Nick Grant

This is a story of a set of events that seem unrelated...

Is everyone familiar with the Monty Hall problem? This is probably a much more humane way to start thinking about our Quantum world, rather than locking Schrödinger's cat in a box with a radioactive decay triggering poison mechanism, which has a 50/50 chance of killing the poor animal.

Imagine that you are a contestant on a game show, and you are presented with 3 identical closed doors, with a prize behind each door. Behind two of the doors is a goat, and the third door has a brand new car (or some other more desirable prize than a goat).

So, as the contestant, you are allowed to choose one of the three doors. That is a 1 in 3 chance of picking the good prize, right?

Imagine if the game show host - after you have picked your door - then opens one of the other doors to reveal one of the two goats. Now, you are given the choice: are you going to stick with the door you picked, or switch to the other door?

If you believe individual events in reality are probabalistically unrelated, you might be thinking "it makes no difference". Perhaps you have even gone as far as to think that "it's 50/50 now that there are 2 doors remaining". In other words, it seems like there is no advantage to switching your choice, according to our intuition.

What if I told you that I could be twice as successful at this game show than you, if you went with your intuition, to 'stick' because it makes no difference?

Yes, that's right... 'sticking' with 1 in 3 odds means you'll be right just over 33% of the time.

However, there is a 2 in 3 chance that we would have picked a door with a goat, so when the gameshow host shows the other goat, I will definitely get the car if I switch. This means that I can win the car, nearly 67% of the time.

Tags: #physics

This is a story of a red flag that gets raised before disaster strikes...

Why does a person sink? Why do they get swamped? Why do they collapse inwards, under the gravity of their own infinite stress, sadness, blackness? Why do they implode in a spectacular supernova? Can we ever understand and relate to depression so deep that it would drive a person to take their own life? Can we make a difference? Can we empathise, help and ever rehabilitate somebody who has the clinical diagnosis of depression, without pills and a padded cell?

From my personal point of view, I have always felt that making a mistake leaves a dark stain on me, a black mark. People seem to have a very long memory for the mistakes I have made, and enjoy bringing up things that embarrass and upset me. In my career, the people who I need to impress and to promote me are always very keen to know about my weaknesses and flaws, seemingly as an excuse that I should "know my place" and not challenge the status quo.

The world has organised itself into a Pyramid Scheme, where there are a handful of unbelievably filthy rich oligarchs, sheikhs, kings, queens and emperors and other scum, who sit in their palaces, while their people starve in squalor. The trickle-down effect is a lie, spun by the courtiers, the sycophants in the entourage of the super-rich.

This wealth-worship has created a totally fake society, where newspapers, TV and the media, exists only to tell the proletariat that they are 'special' and 'unique' while at the same time, getting them to buy mass produced products from factories in China.

The best example of which is Apple and Beats by Dr Dre. There is a standard line amongst the creative community, that only a MacBook will suffice, as a the workhorse for the output of recording artists, graphic designers, web developers and startup founders. This is backed with the celebrity endorsement of footballers, who are seen arriving at matches wearing their 'individual' choice of a pair of overpriced Beats headphones.

I have always said that it's the software packages that are important, not the Operating System (OS) or the hardware, provided that both of those things are adequately up to specification to run the software. It's true that Apple stuff "just works" but anybody who foolishly accepts a new software release too early also finds that Apple do a lot of their testing by relying totally on the loyalty of their Fanboys.

I have mixed feelings about the largest consumer electronics company in the world. I think they are more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was in their heyday. When IBM's BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) was reverse engineered, which started the boom of IBM Personal Computer Compatible grey clones. This, along with Microsoft Disk Operating System (DOS) launched the home computer from the realm of labcoat wearing boffins, into the ubiquitous Internet-of-Things existance, where my car and my washing machine have an Application Programming Interface (API). This has been Bill Gates' vision for as long as I can remember.

I have always been fairly platform agnostic. I tend to go with whatever works, and ignore the marketing rhetoric and hyperbole.

That takes a lot of work and bravery, because at some point, people start to have vested interests. There are billions of dollars at stake in the tech industry. Apple majicked (sic.) a billion dollar App industry into existence more or less overnight. Who would have thought that paying 59 British pence for stupid little time-filling games (the developer used to keep 36 pence of that) would be so lucrative?

It also seems to take a lot of bravery to stick around and re-invest your cash in something worthy or pay the tax, because Apple seem to have precipitated a brain drain in the developed nations. I know far too many wealthy people who are hiding in tax havens, due to fear and greed. Why run away to South East Asia, taking your cash pile with you? What was wrong with paying tax or investing in somebody or something? What are you afraid of?

Perhaps I have little appreciation of risk? What's the worst that's going to happen to me though? The Conservative government will support me as a successful entrepreneur who invests in people, ideas, research & development. The Labour government will support me as a socialist who pays his taxes and does not try to evade them, recognising that the National Health Service, high quality schools and colleges, roads, libraries, street lighting, policing, fire service, trash collection, civic ameneties, community events, social services and the broad and rich spectrum of life in the United Kingdom is truly a model that every nation should aspire to emulate.

Feel the fear and do it anyway (Y2K)

Tags: #apple #computing #career #NHS #politics

This is a story of a leap of faith...

This is what's happening to me now that I have stopped drinking strong coffee.

"Coginitive impairment" sounds terrifying, and it certainly isn't pleasant to experience, but that's what I have chosen to go through by stopping my caffeine intake fairly abruptly. I didn't taper down, because of the long half-life of caffeine and the fact that it's in so many everyday things, like cola and headache tablets.

That's actually the first symptom of caffeine withdrawal that I experienced: an extremely unpleasant headache. The symptom onset can take a surpring amount of time, but then again, caffeine takes a long time to be metabolised.

The next symptoms crept up on me slowly, slowly:

• Inability to concentrate
• Poor impulse control
• Motor/verbal tics
• Cognitive impairment

I definitely do not "have wings" at the moment. It feels like my frontal lobes are completely inactive, which I guess is a little bit equivalent to a partial lobotomy.

Definitely not good for productivity, but the brain is a plastic organ, and can learn how to re-regulate its neurotransmitter levels in my synapses and at receptor sites.

So, it's hard work at the moment, but I no longer want to be a slave to tea, coffee, cola/energy drinks etc. etc.

It feels pretty horrible at the moment though, and I've been doing it for weeks.

My sleep is improving all the time though.

Wish I could write more, but I'm really struggling!

Tags: #caffeine #addiction #mentalhealth

This is a story of the part of Great Britain without a voice...

Our media misrepresents "youths" (young people) just like they misrepresent "refugees", "insurgents", "benefit cheats", "drug addicts", "criminals", "con men" and a whole host of other convenient 'bad guys' that help them to tell stories to sell newspapers, magazines and sell TV and radio advertising slots.

I saw a TV program the other night that was criticising a small business owner for paying somebody cash in hand to work for them. Surely the real story was that this well presented, educated and posh sounding journalist was even able to get a job paying £6.50 an hour without alerting suspicions... that's about the best job that even high-achieving school leavers and graduates can expect to get.

The prospects for young people today are atrocious. There are not enough training contracts and apprenticeships. There are no jobs to gain the valuable experience that will make these bright, energetic, enthusiastic and hard-working people into productive members of the workforce.

The Conservative Government has done what it normally does, which is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and I'm pretty angry about that.

The Tories presided over the Big Bang, which resulted in the Yuppies and Loadsamoney generation of the 1980s, but still left big social divides. When the Tories then tried to introduce the Poll Tax, which was a massive tax on the poor, people were outraged.

The Tories have now started to attempt to dismantle the social welfare system, leaving many unemployed, unwell and less abled people, living well below any acceptable standard for a developed Western nation.

Have you actually spoken to people, about how hard it is for them to stretch their budgets? Have you really gotten to know what the daily problems they face are? Have you attempted to live on Jobseekers Allowance, Employment Support Allowance or Disability Living Allowance? Have you filled in the forms? Have you been to assessments, been to the centres, tried to navigate the system? No, I didn't think so.

Many parents have masked the problem, until now, by subsidising their children and grandchildren. This has merely propped up a completely untenable government and lined the pockets of the rich. So much money has been siphoned off into wealthy people's pockets, with little or none of it actually reaching those who work so hard to improve the day-to-day lives of British Citizens.

Do our Nurses feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Teachers feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Police feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Firemen and women feel better off under the Tories? No. Do our Armed Services feel better off (financially) under the Tories? No.

While the Tories have fanned the flames of nationalism and warmongering, and attempted to stoke up a culture of Union Jack and St. George flag waving. This hoodwinks the undeniable erosion of the standard of living of ordinary people living in the UK.

Have the Tories made it any easier for people to buy their first house? No. Have the Tories made it any easier for young people to get their first job? No. Have they increased wages, or reduced rents or generally taken control of the fact that people's debts are spiralling out of control because most young persons' incomes are not sufficient to pay for the basic essentials for an acceptable life.

We are living, for the first time, in a generation where our opportunities, our standard of living is significantly worse than that of our parents and grandparents. Can people afford to get married, buy a house and have kids? No.

If you take away all hope from people, of being able to own their own little piece of the world, to put down some roots, to fall in love, make a baby and raise a family independently... you are robbing people of their self esteem. You are robbing a whole generation of the chance for them to show you just how hard working and intelligent and resourceful they are, in 'legitimate' ways.

The 'austerity' has merely drained the pension pots of our parents, in supporting the children that have been abandoned by a government run by rich old people, for rich old people. These greedy greedy career politicians are so completely out of touch with what is happening in high-rise council flats in Britain's towns and cities. They haven't got a clue what's happening on the huge estates and new housing developments.

The career politician went to private school, lives in taxpayer funded flat in a gentrified enclave of wealth in London, and commutes back to a rich market town or pretty village, where they are surrounded by wealthy people who have bled Britain dry at the expense of the masses. They have never spent any time in the real world.

There are exceptions, on the left and the right, of course, but in general it seems like the strategy of selecting a House of Commons from the most elite group of privately educated toffs who have never had to experience the welfare system first hand, might have something to do with why people are so angry and upset right now.

The problem is, that these people have few routes to being heard in the media and affecting the public opinion of those in power. Politicians are surrounded by an echochamber of similarly minded and educated elite people, who arrived in their positions as journalists, by very much the same route as them.

London really is a place where a politician and a journalist can live in one gentrified street, completely oblivious to the struggles in the social housing on a neighbouring street. Of course, the people in the 'council house' can't afford to shop on the super-expensive streets of London's trendier areas, so the wilful ignorance persists, because the different socioeconomic groups never actually intermingle.

You can't criticise the business owners who are only supplying to demand. It is not the hipster's 'cereal cafe' that is in the wrong, but in fact the whole system that allows such disparity between rich and poor, to exist and grow.

So, the young have ended up being misdirected into disliking the hipsters, just like they were told to hate the yuppies before. Actually, these people are the ones who got lucky or worked hardest. The people we should really be angry with are the ones who are filthy rich and didn't work for it.

I know it looks to many like riding a bike to work and wearing trendy clothes is all there is to the job, but actually, people in startups do at least 5 jobs each (e.g. Designer, Developer, Tester, Marketing and Sales) and tend to work at least double the hours that you would work in a regular job. They also work 6.5 days a week, and are always available on email and social media. They never switch off, because they are so passionate about their businesses. That's why their businesses have succeeded and not just been turned into another bland chain of corporate humdrum grey monotony.

I urge people to find their voice, and make themselves heard in a peaceful, constructive and erudite way. I'm concerned that the media will fan the flames of youth anger, racist ignorance, misguided nationalism, anti-immigration bigotry and everything else I detest about media 'themed reporting' that tends to fixate on a particular narrative that engages people's eyeballs... and therefore their wallets.

We need to remember... the only 'free' press is online, the BBC and the Observer. Everything else is paid for by a greedy rich old person with a political agenda.

I would suggest that people start boycotting newspapers that are paid for by headlines and advertising, and TV news that shows adverts on commercial channels. Start reading opinions from individuals on Twitter who you like and trust. You will also see what's trending, which is far more real than what is being chosen to be pushed by a news desk editor.

Tags: #media #politics #racism #nationalism #gentrification #youth

This is a story of two different investment strategies...

The guy on the left is Junior Banker, William Marshall. The guy on the right is Senior Analyst/Programmer Banker, Nick Grant. We are both professionals in Global Banking, economists, and philanthropists, who have read law and practice accountancy.

We have followed very different strategies for the banks that we have worked for. William is 'old money' and has practiced the buy and hold strategy of passive investment in the world's biggest companies. Nick is 'new money' and has practiced active investment in startups and disruptive companies.

I would say, that as we are well into the 21st century, and we have seen many cycles of boom and bust, that we have enough economic data to make a bold pronouncement: passive investment has failed.

Having large amounts of capital locked away in pension funds, where the fund managers are old and lazy, is not a good strategy for anything. In the 1980s it lead to asset-stripping of profitable enterprises that had employed a lot of people and were generating wealth. This made the Mayfair Set very rich, but left Britain with huge numbers of people laid off, and factories closed and sold off for the land and asset value. In the 1990s and beyond, it has led to boardroom excesses that frankly disgust me.

Male-domination of the boardroom, and eye-watering salaries, bonusses and golden parachutes that are paid to our company executives. This is a situation that must change immediately.

Both William and I share a common belief that we need to see more women in the professions, and we need to smash the glass ceiling that woman have been held beneath for far too long. Both of us have supported our partners to the fullest possible extent to allow them to be the Wonderwomen that they are.

William's wife is a Rocket Scientist, working on Europe's most important Space Missions. My ex-wife quickly became an amazing software developer, outclassing me in every company that we have ever worked for, including Research Machines and JPMorgan. I supported us delaying starting a family and her retraining to become a Teacher. With incredible speed, she rose through the ranks to become Head of the Chemistry Department at one of the best State-funded Grammar Schools in the United Kingdom. The admiration she has of staff and pupils, and the exam results that she has helped achieve are amazing.

Our boardrooms, our corporate culture, are starved of women, and a non-macho feminism in the thinking of the way that we build businesses. We are not being diverse enough in selecting the best minds in industry. We are still sexist in our thinking and our hiring. Myself and some colleagues had to fight tooth-and-nail to retain one of the most brilliant women that I have ever worked with, on the most important project in the biggest bank in Europe. That's not right.

Law, accountancy, medicine, journalism and IT are all lacking in women, while teaching, childcare, events, hospitality and catering are lacking in men. Meanwhile, strong independent intelligent women are being short-changed in their careers and sidelined into roles that they are totally underused and undervalued in.

Myopic business leaders are also short-changing our young people too. By investing in old dying people, rather than energetic young people, the pyramid of society has been stood on its head. Retirement is not a right, it's a priviledge. You only get to retire if you have left the world a better place than you found it. Sorrry, buster... you don't get to spend your hoarded cash until you fix the environment and create some damn jobs.

It's time to do the right thing.

We do need to respect our elders, but that should be strictly in a non-executive capacity. Should these people receive huge remuneration for such positions? Absolutely not. Only those who have already managed to build enough wealth, and can therefore afford to not have to keep working, are entitled to sit on the boards of companies.

The most enterprising and hard working individuals are implementing and executing large-scale changes to our economy, creating jobs, creating wealth and inspiring the next generation. The value of sitting in a chair and criticising everything is precicely zero.

Tags: #banking #career #gender

This is a story of a sabbatical that I never got to take...

Anybody who says I'm ungrateful for my life needs to have their head examined. My life has been paired down to the nth degree. Anybody who has lived aboard a 22ft boat for weeks knows how to live a small life.

In 2003, I asked HSBC if I could take a sabbatical, so that I could backpack around Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. The important thing about the trip, for me, was that I needed to make more friends and do a bit of independent growing up, away from the Angel Islington and Canary Wharf, which my whole life revolved around.

My old boss, an Exeter graduate who had completed an M.Phil (Master of Philosophy degree) in Epidemiology at Oxford, was a brilliant guy and did his level best to get this agreed with Human Resources. The rule at the time was that you had to have been an employee for 2 years, which I had been. It had been agreed and I started to get excited about tying my knapsack to a stick and setting off on the road to secure and happy adulthood, with some brilliant travel stories to tell when I got back.

Sadly, HR decided to change the rules under our feet, and the trip of a lifetime became a choice between resignation or cancelling my trip. I chose the latter, as I had a secure job with a conservative bank that I have loved since being a Griffin Saver, in the days of Midland Bank. Working for HSBC was very personal for me. Also, memories of the Dot Com crash and 9/11 were fresh in my memory. I valued my job, and I liked working for my boss. He's a great guy: so disciplined and inspiring.

Possibly as some kind of compensation (I'm totally speculating here) my boss allowed me to ride his coat tails into a very important project, whereupon I sulked for months and months, because I hadn't fully comprehended what he might have done, in light of the clear importance of the project that I was a part of. My boss exposed me to the very best people within HSBC, and perhaps tried to pair and mentor me - perhaps deliberately, who can say? - with people who are still to this day an inspiration in everything I think and do. I can't help but well up with tears thinking about what an amazing time that was, even if I was sullen and sulky for so much of it.

When the pressure really ramped up on the project, towards the go-live date, I flicked the switch from 'zoned out' to 'warp drive' and started putting in the hours I should have been. I had wasted a lot of time, so this was hardly anything more than working as hard as I should have been all along, but nobody should underestimate the effort that was put in, either.

Anyway, I was eventually ranked - quite fairly - on my average effort over the whole year, rather than just on the 'heroic' efforts towards the end. There was one issue that I was very very tenacious with, having to work with operations, software vendors, networks, sysadmins and security to track down a particularly nigglesome problem. This taught me some well-needed discipline, but not, however, much humility.

My boss did his very best to knock a streak of arrogance out of a jumped-up young upstart: I found it very easy to do the work that was asked of me, but I was lazy, sloppy and work-shy, to be honest. Nothing was much of a challenge, so instead, I filled my time reading the BBC News website, chatting with my friends on the Kiteboarding forums and planning my next weekend trip to the beach or overseas Kiteboarding trip.

I suppose you could say that I had my cake and ate it. I got to continue my career in London, and I also got to travel the globe and meet a set of friends who became a part my life, almost like University or "gap-yah" friends (gap year to those who don't speak posh) would be in the lives of my rich upper-middle-class white spoiled brat peers.

However, I still harboured a bitter resentment against the world for having 'conspired' to deny me a year of diminished responsibility, casual sex with sun-kissed young women with sand in their hair, and generally having fun in the playground of World's backpacking hostels. I felt I was entitled to this, like all the University-educated upper-middle-class twentysomethings in Banking.

I couldn't see that I had kind of won. I had kind of gotten both. I couldn't see that my life was awesome already.

When my boss told me that I been ranked just below the very top performing employees of the company that year, I was mighty p1ssed off. He did a very good job of staying calm and not telling such an arrogant little sh1t to p1ss off. Partly at issue, was that entitlement is bred into us by our upbringing and society around us.

We are told what to expect depending on our position in the World. Perhaps we also misunderestimate (sic.) the effort that is going on beneath the serene surface: some of us are wild swans, with our legs frantically paddling under the surface, while we glide along the surface looking cool, calm, collected & awesome.

Tony Blair told the world that 50% of people should get to go to University. I wanted to go to University, but always felt such a deep sense of responsibility to be self-sufficient and work hard, it seemed decadent and profligate to spend so much money, geting into debt, just drinking and reading books. I have always been excellent at cramming for exams and words seem to flow out of me like so much water in a sieve, so that part didn't exactly worry me.

It's always been a bugbear of mine that people think that education is a right. It's not. It's a privilege, but it is also essential to advance civilisation and humanity. It can improve lives and society more than any other gift that we can give to the developing nations. Teach a man to fish etc. etc.

People have tried to gently, and not-so-gently steer me towards teaching. I loved my teachers and I love teaching. I can remember all the names of my teachers, and I still fondly recall so much of what they taught me in life, and how they inspired me. I hated school though, because the bullying was so unbearable. But then again, I was always terrified of electricity and ended up becoming an electrician, so fears can be overcome.

I think I know now that, when I'm done with wearing a suit, I want to teach - so much that it makes me absolutely sob my eyes out as this realisation dawns on me - Physics, Maths and Design/Technology/IT working with underpriviledged kids in state comprehensive schools in Inner City London. This doesn't have to be soon. It's something to aspire to for semi-retirement, I think.

The only way that I can think to make that a reality from my current situation of zero cash, zero assets and massive debts, is by draining the swamps in banking, as an IT contractor, and by changing the political landscape of the UK so that we pay Teachers a decent living wage and top up the salary of those working in London so that they can afford to live here.

Ideally, I would like to finish the project I'm on, and deliver of a stint of many months and years of steady high-quality work for the global bank I have always loved admired and respected the most. HSBC really is a great place to work, and you really can be reassured that when we are all done, it's going to be good for another 150 years of helping people and businesses to achieve their full potential.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless dreamer. Answers on a postcard if you've got a better idea.

Anyone who says 'narcissist' to somebody who has decided to wear a grey suit for 18 years is going to get a punch in the mouth (Winter 2014)

Tags: #career #london #banking #university #hsbc

This is a story of the people who see you at your most tired, afraid, and in the most pain and discomfort...

I owe the hard-working, caring and dedicated nurses of the National Health Service my life, along with the Radiographers, Cardiologists, Phlebotomists, Psychiatrists, Social Workers, Psychologists, Nutritionists, Physiotherapists, Pathologists, Porters, Caterers, Cleaners and of course the Doctors, Consultants, Surgeons and Anaesthetists. It would be ridiculously selfish of me to not continue living after all the hard work that a huge team of people made in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I always seem to expect that things will heal overnight, and indeed I rushed everything after a fairly major leg injury. After the accident, which luckily seemed to avoid any major blood vessels, despite severing a load of muscle, tendon and nerve. I hastily cobbled together a 'field dressing' with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, and wanted to make my own way home, but paramedics insisted on checking me out. It was them who discovered I couldn't actually raise my foot anymore, due to a severed tendon, and had lost feeling on the top of it, due to a severed nerve.

The operation took a long time and must have cost a lot of money. I have paid a lot of tax and National Insurance during my career, but that does not make me entitled. I need to repay my debt to society somehow. I haven't thought how I'm going to do that just yet, but I do think about it. I do have a list I'm working through, although I'm obviously never that mindful of the "one step at a time" mantra... I tend to sprint everywhere.

Running before I can walk, running with scissors (not how it happened, just a metaphor) and all the other things my Mum warned me not to do never ended in tears because I was always told to MTFU (Man The F**k  Up). A kind friend told me the other day that excess mucous and swollen mucous membrane might indicate a backlog of tears. I guess my tear ducts are fairly full.

But let's keep this about those in the caring professions. These people have to mop up your blood, pooh, pus, vomit and mucus, while you wince and generally try and hide your discomfort and be as polite and courteous as you can under the circumstances.

We should pay people in the caring professions a living wage, and more to reflect the important role they have in society.

I, for my part, am going to ensure that I pay full income taxes on my earnings when I am inside IR35, which is anytime that I have a regular place of work and commute to the same office on a regular basis... like now.

Coming from a startup and small business culture, I have always re-invested any profits into Research & Development projects in my time between contracts, but I think I need to just get a regular hobby... probably a safe one, given my accident prone nature!

I also think that a socially responsible proportion of my disposable income that I have should go as Gift Aid to Macmillan Cancer Support, because Cancer is a disease which blights all our lives, and the nurses in Palliative Geriatric care are really doing an extremely tough job and should receive all the support that we can possibly give them, as highly qualified professionals in a job that demands them to be kind and caring, loving and supportive, dealing with the inevitable painful loss of loved family members.

This by no means absolves me of my social conscience, but it's a public declaration of starting as I mean to go on. Some might see this as pathetic hypocrisy. Fine. Send me a postcard with a better idea.

Tags: #NHS #injury #startup #charity #career

This is a story of the people behind the camera; the unsung heros....

As I was having a "brand interaction" with Shaun the Sheep, I observed that there was one gender that was statistically more probable to be behind a camera, photographing a little person.

Mums are our unsung heros, Grannies are the nonjudgemental free babysitters for mollycoddled mummies boys, Aunties are the eyes that see everything from afar, Cousins are the ones who are 'Goldilocks'... not too close but not too far. You shouldn't marry your cousin though. Not enough genetic diversity.

Men are arseholes. Powerful men are entitled, bullying, cruel and myopic arseholes. Men are warriors, but we are supposed to be civilised. There is nothing civilised about war. There is nothing civilised about bullying, pain, human suffering, hunger and feeling unloved.

Mums are the antidote to men's raging testosterone. When women give birth, maternal instincts are programmed into the mother, which are necessary for the survival of the species. However, human babies have very large heads (ouch!) and are totally unable to support themselves and their alien head until they have drunk lots of mother's milk from the mammary glands of their mother.

Oxytocin is released into the bloodstream of nursing mothers, as part of bonding, but there is a sympathetic reaction, which is not in the mother's body, but in the father (if he stuck around for the birth). The release of this hormone is critical, to change the mode of the male, from fight, fuck and flee, into a responsible adult who deserves to have his offspring survive for long enough to possibly pass on 50% of his genes.

This is not so much the 'selfish' gene, as the 'anti-freeloader' mechanism. I'm sorry buddy, but you don't get to sow your wild oats and expect to reap what you sow. That's called rape.

I'm sorry to say it, but there are far to many rapists in the world. Men who think that they can get away with taking what they want, and not sticking around to face the emotional and physical consequences. The price for your 3 seconds of copulation could well be a pink/brown/yellow/red, screaming, incontinent midget, which can't feed itself, but yet you find yourself doing a weird dance in worship of this blood and mucus covered alien that just exited the mothership.

The "summer of love" was merely a chemical blip that nature would inevitably find its way around. The powerful drugs that have been synthesised in Bayer, Roche, Lily, Pfizer, Myers-Squibb etc. etc. which were tested on animals, including many of society's undesirables is a holocaust that we have conveniently forgotten. Baby boomers should not be nostalgic for being doped up in a field having unprotected sex, because that's f**king up society.

Many well meaning Physicians have entered Psychiatry, believing that it was a new Science, motivated by the desire to improve lives. Nobody did the long-term studies to find out whether the outcomes were better or worse. Where data has existed - for example, with Heroin, Cocaine, Laudenum, Snuff, Cannabis - the long term outcomes only look OK for the extremely wealthy. Are you the Queen of England? No? Then perhaps Cannabis is not for you. Big Pharma gets very rich indeed of patent royalties, which is completely at odds with the needs of sick people.

Psychoactive substances have always been the means of controlling society. Whether it was the Coca leaves of Peru and Columbia, Betel nut of Africa, Paan of Southern Asia, Tea of North India and China, Coffee and Cocoa of South America... and of course, Tobacco of the Americas. Older than all of these, is of course, alcohol which was brewed by monks in order to addict people to something that would fill their congregation pews.

As shamanism, witch-doctoring and magic declined in Europe, so organised religion rose to fill the void, as child mortality and and an early death were guaranteed to feature in the lives of Medieval people, along with hunger and bitterly cold winters. Life was short and sh1t.

Civilisation has advanced. We now have the resources to treat diseases, making them go away and people live instead of dying. In a hell of lot of cases that's a mosquito net and a sachet of salt & sugar, which will save the life of a person with runny pooh, provided they have access to clean drinking water. It's as simple as that.

Add food into the mixture and you're improving lives immeasurably in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara is a bleak and desolate space that separates almost an entire continent from having access to civilisation. Do we travel there to distribute clean water, medicine, bicycles? No, we go there to steal gold, diamonds, uranium ore, dam their rivers, steal their resources and take what little crops the African people grow to feed themselves, paying barely enough for them to survive the winter. This is rape.

I don't know if this is coming across, but I'm quite angry about this. I have been for as long as I've been able to hold a complex thought and set of feelings in my young mind. I'm sorry I wasn't a right-on lefty liberal, born with a copy of The Guardian clutched in my hands, as I was ejected from my mother's womb. I'm sorry that you're too far up your Islington Blairite Hypocrite Champagne Swilling Holier-than-thou F**king A*se to see that the working classes care too... but they didn't have the benefit of your privileged education. But then you're so smart that you knew that? No?

Thankfully, Oxford is a think-tank, where burnt out Blairites decide to raise a family. It used to be an affordable commuter belt City with enough culture and academic interest to make the trip into Paddington on the train, worth jostling with other suits in the morning.

Oh yes, Oxford has its fair share of people who look down their noses at the great unwashed masses. Thankfully though, some of them couldn't avoid actually encountering some grubby street urchins, and having their perceptions shaken up.

There was a joke shop in the heart of Jericho, where you could buy water balloons, smoke bombs, whoopee cushions, firecrackers/bangers and other things that could shock a smug mummy's boy out of his self-obsessed preening, admiring themselves in their gowns in shop windows as they walked through the cobbled streets of Oxford's dreaming spires.

My Parents never really reprimanded me for launching a "Swallows and Amazons" style attack on the punters, from the high boughs of trees and bridges in the University Parks. We were little monkeys, who tore around town on our BMXs and skateboards faster than any Park Ranger or officious old fuddy-duddy could chase after us. We used to ring doorbells, egg houses, put treacle on door knobs. We were working class kids thumbing our noses at the establishment and everybody loved it, except for the arrogant elite.

Luckily, all the 'warrior' men were all in London, hunting big game and beating their chests. We knew our mothers would tell us off and say "wait until your father gets home" but we also knew our fathers would be exhausted from full-on days of p1ssing contests in the Big Smoke, followed by horrendous rat-race train journeys from hell.

This kind of matriarchal society took the sting out of any beatings that the kids got, and us kids bonded a lot more with our mothers than would be ordinary at that time. Did it lead to a load of mummies boys? Actually, it might have led to a group of people who feel so loved and cared for that they feel invincible. Is this a bad thing? Well some of my friends have died young, making unwise decisions when fuelled by alcohol.

There was one friend who shone bright in all our lives, and the circumstances in which we lost him were close to my own childhood experiences, of playing on railway tracks unsupervised by adults. I could totally picture exactly how it happened. It was chilling, and still is today. I am not imagining myself doing that, I am actually able to perfectly empathise with the mindset that would have led to a tiny mistake, which cost my friend his life.

I hope that his Mother and family is OK, if they read this. I'm trying to write it as sensitively as I can. Our friend is still very much alive in our hearts, and I'm crying as I write this. Tears are rolling down my cheeks and splotching onto my keyboard. I can remember how he touched our lives, as clearly as if it were only yesterday.

The cruellest twist of all, was that we had reconnected just as we were leaving adolescence; and embarking on our journey into adulthood. It robbed us all of the chance to see just how great that young man was going to become. Life can cheat and short-change us still, even at the end of the second millennium.

The challenge that life set our group of friends, was how to cope, in the modern age that had scattered us to the winds. We couldn't really grieve properly as a group. Even though, by total coincidence, this young man had ended up in the same City in Hampshire as me. Most of our other friends had remained in Oxford, where we grew up in.

I used the Internet to try and reconnect with these friends, but it was still very early days, and I felt very damaged and bitter about having been taken away from this group of beloved people. My parents were always moving me away from my friends and schools I loved. I didn't undertand why this had to happen. It was heartbreaking.

We left Aberystwyth for Kidlington, we left Kidlington for Tackley, we left Tackley for Oxford, we then had an abortive attempt to leave Oxford for Cinais in France (thankfully my teachers stepped in and stood up for me, explaining that my life was getting f**ked up by this wanderlust) but we still left for Harcombe, and then the family left Harcombe for Charminster.

By this point I had gotten f**ked off and left home at age 17/18, for Dorchester and my first job. I had barely settled in when British Aerospace then had the lovely idea of moving me to the Portsmouth/Fareham/Gosport area. Eventually I got f**ked off with that company keeping me away from my friends (and being responsible for making weapons that were used to kill people) so I moved to Winchester, where unsurprisingly I didn't have the most developed set of social skills or any ability to relate to my peers... unintended consequences, but it certainly hit me right in the feels.

I had a very weird time in Winchester, but I made 2 key friends, one of whom has recently re-entered my life, which restabilised it temporarily. Friends are important. Continuity is important. Stability is important. Trust is important. Truth is important.

I'm still working through thorny feelings about being taken away from my peers. It left me feeling I had to be fiercely independent and do everything early, in a rush. I've always felt like I had to take care of my Parents. When we were in Ireland when I was a little boy, I remember staying awake all night so that I could go and fetch the coal in the morning. I got myself dressed at dawn, and was just heading out with the coal scuttle to fetch the coal, when my Dad woke up and asked what I was doing.

Yes, you can raise your kids in a Victorian way, and they will turn out OK to outward appearances, but they may have problems reconciling your nostalgia for a time that probably didn't exist and you are over-romanticising, with reality in the 20th and 21st century. The projection of your inadequacies will have unexpected consequences. "Children should be seen and not heard" is one of the most offensive things I have ever heard in my life. F**k you, you dinosaurs.

It's not your fault. You were the best Mum & Dad (I wasn't allowed to say "Mum" or "Dad" for some reason) that you knew how to be. I did have an interesting time in my not-really-allowed-to-be-child-hood, being your experiment in denying the infantilism of an infant. It's benefitted me in the long run... I've had a great head start in many aspects of my life. I'm just not what you might call, a rounded character. For every yin there is a yang.

I'd probably make a good butler. I like dressing up and I sound posh. I can be anything you want me to be. I aim to please, Sir.

Tags: #childhood #career #london #oxford #parents #drugs #addiction #alcohol

This is a story of a growing problem in people's lives....

I can't get no sleep. That's a double negative. What I mean is, that I have a problem with insomnia, because I stare at backlit devices around-the-clock. The problem with backlit devices is that they output light that hits your retina, telling your body "it's daytime, get up".

When I'm awake, which is most of the time, I'm either at work on my laptop or working at a double or even triple monitor, looking at my phone, or looking at a TV, tablet or some other backlit device. I had even taken to reading books on my phone, which means that my body had absolutely no light-based clue as to what the f**king time is.

Unsurprisingly, this messes with your circadian rhythm, even if you eat your meals at regular intervals, and attempt to get in and out of bed at normal times. I generally keep at least 3 electronic devices within grabbing distance of my bed anyway (phone, laptop, smartwatch) and often times I fall asleep with either my laptop on my lap, or still wearing my smartwatch (which helpfully vibrates, so I can briefly wake up to check any alerts).

Photographing stuff on my phone and uploading it to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting check-ins and status updates, and making snide or sarcastic Tweets - from 4 different accounts, at least - has grown and grown, leading to a kind of live-blogging of my life.

To say that I was obsessed with social media would be a massive understatement. It's actually an addiction that is affecting my health. That's the generally recognised definition of an addiction: when something you enjoy is negatively affecting your life, but you are struggling or unable to reduce your dependence on the thing you are addicted to (water, oxygen and sugar don't qualify, you see, because you die without those things).

The inscription around the woolly head of our sheepie friend reads: we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Shaun would be well advised to make sure he gets enough sleep, as our immune systems can get dangerously low if we aren't giving our brains and bodies the rest they were designed to have.

Modern life gives us surprisingly few environmental cues as to what we should be doing. Here in London we have artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and there is barely a wall that doesn't have some kind of flat screen attached to it now. We really are a City that doesn't sleep. When all the bankers, lawyers and accountants go home in their taxis, just before midnight, an army of cleaners and trash collectors sweep in behind, to collect all those discarded coffee cups and sandwich wrappers.

Most offices are now 24 x 7 x 364 (you get Christmas Day off - this is the only real Bank Holiday) which have cost-saving motion sensing lighting, so you only have to glance up at one of the tall office blocks at an unusual hour, to get a rough idea of just how many people are working on some unrealistic deadline for their client.

Delivering a deal, getting the Thank Yous from your bosses and clients. High-fiving your colleagues, and adding another tombstone to your impressive collection of deals or projects that you have delivered... that's addictive too. You get a little dopamine hit every time one of those things happens, and before you know it, you find yourself going into the office 7 days a week and answering the phone to your bosses whenever they call.

In a global business, we operate a follow-the-sun model, where Europe hands over to the Americas, and then onto Australasia, and then Asia-Pacific, and then Middle East and North Africa and all too soon it's dawn again. Where those business centres are unable to fully support themselves, some poor sod carries their phone and/or BlackBerry everywhere anytime. We used to call it Crackberry when we first got our BlackBerries, and you found yourself checking email at 4am, even when you officially weren't on call.

We can't actually help ourselves anymore. Whenever we hear that bleep and see that message notification light blinking, we have been habituated into reaching out and grabbing it, no matter what time of day it is, no matter how socially inappropriate it might be, no matter what else we are attempting to do at the time.

I find myself looking at my smartphone, one-handed, while cycling along in front of 3-lanes of red London busses and trucks... what could go wrong? I find myself finishing typing a message, one-handed, while descending steps and even a ladder that leads down onto the 'beach' outside my flat. That ladder is about 80ft high. It would hurt if I fell, or maybe even kill me.

It's a similar deal with selfies. People will go to extreme lengths to get the shot. They won't even let you skydive with a camera until you have done a certain amount of jumps, because of the sensible precaution that people should concentrate on the hard ground that is approaching at 125mph, and not the killer shot that will make their Facebook profile look super awesome.

So I tried to photograph 64 painted sheep in Covent Garden yesterday. Should we be quite worried, in a pathetic hand-wringing Daily Mail reader way? Why? In the above image, some adults might have been accidentally been photographed obsessively taking photos of their children. The image is low enough resolution that you can't actually recognise people, but some idiot will still declare that their privacy has been invaded. Welcome to London, you muppets. We are one nation under CCTV.

(NOTE: I took particular care to avoid taking a photo of anybody's child, and no, that really is not your kid in the image... it's someone else who shops in Baby Gap or Mothercare or wherever, and has a blonde/mousey/dark-haired kid. Can you imagine how hard that is in Covent Garden?).

So, for my part, I am pretty much putting my entire life - not including anything I am under contractual and professional obligation to protect - into the public domain. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Is this brave, or stupid? Will I come to regret doing this? Am I embarrassed? Yes, there is embarrassment at first, and then this grows into a feeling of being liberated. Nudity, sex etc. are still taboos, so I'm not going to take things that far, and I am mindful of other people's need for privacy so I won't be exposing anybody else to my public life laundry. Ask yourself though, why do you feel uneasy about something leaking out?

So, I believe that Cannabis is a very dangerous drug that has been allowed to enter popular culture (some conservative estimates say that 1 in 10 people are regularly 'stoning' themselves). My biggest concern is that prodromal Schizophrenia is being turned into fully blown psychotic episodes in young people. The paranoia and disordered thinking that I have witnessed in friends and relatives is disturbing.

The strains of Cannabis that have been developed with very high Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content are ruining many lives. People just sit around, eating, playing computer games, and p1ssing their youth away. These are smart and enterprising people. We are losing a whole generation, and I'm pretty angry about that.

If you walk around Camden Town, you will realise how the Marajuana plant has become a ubiquitous emblem for a huge powerful narcotics industry. The revenue and turnover involved is many many billions, in the UK alone. The corruption involved, the bribery of government officials, is a multi-agency problem that spans Border Controls, Customs, Police, Local Government, and of course, Parliament. Professor David Nutt was run out of government for trying to bring some sanity to the issues which threaten to tear our society apart.

We can't have an entire generation, whose ideas and energy have been repressed by a chemical 'straight jacket'. These stoners are too intoxicated to see that they have been conned. They might think they are part of a counter-culture revolution. From my first-hand observations, they are actually spouting complete rubbish, gawping at the TV, surrounded by empty junk food wrappers, in the stained clothes they have been wearing for days.

It sounds like I'm having a go at young people. I really am not. This is a major sadness in my life, that brilliant, bright, intelligent, energetic, beautiful young people are selling themselves so short, because they have been trapped into a cycle of poverty and intoxication, addicted to strong narcotics. What other hopes do they have? Getting a job as a young person is almost impossible.

Can't get a job without the experience. Can't get the experience without the job. That's the spine-chilling Catch 22 that is destroying a whole generation. These are your children who are being frozen out from the employment market. Take a bloody look at yourself, stop looking at the profit and turnover for your company, and ask yourself how many apprentices have you trained? How many entry-level positions have you created in your company? What are you doing to help the next generation?

Give young people the break they need in life. It could be as little as a small business loan, of a few hundred or few thousand pounds. That kind of money is pocket change compared to the value of your savings and assets. If you don't give away more than 1% of your total personal wealth (value of your house + value of your salary + value of your savings + value of your pension) every year, for the lifetime of each child that you have spawned, then you are a pathetic spineless leech on society.

My parents, tried to be as supportive as they were capable of being, and I love them. They have made mistakes, just the same as all of us, and I do recognise that being a parent is hard, and everybody is just winging it.

Tags: #childhod #addiction #mentalhealth #drugs #privacy #london #banking #career

This is a story of a dinner out with friends, planning my retirement...

I went to the book store with my friend Lesya. I bought 2 books. I was pretty insistent that I buy one of them. Out of all the books in that book store, I couldn't imagine walking out of there without this one. I knew that it would haunt my idle thoughts and dreams if I didn't have this book.

But, strangely though, as I leafed through the book, trying to build up the courage to buy it - and not repress my general urge to p1ss all my money away - I found a deeper and deeper connection with it. Every page I opened, I fell more and more in love with the content... perhaps I have always loved it?

So, a headhunter recently asked me what I really want to do with my life. I was surprised how unhesitatingly I answered that I want to retire at the age of 45 and become a Therotical Physicist. It just tripped right off the tongue, even though I hadn't made that plan - at least in my concious mind - until that point in time.

But what is time? What is conciousness? At dinner later that evening, we conducted a kind of experiment which was quite enlightening...

There are 1,099 pages in Penrose's book. I asked my friends to open the book at any page, and I would attempt to explain the theory on the page that the book was 'randomly' opened at. Why do I put 'random' in quotes like that? Well, I have a working theory that there is no such thing as a random number, in reality as we can possibly experience it... which leads on to the first page.

The Anthropic Principle is where the book was first opened, by Lesya, which nobody wanted me to explain, as John believed I had rigged the game. Anybody with a reasonable grasp of Greek or Latin or whatever the f**k language that poncey word "Anthropic" is rooted from, will know that basically what this is saying is Humanity is at the centre of the reality we all experience. In the catchphrase of the Moneysupermarket Meerkat.... SIMPLES!!

I did a quick Google search for "number of books in a book store" and the first simple answer I came up with that doesn't sound unrealistic was "upwards of 1,000" which is a bit of a sh1t answer, because 1,160,000,000,000,000 is a number which is upwards of 1,000 so let's use 999 as the answer to be on the safe side.

So, there was a 1/999 chance that I would pick that book, and a 1/1,099 chance that Lesya would pick that page, which means there was a 0.0001% chance that I could have preplanned that 'stunt'. Not likely, but still a chance.

So, then John had a go opening the book. I'm going to try and write the formula that was on that page, from memory:

Δp Δx ≳ ½ ћ

Now, I'm not sure, but I'm just going to go with my gut instinct and avoid cheating, but I'm pretty sure that looks like the Uncertainty Principle to me. The first symbol is easy - delta - the little triangle means 'the difference between two values'. So the first side of the equation says "what is the total area that could be covered by something with a known momentum AND a known location"... where in the world could the thing we are looking for be found?

So, I'm going to explain the other side of the equation in a minute, but for now let's just work out the odds of me being right. It's another 1 in 1,099 chance that John could have picked the page I wanted him to, at 'random'. That makes a statistical probability of 0.00000008% that the events of the evening went in my favour.

So, the other side of the equation is super easy. It's half the Planck constant. I reconised the h-bar symbol and what it meant immediately. We can work out the odds of that. There are 26 letters in the Roman alphabet, and let's imagine that there are 26 kinds of mark applied to them, each with a specific meaning in Physics (this obvious simplification ignores all the Greek characters... but it will suffice). So that's 1/26 times 1/26, which is 0.15% probable that I would match the correct meaning (assuming I knew them all) with the character.

So what kind of probability have we gotten to now?

0.0000000001%

I'm not sure, but I hope that is Six Sigma statistical significance. I was never that great at Maths.

Tags: #physics #friends