So may be that’s why there was a distinct them and us vibe about the programme’s portrayal of humans and their selfish genes which I can’t help feeling misses the point again.

There’s a tendency to speak of genes as if they’re thinking conscious beings, rather than molecules simply doing what they’re chemically inclined to do in their immediate surroundings. Genes do what physical laws dictate – no thought here, just physics – defining our physical form, including that of our brain, and I’m of the opinion that it’s the complexity of our physical manifestation that results in our consciousness, and all subsequent impressions of free will.

Now that’s not entirely an illusion because humans – and may be other creatures – have evolved consciousness that way, so presumably there’s a genetic advantage to this unusual trait, something for natural selection to work on. The free will that allows us to override our gut instinct just might be part of this advantage, but so might the concepts of wealth and power.

On a side note, if consciousness is dependent on physical manifestation it may support David Attenborough’s comments about the gorillas shown in the programme. Sharing almost identical senses and perception it’s no wonder we’d start to think the same way, or that there’d be the feeling of understanding he expressed.

The overall impression I’ve gained from this series is that Curtis’s really got it in of computers and mathematical modelling. More precisely perhaps he finds this analytical approach to the World and especially human interactions distasteful, even disturbing. Most probably he was just trying to sell a series to the BBC and the general public by invoking these feelings, and it worked, well done.

I enjoyed each of the three film comprising the series, which is the main point I guess, but was left feeling that our desire to reduce life to something tangible has little to do with machines, they’re just the latest excuse. I’m not sure it’ll have that effect on everyone though, and I’m no closer to understanding why people craved stability in the first place.

I think it’s the unpredictability of our Universe that makes it interesting and life worth living, but it doesn’t lessen the applicability of a scientific approach, just makes it more essential.

Ayn Rand

She struck me as an intelligent woman with some very interesting ideas, and despite her delusional belief in her own rationality I believe that the basic elements of her theories are sound.

Proper democracy

I also believe that the networked world can lead to a self regulating and stable system without the need for central government. As suggested such a system is based on the composite actions of individuals pursuing their own interests. However, I’d suggest some limiting conditions.

The first is that such a system must have universal coverage, everyone can play, but doesn’t have to. The second is that each individual must carry the same weight in the decision making process regardless of their abilities. With these conditions in place we have the essence of true democracy.

Emergent behaviours

And the programme certainly exposed the absence of these conditions in the system implemented by Greenspan and others, but it failed to pick up on the most important features elucidated by the multi-player game of PONG early in the show.

This experiment placed the participants on a level playing field with a clear goal in mind, and importantly one that inspired and motivated them. This required outside innovation rather than it emerging by group interaction, but I’ll skirt round that one for now, because what I’m really interested in is that you could clearly see that the initial attempts at the game were less than successful. The team on the left were particularly poor, sorry if you were on that team, but the self regulated performance radically improved over time until the two sides of the room were playing as if they were a pair of individuals.

Applying this observation dynamics of the experiments in the global economic system, it’s clear that you’d expect a period of irrational exuberance or unstable dynamics before the component parts of the markets learned to regulate themselves through an understanding of how exuberance affects their bank balance. This comes with an obvious caveat regarding market bias for the two reasons I gave above.

I’d say the same would be true for any application of this philosophy, but I think the basic concepts would work given time and iteration. In the meantime individuals, and social structures would suffer: all part of building a brave new world.

Transition is the key

It’s clear to me that in any emergent system, transition is the key process: complicated in a game of PONG, but in the transformation of the human society and governance… I think you can see where that’s going. It’s not something I felt that the programme recognised.

Still I’m tempted to read some of Rand’s writings now, but I’m a little concerned it might turn me into an evil genius bent on using the World to realise my demented selfish desires. Her ideas are interesting, sadly she and her followers were somewhat naive about the realities of practicing what they preached, but you can’t really pin the economic disasters of the last two decades on Rand alone.

That’s not to say her vision will never emerge, after all the ball is already rolling, and I suspect stability is a function of the rate of change, so give it a few hundred years and who can knows.

The problem in addressing that question is that I’m not an Arab, and I live in a country where wealth and relative freedom are ubiquitous, consequently I have very little basis for comparison. None the less it’s prompted me to consider political events in the Arab world through the lens of my own political views.

I’m no political activist, but I’m a proponent of British political reform, and my gripes are centred on two features of the current system.

An electoral system should yield a government that reflects the votes cast by the electorate. Our existing First-Past-The-Post system doesn’t do that: it’s possible to command a massive majority in parliament with far fewer than half the votes cast in your favour. Thing are moving on this point, but to my mind the proposed Alternative Vote reform doesn’t go far enough, however it’s the only offer on the table.

My second gripe regards the culture of Party politics that’s been an unofficial feature of British government for centuries. It’s a system that obliges individual Members of Parliament to vote as their political party dictates even if this violates the wishes of their constituency electorate, their election promises, and even their own conscience. It’s become a seemingly unquestioned practice in Britain, and not one our Parliamentary system envisioned, and it seems distinctly undemocratic to me.

So having nailed my colours to the mast it’s time to get back to the point, and that’s despite my reformist tendencies, I can’t hide the concern I feel about the results of actually reforming Britain’s system to my satisfaction. I think I’d have a Country more completely governed by the people, so why does that worry me?

I can’t deny there’s something comforting about the perceived stability born of the status quo, and it’d disappear with the advent of greater democracy. Unfortunately I lack the idealism to block out the stupidity, irrationality, selfishness and intolerance that people sometimes display: is this really the way I’d like my Country governed? There are those in Britain that claim that reforms like those I’d support would put an end to stability resulting in political anarchy and economic disaster, and they could be right.

It occurs to me that these sentiments may be reflected in the feelings of a significant proportion of people in ‘troubled’ Arab nations. They’re the people that have left the government alone, and in turn the government hasn’t bothered them. They don’t want their world destabilised in order to replace what they feel is a relatively harmless regime with… God knows what, but they don’t trust the judgement of their fellow Arabs, especially not the idealistic fools leading the revolution.

And they could also be right, but I’d like to think that in their situation I’d have the nerve to take a chance. The fact is though that I’m happy not to be in their shoes, so I can’t be certain about what I’d actually do.

Maybe I can clarify my position by opining that dictators are just people, but people that tend to display all the frailties I listed earlier, they wouldn’t hold power for long otherwise, so can the alternative really be worse?

At a non-scientific level, I interpret something as solid because my senses tell me it is for my immediate purposes. But my senses are limited to detecting phenomena relevant to the needs of a creature of my size in the normal course of evolutionary events.

That’s fine, but at a scientific level evolution’s provided the ability for me to interact with the environment in a distinctly abnormal way: at scales well below the threshold of sensation. Fortunately it’s also given me the scope to build a machine to increase my sensitivity, so now I can see the molecules have shape defined by the solid bits, classical theory.

But is that really what the machine itself sees, or my interpretation based on its output? The thing is that I built a machine that wouldn’t just measure the World, but provide an interpreted image of it via a clever interface; the real thing may be incomprehensible to my primate brain and it’s relatively primitive senses.

Similarly many of the theories we use in science and engineering rely on such interpretation and empirical approximation, and that’s how I designed the machine. By and large, there’s nothing wrong with the approach, and it’s served us well for centuries, but as things shrink, how do you avoid measuring what you expected to see?

As I said at the beginning, my question is theoretical, bordering on philosophical perhaps. At what scale does the physical reality with which we’re familiar go away, and is it a sharp transition? Could matter represent interacting energy fields where an object has a non-zero probability of taking just about any form? Do shape and solidity have any meaning for a hypothetical race of molecular size beings?

This hands-on approach gives you a visceral feel for what’s going on and whether it’s working properly. As a aspiring Engineer I found this a great way to see how process plant related to the engineering specifications and mass balances.

Looking back, this practice was a form of testing, applied to both my knowledge and the construction of the plant. In the latter guise it’s called commissioning, and you’d be surprised the problems you can find this way, from malfunctioning components to blockages caused by dead animals.

And that’s reminiscent of the early days of computing, when fixing a problem could mean finding a real dead bug in the system.

It seems that my process engineering background has followed me into software development: I’m just as fascinated by the use of software test techniques to follow software pipes. Test by test I can find my way around code, checking my understanding of what it does, how it works, and whether it matches the original design intent.

A comprehensive and robust test suite is worth it’s weight in gold when upgrading or carrying out routine maintenance. It’s really liberating to find that you can experiment in code without worrying whether, when the time comes to redeploy, nothing unexpected has changed.

So may be I’m one of life’s testers rather than an outright developer, but then again every developer show have a little tester in them.

It was a time of optimism, and belief in the ultimate power of the financial markets. Many of us in Britain were taking advantage of the privatisation of companies like British Telecom and British Gas, including one of my teenage friends. Key figures like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan were proud advocates for the “Greed is Good” reality of unfettered market economics.

I can’t help thinking that many of the leading lights in the recent Credit Crunch learned their trade in the ’80s, and subsequently built the prevalent culture of the City, for better and worse.

“Wall Street” was interpreted in a couple of different ways, I don’t know which was intended by Oliver Stone.

There’s no disputing that Gordon Gekko was rich and powerful, and that made him an attractive character to many. Equally though, he comes to a sticky end, losing it all because of his greed. To the same minds that succumb to the lure of Gekko that’s easily ignored, they’d have seen the setup coming a mile off, they’re too smart.

To another mindset, this ending is confirmation of deep seated beliefs in the dominance of good over evil. Gekko had it coming, and Bud Fox was vindicated in his betrayal because he was defending the poor and helpless, or was he just saving his own skin? He was tempted by the dark side, but eventually he was drawn back to the right path.

I know I’ve painted a very black and white version of the movie, but things are never that clear cut.

Many of the people in the firm Gekko was targeting would have pensions based on the performance of the markets, including Gekko’s own contribution. Many of them, like the majority of the post-war baby boomers, would now be retired with a handsome pension the like of which is unlikely to be seen again, all thanks to the “Greed is Good” 1980s markets.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not free from sin. I invest in a range of financial vehicles, hoping that I’ll get enough growth to support me in my dotage. And whenever I hear claims about the evils of our financial sector I find it difficult not to remember that fact.

I can’t pretend that I’m making money without harming anyone, the markets and the world don’t work that way. I try to lead an environmentally friendly life, but I invest in petroleum and mining stocks; I make contributions to help alleviate the poverty of the majority of the population, but some of my money is inevitably invested in companies taking advantage of sweatshops.

But what’s the alternative? I could rely on the State to provide for me in old age, but I don’t trust our society to manage its own currency or its finances, now even less than before the Credit Crunch.

Britain’s public debt is too high to be sustainable, so our infrastructure is likely to decay over the coming decades, and our social support…

Private indebtedness is even more concerning. The housing market has outstripped the means of the average Briton, and generated a great deal of outstanding debt in the process. Even more debt has been amassed by excessive consumerism, a good times frenzy reminiscent of the ’80s, and much of this is leveraged against housing that’s still due for correction.

The Bank of England is going to have to buy more debt in order to keep the economy ticking over, an inevitable devaluation in the Pound Sterling, so my cash is going to drop in value relative to the developing economies where most things are made.

Another issue will be the resulting inflation, that’ll lead to a rise in interest rates, which is bad news for mortgage holders that are struggling now; you did realise that the current low rates were supposed to give you a breather to rebalance your finances. At least the resulting housing glut will give first time buyers and investors with cash a chance to enter the housing market at saner valuations.

As you’ve probably guessed, my views don’t readily reflect the prevailing attitudes of our Society. I just don’t trust its consensus judgement; maybe this explains my preference for value investment.

And for me that’s what drives investment and savings, this lack of trust in Society. Money in my pocket, or investments, or pension, means independence. That’s what I need because I can’t believe that the State wouldn’t let me down, and to have to rely on it is frightening.

And this leads me to ask an obvious question. What does State or Society actually mean if everyone in it feels a driving need to be independent?

I already had a Macbook and an iPod Touch, the latter of which has almost completely taken over regular Email, Twitter and RSS duties, whilst the former is essential for my software development and engineering activities.

We both love reading, but we also live in a small house with limited space for our book collection. Our local library isn’t well stocked with the science fiction genre I favour, and with an Amazon basket of full of books I don’t have space for, it was time to go electronic.

Instapaper is great at making web content more accessible on either of my existing platforms, and I use it regularly, but neither is great for serious reading: the iPod screen is too small for anything other than casual reading; the Macbook is too bulky, warm, slow to start up, and the screen has the wrong aspect ratio.

I wanted something specifically for reading, and this is where the Kindle seemed to fit.

At first the interface seemed pretty awkward to someone used to an Apple touchscreen, but after a week of use I’m getting pretty slick with the five-way control and keyboard. I regularly use searches, highlighting, bookmarking, and I’m sorry to have to admit, the dictionary.

It seamlessly integrates with Amazon, as you might expect, but I particularly like the ability to try a sample any books or magazines you might be considering, I’ve several lined up.

There are loads of classics freely available on the Web from sites like Project Gutenberg. They’re not the kind of thing I’m likely to buy normally, but I’ve already downloaded “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

As I write this, I’m a quarter of the way through Darwin’s masterwork, I’ve bought and started a series of Alastair Reynolds short stories I’ve had my eye on for months, and I’m even considering a subscription to a Analog magazine through Amazon – one of the samples.

The one fly in the ointment is that I’d have liked to use the Kindle to read some of the many academic papers I’ve been neglecting. However, with only 6 inch screen it’s pushing things too far, not surprising really.

I’ve tried it and the text can be made just about legible, but doing so compromises the usability of the Kindle: you really don’t want to have to scroll. And after all that, the text on a large document is only just big enough to read, so you’re asking for eye strain.

I’ve noticed that the TV is suffering from neglect, a result of the resurgence in reading caused by the Kindle and iPod Touch. I keep asking myself whether this is temporary, novelty driven behaviour, but I suspect it will be permanent.

“You see, I tend to change from one media to another, and explore anything that interests me at the time”, she explained. She isn’t one of those artists that has a particularly successful theme and moves to mass produce pieces.

This doesn’t make things easy, but during development we managed to draw together coherent themes in her work and present them as collections. But she’s certainly not saying “here you are, this is what I do”, she wants to keep her options open.

As she explained her position, it seemed strangely familiar. The fact is that I’ve always been that kind of generalist, and I’ve exactly the same misgivings about marketing myself, but this is where I’d start.

Pick and choose where you’re seen, and I’m not just referring to seedier side of the Web. Use services you’re comfortable with, you’ll express yourself more effectively: I don’t like the feel of Facebook, so I don’t use it, but I like Twitter.

Make sure all your online profiles tell a consistent story so that you’re not confusing potential customers. OK we’re generalists, so what story do you tell? Talk about what you can do, and why being a generalist makes you such a valuable asset without making rash promises.

On the techie side, I look at the way search engines like Google and Bing perceive websites with Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Try checking the keywords their crawlers identify to see if they’re seeing what you expect, it can be quite instructive.

Finally, try a Vanity search by sticking your name or brand into Google. Look at the results and see if they correspond to the image you’d like the World to see. How many pages correctly, and flatteringly, apply to you will give you a clue to how much work you’re got left.

These are just a few ideas to get started, and they’re not guaranteed, but I’m testing them on myself, and then maybe Margarita.

You see I’m an Engineer that’s learned maths from a practical perspective. We’re taught particular mathematical procedures for application to specific engineering problems: the emphasis is on correct application.

But the series pointed out the sweeping range of mathematical branches in existence, each with techniques that can be applied to many different types of problem, but frequently discovered simply because they were there!

On a practical level, we’ve conceived many types of geometry and calculus, each based on their own initial assumptions, sometimes building on what went before, but often starting from a totally new perspective.

And I guess being an Engineer, the magic lies in the application. It’s possible to apply multiple types of mathematics to the same problem, using those differing viewpoints as leverage to free the solution.

The physical sciences are full of mysteries, seemingly intractable problems suddenly solved by a change in mathematical toolkit. It turns out that understanding our Universe is a function of picking the right mathematical tools for the job, those that describe the problem domain in the simplest way.

I’ve come to view mathematics as a language: a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for the physical Universe itself. Only maths provides the kind of rich syntax that’s required to understand such a mind boggling domain.

That human minds could construct this DSL is a beautiful thing, and the basis of my fascination. For me to understand how to find the right tool might take a while, fortunately there are smarter people around to show me the way.

With the Liberal Democrats and Labour having much more in common, the Tories could be forgiven for thinking that PR would leave them out in the political wilderness forever. At every Election the other two would gang up against them to form a coalition government.

This is why a successful Tory / Liberal Democrat deal could be pivotal. If the Liberal Democrats can prove to the Tory membership that they can work together, that there’s some common ground, it’ll show that PR isn’t the political suicide they suspect.

Such a situation could benefit the Country in the short-term, with the two Parties limiting the extremes of both manifestos through compromise on the Economy, Defence, Education and Environmental policy. The show stopper of Electoral reform could be left for another day.

But reform must come, and there are many Tories, especially those with MEP backgrounds, for whom this holds no fears. But as always you have to win the trust of the majority before progress can be made.

Sacrifices made during current negotiation on the subject of reform could bring greater rewards later in the form of all party support. We pro-reformers may need to exercise a little patience.

The latter is more about good leadership and confidence. That type of strength stems from the ability to compromise without feeling you’re losing control. You know the type of thing… being able to take advice, considering other points of view and adapting to changing conditions when formulating your plans.

And that’s exactly the sort of thing that Cameron and Clegg should be up to now. The greatest test of their ability to lead is lies in coming to some agreement and then winning the support of their respective parties. That’s what’ll determine how ‘strong’ the new Government will be.

We’ve had a long history of majorities yielding dictatorial Prime Ministers: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and most recently that noted control freak, Gordon Brown. They may have possessed strong positions in Parliament, but considering the results how strong was their Government? Each lead us to their own brand of blinkered disaster: the loss of a balanced Economy, an illegal war in Iraq, and the Credit Crisis.

I voted for the Liberal Democrats—in an ubersafe Conservative seat I might add—to indicate my desire for a hung parliament. The absence of a single dominant party is the way of the future. Manifestos will be statements of Party negotiating position rather than an outright promise to the Electorate, that’s often broken.

The modern society is a complex web of systems in constant flux, it’s not one in which anyone can survive with the entrenched opinions our adversarial system promotes. General Moltke once said that “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”, and that’s still just as true.

Flexibility is the key and electoral reform is the way to get it precisely because it’ll ensure that no single party will be dominant again. This doesn’t have to mean perpetually weak government, rather it imposes a responsive approach to politics of which the General would approve.

If our current politicians can’t adapt, we’ll have to find some new ones that will. Cameron and Clegg are both young men that touted the need for change during the election campaign. With long careers ahead of them it’s time to start learning.

The handles are plastic and after about 20 years the splines that connect them to the tap bodies have started to break up.

I thought I’ll replace them with something a little nicer, chromed metal ones should do. I looked around locally and found just what I was looking for… but you couldn’t buy them without replacement tap bodies as well, in fact you could buy any handles on their own. The Internet supplied the answer in the form of prompt service from Not Just Taps.com.

I suspected that the cold bath tap washer was started to fail last night. Replacing the washer is an easy job I’ve done many times and for which I carry spares, this should only take 5 minutes tomorrow I thought.

Unfortunately once dissembled, it became obvious that the tap body was also shot: I don’t have spares for that, and it took a long walk around town on Sunday to yield a suitable, though not exact, replacement part. Definitely not a 5 minute job!

The point of this post is that in both of these situations finding parts locally was really hard, and frequently a straight replacement was unavailable. But what really struck me was that the cost of the parts was often many times that of a complete new tap!

A mass manufacturer can benefit from economies of scale when producing their product, but are our spares too expensive or the taps too cheap? If the latter is true, doesn’t it encourage waste: throwing away useful products because they’re not worth fixing?

I’ve been talking about my bathroom, but this situation will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get any consumer product fixed. But it can’t be right… can it?

You see this cloud has appeared and spread relatively rapidly, but it’s a very localised phenomenon by natural standards. Yet it’s shown how vulnerable our developed-world lifestyle is to rapid change.

When talking about sustainability I’m often told how adaptable our species is, and how technology will provide solutions to all our problems, but here is a dust cloud from a modest eruption and there’s nothing we can do but wait.

And wait for at least one more day, or possibly weeks, nobody knows how long it could go on, it all depends on the volcano and the wind. It’s this enigmatic power of our Planet that fills me with wonder; despite our technological prowess we’re never in control.

Apologies to locals who’s lives are seriously affected, I don’t mean to belittle your life changing problems, but it’s a good thing to discover the fragility of our position when the lesson comes from something we can expect to go away… we hope.

But it’s interesting to note that this sort of thing isn’t a surprise, apparently melting ice, and climate change, could make this sort of thing increasingly common.

We can achieve carbon neutrality in the medium term by using nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions, but in the long term fuel stocks are not sustainable. Interestingly, in the medium term nuclear waste is a sustainability problem that disappears with a longer view due to natural radioactive decay. When I say long, I really mean long.

Alternative energy sources like wind and tidal power could be thought of as sustainable and carbon neutral. But that’s because we have no idea of the long term effects on atmospheric and oceanic dynamics, or biodiversity as a result of habitat damage. Of course there may be no such problems, however at this point we can’t definitively declare them as truly sustainable, even if we consider their life cycle to be carbon neutral.

Carbon neutrality is measured over a short time frame, usually even less than the life of a product, and is a relatively instantaneous measure of a single factor, it’s just the carbon cycle. Sustainability has no such limitations in scope, to my mind it encompasses all factors over an infinite time frame. So once again it’s a matter of choosing the right scale, with sustainability being much broader and deeper than it’s apparent twin.

Does this make carbon neutrality a convenient and ultimately meaningless political metric, leaving sustainability as the only really important consideration? I suspect that it’s often ignored because it’s too difficult to address, in part because I fear sustainability in any guise is unachievable whilst so many humans inhabit our World.

a person engaged or qualified in a profession : professionals such as lawyers and surveyors.

• a person engaged in a specified activity, esp. a sport or branch of the performing arts, as a main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
• a person competent or skilled in a particular activity.

I noticed that the emphasis is on two factors: competence and money. Whilst I’d agree that they’re both part of the equation, they’re hardly unique to professional employment, if you don’t have the skills, you’ll eventually lose the job, and then you won’t get paid.

Personally I think this definition is incomplete, in fact it neglects the most important aspects of true professionalism.

Professionalism is a state of mind, or a way of thinking that’s an intrinsic part of certain personalities and can be enhanced by training to affect your whole outlook and approach to life.

Importantly my view frees professionalism from dependency on job titles, qualifications and even money, after all, voluntary or open source work can be approached in a professional manner.

But I’m not flogging the traditional dead horse, you know… the one about being a graduate of the school of life / hard knocks / been doing that since before you were born / <insert your own excuse here>. Qualifications represent knowledge and training that is absolutely necessary to achieve worthwhile objectives. Knowing when they’ll help and picking the right ones is the professional thing to do: continuing professional development is the phrase and higher quality service should be the goal.

But what does professionalism mean in practice? It means treating clients, suppliers and anyone else equitably; delivering on your commitments rather than walking away when you realise you’re going to make a loss; and always striving to produce the best work that the situation permits, why would you do less?

In short, I guess I feel it’s about integrity.

It’s a funny thing, but I found myself interacting with the people around me, you know, greeting other walkers as we passed and generally talking about whatever comes to mind. It’s probably one of those adversity effects, bringing us closer together by sharing a problem, but it also seemed that everyone was in less of a hurry, kind of resigned to a slower pace of life.

Something about the snow deadening the sound, and it’s effect on the speed of any remaining traffic, made everything appear more peaceful, a strange sensation considering the underlying chaos being reported in the news.

But much of the chaos is associated with the working lives of the Nation. Both my partner and I used to commute over 50 miles a day. I can still remember saving holiday, snow days, for when the weather sprung nasty surprised like this, and although Clare was lucky with snow, she fell foul of flooding and spend a whole day getting home one Easter.

But now I work from home and she works at a local company only a 12 minute walk away. This took a radical reshaping of our lifestyle, but we’re in the position of being able to save a lot of money and view the weather with ambivalence.

This lead me to question whether more people could work in a remote distributed manner, at least part of the time, developing this practice so that when events made travel dangerous they could continue with their routine, not having to worry about childcare for example.

I’ve had colleagues that viewed working from home with the same enthusiasm as they would a prison sentence, and for those maybe local satellite offices, or shared work spaces would be a better option.

More work can be done remotely than most companies care to admit, but that still leaves those not employed in offices.

Would more people be willing to move closer to their workplace if relocating weren’t so expensive? I’m not sure, but it seems logical to me that those being relocated would have more incentive if their expenses were dependent on their proximity to work, companies do pay relocation don’t they?

This is my view of the future of work in Britain, obviously coloured by all my commuting prejudices, but it’ll need better digital connectivity and a rise in fuel costs to be realised. Clearly I think it’d be a change for the better… I’m not sure everyone would agree.

We write down the environmental and ethical values we consider to reflect our lives. I’ve was informed that this is a Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) plan, apparently.

I suspect that this may be construed as a little anal, but if we actually have to write something we’ll have to ask explicit questions like:

• What should we be doing?
• Why do we believe in these things?
• Will we achieve what we expect?
• Do our actual actions reflect these stated beliefs?

I suspect we’ll discover some uncomfortable facts about the reality of our past actions. We may have to change the way we do things in the future, but I hope it’ll give us a framework for these decisions.

Then came the Credit Crisis and the market slump associated with the attendant global recession. Suddenly oil was relatively cheap again, and that brief period filled with innovative spirit seemed to turn to scepticism over the economic impact of carbon taxes. Nations became absorbed in their own relative competitiveness rather than the impact their actions would have on all of us.

Political posturing, and I’m looking at all you NGOs too, has turned climate change is a charged topic. Whilst the majority of people don’t care at all, those that do tend to be entrenched believers or sceptics; the depth of feeling seems to approach religious intensity. Unfortunately the real issue is masked by this squabble over carbon: we waste valuable resources by thoughtless pursuit of an unsustainable lifestyle, and one day we’ll by neck high in rubbish with little left to show for it.

I live in the UK and I’m guilty of doing my part to wipe out our species. Whilst I’m one of those that try to minimise my purchases and recycle whatever I can, a grossly unpatriotic position in the current economic climate, the standard of living I enjoy is plainly unsustainable. Those in other countries have just as much right to experience a similar standard of living, but that would accelerate our decline.

Alternative lifestyles are going to have to be adopted if we’re to experience more than a hellish existence on this planet, but the alternative needn’t be a poor compromise. It’s possible that there are better ways to live with a lighter footprint – and it’s not just about carbon – if we choose to look for them and consider our actions:

• What to buy and why I need it?
• Where does it come from and how much do I need?
• What I eat and how it’s produced?
• How many children I chose to have and what will their impact be in the future?
• Where I look for work and how our companies operate?

But how does this relate to my Copenhagen disappointment?

In the end I concluded that I’d no right to expect such a meeting of politicians from diverse cultures to achieve anything significant. I believe that modern government isn’t designed to produce results, it’s intended to generate a safe level of inertia that keeps us from civil war, and in this it’s been supremely successful for centuries.

Even during periods of party political unity – mostly during world wars – government hasn’t driven progress, it’s the actions of the individual, or small groups, that have made the difference, with government usually very late to the game.

And this is where my regret led me; political action and public protest isn’t the answer, the future lies in the decisions we all make as individuals about our lives at home and as part of the corporate world. Governments can’t change the World, but we could.

During resulting extinction events, the number of higher species is radically reduced, along with the number of individuals of the surviving species, making more space for evolution to act in the context of the prevailing environmental conditions.

It’s this relationship with our environment that may be the reason we evolved into our current form. Given our complexity and attendant vulnerability, the evolutionary response to our unpredictable world was to produce a more adaptable and flexible form.

Walking upright freed our hands and coupled to a bigger brain has allowed us to develop existing tool use and problem solving skills. In the natural world we’re puny creatures, but adaptation is our greatest asset, but one that can be applied in two ways.

Millions of years have passed and we’ve become accustomed to altering the inconvenient parts of our environment rather than adapting to new conditions, but one day we’ll come to a point where the magnitude of change is too great.

It’s inevitable that the current abnormal period of climate stability will come to an end, and my concern is that we’ve become too numerous and rigid in our social organisation to apply the fruits of our evolution to the task of rapid adaptation.

We’ve become optimisers rather than innovators, trying to extract every last drop instead of searching for different solutions. We assess everything in terms of it’s cash price and expend our efforts in developing new regulations. We fail to find the important solutions when we need them, should we be surprised?

Imagination is the best part of being human, and it needs time and intellectual freedom to thrive, commodities I’ve found to be increasingly rare in our modern world. A return to uncertainty may be what our species really needs to rediscover it’s full potential.

The exiled Shah of Iran was reputed to have said Oil is too valuable to burn… There are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s sake!.

He was right, fossil fuel based products are the basis of our modern lifestyle; pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, and huge range of products we rely on daily use oil and coal as a feedstock, and yet we squander this resource to burn for heat, power and transportation.

Without recycling we’d end up burning or burying these commodities, and using even more to replace what we’d just thrown away. I suppose one day we can resort to mining the old landfill sites for the valuable plastics they contain.

It strikes me that the climate change argument appears to be primarily over the concern for wasted money, but money is negotiable, we’ve all witnessed how effortlessly it can be created and destroyed. The natural resources we discard every day aren’t so easily manipulated, once they’ve gone, they’ve gone, money is a virtual resource, we can always make more.