Tell me why I don’t like Tuesdays…

Previous reader’s of my blog will be well aware of my frustration at the alarming inconsistencies in our current calendar and how obviously flawed it is. I have on a number of occasions approached Greenwich with my model for a new calendar and time system and have always been met with rejection. Even if the rest of the world have yet to embrace my model however, I have now for a number of Humonths been living my life accordingly, although this has resulted in my lecture timetable being somewhat erratic – and the tardiness of my students quite unacceptable when I am there in the lecture theatre prompt at 3.17am and no one else is to begin their day.

What I would put forward here is an idea of the radical thinking I am proposing, with the hope that my faithful readership might at least start to follow. As it is some of you then may be surprised to learn that I have long stopped recognising Tuesday as an offical ’day’. The rational is straight forward enough, not least the preposterous idea that there should be an odd number of days in the week. In this respect Tuesday is obviously the most flawed day – and thus the most obvious to eliminate altogether.

I am often told that people don’t like Mondays. Well a week has to start somewhere so my feeling is just deal with it. At the same time a week should have a middle and Wednesday serves that purpose at best quite adequately (although I have always felt Sunday would do a better job). Thursdays are close enough to the weekend for you to start dismissing the week as over, and I regularly skip the Institute altogether on a Friday as my head is already in it’s ’weekend’ space by Thursday night and is of no use to anyone.

So as you can see, Tuesday just sits there, a little bit at the beginning of the week, and a little bit in the middle, prolonging the working week, when we’d all be happier that much closer to the weekend (starting on Thursday night). It is with this rational that I stopped  recognising Tuesday’s some time back – but which  now of course means my head starts to turn towards the weekend at a much earlier point – around Wednesday at 1738, and I switch off for the weekend. Which does bring to mind why I am here telling you this during the middle of my four-day weekend. I’m off to the local swimming baths, they turn the wave machines on in half an hour….

 

When it’s on your doorstep…

I have been based at the Human Institute in South West London now for a number of years. I maintain a modest homestead just up the road and generally commute back and forth by foot, or sometimes even feet.

What may surprise some, being that I work in the country’s capital, is it that outside of the modest borough of Wandsworth where I reside and make science, I have never ventured into the centre. I have never seen the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Nelson’s Column, the apple store or even met the Queen – all the things many people might take for granted of us London residents.

Now of course when I do take myself away for the twice annual Charles Human holiday expedition I often make the most of exploring new areas, often meeting with fellow scientists and trading amusing stories about Bunsen burners. So why should it be that I have all the alleged wonders of one of the largest and most exciting cities in the world, a mere stone’s throw away and I have never attempted to rectify this obvious deficiency in my cultural learning.

Well I could argue that you reading this have never visited the Human Institute, you probably don’t even know where it is, so I do have that one up on you.

I suppose the theory might go that when it’s on your doorstep, there is the feeling that you could go anytime, and so then by default never do. I’m not so certain that applies in this case however. As it stands I am currently running an experiment where I have inserted a small electronic chip in my wrist. The idea being that when I approach doors at the institute they will automatically open for me without the rather tiresome business of using door handles. The technology is fairly rudimentary at the moment, and so my movements to and from the institute are hampered some by the fact the small chip inserted in my wrist is powered by a 5K generator that I have to wheel around behind me. Don’t ask where the power cables enter my body.

Still if this prototype is a success (there are a few teething problems at the moment, and I have walked straight into a number of doors in anticipation that they will simply open up for me) I can though see this type of tech applied for more general use by the public. My hope is by this time next year for us all to have these chips inserted in our wrists and franchise the technology out to major retailers (supermarkets for instance) and opening and closing doors will become a thing of the past.

 

I twitter, therefore I am… (Professor Charles Human)

I’ve done it! I’ve joined the twentieth century and am officially a twitterer-er. If any of you want to “follow” me (and if you’re in any way curious about yourself, please do – just not physically, I am armed) then you will find me @professorhuman.

After some initial scepticism (I was led to believe it involved hanging around car parks, naked), I thought I’d give this new social phenomenon a go – especially after I got wind that Winston was thinking of becoming a user. He’s always trying to get ahead of me and will try anything to get the upper hand: even if it does involve visiting his nearest NCP in the buff. So I thought I’d beat him to it! (by joining up, not stripping off)

I’ll be honest, I’m still not entirely sure how twitter/tweets/twatting works – a student tried to explain it to me as being a cross between faxbook, S&M and face-texting. But I think they got the hint I was bored out of my cranium when I glazed over and reached for the Bourbon. They then massively simplified it for me as essentially being a great opportunity to self-publicise myself using bite-sized ‘factoids’. Once they had clarified this further, I couldn’t refuse the chance to spread my knowledge instantly with the masses and hastily signed up.

So stand back fellow tweets, here I come! Or rather, here I tweet! No, that sounds absurd – what I said first.

There is no ME in team!

What does it mean – team work? For many of us in our working lives we will have to form part of a ‘team’ with which to achieve the job set out before us. In some areas of industry and service we can more readily see this practice and the practical application it has. After all how can we achieve anything if we don’t all work together. This doesn’t necessarily mean however that the working team need be particularly harmonious. Sometimes great achievement and invention can come out of creative friction, when all parties have the interests of the end product best in mind.

There have been many successful partnerships over the years. I think to Crick and Watson, Cannon and Ball, and, well, the other ones.

I however, have always stood apart from the rest – I find there is very little that others can teach me, or indeed that I can’t figure out on my own – this is the reason that under the legal eyes of the law I ‘can’t drive’. But I have been happily getting around ever since as a thirteen year old boy I taught myself how in my first car, much as I still enjoying learning things in my 43^rd.

And it is no different in my own very singular devotion towards science. Of course in the laboratory I may well work with others, but I never look upon them as equals. If I had to give you an analogy, I shan’t.

What has really got my blood boiling this week is the accusations levelled that this very blog, might be the end product of some kind of collboration between two minds, rather than my own, again of which we dismiss as utter nonsense.

I’m still here…barely!

One of the pitfalls of having to regularly post a blog on the internet – is that if you find yourself without internet access, your laptop is about as useful as a social scientist.

I suppose in this day and age now of ever faster broadband connections, e-bay and twits it seems unimaginable for the young baby sat at a keyboard updating his or hers facebook status – that some fifteen years ago we didn’t even know what the internet was. It is often claimed that people always remember where they were when they heard the news that the US President John F Kennedy was assassinated or even indeed when man first set foot on the moon. Those flash card memory moments imprinted on your brain. Not too dissimilar I remember well as do others here, September 11^th 2001 – the first time the wonder of the world wide web was bought into the Human Institute and changed the way I worked forever.

It has been a companion, a confidant, and on occasion a lover – so I am sure you can imagine how distressing it is for someone in my position to feel so suddenly, brutally castrated as I have been these last couple of weeks, having recently moved addresses – where I have been forced to intermittently ‘share’ my internet privileges with that of the common man in cafe’s and tea rooms.

Even now as I write this whilst supping from my usual choice of triple espresso with a shot of syrup, I can feel the eyes of everyone on me. I cannot gauge whether this is more through my general dislike at finding myself mingling with the general public, or that I have chosen to walk down to the local coffee emporium with laptop to do my weekly blog in nothing more than my dressing gown. Still I see the police have arrived so I am sure this should sort out the matter at hand in no time at all…

Working Up North

Well as you may have surmised I haven’t returned to London just yet. Indeed after my Scottish bound Wedding last Wednesday (it was a disaster I might add – I was sat at the table for the reception with most of the older relatives of the bride, all of whom failed to comprehend any of my even simplistic conversational topics about basic quantum physics when applied to Newton’s theorem. I think the lady sitting next to me may have even been dead – certainly she didn’t protest when I helped myself to a second slice of pudding by taking hers). I digress – but it was only as I was boarding the train back to the nation’s capital, that suddenly my mobile phone was summoning me to none other than Newcastle Upon Tyne. Not my actual phone you understand but the person on the other end.

Up until this point I had never been to Newcastle, indeed I have managed for the larger part of my life to avoid ever going any further north than Luton. But a former star student was in need of help and who was I to turn down such an offer. I should mention that I am Charles Human – and so of course turned him down without hesitation. However I was told there was a free meal in it, and was duly pulling into the station before you could utter the charming Northern phrase ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’.

The student in question was embarking on an ambitious research programme to examine the social grouping and movements of the hordes of young revellers that regularly descend on this city’s centre of a weekend. As many of you are probably aware – and as I pointed out to him, I have always considered social science to not really count – and I can never truly take seriously someone who bills themself as a social scientist. We would often laugh and throw things at Social science students when I was but a young student myself.

Still upon observing the myriad of bodies and their sometimes attached faces that would pour out of the doors of pubs and nightclubs here, usually with next to nothing on, bar the lining of their stomaches now bought up for all to see, I was intrigued to see for myself how the various groups interacted. I wondered if I were to place myself amongst them, would these barely dressed barely adult creatures throw themselves at a rakish, handsome, but distinguished science professor who had failed to copulate at a recent wedding.

In the name of science I am off to find out. I may be some time…

Marriage

I’m on my way up to Scotland to attend a friend’s wedding. Ah, marriage. I remember it well. For many it’s the celebration of human unification, the joining of two souls to become a greater whole. For me it was the biggest mistake of my life.

That woman, who shall remain unnamed, made my life hell from the second I said ‘I do’. It truly was the most professional deception in history and one in which I was the sole victim.

Prior to the wedding, it was all “You’re the greatest Charlie, I’d do anything for you. You complete me!” Blah-blah-blah. Damn it, I really hate being called Charlie. Then without warning it was ‘Do this, do that, fix this, fix that, take me here, pick me up from there, wear this, stop wearing that, grow this, stop growing that, bend over, rub this, hold these, cough, stand up straight, stop slouching, run…faster, faster!” ENOUGH WOMAN!!

As you know from previous blogs, we have since parted company. We came to an arrangement whereby we communicate once a year over the telephone, but using morse code. I confess to becoming even bored by this infrequent exchange and one year I left an active heart monitor on the other end of the line, while she blabbed away about her new Greek lover (or possibly her mother’s illness, I’m not an expert in morse code unfortunately).

Aside from these depressingly negative comments, I would thoroughly recommend marriage and just because I utterly regret mine it doesn’t mean yours will also be a seemingly bottomless pit of misery. So if you find yourself in a ‘do I?’ quandary, then I say go for it. Apart from possibly your sanity, your social circle of friends, TV remote, independence, enthusiastic outlook on life and your credit rating, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Mac or PC?

Ever since the dawn of man – there will be some who prefer one method, over another. I know during my earliest sexual encounters as a burgeoning teenager, many of my partners preferred to go for the rather straightforward practice of the missionary position, whereas I was always more interested in exploring things from the rear.

Not so dissimilar, is the decision, when it comes to your choice of home computer. As a professor and teacher of science, and also a regular internet blogger, my laptop computer is an essential part of my daily life. With that in mind – as many of you I am sure aware – these type of things fall into two distinct camps. Mac & PC. That’s Apple Macintosh and Personal Computer for those not familiar with some of the more technological terminology I am using here.

For a number of years I have always been a fervent PC owner. My issue with the Mac has always been not unlike my distaste for sports cars. I own and drive a vintage red 2003 Suzuki Swift. It is small, compact, unfussy. It may be lacking in a basic aesthetic grace but I find it performs its given task in a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat functional manner, much like my ex-wife did in the bed. Sports cars are loud, needlessly flashy and prohibitively expensive, and that it a totally unreasonable prejudice I have carried over to my perception of Mac’s.

My loyalty of PC’s however has been tested this week – due to irritation at the constant barrage of windows updates that Bill Gates insists on sending to my computer at the most inconvenient of times. Having recently crossed over to the superiority of Windows Vista as a system, the continual updates I readily accepted came to breaking point only a number of days ago when I went to shut down my laptop and take it with me to the lab, only to have to wait for a number of ‘essential’ updates to download to my computer before I could unplug it.

Of course as a HUMAN – I am not about to let any mere machine be the better of me – no matter how technologically advanced. Although I might add as a SCIENTIST I am more than prepared to eventually make way for our inevitable A.I masters. The one advantage I had over my little laptop friend who now held my time to ransom, was I knew exactly where his button was. All I had to do was hold it for a few seconds and he was helpless not to shut down immediately. (I might add at this point had the computer likewise plied me with Malt Whiskey the effect tends to be much the same).

So I continued about my day – content in my small victory, and happy that whenever I had any kind of technical malfunction, the on/off button always appeared to prove a valuable life raft. This was however until I tried to turn my laptop back on again and the little blighter spat back as me various lines of code and something about needing to CHKDSK – and now there were a number of unreadable files. I was incensed – unable now to update my facebook status, the computer had seemingly won.

I am told by the ‘man in the shop’ that I shouldn’t have turned my computer ‘off’ before it had finished installing the updates – and had subsequently corrupted the hard drive. How could Vista have let me down like this? I would have fired off quite a stern e-mail to that moron Gates had I actually had a computer with which to do so. similar I was going to hand write a letter but now find there is a postal strike on.

So it is Gates gets to sit on his micro-chip throne, continuing to infect our computers with his so called ‘updates’ and we are all held to ransom, all because we chose a PC over a Mac. Well sir I am done. Short of a new improved Windows system appearing, you can call it Windows 7 if you like (best copyright that before someone else comes up with it) me and PC’s are through. I am to embrace the cool, sleek surfaces of the Mac – Alan Turing forgive me….

The Adventures of Grandmaster Human and the Wheels of Steel!

It may come as something of a surprise for you to learn that I am not always all about ‘the science’.

Now don’t get me wrong – I recognise just how important it is the work I do. Both in helping, not only further understand ourselves but also, that person standing over there. However I should put emphasis on just how important it is to be able to relax and enjoy some down time too.

 When I first started out on the path toward scientific greatness, I was all about the work. I worked every hour there was – and well also some there weren’t. And my hard graft has certainly been key in some part, to my success, and my being able to build the Human Institute. But for those first few years work saw me go without weekends, bank holidays, public holidays, ‘religious’ holidays. And only at the point of collapse, at the point of complete and utter physical exhaustion – and unfortunately also at the point when I was in charge of dosage quantities for a new test drug on live volunteers, that I realised that I was going to have to find a more even balance between work and rest. 

Indeed ever since ‘the accident’ I look back now with some sense of relief – that those people didn’t give up their lives in vain. Were it not for them I would not have the balance I enjoy so much now in my day to day routine.

So you’re probably asking how does a Scientist and Professor of my esteemed standing go about relaxing. Well the answer is…dance.

Yes….dance.

I may have the appearance of a bespectacled, rather bookish, though still virulently handsome laboratory type – but I am also something of a dynamite mover! This can be traced back in part to my childhood. Much like the celebrated child retard figure of Billy Elliott I harboured a desire to light up the stages of the world as a prima ballerina. My promising career was cut short early however by my father – a much more practical man who demanded I follow him into the familial tradition of science. (A strange request at the time being that neither family on either side of my parents had ever shown the slightest inclination for the sciences.) Indeed my father’s father was a celebrated theatrical actor and they rarely spoke to each other. If you tried to push my father on the subject he would claim that my grandfather taught at the European Academy of Science in Vienna and had invented gravity.

Of course now in my later years I recognise the folly of my youth – there is no question had I pursued a course into ballet I would, as my father warned, have become a homosexual. And it was only fitting that my childhood dreams be crushed at such a forever mentally scarring early age that I should eventually find my true calling.  

But now in recent years – and far from the ever present shadow of my father – I have discovered the joy once more in throwing yourself round like a loon to a percussive one two beat. After all – all work and no play makes Charles a very lonely boy…

Britain’s Got – The New Cambridge University Lucasian Professor of Mathematics – Factor!

So news has come to me this week, that my old colleague, and drinking partner the physicist Stephen Hawking has completed his last day as Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He has held the position since 1979.  Now as academically celebrated as this position is, it is to a much lesser known degree also something, of a chick magnet.

And didn’t Hawking know it.

Believe me, were it not for the university’s policy for holders of the title to retire at 67, he’d still be lording it up in front of us fellow scientists even now. Often would be the times he would phone me and leave messages about his latest conquest. I was always loathed to phone back, in part because you could never tell whether you got him or his damn voicemail.

Still every scientist’s time will come, as the search at the University begins anew for the next Lucasian Professor. Previous holders of the title, founded by MP Henry Lucas in 1663, include Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, Sir Joseph Larmor, Sir James Lighthill and on a temporary basis for two weeks in the summer of 1984 when Hawking fell ill, the University bent to popular demand and appointed the  somewhat unusual choice of pop singer George Michael, then, at the height of his fame with WHAM.

I understand the selection process has now gone under something of a shake up to reflect our more modern times. After all Hawking was  given the post some 30 years ago. With this in mind I have duely submitted my application this very morning. The review panel chosing the next Professor I am told will consist of four members of Cambridge’s scientific top brass and Mylene Klass.