I’ve just watch the 20th episode of the 3rd season of Heroes. It was a decent episode; the special effects were stunning, but it felt more like a setting up post for future plot lines. Several heroes had changes to their powers, and two people died. After having just watch 4 seasons of BSG, nothing is going to sadden me that much, but I was particularly fond of one of the characters.
This was Bryan Fuller’s first proper episode back – I think he was the main writer of this one. There’s one lingering problem that I have with Heroes now, though: it’s too big. Unfortunately, with such an expensive and time consuming program, there is no scope for increasing episode output, and cutting down on characters and storylines would damage the show too much.
Maybe it has just come before its time. Maybe they’ll find a way of going much deeper. I, for one, will keep watching to see if it becomes all that it can. Even though it’s far from its potential, it’s still one of the best shows on TV.
*** BIT OF A SPOILER ***
Slight footnote: I love Daphne. She’s so cool. If her idea of the perfect evening is to sit on the rooftops of Paris, watching over the city and the Eiffel Tower, and then flying off to the Moon… awesome ((Not a word I use lightly!))!
Last week, the weather was really nice. It was still only half-way through March, yet the Sun was out and warm on the skin, and the clouds were gone. The only things that destroyed the illusion of summer was the lack of leaves on the trees, and the lower temperature of course (though you couldn’t tell that from the inside). There was even an Augustine haze in the sky.
So what did I decide to do? Hey, don’t give me that look, so I may have given the game away in the title: I gardened. My mother and I thought it would be a good idea to plant something to make the garden look a bit nicer. It is predominantly gravel, so we chopped a bit off the side to create a border, perhaps 50 cm wide.
The soil beneath the gravel was rather shit, so we decided to get some compost. Now, I think this is great – you can go up to the recycling centre and whilst dropping off your empty bottles, you can pick up a bit of compost for the garden on the way out. The council here collects garden waste, and I always wondered where it went. Into the ground? To farms? Well, it turns out that they give a bit of it back, to us.
That’s the sort of recycling that I really like.
Once we got the compost, it was a laborious task of digging it all into the soil, and preparing the border for planting, which I did at the weekend (when there was even nicer weather).
I’ve planted potatoes, garlic, spring onions, onions, beetroot and lettuce. Let’s see what grows!
Have you heard of synesthesia? Wikipedia has.
My sister was home for the weekend. She’s in the middle of a psychology degree, and I always like to chat with her about interesting things we’ve learnt. She was particularly interested in some of my books, like “Did You Spot The Gorilla?” by Richard Wiseman, amongst others.
This time, we got talking about synesthesia. I’d read briefly about this before – where people ascribe personalities to numbers of letters, or associate certain colours with letters, for example. I think I learnt about it from a documentary about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome ((Ass-burgers)) – yeah, the one who wrote “Born On A Blue Day“. He’s called Daniel Tammet, and he’s an exceptional guy.
Anyway – I thought that that was all there was to synesthesia – that it was just something strange for crazy people to do. That, I found out, is not the case.
“Wilf,” said my sister, “can you see the days of the week?”
I can, in fact, see the days of the week. I see the week in the rough shape of the letter D, with Saturday and Sunday taking up the bottom and top half of the vertical line, respectively, with the rest of the days placed around the curve. This is spatial-sequence synesthesia, says Wikipedia.
Yay! Look at me! I have a label! Synesthete. I’m a synesthete!
Days Of The Week
A very basic represtentation
Here a diagram of how I mentally see the days of the week. It’s not exactly like this: I don’t actually see the words “Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday”, for example. Instead, I know that certain areas on my “D”-like shape are particular days – Friday the bottom left, Saturday and Sunday on the side, and so on.
I also constantly keep track of where we are in the week. Right now, for example, it is a Tuesday, and so on my mental image of the week is a non-descript marker of where we are – currently at about the 2 o’clock position of my “D”. This pointer does slowly move throughout the day.
With this marker, I can see how far it is to another day; from that, I can see when homework is due and how long I have for it, and how far away the weekend is, for example.
I can also attach certain regular things to my map. When I look at “Sunday”, I might often see Family Guy, as it is broadcast on that day. Alternatively, on Wednesday, I see a bit of a gap, representing my free afternoon. On Monday night I ‘see’ swimming.
It’s useful when seeing how far away a certain days is – for example I can quickly visualise what “three Monday’s time” is: I count forward to the next Monday, and then loop round twice more. It also makes counting down to a particular day quite easy. How many days til next Thursday? Well, it’s Tuesday right now (2 o’clock), it’s two days til Thursday (at about 4 o’clock), and then I loop round (7 days) to get to next Tuesday. 9 days.
A limitation with this system is that I have no way to incorporate dates. I rarely know what the actual date is, unless there is some specific reason for me to know it – perhaps for an appointment or an exam. As much as I love numbers, there is just no place for it in this system. This usually means that I have to loop back or forwards to a particular day which I know the date of, and which I will have visualised previously, and then work out the current date by adding or subtracting that date’s time difference.
It’s not as complex as it sounds. Really.
Months
Again, this isn't the whole story
I have a rather strange way of seeing the months. Perhaps the pattern came from a calendar which I saw when I was much younger – I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve used this system for as long as I can remember.
The year number is not always there, but if it is then that is where it goes. Unlike the days of the week, I can actually see this image with just the names of the months. However, it is a lot more common for me to be zoomed in to a particular area on the map. For the last couple of months, since the New Year, I’ve been mostly focused on the first 2 or 3 months when I look at my month-map. More often than not, instead of the name of the month, I see the individual numbers of the dates, 1 ~ 30 – sometimes with important dates highlighted.
The summer months are slightly different. They’re at angles and their days do not always flow in the same way as the other months – they may be curved, and usually they’re not horizontal. When I think of how long it is to summer, I imagine myself zipping horizontally through the last bit of March, then April, then (like a typewriter moving to start a new line) going horizontally through May, before plummeting through June, and then levelling off into July. It’s all rather crazy stuff.
I see years side by side – mostly ones that I’ve lived in. I’ve never looked beyond my 2010 “calendar” yet, but when I look at my current calendar, my 2009 one, adjacent to it on the left is 2008’s, with 2010 to the right. All calendars have the same shape, however they all have particular memories and things attached throughout their months.
I could go a lot deeper than what I have explained, however a lot of it I don’t conciously know, and is actually just a subconcious process that I’m not aware of.
Years & Numbers
I also see the numbers and the years in particular ways – my numbers are a bit like a numberline, but very different and zig-zagged. My years generally group into lines of centuries, with newer centuries added to the bottom of the pile. However, from 2000, things have been different, and we’re on our way up again.
Unfortunately, I can’t be bothered to explain all of this stuff to you in detail.
Well, I hope you’ve found that a bit interesting. Go and read the Wikipedia articles on Synesthesia and Number form if you have the time, and let me know if you’re a synesthete. I’m not boasting about how I visualise and see things in a particular way, but I thought you might want to know.
Au revoir.
Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!
SHIT!
In the time since I last wrote about watching BSG, I have seen the whole third and fourth seasons. There is so much to talk about: so many spoilers to squeal about, so many developments to consider, so many philosophical points to take in – as well as a whole lotta AWESOME to deal with.
This weekendm I watched the series finale, and I really want to write about it. I really do. But I can’t. I need more time. I’ve not finished processing everything yet, I’m still connecting dots and I’m still forming my opinions about every part of the show. I’ve watched it for almost 90 episode (in the short space a month and a half)… and now it’s done. Finished. It’s not coming back ((Except for the TV movie, The Plan.)).
Oh – there’s also the problem that once I start writing about it, I’m not going to stop, at least not until I’ve written several thousand words. There’s so much that I want to say; you may not like it, but BSG will be featured prominently here for the next little while.
Keep an eye out.
UPDATE: I’ve even watched The Plan now, so it really is over. Sad.
OMG, what a failure this man is. Ray’s off to his home country of New Zealand, and whilst he’s there he’s going to be taking part in a debate “on the subject of evolution”.
This is his “outline”:
- An atheist is someone who believes nothing created everything. If he denies that and believes that “something” created everything, he’s not an atheist.
- Man can’t create a grain of sand from nothing. How intellectually dishonest is it then to say that there was no Intelligent Designer?
- Where did females come from (in every species)?
- Which came first? The blood, the heart or the blood vessels?
- There are variations within species, but no species to species transitional forms in the fossil record.
- God made Archaeopteryx with teeth and a tail. It’s a bird, not a dinosaur. He made many weird animals. There’s a huge mouse with a pocket in its front that hops all over Australia, horses with stripes, weird desert animals with humps on their backs . . . and He made some birds with teeth.
Yup, he’s at it again: being a complete idiot. He doesn’t know the first thing about evolution. What a twat.
