My LOVE for Cartoons

I LOVE cartoons. Presumably like most children my first entrancing TV moment is during cartoons. I can honestly say that some of my most formative heroes have been of the animated kind (hand drawn back then of course!) Even today I hold up Bugs Bunny as probably my favourite cartoon character and still one of my heroes. I LOVED the way that, not only did he always win (as far as I remember) but he did so by using his brains to achieve his aims. Probably my second favourite – from the pre-CGI Age – is the ‘underdog’ Mutley from The Whacky Races. Again under appreciated, scorned, but very smart and who won (or at least go his own back) by using devious methods. Some of my other favourite are The Scooby Gang (before Srappy or the risible movies) when they solved problems and uncovered fraudulent Supernatural events using reason and logic, then there’s Dangermouse (the great detective) and finally the totally bizarre but wonderful Magic Roundabout (HATE the movie BTW). But there days it’s essentially seventh heaven to all cartoon lovers. We live in the age of CGI and, more importantly, Pixar. Hardly a month goes by where I don’t watch one of my favourite CGI movies. But here are my favourites from recent years (in no particular order).

Inside Out
Monsters, Inc
Shrek (and Shrek 2)
Toy Story (and Toy Story 2)
Wall-E
Up
Megamind
Wreck-It Ralf
Despicable Me (and Despicable Me 2)
The Incredibles (and Incredibles 2)
Ice Age
Bolt
Minions
Over The Hedge
Home
Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within
Sing

They make me laugh, make me cry make me look on in wonder and make me think…. Can’t beat it.   

Cartoon Time.

Google's DeepMind goes undercover to battle gamers

From The BBC

11 July 2019

Gamers in Europe are being invited to take on a bot developed by some of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers. But there's a twist: players will not be told when they have been pitted against it. The tests are being carried out by DeepMind, the London-based AI company that previously created a program that defeated the world's top Go players. In this case, the challenge involves the sci-fi video game Starcraft II. It is seen as being a more complex task, since players can only get a partial overview of what their opponent is doing, unlike the Chinese board game Go where all the pieces are on show. In addition, both Starcraft players move their armies about simultaneously rather than by taking turns. DeepMind - which is owned by Google's parent Alphabet - has said its bot AlphaStar is playing anonymously so as to get as close to a normal match situation as possible. The concern is that if people knew for sure that they were playing against a computer, they might play differently. But gamers will only face the algorithm-controlled system if they have first opted in to be part of the experiment.

There is a risk that if they lose, then their Match Making Rating (MMR) score will suffer, reducing their ranking against other players and affecting their likelihood of being promoted to higher leagues. One of the UK's leading players said there was a lot of interest among the Starcraft community as to how AlphaStar would perform. "It's a game of hidden information and making decisions with very limited knowledge," explained Raza Sekha, from Kent. "People are very curious to see whether DeepMind will innovate and come up with new strategic thoughts. That would be a really great achievement, but I don't think many people are expecting it to happen." AlphaStar's predecessors have, however, come up with creative strategies within the games of chess, Go and shogi, which have in turn influenced some of the top human players to change their own tactics.

This is not the first time AI researchers have sought to advance the field via video games. Last year, San Francisco-based OpenAI reported a breakthrough when it effectively created a "curious" agent to achieve high scores within Montezuma's Revenge. A range of machine learning experiments have also been carried out within Minecraft, thanks to Microsoft developing a special version of its block-building title. And DeepMind itself rose to prominence by developing agents that taught themselves how to play dozens of Atari games including Breakout and Space Invaders. More recently it created software that plays alongside human team-mates within Quake III Arena. These ready-made virtual environments provide a way to carry out a process called reinforcement learning. This involves agents discovering ways to perform better by themselves via a process of trial and error, receiving "rewards" for success rather than being told what to do. In some cases, agents teach themselves from scratch. But in AlphaStar's case, it was first trained to imitate human play by referencing past matches, before being unleashed against other versions of itself to further improve performance.

AlphaStar's progress has not been without controversy. Some players felt that it had an unfair advantage in earlier matches because it could look at a game's entire map at once, taking in more detail than a human could. "As a human, one of the hardest parts of the game is multitasking," explained Mr Sekha. "It's really hard to split your attention between two places. So, an AI has a crucial advantage when it can see everywhere at once, as that lets it attack and defend almost at the same time, whereas a human would have to choose whether it's best to do one or the other." To tackle this, the agent has been tweaked to use the game's map more like humans do. It now has to zoom in to a section to determine the action within, and can only move units to locations in view.

DeepMind has also reduced the number of actions AlphaStar can take per minute to address other criticism. But Mr Sekha said there were still unanswered questions. "If it can switch very quickly from one camera to another camera, much faster than a human could, that would still be a bit unfair," he said. "So it will be really interesting to see what steps they have taken to level the playing field, because last time the community felt it was a bit too much in favour of the artificial intelligence." DeepMind intends to share more details about the project as part of a scientific research paper, but has yet to determine when it will be published.

[I’ve long thought that there are players out there who HAD to be AI’s – they were just too damned good! It’s also well understood that online gaming is THE place to train AI’s. Not only is it an existing artificial environment with bounded rules where a machine intelligence can do well it’s also a ready-made laboratory to study many aspects of human behaviour. Inevitably I think AI’s will do very well in many if not all game formats. I for one certainly wouldn’t like a fully ramped up AI opponent. But, as most of my friends would agree, playing against the computer on single player is sometimes very easy as the AI continues to do stupid things are singularly fails to learn from its mistakes. But once learning kicks in the human player is very quickly outclassed and the game becomes unplayable. Good for training AI’s – just not particularly fun for human players.]

Just Finished Reading: Life 3.0 – Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark (FP: 2017)

It’s coming whether we want it or not, it’s just a matter of when. Although there’s a chance that such a thing might actually be impossible most experts in the field consider the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (equal to that of humans) consider it a certainty. Few, however, can agree on when or what it ultimately means for humanity – its creators. Few experts consider it likely that AGI will be arriving imminently – as in the next 5 years. It’s just possible but there would need to be a number of unexpected breakthroughs to make that happen. An equally small number hold that AGI is either impossible or that it’s hundreds of years away. The present consensus seems to be hovering around the date 2045-2050.

But when it does finally arrive what will it mean to us? Few if any see Terminators in our future although some do not rule out that a future AGI could see us as a threat and be determined to do something about us. One of the scariest aspects of hyper-intelligence is that we might even be aware that our AI has determined our fate in a microsecond. It might just as easily introduce an irreversible contraceptive into our drinking water or the atmosphere as send robot killers to hunt us down. We’d probably never know until it was far, far too late. Likewise the empowered AGI could see us as a minor inconvenience (as we often see ants or wasps) an eliminate us to make way for a host of ultra-efficient batteries (just not in The Matrix). But how do we avoid this fate? A good chunk of the book – one of the less speculative sections – discusses bringing into fruition Friendly AI which won’t kill us by accident or by design. It might end up keeping us a pets or as we keep endangered species off the endangered list by paternalistically looking out for us. The bargain, according to the author, might be worth it with the trade-off for being obsolete being a long life free from pain, disease or want – a bounded paradise for as long as we want it.

The author is primarily a mathematician and cosmologist and it shows. Whilst a very large portion of the book is theoretical a good chunk is very theoretical indeed. When the discussion moves to humanity in the next billion years and colonisation of other galaxies (without the benefit of Faster Than Light travel) you know things have moved far beyond the reasonable – especially considering humans have been around for much less than 500,000 years and we haven’t managed to start a colony on the Moon or Mars yet. But that kind of expansion into known and unknown space is based on the author’s expectation that, once AGI becomes a reality, pretty much everything becomes possible. He did seem more than a little entranced with the idea of The Singularity (AKA The Rapture of the Nerds) were technology becomes so advanced so fast that it simply cannot be speculated about on this side of the ‘event horizon’. But it’s easy to get carried away – with talk of computing power thousands or even millions of times more powerful that today. Just imagine what you could accomplish if the laptop you use every day has more computing capacity and simple raw power than every machine in existence today. At the push of a few buttons and the click of a mouse you could do….. anything. Now times THAT by a million and think what we could do.

There was much here that I agreed with. AI or AGI is coming within the next 100 years and probably much sooner than that. Once it exists it will not be contained for long. Once out it will…. Well, do what it wants. If we can ensure that its goals are either in line with ours or do not actively conflict with ours we could not only see a new Golden Age but a Golden Age that extends into the far, far future. If our goals do not align and especially if they conflict then we’re in trouble – BIG trouble. That in itself is a good portion of the book, the idea that we need to be addressing this issue now before the AI arrives without any guidance or any idea of what we need to teach it. Being ready for Life 3.0 will do immeasurable help in keeping humanity alive and assisting in the birth of a future worth having for countless generations to come. It’s a noble aim that should not and cannot be ignored. Mostly definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the future of computers, of humanity and the likely consequences of getting the technology wrong. Highly recommended.   

Cartoon Time.

Notice how some of those kids, sheltering from a WW2 air raid,.... are excited. 

Just Finished Reading: Hill of Bones by The Medieval Murderers [Karen Maitland, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Philip Gooden and Ian Morson] (FP: 2011)

It all started (as many things do in England) with King Arthur. Joined by warriors, as well as a few well intentioned boys, he made a stand on Badon Hill and beat back the Saxon horde to usher in a period of peace and prosperity before the deluge submerged Celtic Britain once and for all. As centuries passed and names changed Badon Hill became Solsbury Hill outside the ancient city of Bath but its fate continued to be soaked in the blood of the guilty and the innocent from the time of myths to the present. Treasure is stolen and lost again. Thieves flee in triumph only to choke on their own blood. Answers to the mysteries of the Cosmos are promised to those with the beauty to demand it… and then there are Mummies, there are always Mummies.

This was rather a strange one picked up (as they often are) on a whim. Now I’m a sucker for a bit of historical crime writing so this looked the charm. Authored not by one mystery writer but by five of them working in tandem to produce a series of (rather loosely) connected tales with a common geographical location this could have been quite something. Unfortunately (as is all too often the case with collections of short stories) the mini-novellas presented were of variable quality and the links between them proved tenuous indeed. There were most definitely moments of interest. Some of the characters were very well drawn and I never found myself skimming or skipped ahead (or even sighing) but the overall affect lacked….. Something. It just didn’t gel (at least with me) so I found myself drifting through the prose – moderately entertained if not wholly engaged until the reasonably laid out and moderately amusing epilogue. The team have produced at least six other collaborative works so they’re obviously selling books to a willing audience. But I for one will not be joining them. Reasonable but there’s much better out there no doubt. So, not exactly a shining example of the genre to start off my Historical Crime selection…. But there are nine more yet to come!     

Cartoon Time.

Lost Lewis Chessman piece bought for £5 sells for £735,000 at auction

From BBC Scotland

2 July 2019

A medieval chess piece kept in a drawer of an Edinburgh home has been sold at auction for £735,000. Its previous owners had no idea that the object was one of the long-lost Lewis Chessmen. The chessmen were found buried in a sand dune on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 but the whereabouts of five pieces have remained a mystery. The Edinburgh family's grandfather, an antiques dealer, had bought the chess piece for £5 in 1964. The new owner of the piece has not been named. Sotheby's said the price set a new record for a medieval chess piece at auction. The Edinburgh antiques dealer had no idea of the significance of the 8.8cm piece (3.5in), made from walrus ivory, which he passed down to his family. They have looked after it for 55 years without realising its importance, before taking it to Sotheby's auction house in London to be auctioned.

The Lewis Chessmen are among the biggest draws at the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Made in Scandinavia, possibly Norway, they are seen as an "important symbol of European civilisation". Sotheby's expert Alexander Kader, who examined the piece for the family, said his "jaw dropped" when he realised what they had in their possession. The newly-discovered piece is a warder, a man with helmet, shield and sword, which "has immense character and power". Following the sale, Mr Kader said: "This is one of the most exciting and personal rediscoveries to have been made during my career. It has been such a privilege to bring this piece of history to auction and it has been amazing having him on view at Sotheby's over the last week - he has been a huge hit. When you hold this characterful warder in your hand or see him in the room, he has real presence." Despite not knowing its significance, the late 12th/early 13th Century chess piece had been "treasured" by the family. The previous owner's late mother believed it "almost had magical qualities"

The Lewis Chessmen set includes seated kings and queens, bishops, knights and standing warders - the medieval version of rooks on a modern chess board - and pawns. Some 82 pieces are now in the British Museum and 11 pieces held by the National Museum of Scotland. As well as the chess pieces, the hoard includes 14 "tablemen" gaming pieces and a buckle. Since the hoard was uncovered in 1831, one knight and four warders have been missing from the four combined chess sets. The discovery of the hoard remains shrouded in mystery, with stories of it being dug up by cattle grazing on the dunes. It is thought it was buried shortly after the objects were made, possibly by a merchant to avoid taxes after being shipwrecked, and so remained underground for 500 years.

[What an amazing legacy to leave to your grandchildren and what an amazing purchase all of those years ago. I’m not sure what the 1964 equivalent of £5 is today but it’s quite a lot. I wonder what prompted the purchase. Although I can understand how attractive the piece is. I’d certainly have bought it if I’d seen it up for sale even without any foreknowledge of what it was and what it was worth. I do love stories like this!]

Beautiful....!

That's in the UK.... after 70 years of the National Health Service.

Just Finished Reading: Chasing Che – A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend by Patrick Symes (FP: 2000)

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact it was a good idea at the time but, only days into the long journey he was already beginning to regret it. Despite speaking flawless Spanish and knowing the South American continent fairly well things had already started to go wrong. He had expected his BMW motorbike to have arrived a few days after he did – by ship rather than plane – but the port had lost it if it had even arrived yet. Day after day he asked for his bike only to be told that they still couldn’t find it. Not exactly auspicious. But finally there is was and the journey could begin.

Of course much had changed in 40 years so a simple recreation of Ernesto Guevara’s famous trip – brought to the public’s knowledge by the publication of a pair of books and the subsequent Spanish language Oscar winning movie in 2004. For one thing many of the dirt roads Guevara and best friend Alberto Granado travelled on had been upgraded to more modern standards. Likewise the authors more modern BMW machine was far superior to the previous travellers 1940’s Norton. But the author tried his best and only deviated from the original route when he had compelling reasons to do so. Along the way he met people who said they knew Che before he was Che and others who had actually known him as the young idealistic doctor and before he became the political icon that launched a thousand T-shirts and a million dorm room posters. What was more surprising was the number of people the author met who had never heard of Che and had no idea why an American journalist would want to follow in his tyre tracks so much later. Of much more interest was just how FAST the BMW could go. Somewhat more understandable were the number of people who vilified the historic Che for his revolutionary endeavours and his legacy that had resulted in violent revolutionary movements across the region and the subsequent brutal repression by the authorities from Argentina to Brazil and beyond. One encounter in particular which stuck with me was when the author visited a prison containing captured ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas who ran political education classes in their cell blocks with almost complete impunity. Violent revolution in all its many guises is far from dead in that continent. In an almost mirror image I was also struck by the brutality measured out by the authorities who spent a great deal of time crushing any revolt with overwhelming force and brutality – all without generating the long hoped for political awakening of the masses that would usher in a new world order that many are still waiting for.

Despite being fascinated by the ‘real’ Che Guevara the author was not afraid to ask some serious questions regarding the man, the myth and the legacy such an iconic figure. Nor is he afraid of pointing fingers at the Left and Right for using Che to gain their own ends as well as those who sell Che to the masses in a capitalist friendly faux revolutionary way [full disclosure: I own a Che T-shirt. It’s red of course]. What made the book so readable – indeed often a delight to read – was the way the author wove his journey, Guevara’s journey and the history of that turbulent land into a single page turning narrative. I certainly know a lot more about South America than I did prior to reading this and am interested in knowing a lot more. Recommended – especially for independent travellers and motorbike enthusiasts. 

Cartoon Time.

Eternal Friendship........

You know its Foreign, Right?

Some years ago my friends and I really got into foreign films (complete with sub-titles) when our local multiplex started showing them regularly. It probably all started with the runaway success of Crouching Tiger way back in 2000. A friend of mine who was into such off the wall things – and who also enjoyed being ‘in’ – dragged me along to see it at a local arthouse cinema and I honestly haven’t looked back since. So, here’s some of my favourite foreign language sub-titled films of recent years:

The Motorcycle Diaries (Spanish)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Chinese)
House of the Flying Daggers (Chinese)
Army of Crime (French)
Akira (Japanese)
13 Assassins (Japanese)
Brotherhood of the Wolf (French)
Ghost in the Shell (Japanese)
Flame and Citron (Danish)
Troll Hunter (Norwegian)
The Spanish Musketeer (Spanish)
Nikita (French)
Amelie (French)
Seven Samurai (Japanese)
Fearless (Chinese)
Mesrine (Part 1 and 2) (French)
Hero (Chinese)
22 Bullets (French)
Let the Right One In (Swedish)
District 13 (French)
He Loves me, He Loves me Not (French)
The Apartment (French)

I’ve actually been a HUGE fan of French movies in particular for many years. I even think my Dad might have got me watching this sort of thing with his love for Jacques Tati and Francois Truffaut movies. My Dad was a lot deeper and more cultured than most people gave him credit for. So, if you’re feeling adventurous or in the mood for something different maybe try some of these out.

Cartoon Time.

Keeping hydrated.....

Why are Nike trainers washing up on beaches?

By Hamish Mackay for BBC News

19 June 2019

Over the past year, from Bermuda and the Bahamas to Ireland and Orkney, hundreds of pairs of unworn shoes have washed up on beaches. But how did they get there, and why are scientists so interested in where they are being found? In September 2018, on Flores Island, in the remote Atlantic archipelago of the Azores, Gui Ribeiro began noticing strange items washing ashore. At first they appeared in small numbers and could be dismissed as ordinary artefacts lost by individuals - mere flotsam among the churn of man-made waste that inhabits the world's oceans. Soon, though, it became clear these Azorean arrivals were part of a greater group. Trainers, flip-flops and a selection of other footwear were appearing with a regularity that singled them out from the other tidal deposits. They were the same brands, in the same styles, and, for some of the trainers at least, the same production dates were printed on a label sewn into the tongue of each shoe. Moreover, every item of footwear appeared to have been unworn. In the months that followed, Mr Ribeiro retrieved about 60 Nike trainers, along with a host of other brands. News of the findings began to spread.

Seven months later, and 1,400 miles (2,250km) away in Cornwall, UK, Tracey Williams started noticing a similar trend. "A friend in Ireland asked me if I had found any," says Ms Williams. "I went out the next day and found quite a few. Beach cleaners or beach-combers tend to network, so if a certain item is washing up, we quickly find out about it and we're then on the lookout." As well as the Azores and south-west England, specimens of this scattered footwear flotilla have so far been found on beaches in Bermuda, the Bahamas, France, Ireland, Orkney and the Channel Islands. The source of all these shoes is believed to be a single ship. "Through the research I have done," Mr Ribeiro says, "everything indicates they may have been from some of the 70 to 76 containers that fell overboard from the Maersk Shanghai.” In early spring last year, the Maersk Shanghai - a 324m (1,063ft) vessel capable of carrying more than 10,000 shipping containers - was travelling from Norfolk, Virginia, down the east coast of the US to Charleston, South Carolina. On the evening of 3 March - 17 miles from the Oregon Inlet, off the coast of North Carolina - it was caught in a storm. While battling high winds and rough seas, a stack of its cargo-laden containers toppled overboard.

At the time, the maritime trade press reported that aircraft crews sent to locate the missing containers had found nine of them floating, but that seven had later sunk. It is not possible to say with certainty all the recovered footwear originated from the Maersk Shanghai - the vessel's operator Zodiac Maritime did not respond to BBC questions on the matter. Nike also chose not to comment when contacted. However, two footwear brands, Triangle and Great Wolf Lodge, confirmed the examples of their products that had been retrieved did originate from the ship. And Mr Ribeiro is not the only beach cleaner to be convinced they came from the Maersk Shanghai. Liam McNamara, from County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, has found "well over 100" shoes - mostly Nike trainers - that in his opinion "most definitely" came from that vessel. "One company has admitted to losing stock from that shipment and another admitted losing stock at sea," he says. "They've been turning up all over the place."

So what impact can events like this have? "Whatever it is - if it is sinking to the bottom or washing up on beaches - it's going to have a detrimental impact to the marine wildlife," says Lauren Eyles, from the Marine Conservation Society. "The shoes will be breaking down to micro-plastics over years, which will have huge impacts on the amazing wildlife we have both in the UK and worldwide." Estimates vary, but it is thought about 10 million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans each year. Asked how big a role container spills play in that pollution, Ms Eyles says it is not fully understood. "I don't think there's enough data on it to draw proper conclusions," she explains.

The World Shipping Council estimates that of the 218 million containers transported annually, just over 1,000 go overboard. But one oceanographer, who worked with Nike helping to clear up a spill of its shoes in the early 1990s, believes the real number is likely to be higher. "It's a number the industry likes to dispute," says Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer. "I think it's in the thousands of containers annually. The question really is: what's in them?" It is at least possible in this case, Dr Ebbesmeyer says, to estimate the size of the spill. "A container can hold about 10,000 sneakers. So if you say 70 containers multiplied by 10,000, that gives you an upper limit [of 700,000 sneakers] that could be out there." Despite the environmental damage, scientists can salvage something from such incidents - a better understanding of our oceans and the currents that drive them. While many of the shoes from the Maersk Shanghai have been washing up on beaches, far more are likely to be doing laps of the North Atlantic Ocean, stuck in a network of powerful currents. When and where the shoes appear, Dr Ebbesmeyer says, can tell us how fast the currents are moving. "If they've gone about halfway around [from North Carolina to the UK] in just over a year, then it takes about three years to go once around the North Atlantic. So that's the typical orbital period of the sneakers, but that hasn't been studied by oceanographers much at all."

Even more enlightening, Dr Ebbesmeyer says, is how the shape of the shoes seems to dictate where they end up. "The left and the right sneakers float with different orientation to the wind," he explains. "So when the wind blows on them they will go to different places. So on some beaches you tend to get the left sneakers and on others you get the right." Despite the criticism of the commercial shipping industry, Dr Ebbesmeyer believes it has started to clean up its act. But he says more could be done. "It takes something like 30, 40, 50 years for the ocean to get rid of this stuff," he says. “I think companies that have spills think we will just forget about it - but it just keeps washing up. So how do we hold companies responsible? Right now there is no accountability." Part of the problem is that shipping companies only have to report lost containers if they could become a hazard for other vessels or if they include substances deemed "harmful to the marine environment", such as corrosive or toxic chemicals. While the Marine Conservation Society says products like trainers harm marine environments, they do not count as "harmful" for the purpose of reporting cargo lost at sea. The International Maritime Organization - the UN's shipping regulator - told the BBC it recognised "more needs to be done to identify and report lost containers" and it had "adopted an action plan to address marine plastic litter from ships".

[Fascinating stuff – especially about right foot and left foot trainers moving in different directions on the currents! Maritime pollution of all kinds, especially plastics, is a terrible thing. The worlds waters have been used as a dumping ground for far too long because it looked like there was little come-back. Well, that time is up I think!]

Last one.... honest..... [grin]

Quite warm here presently - but thankfully not as warm as France or Spain!

Summer days are for reading.....

Just Finished Reading: The Antidote – Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman (FP: 2012)

It’s relentless, really it is. The idea that we need to be positive – all the bloody time. That you can’t even speculate about what might go wrong in case thinking makes it so. Accentuate the positive and eliminate the word ‘impossible’ from your mental processes and everything you wish for will be yours – or at least the latest best-selling self-help book or motivational speaker will tell you. But if you fail at your dreams you have only one person to blame – that’s you, for being too negative, for having doubts, for not believing enough for the Universe to give you what you’ve always known you deserve. Of course, being human in a world of infinite desire means that failure to achieve at least some of your dreams (dream BIG remember!) is inevitable – not everyone can be President after all (although it’s apparently true – indeed proven – that actually anyone can run for President and succeed beyond their own dreams). Which naturally means when belief hits reality you’re going to be disappointed and probably miserable into the bargain. But what can be done? Fortunately two schools of thought are readily available to come to the rescue and, if not always providing clear answers at least provide a practical roadmap to help navigate an often unforgiving world: Stoicism and Buddhism.

The author maintains (and I agree) that we – in the West at least – try far too hard to be happy. Not only do we have an ever increasing pharmacy of drugs to wipe the blues away we are afraid to feel unhappy and positively terrified to tell people about how unhappy we are. Unhappiness equals in many people’s minds simple failure. With the world at our feet there is no excuse not to be up and running. But, the author maintains, it is this relentless and endless pursuit of happiness that is the cause of so much unhappiness and anxiety in the world. One way out of this trap is a Stoic method of imagining the Worse-Case Scenario of any action or project. Ask yourself as you venture out each day – What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Of course most days everything will be fine and you’ll soon realise that things could be much, much worse. Things are actually pretty OK to what they could be. As an added advantage when things DO go wrong you’ve been thinking about them so much that you’ll be mentally (and maybe practically) prepared for almost anything – which still won’t be as bad as they COULD have been!

It’s but a small step from thinking how bad things could be to realising that we cannot control the future and that we shouldn’t even try. Control of anything external to yourself is an illusion anyway. Just try to control the simplest thing in your life and you’ll realise it can’t be done. Once you learn this fact and accept that the only thing you can really control (mostly) is how you react to things that are beyond your control. You can’t control the weather – but you can make sure you check the forecast in the morning and then dress appropriately. Remember – there’s no such thing as bad weather just inappropriate clothing. So it is with many things in life including the artificial goals that we set for ourselves. Of course we spend a great deal of time and effort trying to make ourselves happy but such a thing might we be impossible if the ‘self’ does not really exist in the first place. It’s an idea that’s been around for quite a while – especially in Buddhist teachings - and the author has some very interesting things to say on the subject.

Then, of course, there is failure and the ultimate failure of all: death. Knowing that someday we’ll be dead is nothing to avoid maintains the author. Indeed the conscious denial of death not only cannot be maintained except with increasing levels of narcotic rejection but acceptance of our limited time here makes every moment and every experience that much more precious – not in the way of panic where life experiences are gobbled down like candy but savoured like a rare bottle of fine wine. In so many ways life is defined by its limits – by death. This is really nothing to be greatly afraid of. Dying might well indeed be a short and unpleasant experience but death itself cannot be experienced because you are dead and cannot, therefore, experience anything.

There’s not a huge amount in here that I haven’t come across before but the interesting mix of the Stoic and the Buddhist (both of which interest me intensely – especially the Stoics) gives plenty to think about as a rational and well thought out alternative to all of the daily crap we’re expected to believe, buy into and say thank you for. If you can’t stand the way we are ‘supposed’ to act or feel or respond but want something more than rejection without anything else to move towards then this is definitely the book for you. The blend of Stoicism and Buddhism might not answer all of your problems but it’s a damned good place to start out from. Recommended.(R)

Cartoon Time (click to enlarge).