You Wouldn't Bloody Read About It

Over time you get used to the cultural imperialism and arrogance of America. You get so used to history being re-written in World War II films that you no longer react when you see only American soldiers depicted in D-Day films. You merely sigh when a different film shows the American military capturing an Enigma machine instead of the British. After a while you even stop noticing that although our TV screens are awash with American product not one of our shows, not one, will ever appear on the mainstream channels in America. If they like one of our shows, they’ll remake it with an American cast, but you’ll never see the original. These are all old insults and like I said, we’ve all got used to it.

However annoying these things are, they’re all in the realm of fiction where artistic licence (and cultural arrogance) are pretty much expected. But when it comes to the reporting of history, you expect better. If you consult a book that purports to be an encyclopaedia and find breath-takingly inaccurate information, you’re allowed to get a little grumpy.

So here’s the thing. I’m working on a new introduction for the book I’m writing. I wanted to have a line about how the sky is no longer the limit and hasn’t been since the 1950s when Sputnik was launched. I thought I’d better check that Sputnik was actually launched in the 1950s and not the 60s. I could have Googled it, but the computer wasn’t on, the Microsoft start up takes so bloody long and besides, I can’t fricking stand that Google always seems to send me to bloody stupid, bloody annoying, bloody poxy Wikipedia first.  I find it simpler and easier to consult the reference section on my book shelf. Call me an insane old Ludditte but I trust books more than the Internet.

Sadly, the book I picked up let me down badly. So badly I even briefly considered throwing it in the bin. It’s a little one volume encyclopaedia put out by Columbia University Press and ok, it was published in 1983 but it’s still useful in terms of history and Sputnik should have been in it. The cover assured me that it was not just ‘..comprehensive and authoritative,’ but ‘was prepared under the guidance of  a distinguished panel of scholars.’ A distinguished panel of incredibly biased American scholars would have been more truthful. I’d known for some time that this particular encyclopaedia was really good for facts about America, but not so much for other countries and their histories. I’d encountered omissions before, but not outright fraud.

So I tried to look up Sputnik. No listing. Rude but not unusual I thought. It’s probably in the section a few pages back, under the heading of Space Exploration, I thought. But no, by a clever sleight of hand and the drawing up of biased categories, there was not a single mention of Sputnik in the entire section. The two categories listed were Manned Space Flight Programs and Space Probe Programs and because Sputnik was not technically a probe, they managed to ignore it completely, the rude bloody bastards! The first human made device to ever leave the Earth’s atmosphere, the first ever artificial satellite to orbit our globe and 26 years later the Americans who wrote this book couldn’t even bring themselves to mention it. I mean, I knew the Americans were touchy about losing the early stages of the Space Race, but to hold a grudge for almost 30 years, that’s just nuts. (In case you’re interested I did manage to find the launch date of the first Sputnik -1957- in another of my books, a dictionary. An English dictionary.  From England.)

The rudeness didn’t end there. By another sleight of hand in the listing of the various space programs, they managed to disguise the true Russian contribution to the exploration of space. By listing the programs alphabetically instead of chronologically they managed to give the top six entries to America instead of Russia. It starts with all the Apollo launches and you don’t get to anything Russian till half way through. It’s only when you carefully check the column headed Year of Launch that you realise that you’ve been conned. Especially when you notice that Yuri Gargarin and his first manned flight comes last on the list. Damn the Russians for using words like Vostok and Zond for their missions! If only they’d named them all Aardvark or Aasvogel (a South African vulture) they could have beaten the Americans linguistically as well as in the real world!

Wait. Strike that. The American authors would have figured out some other scheme instead to keep them at the top. Those thin-skinned, delusional, arrogant, petty-minded, bloody purveyors of American propaganda. I could go on, I know lots of other rude words, but I might end it here. Can’t be too rude about America these days. Not since Obama signed an Executive Order that allows the American military to grab anyone they want, from any country in the world and then take them back to America to stand trial for the crime of terrorism. Or being Un-American. They’re the same thing aren’t they? Either way, better zip my lip.

The Weirdness of Time

Ever since I was a kid I have been fascinated by the bendiness of time. It amazed me that two hours spent watching a film could flash by in seemingly no time at all but that two hours of church on Sunday could drag on and on and on…and on. Once I thought I could even see new grey hairs appearing on the head of the person sitting in front of me. Church time dragged that badly. Time going slowly wasn’t always a bad thing. In primary school it meant that the six weeks of summer school holidays seemed to last forever and when school started again my friends would have visibly grown or changed over that time. Seems odd to think about it now when six weeks can fly by and nothing seems to change at all. Actually it’s not just weeks that fly by as I get older, whole bloody years seem to evaporate before my eyes. Didn’t we just have Christmas like ten minutes ago?

My first real taste of how bendy and flexible time could be was in a psychology class at college called ‘Altered States of Consciousness’ and Len Kane, if you’re out there, you were one of the best damned teachers I ever had. The class took place in the evening and the first thing Len did was teach us a few basic relaxation and meditation techniques. So each class would start with everyone lying down for ten minutes practising those techniques. It was a fine way to start a class, even if some of us nodded off and started snoring. After we’d been doing this for a few weeks one night Len said, ‘Ok I’m going to play some music now. When it stops I want you to come back to full consciousness.’ Once we’d all sat up, Len asked us how long we thought the music had played. The guesses ranged between 6 minutes and 12 minutes. Len just smiled and said that it was only 90 seconds long. Which surprised us all, but proved that time can flow differently depending on what physical state you are in.

The next experience I had with bendy time was when I became a comedian. It didn’t happen often but occasionally I’d forget what I was going to say next or someone would heckle me and for a moment on stage I’d freeze. As my mind raced frantically to figure out what to say next, time would sort of telescope and start running at different speeds. In the outside world, probably less than 5 seconds would go by before I spoke again, but on the inside that 5 seconds would feel like minutes. I could have whole conversations in my head and re-run routines to figure out which bit I’d missed, all in the space of 5 seconds. It’s a very odd feeling.

So I have a bit of experience with the nature of time and how it can telescope in and out and run at different speeds, but I was still astonished by something that happened a few years ago. Thanks to the joys of telephone banking, I can now tell you precisely how many coherent thoughts I can have in the space of a second. For those of you who haven’t used telephone banking, when you ring up to get an account balance, an automated voice tells you much money you have in the account. The pre-recorded voice runs at normal speed until it comes to the actual dollar amount. That bit can’t be pre-recorded so it takes a bit longer to say the dollar amount as the computer pulls from its files the right sequence of words to match the numbers. As a result it sounds a bit like this: ‘You have…two…hundred…and…thirty…two…dollars in your account.’ The time gap between the numbers is less than a second. It’s noticeably slower than the rest of the message but not too annoying.

So here’s the background to my little adventure. I had about a hundred dollars in my account. I was waiting for two payments to come in. If just one had been deposited in my account it would have gone up to over five hundred dollars. If both the amounts had gone in, it would have been over a thousand dollars in my account. So when I rang to get my account balance I was really hoping to hear an amount in excess of one hundred dollars. When the computer voice started saying my account balance, the first number I heard was, ‘You have…one…’, and everything you are about to read happened before the next number was said. First came the absolutely-speed-of-light assumption that my account still had only one hundred odd dollars in it. Then came a whole bunch of quick thoughts; ‘What?! At least one of those cheques should have come in! That gig was four bloody weeks ago. We’re going to have to make another follow-up phone call. Damn it!’ And then the voice said the second number, ‘…thousand…’. Both the cheques had gone in. Happy days.

But when I got off the phone and thought about what had happened, I was quite stunned that by a computer quirk I know knew that I could have five coherent thoughts in less than a second. I find that mind boggling. All the thoughts differed in length but seemed to take exactly the same amount of time to unwrap in my brain. And there is simply no way that I could have physically said out loud those five thoughts within the space of a second. I reckon it would take at least 8 seconds to say them. I’d always known that thought was faster than speech, but I was staggered that according to my rough calculations, thought is eight times faster than speech. It explains how writers can pop outside for a cigarette and come back five minutes later with a whole book sketched out in their mind. Because five thoughts a second means that you can have 1500 thoughts in the space of five minutes. It sounds incredible, but I suspect that it’s true. Unless my brain is a complete freak of nature and thinks faster than anyone else on the planet, which even with my genetic Dutch arrogance I find very difficult to believe. I’m just not that special.

The other implication from this accidental experiment I find a little disturbing. Because by the end of my five thoughts in one second I had built up quite a bit of anger about what I thought were late payments. It only lasted till I heard the second digit, but it was definitely anger. The fact that I could generate genuine anger within the space of a second, I find very scary. It means that I can get angry before I can even say the words to explain why I’m angry. It makes me wonder how many times we get angry before we even know ourselves why we’re angry. It might even be possible that by the time we verbalise it we’re already rationalising and justifying something we didn’t consciously start. It’s enough to make you want to have a Bex and a good lie down. Or have a long chat with a neuroscientist. Or maybe just have a few too many beers and a quiet think. Hmmm, think I’ll go the beer option.

Clean Up on Aisle Five

There was a story about the Pacific gyre in the news recently, that island of floating rubbish that has greenies tearing their hair out in despair. In one of nature’s many quirks the different currents of the Pacific Ocean conspire to gather all the rubbish of the ocean in one spot, the gyre. A bit like how all the leaves in your pool get swept to the middle as the pool pump creates a vortex around the edge. The collected rubbish pile in the gyre, much of it plastic, is getting bigger and bigger and the plastic itself is breaking down into smaller pieces and affecting all marine life in the area. It’s a horrible, terrible mess and no one quite knows what to do with it. Volunteers have gone out and tried to tackle it, but a few small ships with nets can’t hope to make an impact on it. Larger, industrial ships will be needed but then you run into the problem of clearing the fish and dolphins that swim under the rubbish island out of the way. Can’t endanger your greenie credentials by killing fish and dolphins even if you’re clearing up a major problem…that affects fish and dolphins. So everyone is flapping their hands and saying how terrible it is, but nothing is happening.

Well stop your flapping and listen up, as I turn a sow’s ear into a beautiful purse. If we really want to clean this mess up, it will take a bit of money and some research but it’s totally do-able. If every Pacific nation kicks in some money we’ll build a small flotilla of big, rubbish-munching ships and factory ships that can recycle all that plastic back into feed stock for new plastic products. The money from selling the feedstock will help fund the flotilla. Then we get some marine biologists to research what sounds, blasted underwater will scare fish and dolphins away. Not loud enough that it will damage their little fishy brains, but enough to make them crap themselves and move away. I’m thinking the hunting calls of killer whales might do the trick. Any fish too dumb to flee from the sound, or any dolphin insanely feisty enough to want to tackle a killer whale will just have to take their chances with the big ships. Think of it as culling outrageous stupidity from the fish and dolphin gene pool.

Once we’ve cleaned up the current mountain of rubbish, take a minute to think how mind-bogglingly useful that ocean gyre truly is. If it didn’t exist, if it wasn’t there to gather all this crap in one relatively small spot, if all that rubbish had remained evenly spread throughout the whole ocean, it may have taken decades to realise just how much garbage is out there. Years down the track a marine biologist may have noted the increasing amount of tiny plastic pellets found in the bellies of dead fish and then it might have taken even more decades to figure out what was actually happening. As it is, the ocean has virtually picked up a microphone and announced to the world, ‘Clean up on aisle five please, clean up on aisle five, STAT!’ (just to mix up my metaphors even more charmingly). It truly is astonishing.

I should point out here that there is more than one ocean gyre. There are actually two in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic and one in the Indian Ocean (the poor third world ocean always gets less than the big fancy oceans). I don’t know if they all collect rubbish in the same way as the infamous Pacific one and we just don’t hear about it, but I’ll take a punt that the same physics is at work and that they too collect rubbish at their centres. So once our flotilla is up and running and has cleaned up the Pacific gyre, then we can send it on to the other gyres. It means that we have a marvellously effective way of cleaning all the world’s oceans and keeping them clean by patrolling the gyres on an ongoing basis. One flotilla, rotating through five specific spots on the planet will be able to do that. So look past the horrible, nasty floating island of rubbish we’re hearing about now, and marvel that the ocean currents have naturally evolved a system of garbage collection so efficient that any pointy-headed engineer would be jealous. Let’s use it quick, and then we can cross another item off the environmental ‘to do’ list.