When my mother died a few years ago her husband played some Joan Baez music at the end of the funeral as a way of communicating the sort of person that she was and the way she would like to be remembered.

Ever since then I've been wondering to myself what I would like to be played when the time comes for everyone to say goodbye to me.

Music is very important for me - I listen to music a lot while I'm working.

Actually, I think that music is a necessity for programmers that I think a lot of non-programmers struggle to understand. The reason for this is that programming is an activity that alternates between the highly cerebral and the dreadfully boring. Ramp up someone's mind to fever pitch and then give them something dull to do and you are in danger of causing depression. Music is the way that programmers rescue themselves from that. When you're thinking hard you turn it off; when you're committing your thoughts to keyboard you turn it back on again.

Despite the intervening decades I remain principally into 70s music.

The thing about growing up in the 70s was that there was so much good stuff around back then that you couldn't possibly be into it all at the time. I'm catching up with a lot of it now, particularly with the Rolling Stones (loved Black and Blue) and more recently Genesis.

And I think I have found in "Dusk", from the album "Trespass", my Requiem song (assuming Messrs Gabriel and co don't mind me pinching it off them as I'm sure they wrote it for themselves).

Music works, of course, when it engages you emotionally, and when you're considering something of this importance it's going to be a very personal. "Dusk" gets it spot on for me because it communicates the beauty of the tragedy of human existence (if that makes any sense to you).

The beauty of existence comes from its intensity, even if only for a few short moments:

"The scent of a flower,
The colours of the morning,
Friends to believe in,
Tears soon forgotten,
See how the rain drives away, another day."

The finality of life gives it its pathos. I will never see the wonders of the 22nd century and beyond and I wish I could. We are, as the song says in its final line, "passers by, born to die."

And when, finally, a false move by God does destroy me, there'll still be another day, albeit not for me. The leaf may have fallen but the tree isn't broken. I was what I was, loved life as much as I could, even though I knew I wasn't going to be here very long. I wish I could have stayed longer but the option wasn't offered. The world belongs to our children, and then they'll have to pass it on to theirs.

Richard

Well, QuSheet was finally released yesterday, so it's time to break my silence here, and how better than with that little thorny question called "The Meaning of Life".

It seems to come down to me to a simple conflict between two incompatible principles: "Causality" and "Free Will".

Causality adherents claim that Free Will is an illusion. In The Science of Diskworld II, the authors actually devote a chapter to this called "Free Wont". I'm not sure why they, and the scientific community in general as far as I can see, throw their hats in so whole-heartedly with Causality. I, personally, favour Free Will.

And I do think it's a matter of favouritism, because neither can be proved. Free Will cannot be proved because it is impossible to re-run time and see whether someone would do something different. Causality cannot be proved because we cannot work backwards from what we see the universe is doing to whatever formula it is (if there is one) that is making it happen.

Consider this little thought experiment. Imagine two computers. One is infinitely powerful (really) the second one is finitely powerful. Call the first one Omega and the second one Squeak. Although Omega is a lot more powerful than Squeak, it doesn't actually know how powerful Squeak is. All that Squeak does is put out digit after digit of some irrational number, say the square root of some non-perfect square. Omega catches those numbers and is tasked with figuring out what Squeak is actually up to.

Assuming that Omega assumes that it is getting a square root, its problem is that at any point in time there are always an infinite number of possibilities as to what this irrational number is a square root of. The square root of 42 begins 6.4807406984, but then so does the square root of 42.0000000001, 42.00000000011, and an infinite number more. And where with the square root of 42 the next number is 0, with 42.0000000001 the next number is 1.

So Omega can never predict what the next digit will be, since it can never know exactly at what Squeak is taking the square root of. Even with Squeak being finite and Omega infinite, Omega doesn't know just how many 0s occur between the 42 and the 1 (and then the next 1, or 2 or whatever).

And given that, Omega can't even be sure that the numbers coming out of Squeak follow any formula at all. They might be random (as in truly random). Maybe Squeak has free will and is choosing what numbers to put out (and if you re-ran time it would choose different ones).

And if Squeak is our universe, where irrational numbers abound, then Omega will never be able to figure out how the universe works. Or even whether it actually works at all in accordance with logic and formulae.

Unless the day comes, of course, when someone figures out the one and only formula which could possibly work. It would have to be a formula which explained *everything*. Until then, there will always be more than one way to explain our observations, indeed an infinite number of ways, and while that is the case we can never be sure that the universe isn't choosing what it's up to.

Which in my opinion puts Causality and Free Will on an even footing.

And I choose to believe in the latter because, although I can see Causality at work when I throw a stone into a lake and watch it cause those nice little ripples, I know my senses can be fooled, whereas Free Will is a lot closer to home, if you see what I mean.

Richard

I'm no economist but here's what I think:

First of all, there are two sorts of employment: fruitful and useless.

Either case is better than unemployment, since in both cases someone is getting paid for doing "something", and this is necessary for the distribution of wealth and to stop people either dying of starvation or burdening the wellfare state. Fruitful employment, however, produces something which is of use. Useless employment does nothing for society except the wealth distribution bit.

Fruitful enterprises employ people to produce those goods and services which other people want. Useless enterprises employ people to either waste time or to produce goods and services which nobody wants, needs or can afford.

The purpose of all those city-chaps shouting their heads off in the city is to move the wealth of the world away from useless enterprises towards fruitful ones. At least, that is their purpose as far as our society / world is concerned. It's what makes them fruitful and what persuades the rest of us not to choke on our cornflakes when we hear some broker calling himself a "wealth creator".

Of course, there is no over-all ruler-of-the-world employer instructing all those brokers to work towards this end. Instead, an act of faith takes place whereby we all believe (and hope) that if they are incentivised in the right way then this little neural network of greedy little robots will magically produce what we need. The only reason we believe this goes something like this: brokers wanting to make money for themselves will naturally back the enterprises which have the best chance of making money as well and these should be the fruitful ones since the useless ones ought to go bankrupt.

As an act of faith it is massive because it is so reductionist. There are probably a great many different outcomes for a broker-network to converge on, which we'll only discover when they happen. Right now we have a recession caused by one particular outcome: the emergence of a gamble which benefits the brokers without benefitting society.

Brokers know that when they succeed in making a gamble which wins, they gain, but if they lose, they lose their job. How much they gain depends on how much they win. On a loss, they lose their job, regardless of how big the loss is.

So it makes sense to arrange things so that the losses are rare even if that means they have to be huge. In fact, even if it means that the gambles are ultimately bad, as long as no one knows any better until it's too late. These gambles started with derivatives but have now become so complicated that it's very difficult to work out what the odds and gains are. All that any broker has to do is keep on winning and he will keep his job. Unfortunately his boss, or the person whose funds he's playing with, either lacks the expertise or doesn't care enough to ask how the actual odds weigh up.

Eventually, of course, the loss happens, funds disappear, the world goes pear-shaped, the economy re-establishes its win/loss balance, money moves about randomly as panic sets in, frequently over to useless enterprise or sitting in great big bank vaults doing nothing, and we get a recession.

The broker loses his job, of course, but by then he's rich.

All the best

Richard

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

Even if we limit ourselves to "creation" as we know it now, without straying into sci-fi territory as Douglas Adams was doing in the above quote from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we are still faced with the realisation that we are, on the whole, insignificant.

I read somewhere that psychoses happen where the human mind is forced to reconcile as true two facts that are completely incompatible. If so, then we have at the basis of human existence the incredible difficulty of reconciling the importance of our own existence, as perceived by ourselves, and the insignificance of our own existence, as evidenced by the world around us.

If even the great and the good (and the evil), like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Lincoln and Einstein are just so much dust in the ground now (or ashes, or icy and inert), then what possible importance do we have in this life.

And yet, our minds scream out, it cannot be so! Since we are forced to perceive existence through the senses of one individual, that one individual has to be the most important person in the world, for as long as the world holds any interest to us.

It is our ego, as the psychoanalysts define it, which is jumping up and down and screaming. You can't blame it, can you.

I like to look at the statue of the emperor Hadrian and his wife in the British Museum and reflect on this. Here, clearly, was an incredibly powerful man, full of confidence and availed of everything the world had to offer. Now there is nothing.

Edward, the Black Prince, was obviously irked by this. His epitaph in Canterbury Cathedral describes how once he had everything a man could want. In his death he speaks to you like this:

Who so thou be that passeth by
Where these corps entombed lie
Understand what I shall say
As at this time speake I may
Such as thou art sometime was I
Such as I am such shalt thou be.

In other words, "don't think to yourself that just because I'm dead and you're alive, you're more important than me!"

How much of our behaviour, I wonder, is driven by the need to try to make ourselves more important, to bring together the two conflicting views presented of our own existence?

It's quite insulting, don't you think, to have to accept that we are that darned unimportant.

Richard