The triangle book is here!

It's a real, proper, shiny book about triangles... as created by Badger and I, with help from the Head First team and my co-author Dawn Griffiths.

Very, very exciting:

And you can buy it here.

And then you too will know about triangles (other shapes also available) and I will earn about seven pence.

It is a very good feeling :)

And then it was done.

At 2.42 am I finished the first end-to-end draft of the climate change book.  It has been a little like birthing an elephant but I think it's because we've engaged and re-engaged with the content on so many levels, as well as developing what I think is a completely new format with Badger's wonderful left-page-right-brain illustrations.

Thank you to everybody who has read and chatted about ideas within the book - there's a lot I've bounced around on the blog as a way of getting myself going when I lost my confidence in my ability to write. It has been a key part of the process for me in many different ways.

Anyway, this week I need some readers.  It's going to a proofer / editor but what I also really need is a bunch of people to read all or some of it and let us know your thoughts.  Probably what I'll ask people to do is direct feedback to the proofer / editor (the cornish cowgirl) and then she can filter through it and protect my ego for you, so you don't have to worry and can just tell me the nice things ;)

Let me know if you're interested!

How long is the world's washing machine cycle?

We use an analogy in the climate change book about the washing machine of the concrete world. 

Until we throw our abstract ideas, hopes, dreams, plans and theories through a couple of wash-rinse-spins in the Real World we've really very little to judge them by, other than ethics.

Simple theories can produce real-time concrete feedback from which we learn quickly - children building block towers don't have to wait to find out whether their positioning of the next block is just right or just wrong.

But most of what we do as adults doesn't bring real-time feedback at all. The greater the impact of the decision the more likely its consequences will only be visible shortly before, or even after, our deaths.

What I find astounding is how dramatically our judgement, our felt-truth about whether something, or even someone, is good or bad, can change - without them making any new decisions. The city dealers and heads of our banks who until a few months ago were generally considered to be entitled to their fat salaries on account of the huge profits they were producing suddenly appear to be greedy, ignorant and foolish. They haven't done anything different or new, and if there was a 'tipping point' then it was simply the first visible crack which led us to look more closely at the real state of their affairs.

It has also become clear that while they were happy to personally make vast sums of money on profitable deals they were not prepared to lose vast sums of money when they didn't come up trumps.

I have no doubt that mums and dads of people high up in the banking industry felt proud of what their kids had achieved. Would you want to tell your neighbour your child was a stockbroker today?

To me, the most intriguing aspect of what the washing machine has spun for us recently is that 'we', in our hundreds of millions, could not bring ourselves to do the simple addition that revealed the house of cards before.

I am not unsympathetic at all to those whose jobs and homes are lost or in jeopardy, but home ownership and investment in business had become some sort of bizarre pyramid sales scheme in which most people were hoping for their slice of free pie, without really recognising the nonsense of it. They were prepared to be winners without really acknowledging that such gains require a balancing loss and the creation of losers too.

Looking around the UK today I think we're all losers - we've pumped our housing market up to a level where the only practical option for most families is for both parents to work full time. I have no concept of how single parents begin to approach buying a modest family home with a small garden. Never mind the social change of women in the workplace, the economic truth is that looking after our own children, whatever the gender of the carer, has become unrealistic. But don't worry, we've all made 100k of pretend money which we can't unlock without going back to renting or moving into a caravan.

And who has really profited, while houseprices spiralled and mortgages grew larger and larger? Oh - the same estate agents and bankers who kept forecasting houseprice growth! Goodness, what a co-incidence. I don't suppose they had any selfish interest in selling that concept did they?

What if the value of our homes was actually about right ten years ago? What if we agreed en masse that ethically a home should be a place to raise a family, live a life, be a citizen, not a financial investment? What if, in order to have a generation of children who can grow up with values about kinship, we had to not just sit back and watch house prices trickle down but actively engage in a discussion about what a home should cost in the UK such that an average family can afford to have at least one adult raise those kids?  What if we held our banking industry to account for their part in house price hysteria and instead of just bailing them out with cash directly, we provided that fluidity to them by paying off a chunk - proportionate to the disparity between the perceived value at sale and the ethical value we agree on - of every mortgage taken out in the last decade?  I don't have a mortgage... but I'd still vote for that to happen.

The truth of the concrete world is that we can only add value by adding value. Industries which don't add value can only ever be sustainable by taking a reasonable charge for the convenience of service, allowing those who add value to get on with adding value even more efficiently. Stockbrokers don't add value. Mortgage brokers don't add value. Estate agents don't add value. They are middle men, no different and somewhat less honest than folk selling fruit on a market stall. The idea that they should be rewarded for this as if they were brilliant surgeons, engineers, inventors or scientists - simply because their lemons are more expensive - is one of the capitalist felt-truths which I hope this washing machine cycle has scrubbed away.

A new kind of disappointment in our government

Disappointment in our leaders is inevitable. They obtain their status by claiming to believe x, y and z to be important, and when we fickle members of the population begin to reinterpret our world, and to see a, b and c as important instead, they are faced with some lose-lose choices:

Box 1) Admitting that they do not know as much about a, b and c as they did the old problems of x, y and z, and handing their privilege and power to someone else.

Box 2) Shifting their position on both x, y and z and a, b and c to reflect the new priorities which have emerged. We then publicly humiliate them for having performed a U-turn, the press characterise them as weak and confused and shortly afterwards they are forced to hand their privilege and power to someone else.

Box 3) Pretending that they don't agree with the shift in priorities and clinging to the ideas which afforded them their privilege in the first place, desperately defending the seriousness of the old problems and denying the validity of the new ones.

Nobody gets to be a politician by lacking confidence in their own 'I know better'ness, so inevitably our leaders respond to change - change which is simply a natural and unavoidable consequence of the experiment of democracy unfolding over time - by sticking with box number 3: I was right, I continue to be right, please listen to the scary things I have to say about what will happen if you don't wake up to how right I still am.

In the climate change / sociology book I'm just finishing (still) we call this "The Alpha Trap", and believe it is the source of the inevitable emergence of distance and disappointment between the leaders and the people, as well as many of the reckless and destructive actions they undertake on our behalf. 

The key to reducing the negative impact The Alpha Trap has would of course be to make it easier for our leaders to open box number 2, but "open minded leader reassesses position in the light of new information and further experience" doesn't make for much of a headline.

It would also hinge upon the recognition that all societies are simply a series of experiments. The unique aspect of a democracy is that the subjects of the experiments get to influence the design of the next experiment. The difficulty we face is that our biology drives us to assume certainty, particularly in the face of danger. 'Oh, I wonder if that might be a tiger...' is not the kind of thinking which keeps a species on the rise. So, we don't like to hear about experiments with education and health care, we like our leaders to tell us that they definitely know that the new plan they are proposing will be successful. Who is more to blame, the leader who lies about their confidence or the follower who only follows leaders who lie about their confidence?

And now, suddenly, I face an even greater source of disappointment in our leaders. One I'm not sure I will ever be able to recover from. I have almost finished watching five series of The West Wing. And I want my politicians and my press to be as witty and incisive as Josh, Toby, CJ and President Bartlett. 

Yesterday, Badger and I were watching Prime Minister's Questions while we ate our eggs. And Cameron accused Brown's VAT cut sales stimulus of being an 'Expensive Failure'. And I waited for someone, anyone, politician or press, to point out that a sales stimulus tax cut could be either expensive or a failure, but probably not both. And I'm still waiting.

Irrational economics

I lived on the edge of the city (as in the square mile where the banking is done in London) for several years, and I can understand the peculiar fascination I feel towards the current meltdown as being heavily influenced by the general unpleasantness of having to share space and transport with so many merchant bankers.

I feel a little disappointed that I haven't finished The Survival Paradox quicker, because one of the themes running through it is the unreasonableness of the modern obsession with 'rational' economics.

Firstly, there is a difference between 'rational' and 'reasonable'. There is a wonderful 'rational' solution to the 'Fox, Chicken, Grain' puzzle, in which a farmer has to use a small boat, in which he can only transport himself and one of his cargo (fox, chicken or grain) at a time, to cross a river. Leaving the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the grain will result in disaster. The rational solution is satisfying to work out, but the reasonable question remains: why is a farmer carrying a live fox around with him?

The number of important decisions made daily on the basis that they are rational is something that genuinely concerns me. Particularly when at its core, western rational economics has an apparently bonkers principle: compound interest.

Older civilisations recognised that compound interest wasn't viable, because while value was still linked to concrete stuff (be it gold, sheep or grain) a debt or investment subject to compound interest would one day require you to pay back more 'stuff' than there was on the earth. Which would be silly.

When we magically unlinked value from the concrete world and created the paper based currency we know as money today it was intended to be a 'promise' which could be exchanged for real gold when the time came. But even 300 years ago, over confident banks released more paper money than they could back up with gold in their vaults, assuming that the flow of gold would be so continuous that as long as their hands moved quicker than the investors' eyes then all would be well. Then there was a war and the gold supply dried up and some of the paper money became worthless.

Fearing that this might happen again, instead of passing legislation that prevented banks from issuing more paper than they had gold, in 1833 a law was passed 'guaranteeing' the value of the paper currency, so that people would continue to have confidence in it, even in times of low gold supply. (It was only passed in England and Wales, there is still no legal guarantee of bank notes in Scotland).

So - here we have a prime example of what I have been calling 'The Alpha Trap' in action. Alphas have privilege. The status of an alpha is a result of the status quo - whether that is a set of collective beliefs which holds them to be special (king, queen, priest, soothsayer) or a common understanding of today's survival problems which frames them as an appropriate solution (politicians, CEOs, football managers). So, what is the number one priority of an alpha? 

Maintaining the status quo - because this is what affords them their privilege.

The Alpha Trap is particularly rife in rational economics. 'Rational' Economics is a game which relies upon most of the participants having a rough understanding of the 'rules', while a few alphas gain advantage by having a more in-depth understanding and a closer position to the levers. House prices are linked to interest rates because we believe them to be, and so on. The people who repeatedly reinforce the rules are of course those alphas who personally benefit from being able to expertly play the system. If we decided the rules were nonsense then those alphas would quickly find themselves unable to maintain their privilege.

Wouldn't that be kind of fun?

I have to admit that I am reacting to each further news bulletin promising impending doom with a little bit of glee. And also sadness, because I've read that one tenth of American families are more than 3 months in arrears with their mortgages, and I've no doubt that those people are experiencing stress and pain. What interests me though is how a government can dress up a rescue package as being for the benefit of those people when it is so clearly geared to the advantage of the financial sector. If you want to prevent families having their homes repossessed, pass a law preventing repossessions.

For global politics I can see the current crisis as wonderful and positive. Do I sound insane? 

The reason for my optimism is that capitalist westerners are caught in a set of thinking where we confuse having more 'stuff' for being better people. To solve the impending Climate Change crisis we're going to have to cooperate with other societies who don't have as much 'stuff' as we do, and frankly we collectively look down upon those people because they don't have iPods. If we don't shift our attitudes rapidly then we'll see millions, even billions of people in the undeveloped world die through human-generated natural disaster during the next few decades.

So, I'm looking at the markets falling, and the banks collapsing, and the government experts backed into a corner where they finally admit that 'rational' economics isn't actually a proper science, despite all the numbers and graphs and formulas, and is really just a widely held set of beliefs ... possibly even superstitions ... and I'm excited. Because normal people are losing their faith in the status quo of rational economics, and starting to ask the question "what next?"

Introducing The Survival Paradox - Badgered up!

You'd be forgiven for thinking that if something was "badgered up" it was in less than working order, but in our family it means quite the opposite.

Above is a screenshot of some Badger magic.  Click here to get a pdf download of the opening gambit of the climate change book we've been working on. 

Even better than a cheap vodka, it has been filtered by both the producer, Julian and the super-clever Ms Melancholy, before being passed to the ultra-talented Badger for a final 'badgering up'.

The book uses a split between the left hand page (graphics, cartoons, graphs and illustrations) and the right hand page (body text) to try to engage both sides of your brain in the discussion. Badger has whisked up the illustrations based on my rubbish approximations, and suddenly it feels like a really-really-real book.

I've still got the very ending chapters to complete. And then there will be A Big Announcement. Because something quite amazing is happening when we launch it.

We've got some very early feelers out to publishers - so far it's quite positive, but if you happen to own a massive publishing company and want this book then do feel free to email ;) We are also considering web-publishing via something like Lulu, because it would allow us to keep it available all over the world, and not get buried in the normal distribution and territory issues. There will be a significant web presence because of the Very Exciting Secret Thing, so one more click to order the book doesn't feel like a barrier.

So - please feel free to download this taster, and email me or comment here if you have feedback. (Especially typos ... as nmj and Cas both know first hand, there is no such thing as perfect). 

The book is designed to be accessible to bright 13-year-olds as well as non-academic adults. It's wide ranging in the content - animal behaviour, neurobiology, psychology, sociology, economics, climate science, philosophy, politics - so the assumption is that no reader is an expert in all those areas, but that every reader has first-hand experience of being a human being.

The latest title, by the way, is The Survival Paradox: Why Global Climate Change has a Silver Lining.

Any one for adrenaline?

On Saturday evening I opened the back door to grab some dog food from the big metal bin we keep it in and heard a funny rasping noise in the field behind the house. I looked up and saw that one of the tups was rubbing himself against the wire fence and sort of coughing. He was also foaming a bit around the mouth. These particular tups are mostly Leicesters and they're not known for surviving ailments. I rushed back in to find Badger, hoping that her agricultural college days might have instilled some knowledge about sheep-coughing.

She dutifully came to give a second opinion and suggested that perhaps he was dehydrated, and I should go and take a closer look. Suddenly he bolted, running for about five meters before he was restrained by the yellow hose-pipe which was tied around his neck. I have no idea how but this fellow had managed to not just loop the hose around his neck but actually tie a proper knot in it as well. 

Most of the rams around here have horns and you'd be foolish to get into a croft with one that might be unhappy, but Leicesters are horn-free and very friendly, so it was only out of fear that he might take fright and choke himself further that I decided not to hop the fence and try to get it off myself. Instead I legged it to the farm where I found the farmer and his family having a BBQ, and so it was only a couple of minutes before the farmer was in the field sorting it out. Phew. He said that there's no doubt that the Tup wouldn't have survived much longer. I kept expecting Michael Buerk's voice to cut in with some dramatic cliches.

Ms M thinks I am disproportionately invested in the well-being of critters (though I'm not averse to them ending up on my plate with some roast potatoes). I was rather worked up about the near-strangling of the Tup, but assumed I'd had my adrenaline for the weekend. This was not to be the case.

On Sunday night little Ruby had a run in with an over zealous farm dog up the road. Ruby was largely oblivious to the gaping hole in the top of her leg, which was quickly doused in sheep wound treatment (the dog's owner is a Defra vet) before we rushed her to the emergency vets. Ms M did a stirling job of maintaining a decent speed over the tops in the dusk while somehow avoiding the dozens of suicidal sheep, rabbits, baby lapwings and even a proper hare who threw themselves into our path.

The vets were wonderful (with me, as I was in a far worse state than Ruby), patched her up temporarily and dispatched us with antibiotics. On Tuesday Ruby had a procedure done to take away the bits of skin that weren't going to be viable and fix the whole thing up. The interim period was interesting, but I'll spare you the gory details.

So. Tuesday was already an event filled day. Ruby has a heart murmur which means that sedative is to be avoided, but luckily she's very compliant so she got through her little op with just a local. The vets claim she was as good as gold. I believe them but suspect that if they'd had to kneel on her head to get her to stop wiggling then they might not tell me anyway.

During all this I'd been doing a very good job of patiently waiting for news about The Triangle Book. I'd submitted my audition last Thursday, expecting to hear back late on Friday. I am not good at waiting under the best of circumstances. By Monday night I was pretty much rocking.

Now, I know that for many of you, the idea of writing a 500 page text book on geometry is strangely less than appealing. But for me, this is the holy grail. This publisher write the best learning books I've come across. I love their books, most of which are best sellers in their class. I don't know how to communicate what this means to me ... it's like coming up with an idea for a chocolate bar and being asked to produce it by Cadburys.

Anyway, on Tuesday night I finally got the nod. As in, yes, they think they want me to do it! Eek! So, in about 2 weeks time I'm off to the US for a few days for some training. 

I enjoyed doing my audition chapter so much that I can hardly stop jumping about with excitement at the idea of doing the whole book. It's my idea of heaven.

It feels like a really important project. Geometry (and algebra, because frankly you can't do geometry without it) is so pure and beautiful. Plus, Master M is going to rock at this stuff by the time I'm done. If I do it right it will help millions of people to grasp the fundamentals of mathematics for many years to come. How cool is that?

There are still a couple of steps in the process to come. And I'm still in the final stages of the climate change book - we keep getting 90% done and then moving the goal posts at the moment. I'm on second draft of the first 80% though, which feels good.

I should take a moment here to thank Badger, who came up with the idea that I should contact the publisher and offer my services. And also for her excellent artwork on my audition. Badger is part of the appeal to the publisher - the fact that I have a designer who is so well suited to doing the fancy bits is perfect. We're really a package deal, so I hope she's feeling pleased about it too, even if the square-root signs make her feel a bit sick ...

In other exciting news, nmj's book The State of Me has dispatched from Amazon today!  Ms M and I will be fighting over it this weekend no doubt ...

Synergies

In the last couple of weeks I have been working on two writing projects which couldn't be more diverse.

On the one hand, The Survival Paradox is about the inevitability of the human struggle to balance short-term self-interest against long-term community-interests. It is about what makes the issue of Global Climate Change so challenging: not the technical aspects but the social aspects. The barriers to saving our planet are all socially constructed, existing solely within our collective imagination. There is no Rational Economics, there is no Nation State, there is no spoon...

The Survival Paradox is about our felt-truths. Felt-truths are the rules and meanings about the world which we have gathered in a sensible attempt to reduce the chaos and uncertainty which we experience. The fact that they are so effective, and so affective, does not make them true. The only real truth lies in mathematics and science, and it exists as ratios; the world beyond numbers. 

(Our number system is social constructed - there is nothing special about the number ten unless you choose to count in tens).

Truth does not have units of measurement. It does not come in pounds or dollars.

Truth comes in circles and triangles, and little else.

The Survival Paradox is a search for the truth, which is that there is little truth in our world. This statement is itself a meta-narrative and thus a Liar's Paradox. It is an attempt at truth with continuous doubt; a book that seeks to prove the fact that almost nothing can be proved. *sigh*

No wonder I am tired. Envigorated and utterly grateful to have been on this journey, but exhausted.

The other writing project is my audition chapter for a deal to write a book about geometry. It is exclusively about triangles, circles and ratios. It seeks to help the reader find the proofs for themselves.

Yin yang, and all that jazz.

Words and pictures

44,000 / 80,000 words done in the Global Climate Change book. At points it has been more, but these feel like 44,000 good words. It's quick now. I think and think but when I write it's rapid. 1500 words an hour at top speed. 

The neuroscience stuff I've been learning has really helped. It feels solid now. Like a book made of triangles.

Speaking of books made of triangles, the textbook-publishing-people loved my idea for my 'audition chapter' for the-best-book-about-triangles-ever-written. They actually said LOVE. In capitals. I had presented one main idea and two backups. They said 'don't worry about the backup ideas, the first idea is PERFECT.' In capitals.

Isn't that lovely?

This company has a great track record for best sellers. When I was nine I had a wonderful teacher called Mr Long. He was a hippy. He had long hair and a beard and he sat at his desk strumming on his guitar all day. He had time for every one of us. It was before the national curriculum, in the days when learning didn't mean ticking boxes. He taught us in small groups, according to our interests and strengths. Mr Long taught me and two other children all about triangles. Sin and Cos and Tan and Pythagorus. He told my parents that one day I would be a writer. 

I am rather taken with the idea of writing a best seller about triangles.

I would dedicate it to Mr Long.

Would you buy a book called ...

Homo Sapiens Globalis

The species that can save our planet.

?

It's a serious question. Finding a useful title for the book I'm working on is proving to be incredibly difficult.

Having completed all the chapter introductions and summaries, and the bullet pointed content from cover to cover, I'm now at the point where calling it 'the book' isn't cutting it anymore. Someone who has a potential hook into a publisher wants to read an overview, and the overview needs at least a working title. Today I'm attempting the 400 / 200 / 100 / 50 / 20 and 10 word synopsis. Many versions of each. The title above is a 10 word synopsis. I think I like it, but I need feedback!

Oddly I came up with the term 'Homo Sapiens Globalis' without even knowing if 'Globalis' was valid Latin, and then when I googled it I found that a couple of people have used the term to mean precisely what I am intending. That bodes well, surely?

So - as to the synopsis, the front cover of this book will also bare the statement:

Why the threat of Global Climate Change is the greatest opportunity ever to have faced the human race.

The back of the jacket might say something like:

Global Climate Change is not a technical problem - zero-carbon energy sources are available and well understood today. Global Climate Change is not an economic problem - a world that can afford Formula One, Space exploration and armed conflict is not unable to find the money to fund the technological solution. Global Climate Change is a human problem. If we do not successfully address the threat to the livability of our planet it will be because our own human nature got in the way.

So - are you interested? Would you pick it up and give it a flick through? Inside it's a mix of normal text and light hearted illustrations - not entirely dissimilar to the "Jung for Beginners" kind of books. It's being pitched at bright 13 year olds upwards - not too dry and stuffy but with a lot of quite complex ideas in it.

I'll also be looking for readers for the first and second drafts. Any volunteers? 

*edit: This is a book for grown-ups too! It's intended to be mainstream - we've included smart young people in the target group because they're particularly good at weeding out jargon etc, and because they're the generation who have most investment in the outcome.