10cc: I’m Not In Love

It was number one for two weeks in 1975, but it got mad airplay. Wikipedia has a nice story about how it came to be written and almost never released. I recall someone in the NME at the time describing it as “a portrait of total alienation”.

It was more than that. It said that even if we were in love, we couldn’t admit it, and even when we did, it would have to be ironic and downbeat, as keeping her picture upon the wall, because “it hides a nasty stain that’s lying there”. It said that love was something that you suffered and had to be hidden, and was best denied.


The song sold gazillions and won all sorts of awards. Because it hit a truth: that the world was changing and love was no longer a joy and the best reason for living, but a liability and an embarrassment.

Of course it could be spun as irony rather than alienation, but this was the 70’s. We weren’t ironic back then. We were alienated. And this was the song that changed the way an entire cohort of young people thought about love.

The Many Lives of the Multiverse

What is it about cosmology that turns clever people's brains to mush? Well, some of them they think that if they can't come up with a good idea, then the religious fundamentalists will claim that God is behind it all. And only a handful of people notice that believing in a Creator God does not mean that you have to buy the Old and New Testament, the Koran, beards, niqabs, circumcision, and every last condemnation of your local rabbi, priest, parson or mullah. That's just what Richard Dawkins and your local mullah want you to believe.

The alternative to a scientific theory isn't a few verses in the Bible, it's another scientific theory. And if there isn't one, then the scientific community needs to invent three. Unanimity is not a sign of truth, it's a sign that your scientists aren't imaginative enough, or that you need to get the dogmatists off the grants committee.

Another reason is that people get far too emotionally involved in their cosmological theories. They shudder at the infinity of space, or at the idea of the universe turning into a luke-warm sludge. And then they get horribly confused over some philosophical points. The result of this confusion, emotional involvement and the feeling that they are responsible for keeping the lunatic fundamentalists from the door, are mutliverses, Big Bangs and the Many-Worlds theory, surely the most lunatic piece of nonsense ever to be taken seriously by people much smarter than me.

We live on the planet Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe. Most modern theories of cosmology want to give The Universe a postcode as well: The Multiverse GH23 7FF. Except there's a lot of universes in a multiverse and the post-code would be a lot longer.

It seems it's important to us to know how the universe got started, or if it was always here and always will be. Nothing hangs on this: of all the things we could know, it's about the most useless. Large numbers of people don't even know who their father is, and they get on kinda okay.

Is there something outside "the universe"? No. Because otherwise it wouldn't be the universe. Was there something before it and will there be something after it? No. Because ditto. Might the bit of the universe that we see not be all of the universe? Undoubtedly. Could there be places elsewhere in the universe we can't see where robins have green breasts? Depends how important red breasts are to your definition of a robin. Could there be places in the universe where conservation laws don't arise as a symmetry through Noether's Theorem? Now, that's an interesting question. Is there an inaccessible part of the universe where energy isn't conserved? I'd go with a NO on that, but I'm open to argument. Maybe energy could just vanish, but not be created.

But General Relativity says the Big Bang, doesn't it? It's not compulsory. There are all sorts of solutions to the equations, but the equations can't tell us which solutions actually apply to this universe. Only the initial conditions can, and there's a lot of ambiguity in those.

But fine-tuning and the Anthropic Principle? Stop it. Just like God is not the answer to where the universe came from, nor are zillions of universes the answer to why we all got stuck in this one. Fine-tuning is how we know the laws of nature we're using are about right, and say that an interesting universe can only really be made one way.

Laplace spent a long time thinking he had to prove the Solar System was stable or there was something wrong with the whole edifice of Newtonian Dynamics. Well, now we know there's no reason it should be stable. Now people think they have to prove that the universe is always going to look something like it does now. But it won't. It will look exactly what it is going to look like.

Leverrier spent a long time trying to find Vulcan so he could get rid of Mercury's anomalous perihelion. A lot of people are now trying to find Dark Matter and Dark Energy so they can fix some galactic rotations. Does anyone else smell a generous helping of ad-hoc here? If Newtonian Dynamics needed a planet that wasn't there, or a fine adjustment to the inverse power, to be right, then it was wrong. And if General Relativity plus cosmological constants and simplifying-assumptions-so-we-can-calculate-anything-in-the-first-place needs dark energy and dark matter, well, then, it's wrong. And if we can only understand Quantum Field Theory via a Many-Worlds theory, then we just don't understand Quantum Field Theory either.

Until we do, and until someone comes up with a better General Relativity, I guess we're still going to get more whacky cosmology that in a couple of hundred years' time will read like Aristotle does now.

October 2015 Review

I’m an alcoholic. I’m glad I’m sober. I really don’t want to have the hangovers and bad decisions and behaviour anymore. I’m also an ACoA / co-dependent and I do not attract healthy women and I am attracted by dysfunctional women. In the past, when I was good-looking, we would at least have some sex before the dysfunction pushed us apart. Also I didn’t know about all that stuff, so I didn't know I was getting involved with messed-up women. Now I do know how to identify that stuff, and we don’t get to the sex because I look for the warning signs instead of concentrating on getting her into bed. I’m conflicted here. I am really glad I’m not involved with the post-Wall, Alpha Widow, dysfunctional, emotionally-unavailable women who are, if I’m honest, pretty much all that’s available to me now. But I miss the adventure around the sex. Every now and then, that hits me. I get sad and sour. Every now and then, the sheer lack of physically and emotionally attractive women in this town leaves me feeling close to hopeless. And then it passes and I get back into a groove.

That’s what October has been about. Possibly because it's the month of my AA birthday. I have 22 years sobriety. Shit. But then one reason I have is that I count my sobriety as starting every day I wake up. Sobriety has no memory.

I read Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of my Life; Jeremy Gray's Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics; finished George Cole's The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis 1980 - 1991; looked through a hefty chunk of Gelman et al's Bayesian Data Analysis; Mark Kurlansky's City Beasts; Robert Greene's Concise 48 Laws of Power; and Adam Warren's Empowered vol 2.

On DVD I watched the whole Arne Dahl series, and the whole of the Unit One series. At the cinema I saw Red Army at the Renior; The Lobster and Macbeth at the Curzon Soho; and Sicario at the local Cineworld.

I went to the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the RA, followed by supper a conveyer-belt sushi bar in Soho. Talking of food, Sis and I had supper at Tay Do on the Kingsland Road, and I discovered Mas Q Menos in Soho, which is now my go-to place to have a two-course supper if I have time to spare.

The highlight of the month was a wedding (!) in central London between an ex-colleague and her entrepreneur boyfriend. This required wearing a tuxedo, which I haven't done in decades. I left when the dancing started: it was 10:15 and I had to get back to the car at Kew Gardens station.

The Anthropic Principles as Categoricity Proofs

The Standard Model of particle physics has a number of physical constants which need to be determined by measurement and don't seem to predicted by any more fundamental theories. These are: the charge of an electron, the ratio of electron mass to proton mass (the 137 figure), the gravitational constant, the cosmological constant and a couple of others.

One of the many things that puzzles philosophically-inclined scientists is that there's not a lot of wiggle room for these constants. If the charge on the electron (and hence proton) is a lot higher, then electrons will bind so tightly to the nucleus that chemical reations won't happen. If the cosmological constant isn't 1.0 to a lot of decimal places, the universe would have a) expanded to quickly, or b) failed to expand at all. And so on. The puzzle is: how is it that this universe got created, with the fundamental constants at just the right values to create Nobel prize-winners, and not some other values that created a boring universe?

Something like this happens in mathematics. If you want an algebraically-complete (so that all polynomials of degree n have n roots) set of numbers which is also order-complete (so that every convergent sequence of numbers has a limit) that forms a field, then you can have the complex numbers. Or.... you can have the complex numbers. And if you want something different... you can't. Those requirements can be satisified only by the complex numbers and there's even a proof of it. Strictly, all models of those requirements are isomorphic. The theory is categorical - in second-order logic.

Mathematicians are not puzzled by this. In fact, they are rather pleased by it. The reason they aren't puzzled by it is because they have a proof of the uniqueness of the complex numbers. In all universes, and all civilisations, all algebraically-closed, complete number fields are isomorphic to the complex numbers. Why? Becuase proof.

To me, the lack of wiggle-room for the fundamental constants feels very similar. It says something like this: if we build a universe where the stable particles are electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, protons and photons (an e2n2p universe) then unless the fundamental constants are very close to the values in this universe, you get a boring universe. Why? Because proof.

The puzzle isn't about the values of the fundamental constants. It's why this universe is an e2n2p universe, and if there might be other ways of building molecules that don't use atoms made up of electrons, protons, neutrons, neutrinos and photons. What needs to be proved is: all universes must be e2n2p-universes or be boring.

You're going to remind me that there are quarks which make up neutrons and protons. Also other short-life hadrons, and muons, which also have short lives. For my purposes that doesn't matter. How the stable particles in a universe are constructed, or perhaps we should say, how the stable particles in a universe break down under high-energy collisions, isn't relevant. What's relevant is that the stable particles are what they are.

The Anthropic Principles are really a statement that a certain kind of theory is in a (possibly metaphorical) sense categorical. So what's really interesting is: can we build another universe out of stable particles that aren't isomorphic to the ones in this universe? And if we can, how much wiggle room is there for the values of the relevant fundamental constants? My guess is that, even if we can find an non-isomorphic set of fundamental particles, there won't be much wiggle-room.

(An "isomorphic set of particles"? Either treat it as a metaphor, or remember that fundamental particles correspond to generators of groups. So it would be the groups that were isomorphic.)

Commitment Isn’t A Gate You Can Keep

There’s a Sphere phrase that everyone repeats: women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Everyone nods wisely. Except it’s not true.

Once the sex you’re having with her is done, she gets to decide if there’s going to be a next time. And she gets to stop you half-way through. She’s a doorman at a nightclub: just because you get in Wednesday night, doesn’t mean you’ll make it in Saturday night. That’s what being a gatekeeper means.

But once you’ve committed, you don’t get to throw her out if she misbehaves. She gets to throw you out if you misbehave. There’s no re-considering, there’s no natural break that gives you the chance to say NO to further commitment. Commitment isn’t a gate: it’s a leap over the cliff.

What men keep the gates of is attention, excitement, arousal and status.

In the past there was an option b): provisioning, attention, care and support. However, women can get jobs, and they get paid more than a man does for the same job. If they can’t get jobs, they can get welfare. If they lose their job, they can find another one faster than a man can. Men stopped being the gatekeepers of provisioning a long, long time ago.

(Small edit 28/1/2023)

Learning from Fitbit Food Tracking

I’ve had a couple of chats about fitness trackers and the real benefits of a Fitbit. Tracking what I eat is one of them, even if it feels a little obsessive at the start. Taking photos of bar codes to get the nutritional information turns out to be slightly cool.

The trick for the first couple of months is not to use the calorie counter to control what you eat, but to be honest in recording it and hence understand what you’re eating and how you feel when you do.

I got a cold and saw exactly what I’ve always suspected. My calorie intake goes up, I eat more biscuits and chocolate and my exercise goes down. Colds make me put on weight, or at least stop me losing it. It lasted a fortnight, and I can see it in the colour of the calorie counter target icons: green and red instead of yellow and green (yellow means I’ve eaten even less than my 500 calorie deficit).

Understanding must, of course, lead to action. So in the morning a single Penguin (106 calories) has replaced the cellophane pack of Belvita biscuits (220 calories), and a home-made sandwich (220 calories or so) has replaced something from Pret (400 calories or more). The ingredients (bread, ham) of the sandwiches costs as much as one Pret sandwich. So there’s a financial saving here as well.

I’m trying to find lighter lunches. I find an Itsu sushi plus a Miso soup, at around 400 calories, is a little light and slightly bland, whereas a Square Pie is tasty but has silly calories – because pie means pastry and pasty means calories: 620 for the steak and kidney. There’s a Crepe Affaire in Spitalfields Market which does a few reasonable savoury crepes. I suspect that if I didn’t eat the bread on a salt beef at the Lower Eastside Deli in Shoreditch that would take lunch back to around 400 calories. (It is at least solid meat, so more filling than the Itsu.)

The afternoons between 3 and 4 are my bugbear. I need something. My senses are bored, and I’m slumping. (If I go straight home, I fall asleep on the train.) I've been having a yoghurt and maybe tea or coffee and a Kit-Kat. A mess: useless caloires. Fruit doesn’t do it. Maybe the mistake I’m making is thinking that food will pick me up, and it won’t. Perhaps I need to schedule some routine stuff for that hour that I can bash out to pass the time.

I’m right now trying a couple of pieces of dark chocolate. Maybe I need something sweet at lunchtime instead of all that dreary protein and carbohydrate. Ice cream, for instance. That is well-known to be medicinal. Perhaps I have a starter and dessert at Canteen, instead of fish-and-chips. It’s worth a try.

Losing weight, I’ve had problems with constipation, which is what happens when you don’t eat enough fibre. Also, I think porridge on a regular basis doesn’t help this either, as it is soluble fibre and doesn’t help with bulk. So my evening meal is a full-of-fibre root-vegetable stew with added Polish sausage and some grated cheese. It gets cooked in bulk, and four servings get put in plastic containers and stored in the fridge.

We singles tend to eat the same meal at least twice in succession, and sometimes four times. It’s all very virtuous, except the Penguins, and I suspect I need to add some variety to it, probably from a restaurant at least once a week.

What to do with a £35m Rembrandt

The Trustees of Penrhyn Castle recently sold a Rembrandt portrait for £35m to a foreign buyer. The export license has been temporarily withheld to allow a UK institution to raise the money. More details can be found at Bendor Grosvenor’s excellent site.

If a bunch of private and wealthy individuals want to stump up £35m for the painting, by all means let them. If a bunch of charities want to, they must consider if there aren’t better uses of the money. Unless their aims are pretty much limited to “financing old estates by the purchases of assets from those estates” the chances are that there will be better uses of the money. “Better” here meaning “more closely aligned with the purposes of the charity”.

The real question is: under what circumstances can the tax-payer be rightly asked to stump up enough money to build several hundred homes for nurses and teachers, just so a canvas can go on hanging in a castle hundreds of miles from anywhere? “Sentiment” is not an acceptable answer. “Because otherwise the taxpayer would be stumping up for regional subsidies that they don’t have to now because tourism generated by the canvas” is an acceptable answer.

Art has two sources of economic value: its price to a buyer; and the NPV of the cash flows it generates as an exhibit. When art can’t be sold – as for example the Rothkos at the Tate Modern – its economic value is in its drawing power and the ability of the museum to extract money from visitors. (So those Rothkos at the Tate really aren’t worth the $200m or so that his auction prices would suggest.) If a buyer is willing to pay way more than the exhibit value, the seller is getting a good deal. I don’t know how much money Penrhyn makes, but it can’t be enough if they’re thinking about selling a Rembrandt.

The Rembrandt is worth £35m to the mystery buyer, because the buyer gets to enjoy it and whatever other benefits it brings. It is quite likely that ownership of a painting like that could lead to deals that would easily yield more than £35m. It is quite unlikely that anything like that much would gained if the painting remains in a castle in deepest Wales. It is not worth £35m to the taxpayer. Or to any kind of consortium.

But it is worth £35m of other people’s money to the Trustees of Penryhn. (Or £22.5m after tax, according to Grosvenor.) In fact, it’s worth any amount of other people’s money. Anything is. What the Trustees are really after is having their cake, the Rembrandt on the wall, and eating it, £22.5m in the bank to pay for the roof.

Nope. If they want the money, they can let the Rembrandt go to where it can do some good: the National Gallery, or the NPG. Or they could start renting it out for exhibitions and charge a decent rate for it.

But but but.... isn't the value of Art above mere grubby money? Shouldn't we keep it because Heritage and The Nation?

Art is not an essential part of our national identity, like, say, secure borders and a requirement that all dealings with British government organisations (social security, for instance) are done in English. (But I digress.) Art is, for all the attendance figures at museums and the queues of young foreign students at the Tate Modern, a minority occupation that takes a fair amount of reading, looking and changes of mind to appreciate. Also money. Art books aren’t as expensive as statistics text-books, but they aren’t cheap either. Art is not a spiritual substitute for religion, though we may get spiritual feelings from the contemplation of certain works. Neither is the mere looking at art a form of self-improvement: that comes with the discipline of learning and appreciating more. If you think that simply looking at art is improving, just examine the faces of all those young foreign students being dragged round the Tate Modern.

That's not the argument to keep the Rembrandt in the UK.  The argument is that it is more valuable at Penrhyn than it is in some mansion in Dubai or Peking. Because the setting adds, or subtracts, to the experience of seeing the painting. Old Masters make more sense in old castles than they do in new starchitect buildings.

So how about this, which I think Dr Grosvenor suggests as if it would never happen. How about we sell the Rembrandt, but it has to stay in Penrhyn? The owners can let it travel and keep the income, and they can pay the insurance as well. They get a bunch of private viewing days at the castle. And of course, they can sell it on. Under the same conditions.