since then I have uninstalled the dongle software and reinstalled it (on plugging the dongle in afresh) and the browser - Internet Explorer as I also uninstalled Chrome - worked for a while before once again the connection failed. Thinking about it, this time the connection really did fail (rather than the ‘3’ software going wrong) because the dongle started flashing green instead of giving a steady blue light.
This sort of failure used to make me think I was being deliberately targeted (with spyware, my top suspicion) but now (on this medication) firstly I understand things more calmly and better (so that I can theorise that most likely the dongle software had indeed gone wrong but is now corrected through the reinstallation) and secondly I can understand the likelihood that the malware (likely something different from spyware) came from somewhere accidental and not some organisation deliberately singling me out.