Gleise 581c: what do you mean, 'far away'?

Some people are putting a downer on the exciting news that a planet where water could exist as a liquid has been discovered orbiting Gleise 581, saying that 20.5 light years is a long way away. I'd like to put a positive spin on this.

OK, so it'd take us a million years to get there with current spacecraft, and the problems would start before you even passed the Moon - but think positive! After only a few years of looking (the first extrasolar planet was only observed a decade or two back) we've found a 'Goldilocks zone' planet, i.e. one where life could conceivably exist, just twenty light years away.
Cosmically speaking, that's the flat next door.

And far from being bad news, it's reasonable evidence that the universe is teeming with planets potentially supporting some form of life, even according to our narrow definition of 'life needs water'. That's the exciting bit.

Let's run some numbers. The new planet is one of about 100 stars within 20 light years of us. In other words, even with our present primitive detectors, we can find two planets (our's and Gliese's) in a sphere just 40 lightyears in diameter.

Now the main chunk of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and 1000 thick. That's a volume of around 2 trillion cubic light years in the 'core'. With candidate planets every 20 light years, that's 250 million candidate planets in our galaxy alone! And that's a worst case scenario.

There are 240 billion observed galaxies in our universe. Each galaxy with, perhaps, a minimum 250m more 'habitable' worlds. That's 60 million trillion (that's 6 followed by 19 zeroes) planets bearing some comparison to warm, life-spawning Earth.

And if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is right, raise all that to the power of infinity minus 1....

The Universe is still amazing, even if we don't get out much.

London disrupted by fire... OUTSIDE MY HOUSE

There's a sizeable fire disrupting London this morning. Had the usual round of early-morning texts from family and friends warning me of possible disruption to travel services today.

All of which proved unnecessary, since I opened my blinds to discover it's happening RIGHT OUTSIDE MY HOUSE, and if I shouted I could theoretically hold a conversation with the hose-holding fire guy atop the cherry-picker. (Yes, those are billowing clouds of smoke in the pic.)

There are gas cylinders stored on that industrial estate. Oh, whoop-dee-doo.

POSTSCRIPT 10:10am: The white smoke has turned to black. Either the fire is getting more serious, or they're electing a new Pope.

Which Minuteman are you?

The 100 Bullets series has grown on me over the last three months.

At first I didn't like it: the ethnic dialogue seemed a little too self-conscious, the story too lazy. (Oh no, not another conspiracy plot.) But after three re-reads of the series to date, I've started to get deeply into it. I was missing the important bit. You don't read 'Bullets' for the dialogue (like 'Preacher') or the writing ('Transmetropolitan') or even the macrographic majesty of the plot (like 'Sandman'.) You read 100 Bullets for Eduardo Risso's incredibly well-realised art: specifically, how he draws people.

Every character in 'Bullets' is a real person, with a different body type bred from a different lifestyle and upbringing. South Side Chicago girls are sassy and posturing just like real Hispanics, but in a different way to the Blacks. Fat people are fat in different ways: the soft bulginess of an obese gay gangster, the hardened grizzle of a hack journalist, the opulent solidity of a well-fed rich man. The Minutemen draw characteristics from their flesh: Lono glorying in his massively muscled frame, Jack Daw self-destructive because of a different response to the same physical superiority. Wylie small but darting-eyed sharp thanks to agility, Cole Burns intelligent and self-assured. They all look different, and characters express themselves as complete human beings instead of just faces, just like real life.

Now it's in its last trimester (there'll be 100 issues in total) all the threads of various story arcs are starting to merge. We've met all the Minutemen - the trained killers that keep the real owners of America in check - so of course there's only one question left: in the pumped-up, over-the-top physicality of the comics world, which Minuteman would you be?

Well, I'm not Lono. The Minutemen aren't exactly good eggs, but Lono's downright evil: a rapist twice to date and a three-time torturer. Also the physically largest, he's a formidable presence even in the comics world, and my physicality's more of an athletic bent than a circus strongman. Not Lono.

I'm not Jack Daw either. A vast man like Lono, the Saint's been weak enough in the past to give in to the lure of the needle. I don't have an addictive personality, so I can't be Jack, even though he's one of the toughest mofos in comics.

Victor was a possibility. One of the more normal Minutemen - with fewer obvious psycho tendencies, and big but not on the scale of Lono or Jack - Victor doesn't sit on fences and openly takes sides. But I'm discounting The Rain for those same reasons: he's not enough of a character, not enough depth to be an individual. Not Victor.

And I'm not Remi Rome either. Remi's the blue-collar Minuteman, sense of family and brotherly love. Not a bad guy, just from a different social class to me.

I'm not Milo, although I admire the guy. Physically capable and a hit with the ladies (scoring two of a possible three in the space of one story arc) he's strong enough to make a genuine choice when the past comes rushing back out of hypnotic prison, and is free of that worst of traits, self-pity. A good guy, but not me.

I was almost Wylie though. Intellectually adept and sharp as a razor, he starts off 'coasting' through life and worries about what he really wants from it: a lot like me at the moment. Not sure why but he doesn't quite feel right. If I were a Minutemen, I'd almost be the Pointman, but not quite.

No, I knew from the first frame he appeared that I'd be Cole. Cole's probably the smartest one. Living on the edge of what's permissible according to the Minutemen's code, Cole's got style and a sense of the depth of life. Even tells a nobody journalist the ultimate secret - the full story of the Trust and the Greatest Crime in History, just to fuck with him. Cole always orders the same drink, is always composed and assured.

We also have broadly similar haircuts.

Ted Simon really annoys me

I'm a bit put out by the attitude of 'Jupiter's Travels' author Ted Simon, who's just repeated his 1973 trip around the world by motorbike and found it wanting.

Quote: "A beach in Thailand that Simon had had to himself for a week on his first trip was now a nightmare of concrete and tourists. Tiny villages in Asia and Africa had ballooned into shanty towns, their inhabitants as poor as ever."

In other words: all that matters to him is that the atmospheric little villages, redolent with smoke and animal dung, have transformed into characterless corrugated towns. The low socio-economic status of the Africans is of secondary concern when compared to the incredible disappointment of him not having a cultural experience.

Or try: "On my first trip I would ride into a small village in Sudan or the Middle East and they would feed me, fuss over me like I was a pop star. This time around no one bothered — they’ve seen too many blokes on motorbikes."

Translation: I'm really disappointed that nobody thinks I'm a celebrity any more.

Another: "I do regret that my son will never be able to dance with the Turkana [the Kenyan tribe] as I once did, or that China has lost its mystery, that it is possible to travel from one end of Africa to the other without seeing a wild animal that isn’t protected, and all the empty beaches I once loved are full."

Translation: It's a shame the rest of the world has changed in the last 33 years, because it's made it so much less fun for me.

Hey Ted, WAKE UP! Everywhere in the article, his plaintive voice is whining: I'm special, I'm the traveller, and the world exists for my personal sense of fulfilment. It's the same mistake made by 99% of travel writers: assuming that they're somehow more special than the people they visit.

Ted, you're just plain wrong. There's still PLENTY of mystery and wonder in the world. Could it be that by visiting all the same places you went to in 1973, you might have been... just a bit... narrow minded? If you wanted wonder, perhaps you should have taken a different route, done it in a different way?

I still hate travel writing.

Sawing wood

I like sawing wood.

I'm not really into dead cellulose as a building material; I like concrete, steel, glass in my buildings, soaring Modernism not twee'ly rustic Arts'n'Crafts. But none of them are as much fun to cut as a chunk of wood.

Sawing wood takes care and thought as well as rhythmic pumping back and forth. You've got to line up the cut, measure twice and make it precise. Then notch each corner with a few short strokes, and score across the whole length of the cut to a millimetre deep or so. Providing a guide for the saw, a little channel to sink your calories into.

Sawing wood with a large saw is like complexity theory: the tiniest variations in conditions at the beginning - your notches not quite square to a corner, your saw placed at a slight angle, your first few strokes not being quite straight - set the scene for a good or bad cut. You'll know, within the first cm or so of the cut, which result you're going to end up with. The line of the cut veering inexorably either side of the groove you scored; the painful-looking lacerations when you bend the saw (the opposite way of what seems logical) to get it back on track. But get it right, and the feeling approaches nirvana. A sheet of metal gliding backwards and forwards into a solid oblong of timber, slicing away a perfect 90 degree section of which Euclid himself would have been proud. Showing the wood respect.

Sawing wood keeps the Black Dog at bay.

Black Dog at bay

I have some plumbing!

Yes, the bathroom's done, sort of. No shower screen or extra hardware like a towel rail yet, but it's amazing how one small improvement - i.e. having a working toilet - can add knock-on positives to other aspects of life. Plus it's the first day it feels like summer. The Black Dog is back in its kennel, for now.

(I won't go into details of how I've coped without plumbing the last few weeks, but let's just say the editor of the Sunday Times wouldn't be too pleased at how I've been treating his publication. Hey, I spent a week on a tiny boat floating up the Nile last year; it's not as if I see plumbed-in porcelain as part of life's essential componentry.)

But as to life itself, that Cocktail Waitress song from the 80s keeps playing inside my head: everything has been so easy. If you're reasonably intelligent, creative, and personable - and lucky enough to be born a citizen of a first world economy - it's just a little to easy to coast through life 'doing ok'. I've been 'doing ok' much of my life, and it dulls the incentive to work harder, takes the edge off your ambition. Why work hard when life's so comfortable? It's the reason so many rich men started out as penniless immigrants: for them coasting isn't an option.

Having a reasonably agile mind can be a curse. I can't remember the last time I broke sweat on a business problem, or had to work 'hard' according to most people's definition. I write marketing campaigns and CRM programmes, which can look arcane on paper. But however complex a marketing strategy is, it's ultimately just a set of interconnected goals and tasks relating to various business propositions and audiences, and once you've broken it down into bits, writing stuff to deliver those goals can be laughably easy.

What this means is that life is boring me fucking shitless. And the other stuff - triathlon, cinema, my entertainingly disastrous love life - isn't changing things at all.

So I feel I have two choices:

a) Sell up, drop out, and wander this world for the rest of my days, preaching my personal philosophy... or

b) Do something completely out of character.

Out of character, for me, would involve going back to school... and the idea of doing an MBA came to me in a particularly dark moment last week. (Option 'a' isn't actually something anyone would be surprised to see me doing. Not sure I'd look good in the loincloth though.)

So I took a sample GMAT-style literacy test (GMAT is the qualifying exam for most MBA programmes) and aced it (38 out of 39). Which was no surprise given I've been a professional copywriter for a decade plus, but still a relief. A maths section was harder, but since I haven't solved quadratic equations for decades I don't think 70% was too bad for a first attempt. Especially since I didn't notice the rider 'Calculators are strongly recommended' until after I'd finished. (You can't use a calc on actual GMAT tests, which will put me at a strong advantage.)

So I've decided to book in for a formal GMAT and at least open up some options; it'll be amusing. And amusement is what I need right now.

Everything sucks

So I woke to another sunrise today. And precisely that much is right with the world.

2007 hasn't been a great year so far, and it's worse since I'd planned it to be a terrific one. (Had it in Outlook and everything. )Maybe I just wasn't cut out to live any kind of 'normal' life.

In the last few months, the world has turned a terrifying monochrome. Everything is 'flat', without colour or depth. I've tried amateur boxing, poetry slams, lectures, but nothing's doing it for me any more.

Anyone who's been to Burning Man knows the feeling: it's called 'burnt'. The way life seems to have the volume turned down after the Playa packs up and you leave the explosions of activity behind. But I haven't been to the Man in years. I did trek across Egypt last summer - and that, truthfully, is when I started feeling dissatisfied with life.

Churchill called it his Black Dog. The melancholy that hits when you're least able to deal with it, a monster within whose only goal is to drag you down. I've got mine. And it's rising.

I hate pandas

This report reminded me why I hate pandas.

I mean, why is an animal without the sense to eat anything more nutritionally valuable than bamboo shoots and won't even screw to save its species so uncritically loved by 99% of the world's humans? Pandas are ABSOLUTELY USELESS CREATURES.

Pandas are TOO FUSSY. Only a small number of bamboo species are acceptable dinner to them, and they change their minds all the time. No species with such food faddisms deserves to be exempted from Darwinism.

Pandas are STUPID. Just sitting around expecting the food to come to them? Pandas have a ridiculous sense of entitlement: if they were human, they'd be stars of CCTV and reality shows, and we'd be deriding them as lazy trailer trash. They're the chavs of the animal world.

Pandas DON'T REPRODUCE. You'd think that when breeding seasons are few and far between, they'd at least be able to make the effort for a night or two. But apparently romance is dead in panda country. Few pandas show any interest in sex, and it can't be just because they all look the same. Or are they just too selfish to bring fresh pandas into the world?

And lastly, saving useless pandas TAKES RESOURCES AWAY from creatures who'd be more grateful. Many termite species are in trouble, but - because termites don't look out at you from a fat furry face with big soulful black eyes, nobody cares about termites. And yet termites are AMAZING creatures. Just a few thousand neurons each, yet together they build architecture whose equivalent human scale would be buildings the size of Everest. Termites are incredible. And yet some species are in terminal decline. All because of those bastard pandas.

I hate pandas.

Farmer's Markets: they're treating us like bumpkins

Ha! Caught! I've often suspected that London's 'Farmers' Markets' aren't quite what they seem, and the truth's now out: it's accepted practice for stallholders to 'top up' their stocks with produce bought from the same industrial producers that supply supermarkets.

I enjoy wandering around the Borough market as much as anybody - which, to be fair, seems pretty legit: you don't see those beefsteak tomatoes or whole pigs in Tesco. But I'm aware that what you're buying here, apart from great food, is the experience. Meeting Farmer Giles, chatting about cuts of meat or the provenance of vegetables, saying hello to the dismembered boar's head on the way in. (The 'Bluffer's Guide' at the foot of the article is brilliant.) Is that experience worth.... double or triple the prices in supermarkets? Maybe. But I'll just stick to Farmer's Markets for the luxury stuff, and get the basics from the supermarket.

Farm bluffer’s guide

- Roll your vegetables around in the mud to give them an authentic farmers' market look and you mark up your prices accordingly. Islington folk also like to see a couple of bruises

- Tear off any labels saying Spanish or Grown in Argentina or 'gassed and stored for the best part of a year by Tesco'. Replace sticker giving the name of a quaint sounding farm or Locally Grown

- Never overestimate city folk. If you say the figs, avocados and pomegranates you are selling have been grown at your farm in Aberdeen they'll almost certainly believe you

- Learn the lingo: 'heifers' are female cows, not overweight people. Also give yourself and your (Polish) stallholders names like Tess and Gabriel — anything out of a Thomas Hardy novel works a treat

- Remember to arrive early at your local wholesale market to 'top up' your stall. As one farmer said last week: 'You've watched those vegetables grow up as if they were your own kids . . . so is [adding a few extra] breaking the rules or just bending them?'

- Ditch your normal weekend clothes and get wellies, a smock and a cap or scarf on your head. If someone starts asking too many questions, chew some straw

- Don’t worry too much about getting a real farmer to work on your stalls. Polish workers will do the trick, but it’s better if they speak a bit of English and look a bit rustic

- Get a CD of farmyard noises and make sure it plays in the background for added credibility. Most city folk will find the presence of cows on an arable farm reassuring, however unlikely

- Don’t get confused with the seasons: remember, you grew the vegetables during the summer and harvested them in the early autumn. Don’t slip up in the winter months by saying you need to slip out and pick a few more spuds when supplies on the trestle tables are low

- Drink a bottle of cider before opening for business so that your breath has 'authenticity'. Sprinkle your conversation with the word 'scrumpy'. It doesn’t matter that you live in Hull

- Have a rant about modern pesticides. Make it clear to customers that you only use the countryside’s natural fertilisers. You will win their undying loyalty

Everybody was Cock-fu fighting

Hmmmm. Apparently the game plan of the Revolutionary guards who snatched the British officers in the Iraq/Iran waters was to "kidnap a bunch of blond blue-eyed sailors and set our cocks upon them". I've always had my doubts about those Persians...

Now that's what I call mental arithmetic

The calculation involved 18 mathematicians for four years? That's almost as bad as a UK Self Assessment. But the result was worth it - the E₈ Lie Group is beautiful, especially when mapped out graphically.

E₈ is the greatest Lie of all: a 248-dimensional representation of the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object. The result is a matrix of over 200bn entries, each cell describing a representation of a symmetry group and in relation to its surroundings. (With all those dimensions, I'm a bit surprised that the matrix itself could be written on an Excel spreadsheet, even if the spreadsheet would be bigger than Manhattan. However, most of the values in that spreadsheet are themselves complicated polynomials, so that's all right then.

What's exciting for theories of everything like strings is that E₈ connects geometry to an important feature of the cosmos - symmetries. Strings are all about symmetries in high dimensions. What if reality is symmetrical, and a Lie Group describes it?

What if E₈ is the universe?

It's a beautiful thought: that the cosmos could one day be described in a great-looking poster.

Domestic campground diary

I enter Week 3 without a bathroom. And oddly I'm getting used to it.

The gym has become so familiar as my substitute bathroom that it's all I can do to remember not to Tube over in a robe. My body has self-adjusted to time toilet needs with scheduled visits to offices and shops. But the room is starting to take shape, with tiles appearing on the walls and the swirling dust of renovation starting to settle.

Lovin' the alien

I'm not one for deceitful bagfuls of chemicals sloshing around in the brain, but there are a few women (about 1 every 12 or so dates) who seem to set my neural pathways alight with something Shakespearean in its intensity. Oddly, there's one sign they share: all of them have a theme tune. It seems to play in my head whenever they're around, whether I'm aware of it or not.

It happened tonight.

TMBGITW - a woman who used to work (possibly still does) for an ex-client of mine, was walking through Waterloo Station, on the arm of a guy. (Not, I might add, a good-looking one. The guy, not the girl.) At least, I think it was her. I noticed her above me on the steps walking into Waterloo Station in the late-rushhour crowds. She isn't the type to walk hand-in-hand - I thought - but from behind it was the same gorgeously upholstered ass, same legs, same straw-blonde hair, same aquamarine scarf, same cracked red leather handbag. Somehow, it was definitely her.

Coincidentally, her theme tune's 'Waterloo Sunset'. And it started playing in my head before I even noticed her.

(Theme tunes in the past have included the 'Akira Requiem', Blue Man Group's 'Rods and Cones', and Velvet Revolver's 'Fall to Pieces'. I am not proud.)

I'm no believer in ESP or any of the other crankpot fuzzy-thinking concoctions desperate to be convinced there's something 'out there', but - there are senses beyond the five we know. And maybe we'll find out more about them some day.

Back on the Playa

I wondered why I keep dreaming about Burning Man, and I've just realised: it's the dust from my building work, layered in fine cloudy swirls that settle gently over furniture and floor, faintly sweet on the tongue, weirdly evocative of that festival in the Nevada desert. Life's a beach.