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Video of the year 2024:

• "The glymphatic system"

This was an absolute eye-opener. If you've ever wondered about sleep, you NEED to know about the glymphatic system. It's a 1-hour special guest lecture by the scientist who discovered this whole thing.

Fiction book of the year 2024:

• "Semiosis" by Sue Burke

I read a few sci-fi books this year which centre on some kind of non-human mind, and how their complex societies might work. For my favourite book, it was a close call between "Children of Time", which creates a society of sentient spiders on a new planet, and "Semiosis", which creates a society of sentient plants on a new planet. They're both great. Semiosis wins because the characters are better-written. The book manages to create this entire world of sentient plant life (plus humans too) - and then on top of that, to draw the reader into engaging twists of detective fiction and psychological intrigue. A remarkable read.

Non-fiction book of the year 2024:

• "White Skin Black Fuel" by the Zetkin Collective

Probably essential reading, given the prospects for 2025. This is a multi-country examination of what's going on in white nationalism, anti-green conspiracy theories, and the ideas that lead to xenophobic violence in the middle of a climate crisis. You might not like the idea of reading this book, but I found it essential knowledge. The first half especially, which gives really good summaries of what's going on in different countries and how they're all connected.

Album of the year 2024:

• Godspeed You! Black Emperor: "NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28-340 DEAD"

You need patience to appreciate Godspeed. I know that people on the WWW generally don't have patience, but I'm going to recommend this anyway. It's not obvious at first that the music is anything more than the many other post-rock guitar bands out there, but Godspeed have the ability to be very subtly soulful, life-affirming, emotionally dynamic, which for me usually doesn't even emerge on the first listen. But this 2024 album of theirs is one I'll listen to again and again for years.

Person of the year 2024:

The person of the year is, quite clearly, Gisèle Pélicot. This goes without saying. Her determination and grace are a model for us all.

Cookbook of the year 2024:

• "Fresh India" by Meera Sodha

An utterly fabulous recipe book. In fact her recipes are impressively useful while also creative.

Drink of the year 2024:

• Coffee tonic

It sounds crazy at first, but it's a lovely refreshing drink (quite cola-like), and surprisingly easy to make. 2 parts tonic water, 1 part "short" coffee (such as an espresso, or I make a short aeropress), plus ice. Remember this for the next heatwave!

I had a dream, that made me think that dreams work in some way like GANs. There are two components in the brain, playing a "game", and the game is creative but also adversarial.

My dream was mundane: I was walking around the house of a childhood friend, and I needed to sort out my backpack - but everything was dark. In the living room I tried turning on the light, but the lightbulb must have been dead. I could see a dim fragment of dawn through one window. No matter. Into the other room. In that room I couldn't find the light switch. It really should have been there - but then, it's an old house, maybe it's in an odd location. I fumbled around various parts - I could feel the wall, the door-frame, but definitely no light switch.

Now - here's what I suggest about the dreaming state. There are two components: an "agent", the first-person me trying to get my goal done, and a "generator", an unconscious part generating this very fragmentary sensory/conceptual world for the dreamer to move around in. As in a GAN, it's the adversarial nature of it that makes it creative. Adversarial means the two components have different and conflicting aims. So what might those aims be?

The agent has perhaps the same goals I would if I were awake. In the world I thought I was in, I needed to sort things out, work out what was going on, and who knows, maybe even get stuff done. I suspect that the agent is also responsible for that event where you suddenly wake from a dream: if the agent realises what's going on, or gets too emotional, these things give the agent the boost to wake - the agent is designed fundamentally not to "want" to be in a dream, because it wants to control and understand what's going on.

The generator, fundamentally, wants us not to wake up. The generator's goal is to keep us busy until we fall out of REM sleep back into deep sleep. There must be some sort of credibility negotiation though: my dream didn't keep sending me back and forth between the same rooms and the same broken lightbulbs - it had to move the plot onwards, at least a little, so that my agent self didn't catch on - "Hey, wait a minute, this is a dream!"

In my dream, I went back to the first room. Someone was there. I was sort of dizzy, but I managed to get the light from my phone on, and it was someone's auntie sitting on the sofa. The light wasn't very good and I was somehow not controlling it very well. I could see the outline of a woman with quite a big hairdo, and her features didn't line up consistently, but I just put that down to my poor perception. It seems to me that my generator was at the limit of what it could be bothered to generate. It couldn't flood the room with light, and it couldn't generate a clear enough person for me to know what to say to them. Or - the generator was being deliberately ambiguous, keeping me asleep without setting itself up for having to generate even more plot.

When we have anxiety dreams, or dreams that seem to be "processing" daytime events, I would previously have assumed that the unconscious (here, the generator) is bringing them in. In this interpretation it seems to me plausible that the generator is just playing its usual game, while the agent is the one bringing our daytime issues in - recalling and trying to deal with something, while the generator hurries to keep up, generating scenery and characters that do/don't fit the theme.

When I was younger my dreams had more energy, chaos and imagination to them. Probably because my "ego" had the same characteristics; but probably also my generator. I do still sometimes have vivid sensory dreams - I'm not sure how that fits with the account I've given here, which basically says that a grown-up's unconscious would generally have learnt to be ambiguous and evasive as a way to distract the dreamer enough to stay asleep!

It's been so hot. It's now the end of August, and I have the feeling we've had 30°C weather here in the Netherlands for maybe 2 months. With some breaks: approx 2 x 2-day periods with cool air and perhaps rain; there were also a couple of thunderstorms, but they generally didn't finish the heat off.

Lots of people like hot weather but here in a "cooler" country the houses aren't built to cope well with it. Our rented house is lovely but it's a sun-trap, with big windows and the sun on the roof. If our big windows had shutters on, that would be great against the heat. The builders did design ways to ventilate the place, not least a nice front-door grille which in theory should allow air to circulate from the bottom to the top of the house. But the air has been so still that this hasn't had as much effect as you'd expect.

Our main living space has been above 30 degrees in the afternoon/evening for most of this period, making it hard to concentrate, hard to relax, etc. On the hottest day we desperately covered the windows with tinfoil to keep the sun at bay, plus of course the usual stuff (windows open in the night/morning while the air is cool; windows and curtains closed in the afternoon; wet towels hung up to transpire). Even so, our living space reached 36.5°C indoors, and the thermostat on our central heating measured "E" (error) instead of a temperature, because it wasn't designed to expect temperatures in that range.

On hot days, we escape the heat: we've been to the museum, the cinema, walking round the canals, sitting out in the pub. The thought process isn't so much "What would be nice" as "What would be cooler?" -- But then, we had to close some windows when we went out, so the house would be pretty roasty on our return.

Why note all this down? I'm not trying to impress - these temperatures are normal in many places (though the housing is presumably designed for it), and I'm sure there are worse houses to live in, even in this same city. I'm noting it down because in future years we'll be living in different housing, different places, and different climates. What will it be like then? It'll be interesting to compare.

To get some idea, here's a plot of the 2022-so-far temperature records from a nearby weather station, as rendered by WeatherSpark (sorry it's in Fahrenheit, there seems to be no option to change this):

What do we see? Well in July-August there were maybe 3 chunks of time when the temperature went above 30°C (86°F), and this was also higher than the 90-percentile high range for daily max temperatures (i.e. outside the red bands in the image). Plenty of times when it was well within normal ranges.

Snapchat lets people share little photos and videos with each other, mostly used to tell the story of their day. Snapchat also created a map where you can click around the world and drop in on anonymous little slices of life. Try it - it's an odd but absorbing thing.

There's one thing I noticed that I really don't understand. People posting funny comments, or snaps of the cocktail they've ordered, or just things they notice in the street - sure, I get it. The thing I don't get is... Why are hundreds and hundreds (at least) of people posting videos of the very boring road ahead of them as they drive?

Here are some I saw locally, in London:

And here are some from around the world:

These are NOT snaps of high-speed driving, or showing off about the car. (Not even doing something daft on a motorway.) They're NOT snaps while held at a red light or in a traffic queue. They're NOT about something funny/interesting outside the window, and usually no-one is talking, let alone talking to camera. There may be some music playing but it doesn't seem particularly about sharing music.

They are incredibly mundane. The driver is going along, driving with one hand, and basically showing us the road as they see it. It's boring. We can see the steering wheel and the backs of some other cars. It might be partly possible to work out what road they're on, but they're not seemingly doing it to share their exact location.

What I'm fascinated to understand is: WHY are they doing it?

Like I said - they are NOT showing off about speed, or car ownership, or friends, or jokes. Their mates are probably not impressed, or even interested, and don't seem to be commenting back and forth on each others' rides. Why bother?

(And, of course, why do something that's certainly illegal (in the UK as well as elsewhere), and known to be dangerous - and before you ask, yes I'm certain that it's the driver filming these, not a passenger (there are some passenger snaps, but many fewer; e.g. some taxi rides). But the moral outrage can come later. The primary thing I'm wondering is WHY BOTHER?

Now I'm well aware that people post all kinds of random shizzle on Snapchat - you can see it right there - and they're not all meant to be amazing. Snaps are often part of a "story", a collage of your day, and I guess these videos are part of the story perhaps of someone's night out. But why include all the boring bits? (These videos are not short - often multiple snaps in a sequence.)

One possibility is: Snapchat incentivises people to post many snaps, or to post frequently. It could alternatively be slightly more innocently that people develop a "habit" of posting snaps, but it seems odd to me they'd post pointless snaps without any incentive. Wouldn't they instead prefer to look at snaps, or post verbal callouts, or suchlike?

Can anyone enlighten me? What makes people post snaps like these?

I started collecting examples of "good news" items a couple of years ago - as a personal antidote to some of the bad things going on out there. This year I've ended up collecting almost too many to keep a handle on. Although the year isn't finished, I'm blogging it here so you can read!

Have a look here - what's a good news item that particularly grabs you?

There's so much good news that it's hard to know how to organise it... I'm writing from a UK perspective so there are plenty of UK things but the big ones are worldwide. I'll try starting with the Big Good News and then grouping other things into categories:

Big Good News

• Irish abortion referendum: Vote held in May -- and a massive vote in favour of Yes!
• Indian supreme court decriminalises homosexuality (i.e. for about 1/6 of the people on the planet)
• Ireland has become the first country in the world to sell off its investments in fossil fuels
• Thai cave rescue operation ends with all 12 boys safe
• The Queen's Green Planet - the queen and David Attenborough joining forces on ITV - there is no better way than this to get the UK on board with fixing climate change, IMHO, so this is big news. Also, the Queen was launching a tree-planting project which stretches across the Commonwealth, planting more trees than you can possibly imagine.
• Ozone layer finally healing after damage caused by aerosols, UN says - should be completely repaired in 2030s
• North and South Korean leaders meet for first time in South, and plan to end their 65-year long war. And South Korean and North Korean families reunited after 60 years.

Health

Breast cancer screening improvement - many women can avoid chemo

UK soft drink sugar tax - many firms have cut the sugar in their drinks

Technology

WhatsApp Co-Founder Puts $50M Into Signal To Supercharge Encrypted Messaging - this is great news for digital privacy, and Signal's a lovely app

Linus Torvalds, the inventor and maintainer of the Linux kernel, had an awakening about his rude behviour, wrote a detailed apology, and took time off to work on his behaviour

Microsoft open-sourced its entire patent portfolio (over 60,000 patents), pledging unrestricted use to the Linux world

Opening up MasterMap - Unlocking of Government’s mapping and location data to boost economy by £130m a year

Development

Over the past 20 years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has almost halved.

Percent of Indian households with toilets goes from approx 50% (2014) to approx 90% (2017)

'Remarkable' decline in fertility rates worldwide (journal source) - while this is a complex issue, a cause and effect of many things, the reason I include this is that it's great news for women's empowerment, indicative of a "demographic transition" connected with such progress worldwide.

Politics

Spain: Mariano Rajoy and his PP finally ousted by no-confidence vote, after many corruption scandals

The Britain First leaders have been jailed

In Dutch local elections, GroenLinks ("Green Left") goes from 5% up to 8.4% of the vote - they were the biggest party in Amsterdam and in other cities! - while the anti-Islam PVV had a poor showing, collapsing from seven to two seats in The Hague for example

Uber lost its court battles trying to claim its drivers were not actually employees

Malaysia: Mahathir Mohamad says Anwar Ibrahim (who he was previously responsible for deposing) to be given royal pardon

'Gay conversion therapy' to be banned as part of LGBT equality plan

Greece emerges from eurozone bailout programme

Boris Johnson faces court over his well-publicised £350m Brexit claim

The UK government’s independent Migration Advisory Committee concluded that international students are a good thing. Even when considered only in cash terms, "the average non-EEA student makes a net fiscal contribution of more than £5,000 a year"; and that they even benefit domestic students.

The UK's bulk surveillance powers - exposed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden - have been found to be illegal by the European Court of Human Rights.

Environment

All kinds of subsidy-free renewable power schemes announced/commenced, meaning that renewables can be economical in themselves.

New government data confirms support for renewables is at an all time high

Chile creates national parks from donated land. "the area being protected was roughly the size of Switzerland." donated by founder of North Face

UK's total greenhouse gas emissions have fallen from 800 million tonnes in 1990, to less than 500 million (...though aviation's contribution doubled and no-one's doing anything about it!)

Bikes now most common vehicle type in City of London rush hour, says official traffic count study

Global carbon emissions could be cut 3% by following the UK’s example

UK introduces plans for a bottle deposit scheme (pfand)

Drop in plastic bags littering British seas linked to introduction of 5p charge

Plastic-eating enzyme discovered (and improved) by scientists in Portsmouth which turns plastic back into its components:

Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry ("with China leading the way" - 17% of China's entire fleet already! Though the UK has the #1 biggest electric bus fleet in Europe.)

"mini-Holland" schemes in outer London boroughs proven successful - including an auxiliary increase in walking

MoD campaign to stop killing of songbirds on Cyprus hailed a success: Poachers killed 800,000 birds on UK base in 2016 but 72% drop was recorded in last year

Organic solar cells (flexible, multi-purpose) reach a new level of efficiency, competitive with silicon and could produce electricity very cheaply

Last year renewable energy made up 30% of UK electricity - a new record!

The number of vegans in the UK has doubled from 2014 to 2016 - and then more than doubled again from 2016 to 2018:

Record-breaking numbers of UK's rarest seabird return to island after near extinction

Groundbreaking 'spinning' wind turbine wins UK Dyson award - interesting design

Aberdeen offshore wind project opposed by Trump is officially opening

Dutch appeals court upholds landmark climate change ruling - the government is legally obliged to actually stick to its climate targets

A survey run by Waitrose (of everyone, not just Waitrose shoppers) finds "1 in 8" people veggie or vegan

Lancashire Fracking protesters walk free after court quashes 'excessive' sentences

Other

UK became the first country to enforce documentation of the gender pay gap in companies

British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars, overlooked by the Nobels, finally won a $3m Breakthrough award

Lancaster City Councillors voted unanimously to save Lancaster Music Co-op

...and finally...

Paris hero climbs four-storey building to rescue dangling child – wow watch this video

I hadn't noticed that both Björk and Kim Gordon had split up from their long-term partners. Thing is, last summer I split up from my long-term partner. I think back then I would have gained some solace from the work of fabulous artists who were going through analogous pain - even if the analogies were only superficial. But then, I was deep in it all, too busy with our own difficulties and the horrible pile of practicalities that accompany a long-term breakup, to notice everything around me.

That changed this year, when Kim Gordon published a book, and Björk published an album, both of which foreground their breakups. But the timing has changed - it's not last summer any more, and I'm not in the heat of it, so I don't need to take solace from these things like I did back then. I can feel some empathy, remotely of course. I really wonder what I would have made of it all last summer.

Björk's album Vulnicura is a heartfelt and very raw heartbreak album. It does some amazing things, some really intense sonic moments, which work on these emotional issues universally, and Björk's lyrics are along similar lines but they often dive really deep into uncomfortably intimate detail. A bit like hearing someone listing all the bad things their ex did, and not being sure quite how literally to take it all:

"Family was always our sacred mutual mission/ Which you abandoned."

It's so direct that it makes me want to hear the other side's rejoinder. (I should say, by the way, that that quote is nothing like what was going on in my case.)

It's really quite striking though that it's Björk and Kim Gordon. Björk has for decades expressed a very open and deep emotional literacy in her music, and in recent years it's increasingly been less about torrid excitement and more about family bonds. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were the alt-rock equivalent of the ideal family: together for decades, raising kids while pushing Sonic Youth and their other projects ever onward. And if these paragons are not immune, well on the one hand that's really sad, while on the other hand maybe I can take some solace from it after all. Their lives aren't exactly average lives, but then whose is? We're still all tumbling through the same kaleidoscope.

I'm quite naive about Islam, so it's hard to get a clear idea of "normal" Islam underneath the headlines about the tiny proportion of violent extremists. Part of the Charlie Hebdo thing was the question about whether it's OK to depict the prophet. So just for reference I found this …

There seem to have been two separate person under a train incidents on the London underground today. I know nothing about either of them, but there was also one last Friday - and the cluster of events, well, first it made me feel awful, but then I wondered if there were …