Łódź is a film set

Back from London, four hours' sleep, and off to Łódź for a conference. And to see Moni after work, to show me the sights of city.

"Take me back, carry back, down to Instagram Alley where I started from." This is Pasaż Róży (lit. 'Passage of the Rose'), where the buildings have been stuccoed with shards of mirror. We were there at exactly the right time - the westering sun was shining right down the alley against a perfectly cloudless sky. Tourists and locals alike were in for a treat.

Łódź - an up and coming city, stranger and more intriguing that most Polish cities. Willed out of the despair that overtook it in the 1990s, it is sprouting new appendages - such as Brama Miasta (lit. 'city gates' - right in the middle of the city), which will be rising skywards right by the new Łódź Fabryczna station.

Is this Liverpool? Are we by a ventilating tower of the Birkinhead Tunnel? No, this is a fragment of the facade of the old telephone exchange on  ul. Tadeusza Kościuszki.

Is this a Punjabi palace? Are we in Guadalajara? No, this is ul. Piotrkowska, Europe's longest shopping thoroughfare, pedestrianised for the main part. One by one, the industrialists' Art Nouveau palaces that line the street are being renovated to their original state.

A kiss at the corner - the weather creates a Mediterranean atmosphere, the strong sunlight pulls the contrast from the stone, the architecture a theatrical set.

Łódź. One big film set. Literally. This is the cinema from Wojciech Marczewski's Escape from the Liberty Cinema (1990).

There's shabbiness, there's flash but above all a sense of a city with many faces which know where it's going.

We ate at Laxmi Indian restaurant (excellent) and imbibed at Piwoteka (excellent, but the Delirium Tremens on tap was off). Łódź impresses me more and more with each subsequent visit.

This time last year:
Contemplative imagery, Ealing and Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Baffled: my first visit to Jeziorki's Lidl 

This seven years ago:
In vino veritas?

This eight two years ago:
Are we getting more intelligent?

This nine three years ago:
Lenten recipe: tuna, chickpea and pesto salad

This time ten years ago:
Coal train sidings, Konstancin-Jeziorna

This time 11 years ago:
Jeziorki from the air

My father at 95

What a blessing it is to reach such an age, to have lived through so much change, to have survived and triumphed. My father is 95 today. The Nazi occupation of Warsaw, the Uprising, prisoner-of-war camps, exiled refugee, who built a new life in a new land, contributing to his host country as a civil engineer. Bohdan Dembiński, born in Warsaw on 5 April 1923, grew up in Ochota, in the very building on ul. Filtrowa where General Antoni Chruściel 'Monter' took the decision to launch the Warsaw Uprising. When asked by journalists whether he knew that the Home Army's HQ was in the building in which he lived, he answered that he didn't know that his brothers were both in the Home Army, nor did neither of them know he was in it, such was the discipline of conspiracy.

Like the Queen, my father has two birthdays, an official one (5 March) and the real one (5 April). The family story is that at his christening, the guests were not entirely sober and the wrong month was entered on the birth certificate.

I wrote about my father's wartime experiences (here and here), but it's worth pointing out some of the work he did as a civil engineer in post-war Britain. He worked for almost his entire career for one company - West's Piling, one of the UK's leading specialists in foundations. In 1961, we lived briefly in South Wales, where my father was engaged in designing the foundations for the mighty Llanwern steelworks (below).

 And towards the end of his career (my father worked until he was a few months short of his 70th birthday), he designed the pilings under Canary Wharf in London's Docklands.

In exceptionally good health for his age, my greatest hope for my father is that he will be strong enough to visit Poland for the commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in August 2019.

[My father's biogram at the website of the Warsaw Uprising Museum]

Sto lat, Dziadzio Bohdan - and then some more!

This time last year:
Happy 94th to my father...

This time two years ago:
HOT! 24C in Warsaw 

This time three years ago:
COLD! Snowy Easter Sunday in Warsaw

This time four years ago:
Happy 91st to my father!

This time five years ago: 
My father at 90

This time six years ago:
An independent Scotland - what if?

On Learning and Living

I came to the conclusion that I'm a slow learner relatively late in life, but I am a persistent learner and when I do learn something - through those insight moments when the penny drops - I tend to learn it well. Lifelong learning is the vocation of a curious and observant mind, a mind that cannot rest. But the speed at which one learns is predicated by native intelligence, determination and focus.

My learning is random; it tends to be driven by coincidences and multifarious paths that converge, diverge and are generally messy. But, just as a jumble of tangled wood shavings and fibres of different lengths and at different angles when compressed and glued form structurally solid fibreboard, so  my haphazard approach to learning has consolidated over the years into something useful. But had I applied myself more to learning, many of the insights I've gained in recent years I could have picked up decades earlier.

Learning is like compound interest, you build on that which has been accumulated before.

Set yourself five tasks for the day, accomplish but three, put two off to the next day; three new ones join them, put two off to the next day and so on - at the end of the week you've done 21 things rather than 35; you've learnt from those 21 things, not from the 35, so procrastination is the reason some of us learn slower than the more focused, self-disciplined one among us.

The advantages of learning are incremental, you stand ever higher on the pile of learning you have accumulated, your horizons ever broader. Do this quickly, methodically, you see further, faster. But if, like me, you put stuff off till the next day, that accumulated learning effect still happens, but the benefits come to you when you're over 50, rather than when you're over 30 and still have time to affect major outcomes.

Breadth vs depth

Learning is like building with bricks. You can use them to build a long wall or you can use them to build a tall chimney. Consider the bricks to be 'learning moments', insights that consolidate facts that we've learnt. These insights come about from our practical experience, from learning from others' experiences, by listening, by reading. Some of us gather them faster than others. Some of us use pile insight bricks in a closed circle, piling new layers onto existing ones, the chimney stack quickly grows higher and higher. Others place the bricks randomly at first, then a line emerges, not necessarily joined up, then the beginnings of a low wall emerge, growing higher but very slowly.

How high should your wall be? Several years ago I was talking to a Polish lawyer, who said that a good lawyer, with good social skills, should be able to engage in a meaningful conversation on any subject for eight minutes. Whatever the subject - speed-skating, photosynthesis, the works of Racine, Javanese gamelan music - literally whatever - using their existing knowledge of neighbouring  subject matter, a person with good general knowledge should be able to hold their own at small talk.

I have written before about breadth vs. depth and advancing age; the generalist's wide range of interests deepen, while the specialist's narrow field of expertise broadens. Why we become generalists or specialists has, I feel, a genetic as well as environmental factors. Our attention span - to what extent is this limited by willpower (or lack thereof)? Ability to concentrate on one subject for more than 20 minutes at one time (said to be the upper limit of the average human attention span) is of great competitive advantage. Ease of understanding, quality of learning material - quality of teacher or mentor - an important factor for the self-taught... but most of all, curiosity.

Then there's RRBI - repetitive and restrictive behaviours and interests - that limit some minds, focusing them intensively and allowing for depth of knowledge in a narrow specialisation very quickly. Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Adam Smith and Isaac Newton are examples. On the other hand, there are polymaths such as Leibniz - said to have been the last human being alive about whom it was said that they know 'everything'.

Jumping about from one subject to another, unable to drill down too deeply in one go is certainly a failing of mine - or so I used to think. Then I found that returning to something that I had once looked at before, though in a superficial way, it became more accessible. Armed with insights from completely different areas of learning, I reach a new levels of cross-disciplinary understanding. It's not that deep in any absolute terms, but deeper than it was, and across a wide spectrum of subjects.

My intellectual self-confidence rises and falls like a wave. When on the high, I consider myself intellectually superior to those around me. When it falls, I realise the big gaps in my knowledge. It is in the dips of my intellectual self-confidence that my learning accelerates; new insights pile onto existing ones, I feel brighter, sharper, smarter - until once more I am confronted with people who are smarter than I. And then the competitive need to self-improve kicks in again. A non-stop cycle.

As human existence becomes exponentially more complex, considering the infinite number of permutations of our scientific, commercial and artistic endeavours, our approach to the acquisition of knowledge and insight is taking on new forms. Finishing to learn the moment one completes one's formal education is no longer an option; it leads to social and economic exclusion. One's success or failure thereafter is down to one's own attitude to learning. The complexity of society - and the complexity of the policy issues that the governments we vote for - mean we all have a huge obligation to keep up with change, and its implications.

This time two years ago:
Goats and hares

This time three years ago:
Białystok the Dull

This time ten years ago:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams

This time eleven years ago:
My second Jeziorki blog post, also from this day

Religion and Happiness: Lent 2018 summary

Day 46: Easter Saturday

My annual period of self-denial and spiritual focus is coming to an end; this is the 27th year in a row - the first was in 1992. Then I gave up nothing more than giving up alcohol, confectionery, fast food and salt snacks between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. Over the years, I've forsworn more items (meat in particular), but more importantly, I have begun treating Lent as a time for spiritual growth rather than just giving up things.

After the excesses of Christmas - the alcohol-fuelled merrimaking and excessive food consumption that sees you though the dark, cold and miserable time of year in  our hemisphere, I look forward to the beginning of Lent more and more with each passing year; it's both a welcome detox for the body and a chance to revisit those most important aspects of what it is to be human, to be conscious, to be alive, to think, to reason, to feel.

As those of you who've followed by Lenten quests over the years, a key issue for me is to seek a clearer path towards the truth. In general terms, I believe it lies neither in the received truths of organised religions nor in the reductionist materialism of traditional science. Rather, I intuit that we humans do have a spiritual nature that is metaphysical and indeed supernatural; that consciousness evolves, that the universe has a purpose, and that God exists - but we have yet to come anywhere close to an understanding of what God is or means. All we can do is seek - our seeking should be based on insights, intuition and reason, on reading widely from many sources, looking for highest common factors, looking for commonalities between cutting-edge science and human tradition - and intuition.

Some of us have a need for a spiritual search, a search for meaning - others don't. Those that don't may feel the need to dismiss my personal search as misguided. But the search is moving me in the right direction, and this Lent I have found much inspiration in Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe. While taking great pains not to write off classical Newtonian science and all the advances it has brought us over the past three centuries, Kauffman opens doors to new ways of looking at our universe that do not dismiss an intuitive approach.

Doubts in my mind have often been engendered by that cold scientific approach. It is born of the faith that consciousness resides in the brain and that death means a final snuffing out, an extinction of self; nothingness. Classical science based on certainties plotted by quadratic equations would posit that thinking otherwise is nothing but self-delusion. But Kauffman - and other serious scientists too - are pointing to a new view of reality, based on the uncertainties at the heart of quantum mechanics, and on the rejection that we're not far from uncovering a final grand theory of everything. The evolving universe is too complex for that, says Kauffman, who posits that the laws of nature themselves may be evolving. I found myself several times during the course of reading this book having insights that not only brought on new horizons - they actually made me feel happier. [I felt a 'Good News' moment of true joy when I read that a serious theoretical physicist arguing that dark energy and dark matter might indeed be consciousness, or that consciousness might be a property of matter along with energy and mass. I was overjoyed to read these ideas.]

Yes - happiness. Being optimistic and positive is a far better way to approach life than being pessimistic and negative. I have met people, ostensibly successful, wealthy and driven, whose worldview is dreadfully negative, whose negativism and misanthropy acts as a black hole sucking in all the hope of people around them. We should avoid contact with such people.

Happiness brings about greater mental health, health and happiness are linked; if you feel there is sense to life, that life is about moving forward on that great universal continuum from Zero to One, then your life has more meaning, you are more likely to fulfil your human potential.

This time last year:
Health and fitness in a Quarter of Abstinence

This time five years ago:

Easter Sunday in the snow

This time seven years ago:
Cycling to work - the new season begins

This time eight years ago:  
Five weeks into Lent

Winter returned for a morning

Yesterday morning, earlyish start - and this...

Out on ul. Karczunkowska, Trombity bus stop. Snow coming in horizontally from the east. I make my train in good time, trudging through mud churned in with snow on the temporary path to W-wa Jeziorki station. Temperature: +1C, wind gusting to 35kmh.

Heading into town, I catch the 07:55 train which has come from Czachówek Południowy, change at W-wa Zachodnia (below). A dear old three-windscreened EN57. One of the last.

Below: A little deja vu thing... By the Hard Rock Cafe, Złote Tarasy.

Veturilo hire bikes standing a bit idle; far from ideal cycling weather.

Outside the InterContinental hotel, even posh cars get snowed on

And on to my destination, Rondo ONZ 1, which afforded good views of a city under wet snow

By the afternoon, the snow had gone. A good thing. Here's a Chausson APH 48 'Pig Snout' outside the Palace of Culture.

This classic bus, the only one in existence in Poland, served Warsaw in the immediate post-war years, to be replaced by the more modern Chaussons in the late 1950s.

This time last year:
Globalisation and the politics of identity

This time four years ago:
More photos from Edinburgh

This time five years ago:
Edinburgh continues to fascinate

This time six years ago:
Ealing in bloom - early spring

This time ten years ago:
Swans arrive in Jeziorki

A Brief History of Time review, Part 2

Lent 2018, Day 44

My Lenten quest this year strolls along the boundary layer between Science and Religion; an important area of inquiry through which few humans tread. I have come to have a deep respect for Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe - the words 'humanity' and 'creative' being all-important descriptors of the word 'universe'. Kauffman's world view is more open to notions of the universe having a direction and purpose; of a universal consciousness that's continually evolving. Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time hails from a passing age, in which it was believed that before too long, science would be able to explain everything.

As I wrote yesterday in Part 1 of my review, Hawking's bestseller remains a milestone in popular-science writing. It sets out the two theories of how we understand this universe in which we live, at the subatomic level (quantum mechanics) and at the galactic level (relativity). It also explains black holes, the radiation (subsequently named Hawking radiation) that seeps out of them, despite previous theories that nothing should escape their gravitational pull. And Hawking describes Time as an arrow that flies only one way - and why that should be.

So there we are, at the end of chapter 9, cheering on scientific progress in its quest to unify all theories into one, so we end up understanding everything. But hold on... Chapter 10 is called The Unification of Physics, and in it, Hawking explains the current (as of 1988) thinking in terms of unifying quantum theory with relativity. It was all meant to be so simple... "In 1928, physicist and Nobel prize winner Max Born [said] 'Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months'. " Hawking continues; "I still believe that there are grounds for cautious optimism that we many now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature."

Aafter introducing the then-trendy superstring theory (space-time was thought to consist of ten or 26 dimensions back in 1988), he asks: "But can there really be such a unified theory? Or are we perhaps just chasing a mirage?" Kauffman believes that a Grand Unified Theory, a single set of rules that consistently describes and explains everything, is exactly that.

Hawking sets out three possibilities:

"1) There really is a complete unified theory, which we will someday discover if we are smart enough.

2) There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe ever more accurately.

3) There is no theory of the universe; events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner."

I intuitively rule out possibility 1) on the grounds that we are not smart enough. The complexity of the universe (be it just our biodiversity or our human economy here on planet earth) is growing so rapidly that it would be folly to believe that we could. I'm happy enough with 2); an infinite sequence will take an eternity to unravel - to me, that feels instinctively right. And 3) also seems right - until eternity minus one chronon, when all (and I mean ALL) will become totally clear.

Hawking then sets up a straw-man argument... "Some would argue for possibility 3) on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it?" Reductionist materialist scientists can take pops at medieval views of God and they can do it well; but it's time for religions to reconsider the notion of a supreme deity in much the same way that scientists (including Einstein himself) had to reconsider the laws of nature once the theory of quantum mechanics was proven to be correct.

Kauffman could also suggest a fourth possibility, namely that the laws of nature, the universal constants, the boundary conditions, are themselves evolving - so science is ultimately chasing a moving target. Kauffman's view of the universe is far grander that the dry calculus of classical physics. Positing consciousness as a property of matter, along with mass and energy hugely complicates mankind's search for a final theory. Those biologists who insist that the seat of consciousness resides exclusively in the human brain (and in the brain of higher-order animals) have yet to prove it, just as theoretical physicists have yet to unify quantum theory and relativity.

But then Kauffman has yet to prove that consciousness resides in subatomic particles; experiments into the way the conscious human observer can influence the outcome of quantum experiments by force of will are are a long way off from showing any conclusive results.

One way or another, science is far from 'over'; it behoves those of us who take the view of the universe as being purposeful, travelling in an untidy line from Zero to One, through chaos to order, to keep up with the latest discoveries in cosmology and particle physics.

Let me give the last word to Hawking: "What would it mean if we actually did discover the ultimate theory of the universe? If the theory was mathematically consistent and always gave predictions that agreed with observations, we could be reasonably confident that it was the right one. It would bring to an end a long and glorious chapter in the history of humanity's intellectual struggle to understand the universe." But Hawking acknowledges that this is not all... "Even if we do discover a complete unified theory, it would not mean that we would be able to predict events in general." This is because of a) the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics limits our powers of prediction and b) the equations would be, says Hawking, too complex to solve "except in very simple situations."

But even so, "A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step, our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence." Phew! Here's Hawking getting very close how I see Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla what have you - total consciousness, awareness of everything.

Well worth taking the trouble to read. Steven Hawking's great message to mankind was "be curious, be determined." He most certainly was both. He inspired many people to inquire more deeply into the nature of our universe. Striving to make the most of our potential as human beings is a noble aim.

On my own journey from Zero to One, I feel that this Lent I have taken another small step forward; life is a quest to learn; don't come to me for spiritual answers but for an open-ended discussion from which I hope all parties will increase their understanding at least a bit. See this life as but a short stage in an eternally long learning process.

This time three years ago:
"We don't need no [tertiary] education"

This time four years ago:
Arthur's Seat - Edinburgh's urban mountain

This time six years ago:
Heaven

This time seven years ago:
A wee taste of Edinburgh

This time eight years ago:
First long bike ride of the season

This time nine years ago:
Life returns to Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Early spring dusk

A Brief History of Time - review, Part 1 - Introduction

Lent 2018: Day 42

Never before in my 60 years has a stranger on public transport ever asked me about a book I was reading. This week, two fellow passengers did just that, as I was sat there with my copy of Steven Hawking's best seller. That a book by the British scientist, who died on 14 March, should so well known as to prompt comments from people here in Poland says much about its fame.

On hearing of Prof Hawking's death, I reached for A Brief History of Time from my father's bookshelf. Like many of his books it is neatly bound in clear polythene, and catalogued (with the number 19). My father wrote 'Xmas 1988' on the half-title page; the publisher's copyright pages says this is the seventh(!) reprint, dated 1988 - of a book that first appeared in 1988. Verily, a best seller, with over ten million sold by 2008.

Pencilled notes in the margins and underlined phrases or sentences from beginning to end, plus numerous newspaper and magazine cuttings (including one from Scientific American, dated December 1991) suggest that not only did my father read the book from end to end, but he continued to return it as and when new stuff came to light. Looking at my father's notes from nearly 30 years ago, when he was 65, I can see a vital interest, intellectual curiosity and broad background knowledge.

Thirty years is a long time in science. The number of subatomic particles know to science has grown, as has the number of galaxies in the known universe, and the number of stars within those galaxies. The age of the universe is given as being between 10 and 15 billion years, today scientific consensus says 13.8 billion years. Gravitational waves had never been detected. Planets orbiting other stars had never been detected. Dark matter is mentioned only in passing, just three sentences in a paragraph about the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is not mentioned at all (now reckoned to be 67.3% of everything the universe consists of). We now know far more - and the more science discovers, the more it realises it still doesn't know. "Ultimately," writes Hawking, "most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces [gravity, electromagnetism, weak- and strong nuclear force] as different aspects of a single force. Indeed, many would say that this is the prime goal of physics today."

Having read Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe (2016), it seems that that goal has been abandoned as astrophysicists and nuclear physicists peer further into the unknown and come up with more questions than answers. Hawking is still of the Newtonian old school of reductionist materialism, believing that mankind was on the verge of discovering all the answers through quadratic equations that elegantly piece together the pieces of the jigsaw into one Grand United Theory. Kauffman is far more cautious - and more metaphysical. He believes there's far more out there than phenomena that are calculable; his background in theoretical biology gives him a messier cosmology than Hawking's. Kauffman mentions Steven Weinberg Dream of a Final Theory (1998), and says that the "hard-headed realism" of scientists who chase such a theory, who try to tie up all the loose ends and tell us - "here it all is, finally solved " - robs our human lives of mystery and magic.

I feel there's more than a little of that with Hawking. While he does a grand job of explaining the incredibly complex and often counter-intuitive cosmos down to the subatomic particle, I detect a certain intellectual arrogance - the universe as a problem for the scientist to solve, to reduce down to numbers and formulae.

A Brief History of Time should not be attempted by a lay reader without some basic understanding of the building blocks of our universe; the notion of spacetime, singularity, quantum uncertainty. Coming at this cold expecting a Dummy's Guide approach will not work. Having said that, Wikipedia is a wonderful tool (for me, the biggest single achievement of the Internet Age), and the ability to pick up at least a superficial grasp of a new concept (such as the Pauli exclusion principle) is very helpful in tackling this book.

Hawkings breaks the subject down into chapters dealing with the universe, the elementary particles, black holes, and of course, time itself. This makes is easier to get one's head around it all; plus, for the lay reader, there is famously only one equation in the book, which is E=mc².

The rest of my review of A Brief History of Time here.

This time last year:
Eyes without a face

This time two years ago:
London blooms in yellow

This time three years ago:
London's Docklands: a case-study in urban regeneration

This time four years ago:
Scotland and its language 

This time five years ago:
Death, our sister

This time six years ago:
First bike ride to work of the year 

This time eight years ago:
Poland's trains ran faster before the war

This time nine years ago:
Winter in spring: surely this must be the last snow?

This time ten years ago:
Surely THIS must be the last snow?

Local update at the start of the last week of Lent

A lovely warm day, with temperatures into double digits - the best way to clear snow, with the sun's rays rather than rain. A long walk (12,000 paces today), and time for a local update. It looks like ul. Karczunkowska will have a new bus stop, between the new Totalbud building and the state security-printers, PWPW. The new bus stop will be 450m from the one on the corner of Puławska and 400m from Trombity. This makes sense. Too many PWPW employees drive in by car, parking on verges, pavements even on street corners. Take away an excuse to use the car, and conditions will be better.

Though work should have started on 12 March, it hasn't really - will the new bus stop be ready by 30 April? And will it be called Pozytywki (50m from corner of Karczunkowska and ul. Pozytywki) or PWPW?

Spring is here, astronomical and meteorologic; I spot my first toad, making its way across Pozytywki towards the pond, now ice-free.

A look from the (unnamed because it's meant to be temporary) road linking ul. Gogolińska and Karczunkowska round the side of Biedronka. A nice view of the viaduct as it begins to take shape.

Meanwhile ul. Trombity is still being dug up for the water mains, so Monday-Friday during work hours, there's no getting through.


Coming soon - a Lenten review of the late Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

This time last year:
"Jeziorki bogged down in railway mud"
Guys - NOTHING. HAS. CHANGED.

This time two years ago:
Ideas, and how they take hold

This time three years ago:
Russian eyes peering down on Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
The fate of urban wetlands?