I was surprised to see listed among the ‘notable integers’ were a few telephone numbers, such as 999 and 911. I guess these were included on the basis of their “cultural meanings”, although they are not integers. (They have since been removed from the article.)

But I was surprised that the most culturally significant telephone number of the past decade — that’s right, 118 — was left out. So I decided to fix that.

(Don’t worry, I only did this in Firebug, not on Wikipedia itself.)

Warp20

A series of posts

1. 20 years of Warp Records
2. 20 Warp albums — part 1
3. 20 Warp albums — part 2
4. 20 Warp albums — part 3
5. 20 Warp albums — part 4
6. 20 Warp albums — part 5
7. Warp20 (Box Set)

This is the final selection of my overview of twenty interesting Warp albums from the record label’s twenty years. To read the other parts of this series, please check the table of contents on the right.

Jamie Lidell — Multiply

Jamie Lidell is clearly a very talented person. His voice is incredible, but perhaps more incredible is the fact that in his earlier career he contrived to hide it. His work as part of Super_Collider (along with Cristian Vogel) and his début album Muddlin Gear were dark, murky, electronic affairs. Although Jamie Lidell sang from time to time, he didn’t show it off.

With Multiply his sunnier persona was unleashed. Instead of the dark and glitchy music of his earlier material, Multiply is very clearly influenced by soul and funk.

But this album is anything but conventional and boring. Jamie Lidell’s considerable skills as an experimental and electronic musician are fully utilised too. This gives Multiply a great crossover appeal. This is on the brighter side of the border that separates pop from experimental music. But clearly there was no way to stop him from pushing the boat out a little bit. This makes Multiply equally enjoyable for those who like to tap their feed and those who like to stroke their chin.

Here is the odd video for the song that effectively introduced me to Jamie Lidell, ‘The City’:

Boards of Canada — Geogaddi

While most favour Boards of Canada’s earlier album Music Has the Right to Children, for me it’s all about Geogaddi. To me, this album is endlessly fascinating, and always an intense listen.

Geogaddi is the darkest of Boards of Canada’s albums. Their other material is known most for its innocent, childlike and nostalgic qualities. Geogaddi retains an element of that, but with a dark undercurrent running throughout.

The music is more complex and multi-layered. Hidden messages are peppered throughout, and some tracks reveal more about themselves when played in reverse. There are hidden references to religion, the occult, mathematics and numerology. Some even say it is a satanic album. (As a joke, the album lasts 66 minutes and 6 seconds — a silent track, ‘Magic Window’, was inserted at the end.)

Whether Boards of Canada were trying to send some sort of message by planting these references is doubtful. Such references are few and far between on Music Has the Right to Children, and absolutely non-existent on the follow-up album The Campfire Headphase. I think the references were planted in Geogaddi to create a talking point and nothing more.

It certainly got fans talking. This webpage lists a full selection of mysterious messages and trivia about the album, even with a track-by-track breakdown.

Needless to say, leaving aside the hidden messages, the music itself is fantastic. Geogaddi is an unsettling album to listen to, but nonetheless hugely enjoyable and an intense experience.

One of my highlights is ‘Gyroscope’, which manages to fuse great music with one of my other interests as it incorporates samples of a numbers station. This is a fan-made video for the track.

Prefuse 73 — One Word Extinguisher

With One Word Extinguisher, Prefuse 73 effortlessly fused experimental electronic music with energetic hip-hop to create a unique-sounding album. The album is jam-packed with ideas — perhaps too many of them. An idea is allowed to develop just as far as it will go and no more, making this an album of many, mainly short tracks.

The music is also quite diverse, fusing many of Prefuse 73′s musical interests, spanning hip-hop, IDM / glitch, rock music and perhaps even a little bit of jazz. As such, the album is a fantastically colourful and diverse journey. There is not much chance to catch your breath.

There are also plenty of collaborations on this album. While he went a bit overboard with the concept in the following album, Surrounded by Silence, on this album the right balance is struck. I particularly like ‘Dave’s Bonus Beats’, containing drumming by David Lebleu from post-rock group The Mercury Program. The track comes complete with the answerphone message sent to Scott Herren to confirm that the drum track had been sent, adding a personal layer to the music.

During this period, Scott Herren was clearly at his creative peak. Very soon after the release of One Word Extinguisher came the accompanying Extinguished, a distinct album made of the “out-takes” from One Word Extinguisher! For a collection of out-takes, Extinguished is surprisingly good — indeed, almost as good as the original album.

At the same time as the material released as Prefuse 73, Scott Herren was also churning out quality albums as Savath & Savalas, a project more focussed on folk and Spanish-influenced music. Sadly, his subsequent material has not been nearly as good. In contrast to the exciting explorations of his earlier music, Scott Herren began to use the same recognisable formulas over and over. I have since lost interest in Prefuse 73.

Nonetheless, One Word Extinguisher remains an excellent album. Here is a track towards the end of the album, ‘Styles That Fade Away With a Collonade Reprise’.

Grizzly Bear — Veckatimest

Warp played a blinder by signing Grizzly Bear. Their pre-Warp album, Horn of Plenty, was charming but not particularly special. After signing to Warp, they came up with the wonderful Yellow House which was full of hidden beauty.

This year, with Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear have released an indie-rock / chamber-pop masterpiece which has propelled them onto the cusp of stardom. Every track is a winner. Gently enticing and maturely constructed, I can’t get enough of this album. This album ought to become a rock classic.

Grizzly Bear is easily the greatest triumph of Warp’s recent policy to diversify further from electronic music. I look forward to hearing what they come up with in the future.

Here is the lead single, ‘Two Weeks’:

BBC Radiophonic Workshop after 50 years

A series of posts

1. Fifty years of Radiophonic influence
2. Radiophonic re-releases

Regular readers may know that I have an interest in electronic music. 2008 has been a bit of a treat for fans of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This year marked 50 years since the establishment of the hugely influential sound effects and music department of the BBC. That, combined with a coincidental discovery of new tapes, has brought a feast of Radiophonic Workshop-related CD releases during the year.

I love the work of the composers of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. For anyone with even a passing interest in electronic music, some of these CDs are an absolute must. Over the years, the Radiophonic Workshop produced some of the world’s most famous electronic music.

It is probably most famous for providing music to Doctor Who. The Radiophonic Workshop was, however, originally set up to meet the growing demand for music and effects to be used in experimental plays and “radiophonic poems” on the Third Programme for which suitable library music could not always be found.

But eventually, the Radiophonic Workshop’s music and effects were in fact used by programmes in every single department of the BBC, meaning that few people in Britain can have been untouched by this magical music. Low-budget education programmes made particularly frequent use of the Workshop’s output. An early exposure to experimental electronic music inspired many to become electronic musicians themselves.

Of course, almost all music produced today is electronic in some form. What we take for granted was largely pioneered by a rather unexotic bunch working away painstakingly in a Maida Vale studio. Initially, the equipment they worked on was old and unreliable even by contemporary standards, having been recovered from the BBC’s “redundancy plant”.

At first no-one could work at the Radiophonic Workshop for longer than six months, as the BBC had a fear that prolonged exposure to electronic music could cause mental illness! Meanwhile, the time-consuming musique concrète techniques largely employed in the 1960s would have many of today’s musicians, who practically have electronic music on tap, running for the hills. Brian Hodgson says he once stayed up for three successive days and nights in order to meet his deadline.

“Radiophonic” music was made possible by the increasing availability of tape recorders which allowed inquiring minds to manipulate sounds in interesting ways. The majority of early electronic music was made by cutting and splicing tapes, changing their speed in order to create the right notes and sounds. Delia Derbyshire always carried with her a book of logarithms so that she could make the calculations required to do her work.

One CD released this year, BBC Radiophonic Workshop — A Retrospective, provides an excellent overview of the output of the Workshop over its forty year life. It showcases the extraordinary diversity of the Radiophonic Workshop. It ranges from a comedy belch produced in 1959 for The Goon Show, to the 1997 theme tune for Michael Palin’s Full Circle, via local radio station jingles and news stings.

The double disc compilation is arranged in chronological order, allowing the listener to track the development of electronic music-making techniques over time. The earlier tracks are, oddly enough, the ones that have stood the test of time much better.

The introduction of the synthesiser may have enabled composers to create electronic music much more easily and quickly. But it also brought with it a set of identikit sounds that were mostly devoid of the charm of the earlier compositions. In my personal view, even though the mastery of the composers remains fairly high throughout, the quality of the sound diminishes as the CD goes on, particularly from the mid-1980s onwards.

By that time, Radiophonic Workshop was struggling to set itself apart. While in the 1960s and 1970s the Workshop had unrivalled access to excellent electronic music making equipment, the 1980s brought about the more widespread availability of such equipment, along with a quality that today sounds rather naff. Soon enough the Radiophonic Workshop found itself being undercut by freelance musicians.

With the BBC’s cost-cutting era under John Birt well under way, the Radiophonic Workshop struggled to justify its existence. It was finally wound up in 1997, just short of its fortieth birthday, by which time just one composer, Elizabeth Parker, was working for it.

Although it is easy to let romance get the better of you, listening to the CD makes me think that the Radiophonic Workshop had ceased to be relevant by then. Fifty years ago, electronic music was a largely unexplored area, ripe for experimentation. By the 1990s, any musician could make music from his home that sounded just as good as what the Radiophonic Workshop could produce.

Nonetheless, there are some real gems to be found on this album. Maddalena Fagandini’s ‘Interval Signal’ is hypnotic and magical. Along with Delia Derbyshire’s ‘Dance from “Noah”‘, it sounds decades ahead of its time. Meanwhile, Peter Howell’s ‘Greenwich Chorus’ sounds so fantastic that it reportedly jammed the BBC’s switchboards when it was broadcast.

This excellent retrospective CD was just one of many Radiophonic wonders that we were brought this year. My next post will look at some of the other Radiophonic Workshop-related gems that have been unearthed.

(Emphasis mine.)

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it…

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

“I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression – the card doesn’t say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled.”

HOLY SHIT! This is how bad standards of numeracy have become. Unbelievable.

Incidentally, my time off this blog was due to the fact that I was being educated. A certain Tina Farrell might have benefited from it more.

Via Chicken Yoghurt.

Update: Chris Applegate reminded me of a point that I was going to make here, but I forgot to write it before publishing.

It is the fact that this person just couldn’t resist blaming someone else for the problem. There is not the slightest hint of her taking any personal responsibility. Even worse is the fact that Camelot have actually caved in, which will vindicate this stance in her mind.

Apparently, whether you perceive the woman to be turning clockwise or anti-clockwise tells you which side of your brain you use the most. Immediately it was obvious to me that the woman was turning clockwise. I felt a bit smug. After all, clockwise must be the side of the brain that makes me intelligent, witty, good looking and a mathematical genius.

Err.

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain…

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

Are they calling me a girl or something?

Seriously. Looking at the lists, I would have always guessed that I would have been the left side of the brain. Not that I wish to blow my own trumpet, but I always consider myself to use logic, have attention to detail, reasonably good numerical skills and reality based. I am far to strategic for my own good, in the sense that I always spend so long thinking about things that I miss the boat.

Not that the skills for the right side of the brain are that bad. But I just don’t see it. I have less spatial awareness than Stevie Wonder, a dire imagination and I’m apathetic about symbolism. I am only religious in the sense that I am a Pastafarian. As for risk-taking, I can’t climb a ladder without completely crapping myself beforehand.

As if to compound the matter, the the article states that most people see the woman turning anti-clockwise. Brilliant! Other people are mathematical genii. I do little more than believe.

I believe, and I also live in a fantasy land. So what if I believe that I am a left-brainer? Or is that just a fantasy? This was all getting a bit too much for me.

I struggled to comprehend the situation. When I first loaded the page it was patently obvious to me that the woman was turning clockwise — there were no two ways about it. But I knew that she could turn anti-clockwise as well. In order to regain a modicum of self esteem, I strained my hardest to get the woman to turn anti-clockwise. It’s Magic Eye for the noughties.

And blow me down. It worked! It happened when I began to lose my focus while staring at her neck. I started to feel a little bit sick. It’s quite earth-shattering to see someone who has only ever turned clockwise suddenly decide to turn anti-clockwise. What’s more, I was now just as adamant that the woman could only possibly ever turn anti-clockwise, and surely never clockwise.

But soon enough I was able to switch between clockwise woman and anti-clockwise woman at will, as though I was flicking between The God Channel and BBC Four. My tip: look at the shadow that the sticky-out foot makes on the floor.

Now I feel much better. I can switch between clockwise and anti-clockwise at will. This must mean that I am brilliant at everything.

Also: Hehehehe. Boobs.

Seriously though. Does the illusion fail to work if it is a boobless man? What about that funny pose she is pulling? She doesn’t know if she’s slipping on a banana or if she is a little teapot, short and stout.

Flashboy was similarly freaked out by the strange levitating woman.

Aaaannyway. How did they decide that clockwise equals the right side and vice-versa? I have not seen any solid science on this — just a crappy Digg-magnetic article on an Australian newspaper. Part of me suspects that this article either

1. Is a pile of horseshit
2. Got the lists for the left and right sides of the brain the wrong way round

I’ll have my eye on Ben Goldacre’s blog for this!

That wasn’t just because we were using computers all the time. It was just that there really isn’t much need to write at all is there? The only thing I can think of is letter writing. But how often do you do that? Once a year, if that? Maybe, back in the day, people wrote letters to each other. Nowadays people keep in touch by IM or text message. Or, if you’re really old-fashioned, by email. No need to lift a pen.

It’s sensible for me just to avoid writing altogether because my handwriting is a complete mess, and it has been probably since I started secondary school. My lowercase letters are all over the place. If I’m not careful, my ‘b’ looks like an ‘S’, my ‘a’ and ‘o’ both look like an ‘e’, my ‘i’ looks like an ‘l’, my ‘g’ looks like a ‘y’, ‘m’ looks like an ‘n’. And ‘v’ and ‘u’ look exactly the same.

The article says, “Teenagers are still experimenting with their handwriting and trying out new things”. The shocking thing is, I’m not a teenager, and I’m still experimenting with my handwriting. I could cope with all of the other things because I could understand myself what I was writing. But when my ‘v’ and ‘u’ began to look the same I had to take action. In the past couple of months I’ve actually added on a tail to my ‘u’. I never used to add tails because I thought they were a waste of time. Now they are how I tell a ‘u’ (or a ‘U’) from a ‘v’ (or ‘V’).

It became necessary because a lot of the equations I have to use at university involve a u or a v — often in the same place, meaning subtly different things. But I can’t be confusing them or I will get myself… well, confused. At the same time I’m coping with how to write Greek letters. Before it was just π in maths and the occasional μ in physics.

Now, in economics, I have to grapple regularly with Σ, θ, δ, γ, α and the dreaded σ. When you’re struggling with the Latin alphabet, the last thing you want to do is work out how to write a σ (my ‘σ’ actually looks like ‘δ’!).

Whenever I have to handwrite a note or something, I always write it in all capitals. Not print, though, because I am such a lazy bastard that I can’t even be bothered to write neatly in block capitals. My capitals used to be neat — when I was in primary school. But when my lowercase letters became illegible and I moved on to using capitals instead — well, of course my capitals became illegible as well. Nevertheless, it is the least-worst option. Although I always have to apologise and explain that I’m not shouting!

I don’t have a signature either. Well I do, but it’s basically just a scrawl. I’ve tried practicing writing my name, but I think I am actually physically incapable of doing it. It looks kind of like “D____ Sl_____”. Distinctive, in a way, but it’s just a scrawl. Some people are genuinely shocked by my signature.

Despite my uneasy relationship with handwriting, I find it absolutely fascinating. It’s interesting to note how different people can take such radically different approaches to writing the same symbols. My friend and I had a discussion about somebody else. I just said, “I like her ‘a’s.” My friend thought I was using some kind of secret man-code euphemism. But no. I genuinely like her lowercase ‘a’.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have a girlfriend.

Via Digg.

Too many schools are “teaching to the test” in mathematics, stifling genuinely stimulating thinking about the subject, a report suggests.

The report is wrong. In actual fact, every school “teaches to the test” in every subject. There is no genuinely stimulating thinking about any subject going on in schools. That is the inevitable consequence of having exams.

I am going to use the example of one subject here, but you could talk about all of them. Looking back at school, none of us learned any physics. We were all taught how to pass a physics exam. And when you’re being just about constantly tested from the start of school to the end that can take up a lot of time. It took up so much time that there wasn’t any time to actually learn physics. All our effort was geared towards passing the exam at the expense of actually learning something.

I’m not complaining. As I said, it’s inevitable when all that matters is not what you learn but the grade that’s printed on a piece of paper. As a result, pupils only want to pass the exams and teachers only want the pupils to pass the exams. It is not at all unusual for a pupil (or a student at university) to ask, “Do we need to know this for the exam?” And it’s not unusual for a teacher to say, “You don’t need to know why this is the case. You just need to remember it for the exam.” You can’t blame pupils or teachers for that.

It might not be such a problem if there was only the summer exam to worry about, but some wise guy invented the Unit Assessment, which are spread out across the entire year. And then there are prelims. The whole school year is geared up towards these peaks of activity and there is no time to worry about anything else.

It’s not just about drumming home the parts of a subject that are in the curriculum. There is the dark art of question spotting. At my school the Modern Studies department seemed particularly fond of this, but they all did it. Teachers study past papers and try to find patterns. They’ll work out which questions are most likely to be asked. If a question wasn’t asked last year but has been asked on a few previous occasions, the question is likely to come up again. Questions that were asked last year are unlikely to come up this year unless they are asked every year. And so on. This is the stuff we were taught at school!

And then there are appeals. Never mind if you mess up the final exam — we have enough prelims and coursework to appeal for an increased grade! My old school is number one in the country for appeals. It made 800 appeals for Standard Grades and Highers in two years. I had my Computing Higher grade raised from a C to an A, even though I underperformed in Computing all year and I can’t remember ever getting an A in any Computing exam.

But until some really clever person can devise a way of proving that people have learned a lot about a subject without having to examine them, this sort of business is inevitable.

Anyway, that throny issue as to whether or not economics is a science is something that Greg Mankiw has got his teeth into on his blog.

In my opinion there are a few barriers to economics being a science (so far). One of the things my dad says is that because the behaviour of humans is “random” (his word), you cannot possibly make any serious predictions. Perhaps so. It does get tiring after a while to see economic models assuming “rationality”. Every human becomes the robotic Homo economicus (there was a post about this yesterday at The Fluffy Economist).

Nevertheless, many economic theories do appear to hold true in real life. I should have asked my dad, “When the price of a good goes up, is it really a ‘random’ occurance if the demand for that good goes down?” Yet even such simple concepts which even non-economists would recognise almost as facts of life are not without their problems.

I was discussing economics with a friend on my way back home from our exam yesterday, and I mentioned that my biggest personal gripe with the economics I have learned at university and that I read in the textbooks is all of the maths involved. The movement towards a more maths-based approach was an attempt by the discipline of economics as a whole to gain more credibility; to look more like a real science and not one of those wooly humanities subjects.

But I think I would take a lot of economics much more seriously if it stopped trying to sum up human behaviour in an abstract equation. It is a square peg in a round hole, in my view. By coming out with such an approach that gives you such precision makes it look like economics is promising the moon on a stick when it evidently cannot bring you it. Maybe this is just my personal aversion to maths coming out though.

Another huge barrier to economics being seen as a science is that it is so closely related to politics. To make a comment about economics is to make a comment about politics. And as we all know, making a comment about politics makes you ten instant friends and a hundred instant enemies. Even if many economists can agree on something (which isn’t often, but hey), many non-economists almost certainly will not. Immigration is a good example (and I’ll probably have a post on that tomorrow — I bet you can’t wait!).

As one anonymous commenter on Mankiw’s blog said, “One hardly hears of Republican chemical theories and Leftwing chemistry.” Is it any coincidence that, for the man on the street at least, one of the most controversial scientific theories today is that of evolution? The scientific community may be pretty well united in its support of the theory of evolution, but because creationism / Intelligent Design and evolution has become such a politicised issue, the theory of evolution has become questionable in the eyes of the general public.

This is a rare, freak event: a biology theory has become politicised, and therefore questioned. Economics is not so lucky: every economic theory is politicised from the word go, and is therefore questioned.

Here is some better news for economics though. Economics is still an extraordinarily young science. While people have been pondering about mathematics, biology, physics and chemistry for thousands of years, modern political economy is said to have begun with Adam Smith just a couple of hundred years ago.

If we go back to when chemistry was that old, we would probably find four elements: earth, fire, water, air. So perhaps we shouldn’t be too critical if economics still seems a bit unsteady on its feet, and we should instead make do with what we’ve got.

Yup, last year I almost took Maths as my outside subject, but just one lecture was enough for me to realise that it was far too difficult for me. This is despite the fact that my original idea was to do Maths and Statistics or something along those lines at university. I had wanted to take Advanced Higher Maths in sixth year at high school, but not enough other people wanted to do it (they only needed seven!). So I had to take a year off without thinking about any maths. It was enough to practically knock it all out of my system entirely. Now I can’t imagine why I ever thought Maths and Stats would be a good idea?!

So guess what I took in sixth year instead of Maths? Economics. And I found it pretty interesting. In fact, my friend who also took Economics and I both found it incredibly refreshing, because it was a subject that seemed to actually mean something outside the classroom. It was something that we could go home and think about and say, ‘yes, I see that happening in real life.’ Goodness knows what crap I was learning in Maths or Physics and at the time, but I certainly didn’t seem important, and I can’t remember most of it now.

(I can remember that s = ut + ½at², but only because when I got some plants for my bedroom, for some reason that I still don’t understand today, my mother was eager for me to name them. So I called them all stupid names to take the piss. ‘s = ut + ½at²’ died quite quickly.)

So after the success of Higher Economics I decided to take Economics (along with Politics) at University as well. Imagine my shock when I ended up having to know calculus inside out! Sometimes I think I almost might as well have pulled a subject out of a hat. Now I wish I took Meteorology instead. I think I’ve been interested in weather all my life, except for those couple of weeks when the Ucas form was in my possession. But the grass is always greener, huh? Who knows what I’d be saying if I actually did do Meteorology…

It’s not that I dislike Economics or anything. Infact I think it’s very interesting. But I find it difficult to be fully convinced by everything that we’re taught, and I do find it the subject difficult as well, which isn’t a help. Nevertheless, I’m quite determined to see Economics through because I feel deep down that it is somehow a better subject than Politics.

I’ve mentioned six or seven subjects so far, and I’ve been somewhat agnostic about all of them for at least part of my life. But sitting here today I feel that so much of what happens in life is down to pure luck, so I guess I should just take what I’m given and be happy with it.

In the past, though, it was a different matter. I think I should tread carefully here, because I got a bit of criticism when I gave up piano lessons. Some people thought that I should have appreciated that I had talent, and that it was a bit selfish of me to just reject it when so many people would give their right arm to be able to play the piano (they obviously haven’t thought about how they would actually play the piano once they had lost said arm). But then again I did get criticised by somebody else who said that I should have quit earlier because I wasn’t interested in it. You can’t win, can you?

Anyway, there are two subjects that everybody thought I was good at in school: English and Computing. But I just have to say no no no.

I have no idea why people thought I was good at English. I hated English with a passion, but for some reason double English was always the most fun subject in fifth year because it was also the one where we were allowed to skive. I can’t remember what we were supposed to be doing, but we weren’t doing it and it must have been something where having loud, jovial conversations and pissing ourselves laughing wouldn’t arouse the teacher’s suspicions.

The only good marks I got in English were for speaking. I don’t know what it was, but something always seemed to click when I had to make a speech about something in front of the whole class. Unfortunately, it was never so when I had to write something. Ironic, given that I now spend so much of my spare time writing for fun. Anyway, I hated writing — especially stories, because I have all the imagination of a sieve (I’m equally bad at similes).

And I know you’re not supposed to admit this if you want people to think you’re really smart or whatever, but I almost never read books for pleasure, and I certainly don’t read novels. In fact, all forms of fiction (films, dramas, plays, whatever) need to be bloody amazing to grab my attention. Don’t ask me why, but I just find it all boring.

Which brings me on to Computing. Zzzzz. Apparently if you do Computing you’re going to make loads of money, but who gives a stuff about that if you’ve got to spend your whole life doing boring shit like programming. Unlike with English, I actually was good at Computing, but I simply could not see myself spending my whole life doing that sort of thing.

Third year, when you start Standard Grades, is when the really boring shit starts. I was sitting at the computer during a lesson, and just as I was actually thinking how incredibly dull programming was, my Computing teacher came up to me wielding a piece of paper with a note scrawled on it: “fourth year and talented third year only”. I was one of those third years singled out. My teacher wanted me to enter this annual programming competition which I think a lot of people actually take quite seriously.

“Errrrrr, I don’t really like competitions,” was my lame excuse.
“But you like programming,” came my teacher’s reply.

AAARGH.

This is nice. I’ve been wanting to get some of those things off my chest for ages! I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no point in finding a dream subject or career. They are all pretty shit, the grass is always greener, and so on. So there’s not much point in worrying about it by, for instance, writing an oversized blog post about it…