Considering the future is widely reckoned to be a useful and productive undertaking, giving groups and individuals confidence in the decisions they take in the present, informing their goals and aspirations and helping them to try to anticipate and respond to change, with some authors calling for a greater recognition of the value of learners engaging with accounts of the future within current curricula (Facer & Sandford, 2010; Slaughter, 2008; Damasio, 2003; Hicks, 2002). There are a number of different approaches towards engaging with the future employed by different sectors – policymakers, corporate strategists, social science researchers, product designers – but they share a common desire to consider the future as open, a need to offer compelling stories of future events or behaviours, and, usually, an obligation to provide an appropriate level of evidence in support of these stories. In many cases, this need for robust accounts of the future capable of engendering confidence in their utility leads to the use of quasi-scientific language and methodologies, borrowing ways of describing and valuing the world from domains that are trusted to talk about future events, such as engineering or economics.

Adam and Groves (2007) describe the social imperatives that lead to this “scientific” approach towards producing accounts of the future, and suggests that they arise from a dominant ideological perspective that encourages us to consider the future as open, unclaimed and susceptible to colonisation: by constructing futures as immaterial and “extraterrestrial”, elites are free to operate without considering the material consequences of their actions. Introducing Bauman’s (1998) description of “the great war of independence from space”, they note that accountability and responsibility are notions that are strongly coupled to territory, and by projecting their actions into a placeless and abstract domain, these elites are able to evade their legal and moral obligations to communities experiencing the consequences of those actions. Castells (2009) describes a similar state of affairs in discussing the “mythical future time” mobilised by corporate planners, and the way in which their work projects the present-day values of the powerful into the future. In both these descriptions, what leaves the future open to colonisation is the way in which it is represented as abstract, immaterial, placeless, remote, general and unconnected to the present we experience and inhabit. This representation of the future positions it as a resource to be exploited, rather than the dwelling of real people to whom we owe the same moral obligation as those existing now (Groves, 2007).

If it is the remoteness and abstraction of futures as commonly represented that works to obstruct positive social action, then, there is a need to discover a way of constructing possible futures that allows people to connect to real, actual places and people. By accepting the immaterial and de-spatialised futures of powerful elites, we abdicate the right to act in our interests and abandon our future lives to those who have different interests to our own. We need a way of representing futures as connected, placed, real, local and enmeshed within networks of being in order to resist these forces.

Drawing on authors in the ecological tradition (e.g., Berry, 1977; Leopold, 1966), who have drawn attention to the need for societies to recognise the value of place and the ways in which elements of ecological systems – including human beings – are interconnected and interdependent, and on writers in the field of education futures (particularly Slaughter, 2004 and Hicks, 2002), this paper develops the notion of ‘located futures’ as just such a way of representing futures.

Located futures are accounts of alternative futures articulated in relation to a particular place: more broadly, they are futures that have been constructed with a sensitivity to the rootedness and located nature of lived experience. Futures are inescapably located – they happen in some place. By paying attention to what might come to pass in a particular location, it becomes possible to recognise the difference between this and the futures that happen elsewhere, offering an opportunity to counter the general and homogenous quality of the dominant futures constructed on behalf of and in the interests of corporate entities, and connecting those who currently inhabit that place with those who are yet to do so.

Subsequent work will describe the notion and derivation of ‘located futures’ in relation to the domain of education, explore the ways in which they might extend our capacity for embedding futures thinking within learning, and consider some practical applications within a learning context.

This will have to affect the way we work. Offices are organised around sitting, finding places for workers to sit, finding places for guests to sit: whole industries revolve around making things that can be accessed from a sitting height. Some people use lecterns or more modern desks designed for use while standing. To be honest, I can’t see how giving yourself varicose veins is a good alternative. Surely the message from this research is that your body needs variety and activity? Lots of small movements that keep your muscles alive and awake.

I saw a Kinect in use for the first time yesterday. The Singapore Simulation and Gaming Association held a ‘family-friendly’ event, which involved an Xbox running Kinect Adventures to occupy the children who had come along. I didn’t manage to get a go, unfortunately, though lots of people have already written about the uncanny nature of interacting using a body rather than a peripheral, and I’d love to try one. But watching it in use was fascinating, and I wondered how it would be used in a workplace, to move around a desktop, rather than a game.

It would certainly be one way to reconcile the need to do work with the need to avoid sitting. It might be expected that it would also reveal certain patterns in our work, through making certain sets of muscles ache more than others. This would be interesting and revealing in itself, of course. But perhaps this new source of fatigue could be used to add a layer to our digital work that isn’t always present?

The metaphor of the desktop, with its files and folders, might be extended through modelling the degree of resistance involved in moving a certain file or performing a particular operation – that is, files would not only have content but weight. Some files could be harder to move than others, or involve more work to manipulate. They would have an extra dimension, becoming more than just equivalent white rectangles with a pixellated drop-shadow. Some files could be sent careening around the desktop with a flick of the wrist, while others might need a solid shove from the core. Maybe this isn’t exactly “weight”, but it’s something quite a lot like it.

How could this be used to communicate more information about them? One immediate choice might be to link filesize to resistance: the larger the file, the heavier it is. There’s something appealing about this, turning a digital property into a physical one. Deleting an old todo-list would be an easier job than pulling photographs off a camera. But it seems unfair, in some ways, to give these files this extra depth without seeing it as a cost to the person moving them around. If file-weight is going to make it harder to do certain jobs, wouldn’t it be more interesting to make this meaningful in the context of the person who’s doing them?

A get-things-done fan or efficiency hacker might see value in making the unappealing jobs light and the potential distractions heavy, so a timesheet could be handled with the same aplomb and dexterity as a sheet of origami paper, while Solitaire or timesink URLs might be dauntingly immobile. I’m sure this sort of self-management would be useful, at least until muscles developed sufficiently. But, to me, it’s more interesting to think about how the meaning of documents could be made tangible through their weight. It should be harder to fling around a will or a contract than a do-list or an IM chat. I have a hunch that I’d treat a heavy text with more respect when contributing to it than I would something flimsy and weightless. There’s a cultural history to access in support of this: we’re used to thinking about lightweight articles or weighty tomes. And there’s something appealing about making an insubstantial property more real, acknowledging that this invisible object has a proper presence and meaning in the world.

There are different ways of determining an object’s worth or meaning, of course, and the way this should relate to its perceived weight. People could decide for themselves, setting it to the degree they felt appropriate. This sounds like extra housework, though, and not the sort of extra work that could be made more than a chore. Perhaps some set of algorithms could look at the file, compare it to the files it came in with, relate this to what it knows about the relationship between senders, check it for keywords, decide where it stands in comparison to documents that have been weighted already, and so on, before assigning it a preliminary weight for people to tweak later. That would be more useful, though it risks setting expectations wrongly, I suppose, with people anticipating a document of little importance paying less attention to something that’s worth more of their time. Whichever way is chosen, it would need to look outside the operating system somehow, examining accompanying messages from the real world, to make sure that the object’s real, social worth was being addressed.

Once people start sending each other documents that can be weighted, of course, we could expect a rapid escalation in heavy files, in the same way that flags and “important!” checkboxes are abused and meaningless right now. Heaving a massive file out of an inbox only to discover an injuction on certain foods being stored in the office fridge would become tedious very quickly, and once the connection between weight and meaning is broken the whole exercise would become worthless. Letting other people influence the weight of a document might culminate in simple but effective denial-of-service attacks, in which users are left frustratedly pawing at gigantic files that block access to the desktop as effectively as a mine collapse. Perhaps weight should be accreted to documents gradually and automatically, reflecting the way they become meaningful. Early versions would seem insubstantial, while later revisions seem overloaded and too troublesome to engage with fully: there would be a brief period when a document is weighty enough to seem worth taking seriously but not yet unmanageable and weighed down by an accumulation of commentary.

All this would slowly change the way office work is conducted and perhaps even what we understand a digital document to be. Bold hopes, perhaps. But perhaps the boldest hope would be that this Sisyphyean struggle to shift a never-ending stream of digital boulders from one virtual place to another might be enough to persuade people to choose to move outside, away from the computer, and leave their humanoid robot to plough the digital fields on their behalf.

“…I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the line to another man similarly placed at the opposite extremity, and all this effected by a simple act of volition on the part of the sender of the message. I began to think of genii, sylphs, gnomes, in short, of all the ministers of the occult sciences, until I laughed aloud at the freaks of my own imagination. Now, it never occurred to me to wish for a nearer inspection of these large insects, with their long black claws, for I always feared to find under their stone wings some little human genius fagged to death with cabals, factions, and government intrigues. But one fine day I learned that the mover of this telegraph was only a poor wretch, hired for twelve hundred francs a year, and employed all day, not in studying the heavens like an astronomer, or in gazing on the water like an angler, or even in enjoying the privilege of observing the country around him, but all his monotonous life was passed in watching his white-bellied, black-clawed fellow insect, four or five leagues distant from him. At length I felt a desire to study this living chrysalis more closely, and to endeavor to understand the secret part played by these insect-actors when they occupy themselves simply with pulling different pieces of string.”

“And are you going there?”

“I am.”

“What telegraph do you intend visiting? that of the home department, or of the observatory?”

“Oh, no; I should find there people who would force me to understand things of which I would prefer to remain ignorant, and who would try to explain to me, in spite of myself, a mystery which even they do not understand. Ma foi, I should wish to keep my illusions concerning insects unimpaired; it is quite enough to have those dissipated which I had formed of my fellow-creatures. I shall, therefore, not visit either of these telegraphs, but one in the open country where I shall find a good-natured simpleton, who knows no more than the machine he is employed to work.”

“You are a singular man,” said Villefort.

Later, in a moment of pre-postmodern clarity, the Count strikes at something fundamental in the relationship between technology and meaning: “The moment I understand it there will no longer exist a telegraph for me; it will be nothing more than a sign from M. Duchatel, or from M. Montalivet, transmitted to the prefect of Bayonne, mystified by two Greek words, tele, graphein.”

It turns out he has a sufficient grasp of the mechanisms in operation to exploit a security weakness in the network through social engineering, using money and charisma to misdirect a vital packet of information upon which a financial empire rests – a “third-rate fortune”, unusually susceptible to such accidents:

“I make three assortments in fortune—first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate fortunes. I call those first-rate which are composed of treasures one possesses under one’s hand, such as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures and property form a total of about a hundred millions; I call those second-rate fortunes, that are gained by manufacturing enterprises, joint-stock companies, viceroyalties, and principalities, not drawing more than 1,500,000 francs, the whole forming a capital of about fifty millions; finally, I call those third-rate fortunes, which are composed of a fluctuating capital, dependent upon the will of others, or upon chances which a bankruptcy involves or a false telegram shakes, such as banks, speculations of the day—in fact, all operations under the influence of greater or less mischances, the whole bringing in a real or fictitious capital of about fifteen millions. I think this is about your position, is it not?”

“Confound it, yes!” replied Danglars.

I had the impression that these fortunes earned the scorn of the Count not for their vulnerability to the sort of events that get called “black swans” today, but for their fictitious nature, for being “like the locomotive on a railway, the size of which is magnified by the smoke and steam surrounding it”. There are lots of concerns I’m used to imagining as being particularly of our time by virtue of their technological or complex nature, but the little thrill I get when I see them reflected in a book written 150 years ago reminds me that “of our time” covers a longer period than I expect.

Jesse Schell should know better, actually: his book on game design is a fabulously sensitive journey through the complex and ephemeral things that make a game a game. Maybe I misunderstood his talk. But the thing that no-one’s saying, out of all the people who know better, is that games that depend solely on accumulating points are rubbish games. And there are lots of great games, games that inspire and transport, games that show you a different way of experiencing the world, that have nothing whatever to do with points. Points are for people with no imagination.

This is part of a wider tendency for people to overgeneralise when they talk about games, to take one part of it for the whole domain, to imagine that the part that grabs their attention most readily is the defining part. For a while now I’ve been talking and working with people in education who have an interest in games, usually because they see the way players devote their attention and focus to them and imagine that presenting their learning content in a game-like way will lead to that level of engagement being replicated. Frequently, it becomes apparent after a few minutes conversation that they think the game lives in the technology, and that as long as a screenshot looks game-y it’ll magically engage their students. They’re normally wrong, obviously, having never considered the structure of the experience, the careful thought that game designers (good ones) put in to keeping the level of challenge appropriate, or any of the other things that make games so much more than a mode of presentation. People who believe that assigning points to actions make an activity a game are making as large an error.

There are a few sources I can think of for the mistake. Firstly, it’s unavoidably true that points are frequently found in games, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they must be an important feature of games. Points are found in most early games, and when you’re working with a system as simple and limited as those early games, points are a pretty good reflection of what’s going on. There are only a few things to do, and usually one clear aim, and it’s easy to mimic a narrative by coding a repetitive mechanic, tweaking the difficulty and using points to provide a temporal structure (no points = “the beginning of time”, some points = “later”). Certainly there’s no room in a Pac-Man or Space Invaders cabinet for different maps, or new challenges. Points are good for keeping track of simple things, and when you don’t have many complex things they do fine. It’s noticeable, though, that there are fewer games released now that have the accumulation of points as a central mechanic.

The second root that springs to mind is the construction “to game”, in the sense of someone “gaming the system”. Huizinga offers a fascinating exploration of the etymology of play-related words like “game” in Homo Ludens, which makes clear that these words have a complex lineage, and the long history and central importance of our oldest parts of language can lead to misleading similarities. In short, where attributes are ranked numerically, people work to make themsleves appear higher in the ranking through actions that might not be what was being assessed. That is, they maniuplate their score: they game the system, in English. But, although this sense of “game” is related to the sense of “structured playful activity” via the card-tables and stock markets of renaissance Europe, it doesn’t actually mean the same thing. I have an idea that the association of this sense with scores, tables of achievement, ranking and so on makes it easier for people to elide the distinction and think they’re using the same word. But they aren’t, and a system that can be gamed is not necessarily a game. Metaphor is slippery, and hard to keep track of, and here I think it’s misled some people.

The third factor that occurs to me is our deep-rooted compulsive behaviour. People are good at behaving repetitively in search of some kind of chemical reward, whether it’s hammering mistakenly at a traffic-crossing button, or checking email again and again. Game designers are well-aware of this, of course, and make regular use of the principles of irregular reward that keep lab rats pressing buttons and hoping for sugared water: will there be a fuel dump there? Should I try walking into that wall? Using this sort of primal psychology in the service of the wider game seems more justifiable to me, somehow, than basing an entire game round it.

So none of these are so very important when considering actual games. What’s worrying, what makes it so vital that we clear this up now before it gets out of hand, is that there seems to be a wider enthusiasm for turning a lot of our online gardening into point-accumulation opportunities. People have noticed Xbox achievements; we’re familiar with the race to accumulate friends or followers on new online network tools; prototypical gaming forays into new forms of media (the first Facebook, or GPS, or AR games) tend to use the simplest possible game mechanics in the proof-of-concept stage. These seem to help to convince people of the supposedly increasingly playful nature of society, proof that games have won and that in the near future all our interactions will earn points. And it’s this that’s so worrying, this idea that it’s right our actions in the world should be quantified so thoroughly.

Play is dangerous and subversive. It’s a frivolous, unproductive, trivial waste of resources: these attitudes have been around for a long time (though perhaps not as long as play has). But the last hundred years of industrialisation and standardisation have made it even harder for activity that appears meaningless to be condoned, more difficult to sanction behaviour that seems not to be directed towards a particular goal, more important that effort be directed towards a clearly-defined outcome with economic value. Numbers are a big part of this. Nothing is usable, no information is meaningful, nothing can be recognised or acknowledged without it being quantifiable. Turning human interactions into opportunities to amass scores is just an extension of this way of thinking: ultimately, quantifying our relationships with people, or our driving habits, is something that serves advertisers much more than it serves us. It might be true that we’re finding more ways to award points for more of our activity, but this doesn’t mean that society is becoming more playful. It means that play is becoming more socialised.

Seeing the accumulation of points as the central, defining characteristic of games means we’ve taken the worst bits of games, the parts that we’ve nearly grown out of, the features that speak to the least human and most animal parts of us, and I don’t think we should do that. Computer games originally used points because they had to: with limited memory and little experience in designing games, it made sense to use points. Later, points were a way to reflect progress in a wider narrative, a way of quantifying progress that acted in the service of something larger. Now, it’s possible to design games that offer reward and track achievement through more subtle means than numbers. Chasing numbers is dehumanising and humiliating. Now computers have grown out of having to use scores to track our progress, shouldn’t we?

I’ve read Will Davies’ potlatch for a while, and always enjoyed his writing and the chance to engage with domains he knows much more about than I do. Catching up recently I enjoyed his reaction to the planned Westfield Mk II shopping centre, and the developers’ efforts to “harness that edgy, eclectic east London feel” through giving the artists and independent producers perceived as responsible for that edginess a central role in designing and filling the shopping centre. His piece highlights the absurdity of a mall co-opting the “messy, racially mixed, polluted, dangerous city street”, after a bit of a scoff at the surreality of putting Hackney bohemians next to Nandos. I enjoyed it: I recognised a shared response in his searching for ways to explain or understand the collision between mainstream corporate lifestyle provisioning and the real world.

But the things that seem to give rise to such tensions of authenticity and what looks like the co-opting of the ‘underground’ (or least a less visible) economy aren’t peculiar to Britain. When I arrived in Singapore from the UK, it took me a long time to understand that there was no irony or contradiction in having edgy independent outlets based in malls owned by pan-Asian conglomerates, except that generated by my own Eurocentric ideas about the correct places to situate particular ways of selling things. From the tone of the piece, Will might be surprised to learn (as I was) that there are plenty of hip young things here who “dream of one day draping antique suits and second hand books across the window of their own glass box”, and around Orchard Road it wouldn’t take you too long to find a pastiche of “anti-corporate urbanism”. I’m writing this in an educational establishment which has stalls available in the public foyer for those students who want to become ‘youthepreneurs’: perhaps that’s some indication that here the imaginary line between ‘real’ and ‘commercial’, the distinction between authentically hip and tragically imitative is blurred in ways that seem contradictory to European sensibilities. (Perhaps it never really existed – perhaps it was just us being embarassed about being in trade.)

Regardless, there’s a kind of honesty to the way ‘subculture’ is sold in airconditioned malls here that I missed when I lived in Dalston six years ago. The bus along the Kingsland Road to Liverpool Street took me past any number of independent shops working hard to avoid the impression that anything inside was associated with anything as crass and mainstream as commerce. The shops in the Cathay have copied their anti-shopping presentation, but by living inside a mall there’s no deceit or pretence. They have nice things and will exchange them for your money. That seems more authentic an approach than pretending your edgy east London isn’t lifted from an incomplete impression of New York in the seventies, or trying to pass Hoxton off as a sort of new media version of Berlin.

This isn’t to contradict or challenge Will, really, just to note that the notions of public space and urbanity that operate in his discussion seem tightly coupled to a particular place, and that the militia marshalled at the head of the piece are out of their jurisdiction in these parts. Globalisation might happen everywhere, but the frames used to understand it are always local.

(Related: I enjoyed this interesting paper on one of Singapore’s first malls: Chii, Wong Yunn and Lin, Tan Kar (2004) ‘Emergence of a cosmopolitan space for culture and consumption: the new world amusement park-Singapore (1923-70) in the inter-war years’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 5:2, 279 — 304)

Exploring links between music and mathematics in a networked mobile system

This project would develop software capable of analysing the positions of a group of learners relative to each other and streaming music generated computationally using the qualities of the group’s shape back to each learner, allowing members of the group to receive auditory feedback on the shape of the group, and to manipulate the audio stream through positioning their bodies differently in space.

For example, five learners, each with a mobile device capable of broadcasting its location (through GPS, network triangulation or similar), might be the vertices of a five-sided polygon, as imagined from above. Qualities of this shape – the interior angles, the length of the sides, the regularity of the shape, the surface area it covers, the length of time the shape has persisted – could map to musical features – dynamics, frequency range, degree of polyphony, range of instruments, different thematic material, degree of harmony – that could be used by software in generating a musical response.

The software would be designed to enable the precise nature of the correspondence between geometric quality and musical feature to be set by users themselves, allowing learners and teachers to explore the connections between the shapes made in space and the ways they can be analysed to an appropriate degree of complexity, and to represent the relationships between shape and harmony in the way they feel is most appropriate. Regular shapes might lead to more harmonious music; shapes sustained for a longer period might be louder than those that persist only briefly; serendipitous figures might be rewarded with specially-chosen vocal samples; learners might be guided towards target shapes through more attractive or moving musical forms; basic musical rules might be used to chart the stochastic movements of students travelling home, producing auditory geographies of familiar territories: a school song might be written by the movements of a victorious sports team during their final match.

The pedagogic value of this system might lie primarily in the capacity for supporting cross-curricular exploration, the participatory design of learning activities by learners themselves and the opportunities it presents for learning across age groups, with more able or older students preparing geo-acoustic systems for younger students to experience, or technologically more fluent students realising other students’ ideas about the relationships between shape and music.

Additionally, from a research perspective, the embodied nature of learners’ interactions within the geo-acoustic system is modally distinct from more usual forms of interaction with these subjects and presents an interesting and novel set of questions around the ways in which intellectual understanding relates to physical bodies, as well as being an opportunity to foreground current issues in education debates, not least perhaps the opportunity to explore more rigorously popular notions of “kinaesthetic intelligence” and to promote physical activity within an educational context. The nature of the activities designed by teachers and learners might well resonate with current interest in the potential educational value of pervasive and augmented reality gaming.

Despite this interdisciplinary focus, there are a number of traditional subject areas addressed in the development and use of such software. The following list is indicative rather than comprehensive.

• Geometry — understanding the ways in which practical geometry abstracts shape from the physical world and the language mathematicians use to describe geometric shapes and relationships
• Acoustic theory — models of synthesis, tone and timbre
• Music — composition, generative approaches to music creation, music theory
• Computer science — understanding networks, representing and manipulating variables using programming languages
• Psychology of perception — making sense of the world through auditory cues, proprioception and mental schemata
• History of science — Pythogarean notions of order and harmony, and how far these relate to current ideas about the way we understand the natural world to be ordered

Additionally, exploring the possible activities that this software might support could lead to explorations of the ways in which information can be presented through sound (sonification) and the various groups in society who might find this approach to sharing information about their environment beneficial, as well as supporting conversations about sound design in media, noise pollution, the ethics of location-aware software and the ways in which people’s individual actions contribute to larger effects.

This is just a reminder to myself to consider how we deal with probability and risk in a national conversation that refuses to acknowledge chance without responsibility: the things Beck talks about in his risk society work, but also the impossibility of talking about and accepting outcomes in which people are seen to suffer.

She also seemed to think that men tell their womenfolk whether or not they can go to work, but that is probably a separate post.

Like Opera, the homepage has nine slots in it, for screenshots of pages you find useful so you can click on them and get going. I like it in Opera, and thought quite hard about which sites I wanted to include (mail and twitter, obviously, and this blog, and work webmail, and a couple of other things). But in Chrome I don’t think I have that choice: it looks at my history and decides which ones I like most.

And as a result I’ve noticed that I spend less time on trivial or just plain uncool sites, in case someone sees my homepage and thinks that what I like. I’m sure that over time my “most visited” will be a genuine reflection of the sites that are most useful to me. But in the meantime, I’m a bit disturbed to find how easily I regulate my behaviour if I think other people will see it.

If you ask to see my updates on Twitter, and I don’t know you as a friend in real life yet, then I probably won’t approve your request. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure you’re really nice. But for me Twitter has always been about friends I know, not work or celebrity stalking or accumulating vast numbers of webfriends or selling magazines. And I’m not making the mistake I did with other social networks, where I let other people dictate how I used them.

Also, I reserve the right to break that rule and to apply it inconsistently.

Also, this article describing Twitter as your house is a good read.

He impressed me, this man who believed things I’m used to hearing mocked, and although I didn’t feel impelled to join him, nor alter my belief that harking after people who have left isn’t healthy, for them or you, I still couldn’t articulate my own beliefs with a confidence equal to his: when asked if I believe in eternity, I could only muster a mealy-mouthed sophistry to the effect that I believed in infinity. I was impressed not by his ontological views but by his lack of evangelical zeal, and his quiet but firm belief in the importance of being master of your own mind and subject to no group’s insistence on a particular way of thinking. “I believe in freedom of mind”, he said, and so, I thought, do I, but only one of us has the courage to test it.

Of course, freedom of mind is a flag under which a motley crew might fly, and I excused myself once he began to explain that Darwin was wrong, not wanting to hear anything which might temper my fine opinion of his polite and cogent way of talking. But he lacked the shine and sparkle of the zealot: his grey hair was neat but not strict, his manner assured, his whole demeanour lacking the excessive normality of someone trying to convert. I don’t know what he’ll experience tomorrow, but if he hears that his mum’s doing ok, then I don’t see how that can be censured, and I hope he hears she’s well.

Earlier today I met a man who has venture capital for colonising the moon. My references may be a little adrift.