Dawn has epilepsy which means that 20-40 times each day she misses a few seconds of what is going on – yet nobody notices.  She finds it disturbing especially when compared to the experiences she has had with her grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s. The thing that struck me was the phrase “I worry constantly about how much we remember.” This made me think of the suffering that even the thought that one might not remember something can create.

My mother had a ‘perfect’ memory right up until the end of her life. I take this as a great blessing because for much of my life I had someone who was certain they could remember almost everything whilst my memory was incredibly fickle and would constantly play tricks on me. The blessing was bestowed when, at some forgotten point in time, I realised that both of us had very similar powers of memory. Mum was just more confident in asserting that she was right. She would declare something to have happened and, because there was often no way of knowing otherwise, it may as well have been that way – someone had moved the car keys and if she was alone in the house she quickly dismissed the incident.

What this part of my relationship with my mother taught me was that your attitude to your memory is more important than what you remember. As I got into bed after another long day and yielded to the wonderful sensation of pillow, sheets and duvet it occurred to me that I have got into this same bed over 6,000 times. How many of those can I recall? I could say none or all. They merge into a feeling of getting into my own bed. Does it bother me that I can’t remember probably 5,900+ times I have done something significant to my life – no. Yet some memories do bother me. What year did my father die? What is the anniversary of my mother’s death? What was my grandfather’s name? How callous that I get them wrong when they are so fundamental to my life – to my identity.

This is the crux of it – identity. To forget ourselves is synonymous with death.

I believe most people work on the basis that they are their personal histories. When we find contradictions between memory and our present reality we are literally wounded and we feel pain. Fortunately we fudge over inconsistencies to avoid the pain. Dawn’s missing moments are an example of this happening within a clinical condition but it is common for all of us.

I just read a wonderful book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman where the author summarises our internal mental processes in terms of two systems. System 1 is unconscious, fast and simply serves up options to System 2 which is our reasoning mind. The cocktail party effect, where you pick out your name being mentioned across a crowded room, is an example of how System 1 monitors everything and only tells you (System 2) about what is relevant. (There is much more to this and I recommend the book.) Memory is a System 1 process. You think “Where are the car keys” and you just know. The “just know” is System 1 going off and fetching that information for you.

System 1 maintains this flow of ideas and thoughts to your conscious mind to maintain the sense of a coherent self and it will create ‘false’ memories and make up excuses if necessary. It basically tells you what you what is needed to support the view of yourself you have.

In Buddhism there is the notion of the Seed Consciousness (ālayavijñāna) which is very similar. Stimuli (which may include our own thoughts as well as external prods) trigger seeds in our subconscious store house to germinate and bear fruit in our conscious mind. The contents of the store govern how we see the world. The task of meditative practice is to purify the store house so that it contains more flower seeds than weed seeds. Everything starts coming up roses!

Now for the scary stuff. You don’t remember most stuff – like the umpteen thousand times you have cleaned your teeth – and your System 1 will seamlessly imagine things to fill the cracks should you need to remember something that is no longer available or perhaps never happened – just like with my mother. The danger is that consider yourself a forgetful person and System 1 starts pointing out all the cracks just to prove you right – like it did with me.

Now for the cool stuff. Because your attitude governs how you remember and what you remember governs how you interpret the world by changing your attitude now you can actually change everything: past, present and future. It sounds crazy but think it through. If you work to change how  you habitually react in the present moment then you change the past. Not physically. You won’t suddenly find that you won the lottery five years ago but you will remember more positive things and see the positive side of things you had thought negative.

One of the experiments that Daniel Kahneman mentions in his book really strikes me. They got people to fill in a questionnaire that assessed two things: their current mental state and an assessment of their lives so far. The trick came in that they asked each participant to photocopy a sheet of paper before filling in the questionnaire. For half the people there was a small value coin left on the photocopier and for the other half their wasn’t. Not surprisingly the half that found the coin were recorded as being in a better mood but they also gave a better assessment of their past lives. Placing a coin on a photocopier had changed how these people felt about their past. I would say it had actually changed their pasts because so much of the emotional content of the past can only exist in memory.

See the chosen photo on blipfoto.com

Eric was my father’s older brother. Here is a picture of them together. It must have been taken about seven or eight years before Eric’s death. He was killed in operation Goodwood to the East of Caen in Normandy in 1944. He was in a tank. He was 20 years old. I took a picture of his grave and of the graveyard in Normandy.

I have no recollection of my father ever mentioning Eric which says a great deal. My mother would talk about him. She didn’t know him personally but said that his death had devastated my father’s family.

My overriding thought on visiting his grave was that this is the only grave in the family. My grandparents and parents are all dead, cremated and gone with no monuments. They all lived vastly longer lives than Eric. It was an odd thought. In some way this one short life and lump of stone was anchoring all these other people.

I have tried to talk about this in the intervening six months but on several occasions received a somewhat disparaging “Oh that is very popular at the moment” kind of response. I believe that they are right. There is a great deal of interest in remembrance of the war dead at the moment. Perhaps this is the product of the long running conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – a Royal Wootton Basset effect. Maybe people are feeling that we are losing touch with the great European wars of the 20th century as that generation passes on. It may be just that the countless war documentaries produced to fill the endless hours of multichannel television have finally sunken home.

I find it all vaguely annoying because I want to talk about Remembrance as opposed to Remembering and Eric’s story is a key into that for me. I can’t remember someone I never met but his life and death still have great significance for me.

When Jesus beseeched his followers to “Do this in remembrance of me” at the last supper he didn’t mean make a documentary about his life and make sure you remember all the facts. He meant something else. When people carved “Lest we forget” onto war memorials they weren’t instructing future generations to literally remember all the names and dates of the people on the memorial. They meant something else. What they meant, of course, was that we should bring these things to mind. Think of them not just about them. This is why only silence will do. Words are about remembering. Silence is about remembrance.

For me this is integrally linked with my mindfulness meditation practice. Mindfulness comes from the ancient Indian word sati which has strong connotations of remembrance. It is bringing the present to mind as one might bring the past to mind. Remembrance of those who have gone before is pausing to be present now. Being here for them and for us.

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Taken with 110mm modified cassegrain and Nikon D80.

This is the first photo of the moon with my 6″ newtonian reflector. Taken 6th November 2011.

I have been working with Sencha Touch and the Ext.util.Geolocation object but am having problems with accuracy. I have noted the following behaviour.

When I call for a location on iPhone (3G) and iPad (v1) I get a one with around 1.3km accuracy. Basically it places me at one of two spots about 1km apart. If I switch to the native maps app then it places my position within 10m of where I am standing – that “wow it knows where I am” accuracy . Switch back to my web app and the first call to the GeoLocation returns similar accuracy. Any subsequent calls return the old inaccurate positions.

I have tested this briefly on Android (Google’s first phone) and have similar behaviour.

I am setting allowHighAccuracy=true and I have experimented with different age and time out durations to no effect. I have also tried calling the underlying JavaScript methods with similar results so I don’t believe it is the Touch libraries – but would welcome your thoughts.

My conclusion is that both iOS and Android only pass cell tower level location accuracy to the browser and do not ever use GPS – at least not in an urban environment. Basically enableHighAccuracy from the Geolocation API spec is ignored. Is this a correct assumption? I hope it isn’t because it effectively cripples the HTML5+GPS application market.

I wrote a test application that you can use to check this behaviour for yourself. Remember this is a mobile app. You can test it in Chrome or Safari on the desk top but will need to load it on your phone and be outside to benefit from GPS! Dink the QR Code with your phone and take a stroll if you are reading this indoors.

The application allows you to either poll the location by tapping the “Update Location” button or ask the browser to continuously update your location using autoUpdate. The maximum age parameter is hardwired to zero so any requests should attempt to fetch new location data. The time out is set to 20 seconds. You will find that if you keep punching the “Update Location” button when it isn’t returning new locations you will just get a series of time out alerts 20 seconds later.

Finally the “Show Map” button will launch the maps app on iOS devices and put a place marker on where HTML5 thinks you are. You can then compare it with where the maps app thinks you are. They are often different immediately or, after a few seconds, the maps app will move your current location to a far more accurate spot as the GPS kicks in. On Android the behaviour of the “Show Map” button is less obvious as it doesn’t always appear to open the maps app and sometimes just opens the Google Maps application. You will have to open the maps app manually.

I find it amazing that there are so many posts out there raving about location info in the browser yet when I try and use it I find it actually sucks. Maybe OK for finding your nearest Starbucks but not a lot else. If you have read The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper then you will be familiar with the notion of “Dancing Bear Software” – it is amazing the bear can dance, what a shame it doesn’t dance very well!

I do hope I am doing something really really dumb here and am totally wrong. Please look at the code in my app page and tell me so.

Find attached my fourth and final assignment for the Bangor Mindfulness course. This one is for the Research module. It is supposed to be a description of a research project that you intend to do later in the course in a form close to what would be suitable for submission to the ethics panel.

• Research_Assign_Two_blog_version.pdf

The proposal makes reference to a prototype application I developed that you can access at  http://breathfollower.appspot.com/ if you would like to try it for yourself. I have done some work to take this further as a mobile application and will blog on it if I get it to a state worthy of release.

By the time I was writing this up I had decided I wouldn’t proceed with the course so it was a kind of fantasy proposal rather than a serious one. I did a ten minute presentation on it and the tutors pointed out that they didn’t think it would produce an effect in the two week duration of the experiment but I did nothing to change this and the marked me down accordingly. I got  69% which is just 1% short of an ‘A’ – always the bridesmaid never the bride I guess I hope you enjoy reading the assignment.

I’ll put another post together in the next few day summarising my reasons for leaving the Bangor course.

If I start to talk about how the world is and therefore how we should best live there is a danger you will dismiss what I say as either playing with ideas that have no relation to real life (philosophy) or trying to impose some mumbo jumbo from a possible imaginary deity (religion). Many people are reluctant to explore this stuff because it will either prove a complete waste of time or overturn a belief system that they have accepted since childhood.

Despite this I do need to create a narrative explanation of why you should try mindfulness meditation. The rationality at the heart of our culture requires that this comes first. Please treat what follows as a pragmatic way of viewing the world for the purpose of living the good life rather than just a set of ideas or a religious doctrine.

Things arise in dependence on conditions and when those conditions cease the things cease. This is the root of the philosophy. This is easy to accept because when we look we can see it is true. This should not be confused with “cause and effect” which is more a product of language. To have a “cause” and an “effect” we need to define one thing as being the cause and something else as being the effect which is useful when we want to use words to represent these things but involves isolating them from the rest of the universe. Drawing a line around them if you like. So we could talk about it raining because it is cloudy but this conveniently leaves out the causes of clouds and the processes within the clouds.

Which causes and effects we choose to define are to some degree arbitrary – made up. We don’t even see things that don’t fit our current point of view. They are filtered out by preconscious processes. A good example is when we get a different car. Suddenly we see the same model or colour car all over the place. They were there before but didn’t enter our consciousness. When you walk down a hotel corridor I don’t suppose room 122 jumps out at you as significant like it does for me but then you probably didn’t grow up in a house numbered 122. The world we experience is not the ‘real’ world it is a construct that involves our previous experiences. What we think causes what is the result of mental processes.

This is not a nihilistic philosophy. I am not saying that there is no reality. I am saying that the world we perceive is in our minds. The alternative would be perception not involving the mind which by definition can’t be true. The upshot is that by changing our minds we change the world we perceive and, as we can only know the world we perceive, this is the same as changing the world itself.

You may now be wondering if we can make the world anything we want, fly or walk through walls. We can’t. This is not nihilism. We can only change how we perceive what is really there. Strangely this doesn’t preclude “magical powers”. Most conjurors rely on doing things that don’t fit our world view. Comedy is playing with our world view to make us laugh. Magicians, comedians and writers loosen our grip on a particular interpretation of reality. Powerful art is always a little scary because it literally rocks our world.

What you do have control over is anything that involves your opinion. How much do you suffer because of your opinion about something rather than the thing itself? How often does your opinion of something create a problem, create suffering?

Sometimes I hear a thump, thump, thump noise coming from the neighbours and feel my anger rising. They have got their music too loud again! Don’t they have any respect for the rest of us! The feeling of anger is quite uncomfortable. Then I realise that it is their washing machine and my anger disappears. It is an innocent by-product of daily activity and not inconsiderate at all. Nothing has changed outside of me. All that has happened is a change in my perception of the world. But what if they really are listening to music? Couldn’t I make the same internal change and decide that it is OK to listen to music during the day . They don’t usually do it for very long. I could just change my mind and I’d be happier.

If we could develop a flexibility of mind that enabled us to choose our emotional response to a situation, that is to choose how to perceive it not change the facts, then how often would we choose to feel rotten, angry or depressed?

The seaguls have ripped open the rubbish bags again and there is trash all over the street. They are crying and wheeling overhead. Swirling up and down between the buildings. I could feel angry that the city is such a tip, that people aren’t more careful when they put their rubbish out and that the council don’t arrange the collections better. On the other hand I could find joy in the shapes the birds are making as they turn in the air and rejoice in the pleasure they appear to be having. If I find pleasure in the birds that doesn’t mean I don’t care about the messy streets or that I refrain from writing to the council. It does mean I live a happier life. I am more likely to smile at the next person I meet so that their day is a little brighter. It changes stuff.

This is why meditation is a good thing. It helps you develop a flexibility of mind that loosens your requirement for the world to be a certain way for you to be happy. The world you perceive is created by you and can be changed. Ultimately this has profound implications for discovering ‘meaning’ but I won’t expand in this direction or I’ll get too close to what many would consider religion.

We are vegetarian though not vegan and we don’t fly for recreation. I have to fly for work sometimes and one day I will take the kids on a plane somewhere just so they have the experience. They are the only ones in their classes at school who haven’t been on an aircraft and some of their class mates don’t believe them when they say so.

The one fly in the ointment of our general green-smugness is our vehicle. A year ago we did away with the car and bought a modern VW camper van – a year old California. We don’t actually use it on a day to day basis as we walk and cycle everywhere. This is our weekend machine. From central Edinburgh we can be in Northumberland or the highlands in two or three hours. It also enables us to partake of the out of town shopping experience occasionally and do trips to the South of England to see family. The downside is that it only does between 35 and 40 miles to the gallon of diesel on a run and about 30ish in town once it has warmed up. It does sleep four comfortably though!

I thought it would be nice to see how much CO2 we were emitting by using the van and initially I wondered how I would calculate it. Then I realised that the litres of diesel are written on the receipts! So for the last year I have been collecting all the receipts for diesel and putting them in a spreadsheet. April to April we have spent £1,352.56 on 1,080.25 Litres of diesel. Using the conversion factor of 2.6391 this means we have emitted 3,569.54 kilograms of CO2 – just over 3.5 tonnes. That is quite a lot of guilt but we did get a lot of value out of it. We had several trips to the South of the UK (the van acting as an office outside mother-in-laws house on a number of occasions). We had several weeks away and I have lost track of the number of weekends. I did five long weekends in North Wales whilst doing the mindfulness course for starters. At Easter this year we had a whole week away on a single tank of fuel – around 190kg of CO2.

What else could we have blown 3.5 tonnes of CO2 on? According to the figures on this site 3.5 tonnes is the equivalent of  12,321 passenger miles short haul, 17,601 medium haul or 20,166 on long haul. Now there are four of us so we have to divide these by four to see where we could go – so that is roughly 3,000 miles short haul, 4,500 miles medium and 5,000 miles long haul.

It is about 3,000 miles Edinburgh to New York so we could have flown to Newark on Continental Airlines and then two thirds of the way back – which wouldn’t have been a very pleasant holiday – especially the last part. Or we could have gone to somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and made it all the way back. Perhaps a week in North Africa? The trouble is none of this would have included our obligations to visit family or my five weekends in North Wales or out of town shopping trips. We would have had a single holiday at one location and/or burnt more carbon by running a car or maybe hiring one.

What about alternative lifestyles. What if I worked in Livingston (20 miles away) and commuted in a Toyota Prius? Then at the weekend we went camping in it. At 225 trips a year is 8,800 mile at 72mpg is roughly 1.3 tonnes of CO2 then we did about 9,000 mile for leasure in the van so an equivalent in the Prius would be another 1.3 tonnes. So 2.6 tonnes total – not bad at all as long as we weren’t tempted to jump on a plane. I have a sneaking suspicion that a Prius wouldn’t do 70+mpg if you sat four people in it and put all the camping gear for a week in the highlands in a roof box on top. Camping in Scotland can be pretty unpleasant for much of the year which is why we got the van and why alot of people take a cheap package holiday to Spain mid winter (that’s 3 tonnes of carbon for the family).

I think my conclusion is that this is far more complex than it at first seems. Although I feel guilty at driving a large vehicle, especially when we do use it for the occasional shopping trip, it is nothing compared with a quickly forgotten week in the sun and many people do both. Thinking it through has made me appreciate every litre of fuel we burn – which must be a good thing.

Next month we are off to France in the van. It should be exciting and we shouldn’t use any more fuel in the tank than flying but maybe we will have more of an adventure. The trouble is we are getting the Plymouth-Santander ferry and that will use loads of carbon. Still lets get the most out of it by trying to do some whale watching. It has to be a better use of resources than watching inflight videos.

A friend just introduced me to BuddhistGeek which looks like a wonderful source. I enjoyed listening to this podcast on The Practice of Contemplative Photography – which I would highly recommend. It certainly chimes with how I have felt about my own photography.