Article

Pins And Needles Of The Brain

As you may be aware, I’ve gotten to be very good at Wii Sports Tennis. My rating at the main game is now so high (about 2200) that the line representing my progress breaks free from the top of the graph and is beginning to underline the title at the top of the screen. It’s so un-challenging to play computers (and most humans I’ve played) now that I instead started playing the "Targets" training game, where you have to bounce a ball off targets appearing on a fragile wall, where I’ve now got a top score of 84 targets (I got my platinum medal some time back). As you can probably imagine, I’ve been looking for a new challenge.

Last night, I found it. I’ve set myself up two new characters – one left-handed, one right – and, holding two Wiimotes (one in each hand) I play a co-operative doubles game with myself. Controlling two players on the same side with different handedness suddenly makes the game more challenging again: I’m not ambidextrous, and the act of playing as if I am makes the inside of my head tingle in an unusual and curious way.

It has it’s advantages, to play like this: people who’ve played the conventional single-player game, controlling two clones using one Wiimote, will know of the frustration caused when trying to swing for the ball with one of your players cripples your ability to hit it effectively with the other (who’s still recovering from the last swing which both players took simultaneously), and it doesn’t take long before you start taking braver, chancier shots, of the kind that you typically only do when you’re working co-operatively with another human player on your side. Nonetheless, it’s very challenging to bridge the gaps in your hard-wired "handedness" and get the same kind of dexterity out of your left hand as out of your right.

I find myself missing more shots with my left hand, but I’m getting better. My two new players for "two-handed" play are half-way to a "Pro" rating, and they’ve only lost one match so far (the first match I’ve lost at all in a long, long time). It looks like I’ve found a new challenge.

Further Upcoming Events For Aberites

So what’s happening this week?

Tuesday, 7pm (tonight) – the latest episode of Heroes, after it’s hiatus, has broadcast, and I’ve got a nice HDTV copy of it. Want to get together and see it? It’s just the one episodes, but if folks feel that way inclined, we might drift into a Jeramiah episode or two thereafter… unless you’ve got revision to do…
Wednesday, 7pm – Red Black Dwarf Adder Night II – we’ll be watching the second series of Red Dwarf and finishing the first series of Blackadder. We’re going to be keeping a mighy pace of two a week with Red Black Dwarf Adder Night in order to ensure we get though every episode of both TV series by the end of term (especially for those of you that are students!).
Saturday, 8pm – Troma Night CLXXIV – the usual early start for those who want to see Doctor Who, before we watch Falling Down (which, owing to a tied vote and a coin toss, we didn’t see last Troma Night), a short surprise film I’ll be providing, and whatever else we can think of.
Sunday, 8:30am – as mentioned last week, we’ll be leaving nice and early for our Oakwood Theme Park and Crystal Maze Cyberdrome trip.

Usual deal. Hope to see you there.

Who Brought The Weather?

A fortnight of glorious weather, and the very moment that the students return and term starts again, it begins to rain. Did somebody forget to leave the rainclouds at home with mum and dad?

Subscribe To Scatmania

This post was written in 2007. There’s more up-to-date information about how to subscribe!

Subscribe By E-Mail

One way to subscribe to the Scatmania blog and be informed whenever a new post is made is by e-mail. Give me your e-mail address and you’ll get copies of blog articles in your inbox soon after they’re published.

Subscribe By XML Feed

Perhaps the best way to subscribe to Scatmania is by XML feeds. You may have heard them called RSS feeds. Feeds can be picked up by a special program called an RSS reader – you might even have one built into your web browser! Here are the addresses for the Scatmania Blog feeds:

Atom feed at https://danq.me/feed/atom
RSS 2.0 feed at https://danq.me/feed/rss2

No Right To Complain

There are lots of good arguments as to why an individual should vote: perhaps I’ll write about some of those later, and talk about my own personal experience of the system. In this blog post, instead, I’m going to talk about a very bed argument for voting. It’s a very popular argument I’ve heard used by a great number of people who are in favour of compulsary (either at the legal level or just as a social pressure) voting. It’s a very popular argument, but it’s also a very weak argument. It goes something along the lines of this:

"If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain."

Over the remainder of this article, I’ll be taking apart this argument. To help me with the examples, I’ll be using a fictional character called John Voter. John is a resident of the United Kingdom, or a similar Western democracy. His political views are pretty moderate, and he isn’t a member of any particular party, but he’s open to new ideas and arguments: simply put, he’s the ultimate floating voter.

No One Candidate

Suppose the electorate is completely split between the candidates – every candidate gets exactly the same number of votes: there is only one ballot paper left to count, and it’s John’s. It’s a highly unfeasible scenario, but it serves for our purposes. In this scenario, John is responsible for choosing which candidate wins the election. This seems to some like an ideal oppertunity for many voters – a chance to choose exactly which candidate is elected – but not to John. You see, John can’t decide who to vote for. He likes the Red Party candidate’s promises of tax cuts, but he doesn’t approve of their foreign policies. Meanwhile, the Blue Party would increase taxes, but have foreign policies that he prefers. No single candidate is suited to John’s opinion. In the end, he flips a coin and votes for one of these two candidates.

Does John have a right to complain? He alone explicitly chose which candidate was elected, but he doesn’t approve of everything they’re going to do in their term. Does he have a right to criticise the candidate who he put in office. Think carefully before you answer.

If you answer no, then you’re saying that even if you do vote, you have no right to complain if your candidate is elected. It doesn’t actually matter whether or not John’s vote "makes the difference." More likely, he’s part of a larger group of people (all of the people who cast their vote the same way as him) who elected somebody who didn’t perfectly reflect their views, but reflected them more closely than any of the other candidates did.

More likely you answered yes; in this situation, where John singly "chooses" the politician who represents him, he still has a right to complain (you might even think that he has more right). So let’s take a different example. This one’s less hypothetical.

The votes are likely to be unevenly split amongst the candidates, just like a real election. There are candidates who will get only a few hundred votes, and there are candidates who will get tens of thousands. John still doesn’t know who to vote for, but – in this more realistic scenario – his vote will almost certainly not make a difference to which candidate is elected (note that I didn’t say that his vote will make no difference – perhaps I’ll look at arguments relating to whether votes "count" in a future blog post). Perhaps his chosen candidate will get in, or perhaps they won’t. Does he still have a right to complain?

Your answer is probably yes. Yes, John has every right to complain that his views are not being reflected, because no matter who he votes for – in fact, no matter who wins! – he will not be completely satisfied, because no politician is able to completely satisfy the things he cares about. He has chosen (either by concious decision or by flipping a coin, as before) to align himself with one of several viewpoints, neither of which he wholeheartedly agrees with. It doesn’t matter if he votes for one of the two tens-of-thousands-of-votes candidates in his constituancy, or if he votes for one of the less-popular candidates… the candidate that is elected remains the same (remember: I’m still not saying his vote doesn’t count). He’s still able, and probably feels the need, to complain about his elected representative.

So what’s the difference if he puts a blank ballot paper into the box? He was equally unhappy with all of the viable candidates anyway. And if he’s going to do that, he might as well not even bother going to the polling station, and make better use of his own time – he could draft a letter to be sent to the winning candidate, outlining his views, or he could write a blog post about why he isn’t voting, or he could go out with his mates for a pint. They’re all valid uses for his time (it is, after all, his time), and the net result is still the same as if he voted: a candidate he doesn’t 100% care for is elected, and he feels the need to complain about it.

And what right does anybody have to try to take away somebody’s right to complain. Complaining, otherwise known as "free speech," is a more important right than the right to vote. When you speak, you can influence people, whether they’re the unwashed masses or the people in power. When you vote, all you do is align yourself with somebody who represents less of the ideals you disagree with than any of the (limited) alternatives.

To say "if you don’t vote, you’ve got no right to complain," says a lot about the people who say it, though. When people say those words, what they’re actually implying that that they feel your right to complain should be dependent upon your duty to vote. On a personal level, they’re saying, "I feel that mandatory voting is important, and I plan to socially stigmatise you – by not listening to your complaints – as a way to try to coerce you into voting."

It’s sad that some people feel that the act of voting is more important than thinking about politics; that it’s more important for you to make an uninformed vote than it is for you to think about the changes you actually want to see, and help bring them about. It’s sad that everybody who "doesn’t vote" – from the man who just can’t be bothered and doesn’t care what happens (more on this in another post, as well, I think) to the anarchist who doesn’t want to support the system he opposes – gets lumped into a group of "apathetic voters."

The Personal Bit

Personally, I’ve very rarely felt the need to nominate a particular candidate as a preference over the others: most elections, I spoil a ballot, because no single candidate has a clear lead in my mind. I do, however, write to (well, usually e-mail and fax these days) politicians from time to time to try to persuade them of the validity of my viewpoints. I’d be more likely to vote in more elections if we had a better electoral system, such as STV. I’m not a non-voter (nor am I politically apathetic), I’m just, like John, unimpressed by most of the choices in most of the elections I participate in. The Liberal Democrats almost won my vote in the upcoming Welsh Assembly elections, but I challenged a representative of them on a couple of key issues I feel strongly about, and they seem to be adamant that they’re right (and I feel otherwise). It doesn’t look likely that I’ll find a candidate that reflects how I feel significantly better than any other, so instead of voting for a candidate, I’ll write a few letters (to whoever wins).

In the long run, if the system works, and politicians are at least slightly in it for the purpose of representing the views of their citizens, I’m having more of an effect than your average voter. If the system doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter anyway.

If I get the time, I’ll be talking about some of the (better) arguments for reasons to vote over the next couple of weeks. Don’t forget, those of you in Wales, Welsh Assembly polling day is May 3rd.

The Best Thing About Being My Age

Please excuse the title, which feels at least a little like it could have been the proposed title for a creative writing project for a group of 7-year-olds, but it feels like the best title for the job. It’s not, I know, but it’s my blog and I don’t care. I just wanted to share with you one of the single worst things about being a child (and equally, perhaps more so, a young adult) that I mostly now get to look back on.

That thing – the thing which thankfully gets better with time – is the patronising cynicism of your elders. Over the course of my life, I’ve made a great number of decisions: some of which I’m happy with, and some of which I’m not – that’s the nature and the beauty of life. And, of course, others may approve or disapprove of my decisions. That’s fine too.

The problem comes when people try to use their age to invalidate your independence. How often have you heard a parent or grandparent or teacher imply that a younger person is "just going through a phase," or that, perhaps most critically of all, "they’ll see" when they’re older: the implication being that they will see that they were wrong when they were younger and remember the smug faces of their mentors.

I’ve made a great number of decisions, and, because I’m a rather unusual individual, some of these have been unusual decisions. Not all of my plans have unfolded as I’d expected, and many of my ideas have changed, but some haven’t. I’d love to be able to more clearly remember every single person who implied that by now I’d have changed my mind, and slowly and calmly explain what belittling twats they were. Of course, it doesn’t take too great an age before you start forgetting things like that, and it’s all a bit theoretical… but I’d love to be able to better announce, "Yes, I’m still me: surprised?"

My single favourite example – because it’s trivial, "tame," and easy to debate, as well as being a genuinely good example – is my decision not to marry, which will come up again in a blog entry in the near future, I suspect. Allow me to elaborate:

This decision is based on a great many things: that it provides me with no benefits I don’t seem to be able to achieve by better means, that it has societal implications that I disagree with, and that I feel that whatever benefits it could conceivably get me would be given to me in an example of unfair positive disrcimination, which I object to. Plus a million others (if you’re looking to debate the point with me, catch me in person or wait until a blog post more specifically on the subject). Now this isn’t a new revelation for me: I’ve been sticking to my guns on this point for about a decade now, and I’m not showing any signs of changing my stance… I have no objection to people disagreeing with me: in fact, when I hold an off-the-beaten-track viewpoint like this one, I ought to expect it. But as a young adult, the number of times I was told that "I’d grow out of that," "I’d change my mind someday," or, worst of all, "I’d fall in love with somebody, then I’d see," – like there’s some kind of magical link between love and marriage that appears in your mind exactly ten years after your balls drop – goes beyond my ability to recount.

Why do people do this? Statistically speaking, adults who say these things are usually right: they’re speaking from experience, albeit their own experience, and they’re not stupid. But that’s not an excuse to tell anybody, and especially a child, that their feelings are invalid or somehow wrong because they will probably be changed by time. Those younger than you may lack experience, but that doesn’t make their opinions wrong – just different.

I got lucky. My parents were always brilliant at nurturing and helping me through anything I felt was right… even the decisions which in hindsight make me cringe or were blatantly just anti-conformism for anti-conformism’s sake (and the huge area of crossover between the two). I’ve spoken to many, many people who had a far more upsetting experience in this area than I did, and even those whose growth as an individual, I expect, was crippled by the blind criticism of their parents.

The best thing about being my age is that almost nobody tries to tell me I’m wrong in my opinions based on their age and experience, under the implication that I will in time see my mistake. The exception, of course, is the devoutly religious, who still insist that "after death" I’ll understand that they were right.

They’ll see.

Razburgers

Rory‘s making some more of his delicious-looking all-steak burgers for tomorrow’s barbeque. If you want one (and are willing to pay for the mince!) drop him a comment on his blog.

This evening, I kicked off with a few hobbies I’ve neglected lately, starting brewing some wine and juggling some fire on the beach. It’s amazing how quickly you lose the fitness to juggle clubs effectively if you don’t do it for a year or two. Must get more practice.

Castle Master Meets Dan In Bed

Time for another episode of Dan’s bizarre dreams. Here’s last night’s:

At least to begin with, the whole dream was animated like an early 3D computer game – with a certain Castle Master feel to it – but became less and less like a game as the story went on. I was in some kind of tower in which some friends and I were trying to gain access to the room at the top, which was locked. The friends – who I hadn’t gone so far as to assign identities to at the time – stayed on the ground floor, while I ran around the upper floors trying to solve the puzzle that would open the door. They were generally useless, needing me to run ahead and sort out the route before they’d go anywhere. I needed to flip the correct combination of switches, hidden on different floors, to turn a set of red lights to green which would indicate that the door on the top floor could be opened. I was making good progress at working out what I needed to do, but was having some difficulty in finding all of the switches.

Having gotten all but one, I found myself in the (more realistic looking-and-feeling) ground floor again, and Helen G (turns out she was one of the folks I’d left at the bottom) indicated that the final switch would be on the roof, and pointed out a ladder that went through the ceiling, up the side of the tower, and onto a platform at the top. There was one of those silly ladder guards at the bottom in an attempt to make the ladder inaccessible, but I was able to climb up the adjacent wall in order to get above it, and began to climb.

Outside, it was very windy and beginning to rain, and it was difficult to keep hold of the ladder as I climbed up to the platform at the top. Struggling across the platform, I discovered that to trigger the last switch, I had to fill a bucket with water that would pull against a pulley (perhaps I’ve been watching too much Crystal Maze?). In any case, I found a system of pipes and opened the appropriate valves. I turned a “wrong one” as well, it seems, because water started to pour from pipes above me, too. I huddled as best I could to avoid getting soaked and to cling on to the tower while I waited for the bucket to fill, and that’s when I woke up.

Pretty structured, as far as my dreams go.

Upcoming Events For Aberites

Here’s a round-up of some of the things we expect to be doing (and we hope you’ll consider joining us for) in the near future. Yes, there’ll undoubtedly be extra stuff that isn’t mentioned here. You know what to do:

Wednesday, 7pm (tonight) – Jeramiah Night: post-apocalytpic fun. BYOB, although there’s still about half a bottle of Bryn‘s abandoned vodka left if anybody wants some.
Friday, 6pm – weather-permitting, bonfire and barbeque on North Beach to welcome Ele, Penny, Sarah (and anybody else who’s getting back to Aber late this week after an Easter elsewhere) back into town. A chance to eat charcoal, drink warm beer, and catch-up on the events of Easter.
Saturday, 8pm – Troma Night CLXXIII – starting at the even-earlier-than-usual time (pay attention!) of 6:35pm, at The Cottage, for those who want to see Doctor Who, then kicking off with a couple more educational episodes of Look Around You before beginning our main features: Falling Down, Howl’s Moving Castle (especially for those of us who haven’t seen it), and – if people can stomach it – perhaps an MST3K. Open for debate.
Sunday, 7pm – Red Black Dwarf Adder Night – the first ever Red Black Dwarf Adder Night, which will consist of alternative episodes (or blocks of episodes) from both Red Dwarf and Blackadder, two stunning bits of British comedy. We’ll be having one or two Red Black Dwarf Adder Nights a week to ensure we get through all eight series (plus some extras) of Red Dwarf and all four series (plus some one-offs) of Blackadder before term ends, for those of you who are students and who won’t be around over summer. Should be a great night.
Saturday 28th, 8pm (a week on Saturday) – Troma Night CLXXIV – as usual. Added here for completeness because I’d feel wrong writing about something the day after without tipping my hat to Troma Night… even though there are no plans for what to watch yet.
Sunday 29th, 7:30am (a week on Sunday – early) – this is the confirmed final date for the combined Oakwood Theme Park trip / Rory‘s birthday celebrations. Gather at The Cottage at 8:05am or the railway station (where there’s sufficient car parking space for multiple drivers) at 8:20am for seat allocation and a quick clarification of driving directions. Attendees are expected to negotiate for seats before appearing – we’ve got room for a few in Claire‘s car, and we’re aware that Jimmy‘s probably driving, ditto Gareth (although we’re not sure if he’s travelling from Aber or elsewhere).
We’ll be starting the day at Oakwood by entering a couple of teams into the Crystal Maze Cyberdrome before entering the theme park itself. Once I’ve got estimates of how many people are coming, I’ll advise the Cyberdrome and try to book places, although I anticipate it won’t be busy. You can buy tickets for the theme park from their web site and you get a discount for doing so – so please consider doing this. When budgeting, remember to offer to pay for your share of the petrol in the car you travel in.

That’s some of the upcoming events. Just because nothing’s listed for the intervening days doesn’t mean there’s nothing on – to the contrary, there’ll probably be another Red Black Dwarf Adder Night, a Stressed Eric Night, and maybe another Jeramiah Night stirred in there at some point. So you know.

BBQ, Says Rory

Weather permitting, there’ll be a barbeque tonight.

That is all.

BBQ Cancelled

With impending rain, tonight’s BBQ and fire is cancelled.

In other news, apologies to anybody who got a garbled text message from me last night. Orange fucked up.

Ready To Challenge The Crystal Maze?

Now I’ve got you excited with an interesting title, I’ll make you wait until I actually tell you what it’s about with the following announcement: beach fire and barbeque tomorrow evening; usual affair. Right, next…

A little while back, several of us, inspired by an idea of Pauls, discussed a special outing this month. Later, Rory independently came up with a similar plan. So, now, for everybody’s comment, here’s the proposals as they stand so far:

Event: Crystal Maze Cyberdrome / Oakwood Theme Park / Rory’s Birthday Party
Date: Rory proposes Saturday 28th April. I can’t make that, so I propose Sunday 29th April. We’ll let the mob decide.
Plan: We leave Aber in as many cars as we can muster at about 7:30am, arriving at Oakwood at about 9am. We enter several teams into the last remaining Crystal Maze Cyberdrome (£4.75 / head) and run around like looneys shouting "get the crystal" at each other, and then go to Oakwood Theme Park, Wales’ only theme park (£14.75 / head, but if we plan it right and bulk-book online we can potentially get 15% off by booking online) – it’s right next door. We ride some silly rides and get very wet.

Other dates: Another option would be to go on a weekday. As the date it likely to be outside of school termtime, going on a weekday can be expected to dramatically reduce the queuing time for the theme park’s attractions.

Other activities: There’s a discount on bowling when you buy Cyberdrome tickets. Especially if we’re going on a weekday and queues in the theme park won’t be problematic (and it’s only quite a small theme park), we could do even more stuff with out day, if we so wished.

Discuss.

40 Days On Facebook

I’ve been playing with Facebook for the last 40 days or so, to see if it’s any good. Here’s some of the things I’ve observed that I like (and don’t like) about it, followed by my conclusions:

Observations

In no particular order.

Nice. It’s a good platform for keeping up-to-date with your friends for the “littler things” that don’t really warrant blog entries, for helping you remember your friends’ contact details, birthdays, etc., for quickly sharing photos without too much hoo-hah, and so on.
Nice. It imports XML feeds, so you can integrate your Facebook presence with your blog or whatever else.
Nasty. It doesn’t export XML feeds! What is this, the middle ages? There’s a slight risk that some users may begin to use Facebook “notes” as substitute for blogging, and I and others who depend on RSS/Atom will end up not reading what they write as a result of it, but the notes system is pretty simplistic (as it should be) so it’s not terribly likely, at least for the time being.
Nasty. Searching for people is a little clunky: it could at least allow me to filter by country, or intelligently suggest people from my own country before showing me people in other countries.
Nice. Easy bulk-addition of friends from your address book. I’m an untrusting bugger, so I wouldn’t give them my webmail passwords (but I know others who have), but the CSV import tool, combined with a little scripting, quickly achieved very similar results, plus more.
Nice. Unlike many other social networking sites (and particularly the ridiculously bad myspace), it doesn’t allow arbitrary HTML to be splattered all over your profile page, so at least the user interface stays consistent and you’re not horribly vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks every time you use it.
Nice. Good reciprocal “friends” system (including a wealth of FOAF-like “how do you know this person” links that make for interesting exploring when you start looking through your circle of friends) and well-designed privacy options so user have a great deal of control over who sees what.
Nasty. On the other hand, some people still seem to treat it like myspace: trying to join the most groups, have the most friends, or whatever, as if it were some kind of popularity contest. This probably also extends to people with silly names. Thankfully, they’re pretty few and far between, and – at least in my experience – they don’t harass you with endless messages a-la myspace.
Nice. The ads (it’s mostly an ad-supported service) are sparse and discreet. No big flashing animGIFs, flash, or banners.
Nasty. I can see why they’ve done the “networks” thing, but it can get on your tits until you get the hang of it. Why can’t I be in an alumni network for Aberystwyth? Because I didn’t have a Facebook account when I was at Aberystwyth, apparently. Why couldn’t Matt join the original Troma Night group? Because it, like me, was in the Wales regional network (because I hadn’t specified otherwise when I created it, and he’s not in Wales, is he!).

Conclusions

It’s a nice little social networking platform. It suffers from a lack of subscribable output feeds, a very slight “myspace factor” amongst some of it’s users, and weak search tools. However, it does a remarkably good job of providing a secure environment in which to publish your up-to-date contact and other personal information to your friends, share photos, pass simple messages around, arrange events, and discover the links within your friendship groups. I’ve heard good things said about using it instead of Friends Reunited and similar services, for getting in touch with old friends, but I’m not interested in that – I just like to be able to keep in touch more easily with the friends I have.

I’m making the Facebook team aware of these comments (and gripes) and hopefully it’ll become even better. In the meantime: if you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend giving it a go: they’ve got a nice, ethical account closure policy if you decide it’s not for you. A 40-day test drive had me… not hooked like some people, but… contented and impressed nonetheless: something I genuinely didn’t expect.

The Seven-Year Itch

You know that famous photo of Marilyn Monroe – iconic of the golden years of the silver screen – trying not-too-hard to hold down her dress against the wind effects of a subway train passing underneath? Well, apparently the film it’s from is a romantic comedy called The Seven Year Itch (1955), which is based on a 1952 play of the same name. I haven’t seen the film, but there’s plenty of fascinating trivia about it on the IMDb page if you’re interested. But I wasn’t planning on writing much about the film (or the play) anyway.

The story is about a man (played by Tom Ewell) who works as a publisher, in the process of publishing a book called The Seven Year Itch, which claims that a significant proportion of men have affairs after seven years of marriage. While his wife and son are out of town, he meets a young woman (played by Monroe). In the play, he has an affair with her, while the (in some ways cleverer) film adaptation sees him merely play out fantasies in his mind as he gets to know her: these fantasies are fleshed out with justifications for his infidelity – he imagines his wife cheating on him, too, and this makes him more comfortable doing the same.

It’s just a story, but it’s one with a grounding in statistics that were being observed even then: that many relationships go through a point at which break-ups and infidelity are more common after about 7 years. A more recent study, published in Development Psychology, indicated that there is another significant point – at least, in contemporary marriages – at which relationships are likely to fail, at about the four year mark. If you draw a graph of the length of time that broken marriages last, there are significant peaks at the four and seven year marks. Less widely-published studies exist (often for the purpose of testing if this phenomenon applies to relationships that do not involve marriage), and generally get similar results. I haven’t seen anything that looked at homosexual relationships, but I’d be interested in such a study if anyone’s seen one.

Several researchers have looked for biological explanations: four years is about the right amount of time (perhaps a little more) that, if a woman was impregnated at the beginning and was breast-feeding the child, she’d be fertile again and potentially looking for a more attractive mate. Conversely, it’s about the right amount of time that a male can be sure that a genetic rival isn’t going to kill his child (or impregnate his female), and can move on. All of these (and many more) theories draw on things we believe we’ve learned about the behaviour of early human societies, which sadly doesn’t amount to much. The seven-year mark is harder to explain.

It’s all quite believable, though, once you exclude the speculation about the reasons for it and look at the statistics. Better yet, find some friends who’ve been in stable relationships for a long while, or who were in long-term relationships but then broke up, and find out the points at which things have been most difficult.

From personal experience: there has only been one point, so far, at which I wasn’t sure if Claire and I were likely to be able to maintain our relationship – shortly after we moved into The Place… and almost exactly four years since our relationship began. We had a particularly rough time of things, which we mostly blamed on the stress of moving house (didn’t get the same thing during the move to The Cottage, though) and various other complications in our lives (none of which caused the same kind of tensions when they repeated themselves, though). Perhaps it was just a combination of factors that gave us that "rough patch," or perhaps it’s something biochemical like the "four-year itch." Perhaps it’s partially that, and partially other things. I’m pretty sure Claire would tell a similar story about these particular couple of emotional months.

Claire and I’s relationship is fabulous now, and we’re actually "better at it," in my mind, than ever before (over the year since that troublesome period, we’ve learned a handful of great relationship maintenance and communication skills we’d not quite got fully worked-out beforehand, perhaps). It’s interesting, though, to look at that "four year" mark (give or take nine months or so) in other people’s relationships. I’ve spoken to a few, and while the line of questioning I’ve been using could be construed as "leading" and certainly wouldn’t pass as scientifically valid, it’s yeilded some interesting stories: some people tell tales of partners or partners of friends who cheated (or whose cheating become obvious) after about four years, or who went through a tough spot characterised by arguments or – more difficult still to deal with – a lack of communication. Others talk about break-ups at about that time, or about starting to them and their partner beginning to drift apart, looking for different things in their relationships.

I just thought it was quite interesting, and I wanted to share that thought with you. But if you’ve got any similar stories from your life or stories you’ve heard from others: let me know.

Dan, Inspired By Hippies, Gets Out Balls

Claire‘s dad and his wife visited us this long Easter weekend, and we took advantage of the stunning weather to do some of the usual touristy things that you only bother to do when friends or family come by – the cliff railway, the camera obscura, etc. – and so we ended up at the nearby Centre for Alternative Technology. The CAT, as it’s better-known to anybody who’s had to say it’s name more than once, has improved over recent years (I last went in 2002 with Claire; the summer we became “a couple”) and I was impressed to see many new exhibits.

Anyway, I’ve picked up a set of ecoballs (looking to buy? they’re cheaper elsewhere): they’re basically plastic balls with a spongy “ring”, filled with pellets of various minerals and surfactants. The idea is that you chuck the three of these (reusable up to 750 times, then refillable) balls into your washing machine instead of detergent and fabric softener, and wash at under 60°C. They’re advertised as being more ecologically-friendly than conventional detergents, but what attracted me to them was that they’re potentially cheaper (about 3p/wash, plus savings on skipping rinse cycles) and non-biological (biological detergents, while wonderful, have a habit of bringing me out in a rash).

Obviously I’ll let you know how they go – whether they’re worth getting – in about 1000 laundry cycles or so, although the BBC correspondent who used them last year might be more use. As far as the “Do they get stuff clean?” question goes, though, the answer would seem to be: yes. We baptised them last night with our bedclothes, and they came out wonderfully clean, although notably lacking that “clean clothes” smell we associate with the perfume of traditional detergents. If I can be bothered, I’ll do a couple of actual scientific tests, comparing washing a particular type of fabric with a selection of stains on it using normal detergents, ecoballs, and just water, and see how it goes. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with blog-based reviews of individual washes.