I love the Internet. The Internet is for expression. It's for contact. It's a collective unconscious, firstly of all the computers that are connected to it at any one time, and secondly of the minds of all the users of those computers.

Globalisation is not evil.

I begin to wonder whether the constant faint fizzing noise I can hear is not static inside the printer, as I had supposed, but is actually the sound of cathode rays gradually frying my brain.

Intellectual property is an outdated idea. Nobody has the right to control intellectual property on the Internet. Nobody owns it, nobody regulates, therefore nobody can or should regulate what happens on it. Feel free to use images and stuff from this site any way you wish.

No event has consequences. Each event stands alone in a sea of events and no event has more significance than any other. The lines of causation are so deeply entwined and involved with other, seemingly unrelated events, that no event can be said to have caused any other. What if, on September 10, a mad taxi driver had hit George W Bush's private car in a terrible crash, leaving no survivors?

The fizzing noise, thankfully, ceases when I switch off the printer.

Hit counters are unprofessional. It shouldn't matter how many people are visiting my site. What matters is the joy of creativity, the wonder and pleasure associated with having my own 20 Mb on the Web all to myself... or nearly all to myself, anyway.

How to win friends and influence people: Write a crappy self-help guide.

nothing makes any sense
but the thing that makes the most sense
is pain
- 2 am

I am in a kind of "flow" state following three intensive hours of emergency backup and rescue procedures. Apparently, Angelfire's "TN directory was resolved". The effect was that I lost many pages and images altogether, including a number of almost-irreplaceable ones. Oh, thank Bob I had hard copies of most of them. Now that they're all re-scanned, re-uploaded and/or re-written, all I want to do is hit Angelfire administration over the head with something large and orange for not warning me that this might happen. I've backed everything up exhaustively, including all the images (just you look at Total Cars for an idea of what a job that was)... my God, do you have any idea how wonderful it is to click on a link and find the page you were expecting?

Child prodigies really are more likely to be unstable adults. It's a physical thing.

All actions are taken out of self-interest. If I make some toast for my family, it's so they won't make loud irritating noises as a result of being hungry. If I give up my seat for an old lady on the train, it's so I won't risk being told off by the train guard. Even the most apparently selfless acts come right down to the ultimate, simple truth of "charity": It makes the giver feel good.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are a group that can rhyme "everything" with "mercury" while doing flamenco guitar.

We can never understand what it would be like to fly with wings attached to our bodies because we are ground-locked. We see objects as being in one of two states: "on the ground" or "not on the ground". Our view in this area is discrete. Birds, however, will have a continuous view, where "on the ground" is just one of many states they can be in. If I may attribute a bird with so much intelligence, they will think in numbers, in terms of how high off the ground they are. Their point of view is probably a lot more liquid than ours.

On the same train of thought, when Richard Feynman said "Nobody understands quantum mechanics", he was not just being pessimistic. I believe he meant that nobody can understand quantum mechanics, because the entitites involved are so small they are beyond our perceptions. We can only fully understand what we can perceive. We can perceive the equations and models we use to describe the quantum world, so we can understand those substitutes perfectly well.

As soon as anyone asks the question "What happened?" then the reality of the thing dissolves, leaving only various people's interpretations of what happened. To all intents and purposes there is no truth, just an averaging-out of the various flawed stories. I'm thinking of a murder scene.