Consider the drafts of Montaigne: they bristle with the prolonged torture of corrections, additions and alterations; endless careful detailed polishing that makes one realise the clichéd schoolmaster’s advice of 10% inspiration 90% perspiration holds true even in the rarefied air of innate talent. Or look at Raphael’s drawings after he has studied the masters and learnt to do perspective. They may look like the effortless strokes born of raw talent alone, but with the context of his earlier drawings I think one could attribute the improvement mainly to years of diligent mimicry, a painstaking transfer of skills by proxy if you like. How prosaic and disappointing to imagine these elite creatures having to stoop to practice in order to make their work seem effortless! (Meanwhile the world is probably awash with lazy geniuses who have come to nothing because they expected their talent to somehow allow circumvention of the work required to bring it to fruition).

Sure, not every web designer will be a Mozart but you’d be surprised how far graft can take one. To deny an aspirant the chance of success because he’s not “built correctly” from birth is to deny the immense and constantly surprising power of humans to learn and adapt, indeed perhaps to create versions of internal circuitry with which luckier ones may have come pre-installed. What is our brain but a malleable electrochemical soup after all? No hardwired semiconductors in place that a priori necessarily deny change. The obvious can become signficant with practice, though yes to the innately talented it will of probably come more easily and to a larger degree. Even if it doesn’t, there is hope for all for are prepared to devote time to getting the details right, honing practical skills on the field of experience and slowly piecing things together, just as there is room for a skilled joiner to work alongside a cabinet maker. Indeed the lazy cabinet maker may have to watch out that he is not replaced.

My wife and I have never rinsed ‘owt before challenging our Teutonic beast with the foulest platens of greasy residue, and we haven’t yet been disappointed. It really isn’t necessary, unless you have entertained a vegetarian with steak and kidney pie, in which case any available quadruped is the obvious beneficiary.

Actually I’ve noticed that folk who perform a ritual pre-dishwasher rinse and employ a cleaner are apt also to clean their house within an inch of its life before the cleaner arrives. There is a definite connection. I’ve never been sure whether they are ashamed, considerate, mistrusting or simply oblivious to the function of, erm, labour-saving technology. Ahh nowt like Marxist baiting.

Stacking a dishwasher properly is an art oft ignored yet easily learned, according to someone else’s Mum. Despite this discouragement, the act becomes an undiluted joy as soon as you realise how much less time even the most complicated “Tetris level 9″ stack takes when compared to the endless drudgery of using a brush and sink. Even if it involves dried-on cat food, tortilla, cigarette ash, lengthy spinach stalks and of course the ubiquitous ‘matter’, on this occasion nervously united with tea leaves by solidified lamb fat, all spread among sufficent oddly-shaped vessels to require devilishly inventive placement, you will still have saved time. Reading that sentence would have taken longer in fact. Wine glasses should never be put in a dishwasher unless you don’t mind them slowly turning grey (thanks to the harsh abrasive powder). Anyone who puts antique glasses in one is a wanton and dangerous idealist. I found a wonton lodged in the filter once, although the contents were ominously conspicuous by their absence. I can promise you a (German) dishwasher is an excellent investment, even if you have to re-clean the occasional omelette pan. Your water bill will thank you too.

Of course there must be the occasional person who enjoys an “incredible” streak betting on the nags, just as a coin will sometimes produce an “amazing” run of nine or more heads in a row. But they are not gifted, at least in any mystical sense (though they may well be deft at analysing form, for instance) merely perched further towards the end of the bell curve.

Indeed, when humans are asked to write down a sequence that represents a realistic series of coin flips, they invariably underestimate the frequency and extent of these runs. For instance they might write HTHHTHTTHHTHTHT whereas something lumpier, such as HHHHTHHHTTTHTTTTT would be more representative of reality.

Similarly, someone killed by a falling durian might be considered dreadfully unlucky (once the inevitable guilty chuckles had stopped) but is simply the victim of a remote probability that they chose to increase significantly by standing under a tree that kills several unfortunates a year. (The latin name for durian means “smells like a civet cat” by the way. ) Meanwhile someone must win the lottery – no luck in that, it’s eventually a 100% certainty – while every other entrant is taxed on their failure to grasp how pathetically minuscule are the odds of a pre-chosen person winning.

People who consider themselves lucky generally have a more positive outlook on life. Good events are highlighted in their memory while bad events fade. A positive outlook will be reflected in their response to certain circumstances and availability to spot and act upon opportunities; the opposite is true for the “unlucky”. This has a cumulative effect which is bad news for the “unlucky” person because they are likely to become increasingly aware of every bad event and increasingly dismissive of good ones, falling into a vicious spiral of irrational “the fates must really have it in for me” paranoia. This type of person often fails to take responsibility for his own actions, preferring instead the easy cop out of fatalism, or worse, puts their faith in astrology. This doesn’t usually help.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” – Seneca

“The harder I work, the luckier I become.” (Jefferson?)

I note that no fewer than 380 lucky horseshoes were sold on eBay in the last 15 days. Sadly I doubt it was cheaply to meet the needs of 95 barefooted nags.

“Without intelligence behind evolutionary design means that random chance engineered apparent design. Look at today’s top designers of engineering products, maybe a Ferrari F1 engine. If I said that the Ferrari engine happened by accident and without intelligence behind then I would be laughed at like an idiot. Yet look at the complexity in the engineering of the human hand which is literally infinitely more complex and this happened by accident. What about the human eye ? Again even our top most intelligent scientists cannot come close to the engineering capability of something that again happened by accident.”

It is an oddly common (and I suspect often deliberate, at least among proponents of intelligent design) misconception that a complex creature (or element of one, such as a hand) as seen by a Darwinist is nothing more than a happy accident. This assumption fails signally to understand how evolution works. No Darwinist would suggest for a picosecond that the human hand is the result of an extended medley of dice throwing.

The process, which involves random chance (mutation) together with cumulative selection, occurs in minuscule steps starting from very humble (and thus realistic/credible) beginnings over a huge number of generations. Mutation may be random, but selection is not.

For instance, to use the old eye chestnut: once upon a time a single cell mutated and became sensitive to light. A single photocell gave a small advantage over the creatures with no photocell, perhaps gaining them the sight of a few extra scones. So the former became healthier and more prevalent. Then another mutation improves this most primitive of eyes a tiny bit further; that slightly improved creature again multiplies while the ones with less useful mutations die off.

“Heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success” to quote Darwin. So the eye is steadily honed (”climbs mount improbable”, to paraphrase Dawkins) over a large number of small steps into the glorious baby blues we have today, bringing with it to some a seductive illusion of design.

“Thus the creationist’s favourite question ‘What is the use of half an eye?’ Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant.” (Dawkins)

“If there is no intelligence behind our evolutionary development, this means that only matter exists and the human mind, the human soul and the human spirit only appear to have a separate conscious ability and existence. If this is not the case then how and where have they come from ?”

I’ve never thought of my mind as anything other than a deliciously complex machine. The eye is impressive, the brain even more so, but fundamentally I don’t see why the two couldn’t have emerged similarly through evolution. The dualistic idea of the mind existing in some way separately from the rest of my flesh ‘n bones (I guess what people mean by soul or spirit), or being anything other than matter coursing with chemicals and electricity is alien to me, though I can see the romantic appeal of the notion. Muscles contract, rods and cones are sensitive to light patterns, brain cells process information, simple. Or rather, complex.

If the audio is linked with vision then obviously it matters. I wired my projector the wrong way into the stereo and it was quite odd seeing people walking from left to right while hearing their steps pattering from right to left.

Swapping the L&R of a piece of music should not affect its objective integrity. It’s still exactly the same piece of music after all, with nothing added or subtracted. The trouble is it then has to strike our ears and be processed by two halves of brain in order to be heard and enjoyed. If the listener is habituated to certain conventions such as the spatial arrangement of an orchestra, e.g the trombones parping on the right, then to hear them suddenly on the left may produce a feeling of unease, much as one feels looking at a photo of oneself when used to seeing one’s ugly fizzog in the mirror. This is I suspect merely due to conditioning and could presumably be reduced with repetition.

More interestingly perhaps are subtle disctinctions between both the ways in which the different ears respond to sound and the way in which sounds are processed by the two brain hemispheres.

“From birth, the ear is structured to distinguish between various types of sounds and to send them to the optimal side in the brain for processing,” explains Yvonne Sininger, Ph.D., visiting professor of head and neck surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Yet no one has looked closely at the role played by the ear in processing auditory signals.” LOL at David Geffen school of medicine. School of rawk, surely?

“The auditory regions of the two halves of the brain sort out sound differently. The left side dominates in deciphering speech and other rapidly changing signals, while the right side leads in processing tones and music. Our findings demonstrate that auditory processing starts in the ear before it is ever seen in the brain [...] even at birth, the ear is structured to distinguish between different types of sound and to send it to the right place in the brain.”

So could this mean, for example, that rhythms might be processed more effectively if piped in on one side and complex melodies or harmonies on t’other? And thus to swap over one’s favourite track could ensure we process it suboptimally and don’t enjoy it as much as we should? Are sound engineers aware of this? I suspect the brain is so fast it makes little difference, but you never know. Either way, if it’s Oasis blaring out I’ll be using my third ear only, to mark my appreciation.

1. Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift. (Stoppard)
2. Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty. (Frank Herbert)
3. Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. (Montaigne)
4. To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. (Nietzsche)
5. Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. (Jong)
6. Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. (Sanders Law)
7. Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. (Byrnes)
8. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. (Dawkins)

This does not, of course, mean that I don’t find the universe incredible, perplexing, wonderful and mysterious – of course I do – rather that it is sufficiently so (understatement) to make the mental conjuring of another layer of complexity (god) redundant and unlikely, at least to my small mind.

Naturally this makes me wonder how religion ever came to arise in the human mind. The disturbingly stubborn longevity of religion (indeed in some quarters it’s actually gathering strength, even in these supposedly enlightened times) strongly suggests to me that there must be (or have been) a survival advantage to harbouring religious beliefs. If there wasn’t, I’d expect natural selection to have weeded it out.

Another school of thought holds that religion is simply an exaptation, an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.

Then there are those who suspect a hardwired religious gene, which may cause a predisposition to episodes interpreted as religious revelation.

Whatever the cause, it’s still very much a prevalent social phenomenon. The conditioning of young children (often by well-meaning parents) into religion when they are at their most credulous is easy and not necessarily a tragedy, though the idea of calling someone a “Muslim child” or “Christian child” before they are old enough to make a rational choice of their own is depressing.

More sinister, however, is that religion is still a perfect tool for nasty people to acquire and prolong a great deal of power, influence and money, often at considerable cost to others.

Still pondering this one, hence the sloppy unfinished feel.

Now I’m down to one free web-based chart and have let it all go, it’s such a relief. Four monitors, 85 charts with various pointless divisions of time, range and volume, bid/ask order book overlaid with pit noise, Tick, Vix, put/call open interest, A/D and Trin. What on earth was I doing, apart from muddying the water and creating diversions to avoid facing the simplicity that was always there. I suppose it’s kinda hard to accept that an innocent child with the proverbial crayon would probably do the job better, especially for the inquisitive male ego “But… but … you mean that’s all I have to do? Can’t be right. So let’s misovercomplexify it” as Bush might say.

Notwithstanding I think basics still need to be grasped: the formations and background levels of commitment and emotion that manifest as, for instance, an even-handed fierce fight; a non-commital can’t be bothered to fight; woah that hurt and I grimly held on but now it really hurts capitulation; directional grind, whippy uncertainty etc. Vague levels of view (or lack of it) and positioning, but beyond that I no longer care why anything is happening outside of the nebulous bigger picture. Perhaps it gets more exciting when you can see the less obvious coming, but you don’t need to. Pursue another (parallel) career if you want creative rewards, enlightening explanations or a sense of having produced something whether physically or in the mysterious carapace at the top of our bodies.

Accept that for the market to work it needs to occasionally misdirect – savagely – often during a dull moment (biggest moves often come out of these) but that it is, yes, generally quite obvious. Look at Trader Dante on Trade2Win nonchalantly sweeping pips into his basket with nowt more than the outrageous simplicity of price. Draw a few simple lines, exercise patience and hit those small areas of high probability again and again. That’s all we can do. Thus it must follow that battles will indeed be fought in these obvious areas, as that’s where the seasoned money will always be. It cannot be any other way. Our money, playing the waiting selective game. Not their money, cause they’re impulsive, impatient, clueless, adrenaline diet disciples, or so rumour has it.

The disillusioned trader can allow their other interests to answer and fulfil the needling question ‘but surely there is more’. Without doubt there is, but I haven’t found it in trading. Indeed the searching obscured the very thing I didn’t need to look for.

Actually I’m a bit confused by this dreadful online dictionary’s definition of astrology:

“The study of the positions and aspects of celestial bodies in the belief that they have an influence on the course of natural earthly occurrences and human affairs.”

Clearly the moon is sufficiently close to earth to mess with our sea levels, giving rise to tides. Occasionally Mars gets in the way of the sun and we have an eclipse, and so on. I wouldn’t argue with that, but in my view these are the observations of astronomy, not astrology. Stupid dictionary. However once the celestial bodies are sufficiently far away (obeying the inverse square law) then the gravitational effect they will have on earth is minuscule and outweighed by objects closer to home, such as, in the case of the newborn, a rotund midwife. Are there other mechanisms by which astrologers think the planets etc, interfere with us and if so what? I am genuinely interested, for the next seven nanoseconds, even though I don’t believe a word of it.

Given a sufficiently large set of data you will be able to sift through it in an almost infinite number of ways and eventually find some sort of correlation with something that involves movement/alignment of the stars, planets etc.: it would be a surprise if you didn’t as the permutations and opportunities for curve-fitting are endless. On finding a so-called magic correlation the mistake is to attribute any causality to it.

Coincidences are much more common than we might imagine as there are so many ways in which they can happen. How often does a flushed yummy mummy gracefully dismount her urban tractor to exclaim: “How amazing! I bumped into someone in Waitrose today with exactly the same name as me, her daughter goes to my old school and do you know she’s even wearing exactly the same fur gilet that I bought last month from Agnès B! What are the chances of that?!”

Well, the chances of someone meeting these predetermined conditions would be minuscule, granted, but of course she didn’t predetermine them. It is likely that there would be an immense pool of things the two people might have in common and the three mentioned represent only a fraction. In fact it would be unusual for coincidences like this NOT to happen as there are so many ways in which they can. Put another way, some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place. The paradoxical conclusion is that is would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. (with thanks to Paulos for that, whose excellent book on innumeracy also bewails the fact that it is often a source of pride to people that they are bad at maths).