Calibration

The human brain is said somewhat hyperbolically to be 'infinitely plastic'. By 'plastic' of course, the hyperbolists refer to the capacity of the human primary neural network, that slapdash wetware complex known as the brain, to continually reinvent itself.

The brain repurposes, represents, reformats, reconfigures over time. The person we are each day is dependent on this; indeed, we are never ever quite the same self despite the sense of continuity of self that we assert.

There is an important point here. The only way we know how we change is to do something to fix a baseline of previous experience. We need to do a 'calibration curve' for the changing brain. And that requires us to journal, to blog, to self-record. That's why I'm writing all this.

Archivists

Yes, I am unashamed of it. I assembled and kept 20 years of historical records based on public documents. This is what historians do. And nobody else has this stuff. I am not ashamed of that either. Haha.

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OK, that was wicked. Actually, that first paragraph was just designed to tweak the beards of trawling bots looking for certain things and trying to inspire their masters to virulent campaigns of verbal denunciation.

The real point is that I suddenly felt the urge to celebrate the lives of two very earnest young men who grew up to be very earnest old men, still (after many decades) holding true to their archival instincts and looking after large amounts of historical material. I learnt perhaps 60% of all my craft from these two men and I salute them and remember them fondly all the time.

I also visit them when I can. Both are spritely and vigorous, sane in mind and fit in body. And since one of them is my father and one of them was in loco parentis to me, it's very pleasing to the filial part of my psyche as well.

Lastly, this is also a shout-out to that guy who often spends his Saturdays at the National Archives, a building which used to be a home to me. May he find inspiration amidst the stacks of ancient raw material and once-processed stuff, and may he feel the benign spiritual residues of generations of archivists before him over his shoulder. Heh!

Tidying

The problem with living with an archivist is that everything is kept and nothing is thrown away. Anything with text on it is piled in archaeological layers which one is afraid to disturb or otherwise disrupt. And one fears that the removal of a single item will bring about catastrophe.

Today we removed 20 kg of what we thought was likely to be disposable fissile material: disposable in the sense that it could be bagged and thrown away, fissile in the sense that it was likely to spread in some sort of proliferative manner by falling apart spontaneously, material in the sense that it was only too tangible.

After that, brother and I looked at each other with a strong sense of 'mission accomplished'. Yes, another satisfying male-bonding sibling moment. Heh.