1. We don't have enough resources to give everyone a Western lifestyle.
2. Said lifestyle isn't actually very good at giving us the things which really make us happy.
3. We do, on the other hand, have the resources to throw a truly massive party and invite everyone in the world. Drugs - especially psychedelics - require very little to produce, and sex is basically free.

It was often uncomfortable, often painful, particularly for the first month, but other days were pure joy, a revelling in the sensation of movement, of strength and wellbeing. My regular headaches stopped. For the first time ever, I got through winter without even a cold. I felt incredibly well, began to walk and hold myself differently. When friends asked "How are you?", instead of the normal Scottish "Oh, not too bad," I'd find myself saying "Extremely well!"

How obnoxious.

On other days training was pure slog, the body protesting and the will feeble. The mind could see little point in getting up before breakfast to run on a cold, dark morning, and none at all in continuing when it began to hurt. Take a break, why not have a breather, why not run for home now?

It is at times like that that the real work is done. It's easy to keep going when you feel strong and good. Anyone can do that. But at altitude it is going to feel horrible most of the time - and that's what you're really training for. So keep on running, through the pain and the reluctance. Do you really expect to get through this Expedition - this relationship, this book, this life for that matter - without some of the old blood, sweat and tears? No chance. That's part of the point of it all. So keep on running...

The real purpose of training is not so much hardening the body as toughening the will. Enthusiasm may get you started, bodily strength may keep you going for a long time, but only the will makes you persist when those have faded. And stubborn pride. Pride and the will, with its overtones of fascism and suppression, have long been suspect qualities - the latter so much so that I'd doubted its existence. But it does exist, I could feel it gathering and bunching inside me as the months passed. There were times when it alone got me up and running, or kept me from whinging and retreating off a Scottish route. The will is the secret motor that keeps driving when the heart and the mind have had enough.

The Ball Game

This game is a particular favourite of Josie, but Haggis finds it boring. The kitten takes a ball (usually one made of silver foil), and bats it around with its paws and carries it around in its mouth. The game has a very complicated scoring scheme which we haven't worked out yet, and ends when the kitten gets bored.

This game has a variant called Fetch, recently independently reinvented by Josie. We are, as you can imagine, unreasonably proud of her.

The "It's My $object, Get Your Own" Game

This is a game for two kittens. One claims possession of an object of some sort and then growls threateningly at the other whenever they come near. This is often combined with...

The Sponge-Hunting Game

A favourite of Haggis. The normal habitats of the Common Sponge are the kitchen sink and the cupboard under same. Haggis waits patiently for the appearance of an unguarded Sponge, and then grabs it, drags it all over the flat, and finally disembowels it on the living-room carpet, all while growling deeply. Finally he garlands his tail with pieces of the Sponge's entrails, as befits a mighty hunter such as himself.

The Red Dot Game

The Red Dot Game starts with the bipeds crashing around the flat, uttering ritual cries of "where the bloody hell have you hidden the laser pointer?" This stage is very important for Building Anticipation.

Once the initial phase is over, the Mysterious Red Dot appears! The cats then chase the Mysterious Red Dot around the flat. This used to be a very high-energy affair, with the kittens leaping up walls and chasing round and round (and round and round and round) the living-room carpet to get the MRD; it has now evolved into a more strategic game, with the cats sneaking up on the MRD using all available cover before suddenly pouncing on it.

The Wall Game

A variant on the Red Dot Game, to be played during the summer months. The MRD is replaced by the reflection of my smartphone on the bedroom wall as I attempt to check my email before getting out of bed. Josie in particular can attain impressive heights while leaping to grab it.

The Fly-Catching Game

When a fly is sighted, the hunt is on! Points are awarded for catching and eating the fly, but also for knocking over ornaments while chasing after it. Anything belonging to the landlady scores double.

The Climbing Game

As befits natives of Skye, the kittens loves to climb things¹. Haggis is undoubtedly the stronger climber, having made the dramatic first ascent of Bookshelf Route (K6c) in the living room. Josie's no slouch, though, with the FA of the closet testpiece Warm Jumper Shelf (K6b+) to her credit. Both kittens eschew the standard training paraphernalia of campus- and finger-boards in favour of a 3m tall cat tree covered in sisal. They also exclusively climb solo and barefoot; not for them the ethical grey areas of headpointing or piton use!

Haggis is a promising drytooler, too, having completed the bold Wormwood Pearl's Leg Route.

Haggis's current project is the futuristic Boiler Roof Continuation in the kitchen; the line follows the standard Fridge Route onto the summit of the Crockery Cupboard, then continues it via a massive dyno over the kitchen sink onto the top of the boiler. From there a tricky and exposed dyno should lead to the long-awaited FA of the Catfood Shelf. His previous attempts to reach the Catfood Shelf via the Ornament Shelf below have always failed at the crux roof move from the Ornament Shelf onto the Catfood Shelf; the line is rarely in condition, depending as it does on the seasonal drift of the Kitchen Table.

When Haggis finally completes his project (no doubt celebrating with his trademark Sending Yowl), you can be sure it will be extensively covered in the climbing press.

Haggis chillaxes on his portaledge.

The Tummy-Tickling Game

This is a game for one kitten and one biped. The kitten lies on its back, as if to say "Look! I have a tummy!" The biped must say "Yes! You have a tummy!" and then start tickling it.

The kitten may eventually get bored of this and walk away. Possibly.

The False Tummy-Tickling Game

This is a game for one kitten (who we may without loss of generality call "Haggis") and one biped. Haggis lies on his back, as if to say "Look! I have a tummy!". The biped, assuming that Haggis is playing the Tummy-Tickling Game, will start to tickle it. Whereupon Haggis says "And I also have TEETH AND CLAWS!!!!" and start using them on the unsuspecting biped's hand.

Thick gloves are advisable if you want to play this game for any length of time. Alternatively, it is possible to distract Haggis with a chewable watch-strap.

Watching KTTV

The cats love to watch KTTV (the view out of the kitchen window). They also love its affiliate station KTTV-2 (the view out of the bedroom window), which shows nature documentaries. They particularly like documentaries which involve BIRDS. Their favourite is to watch KTTV in HD, by climbing onto the windowframe when the window is open. This leads us to a new game which Haggis has recently invented:

The Scare The Crap Out Of The Bipeds By Climbing Out Onto The Windowsill Game

Self-explanatory.

¹ If you recognised the title of this post as a nod to Lito Tejeda-Flores' classic essay The Games Climbers Play, you're absolutely right.

"Would you like some money towards another Glenmore Lodge course for Christmas?" said my Dad, some time in December. I thought about last year's course for about half a second and said "Yes please!". This time I signed up for the five-day winter lead climbing course, and had five fantastic days climbing: Wednesday in particular was one of the best days I've ever had in the mountains.

Below are some of the things I learned. Usual rules apply: I am not a qualified mountain guide, and these notes may contain errors. Use your own judgement.

Fiacaill Buttress, taken after we climbed Jacob's Right Edge on Wednesday.

More and larger photos here.

1. Closures are great when you have several behaviours which can all vary independently; objects are great when you have several behaviours that must all vary in sync with one another. Put another way: if your problem is combinatorial explosion of objects, try using closures instead; if your problem is ensuring consistency among different behaviours, try grouping them into objects. Languages like Perl make it relatively easy to do either, so use the best tool for the job. The trick is to spot that you're using the wrong representation before you either create a kajillion Strategy classes or knock together a half-arsed object system out of hashes of closures.
2. In the correct quantity, housekeeping tasks can be your friends. By "housekeeping tasks" I mean tasks that don't directly contribute to solving the problem at hand, but which still add some value. An example from yesterday was converting a small class hierarchy to use the Moose object system. Other examples might be writing per-method documentation, cleaning up your version control history, and minor refactorings. If there's too much of this stuff to do, it can get dispiriting - you want to be solving the problem, not mucking about with trivia! But if there's not too much, it can be helpful: you have something to do while you're stuck on the main problem, and the housekeeping work is close enough to the main problem that it stays in your brain's L2 cache, where a background process can work away at it. If you're so stuck that you literally can't make any progress, your choices are (a) think very very hard and get depressed, (b) go and do something totally different, in the process forgetting lots of important details. I find both of these to be less productive.

I take it back: #aiclass is covering the Oxford 1st-year logic course in <1wk. The good bits of the syllabus, anyway :-)

• "Introduction to Symbolic Logic", taught in the first term to all Philosophy students (including those like me who were studying Maths and Philosophy), and also a few others like Classics students. This covered propositional logic, first-order predicate logic, proof tableaux, and endless pointless arguments about the precise meaning of the word "the" and whether or not the symbol → accurately captures the meaning of the English word "if". This is the course I was talking about on Twitter. I found it unbearably slow-paced, but I remember a couple of folk who'd given up maths years before and couldn't handle being asked to do algebra again. "The alarm is sounding and Mary called" was fine, but "A & M" was apparently unintelligible to them.
  
  According to a legend which was told to me by the Warden of New College and is thus of unquestionable veracity, a class of ItSL students were once sent to the Wykeham Professor of Logic's graduate-level logic seminar due to a scheduling error. The WPoL walked in, saw the expected roomful of youngsters, and started "Let L be a language recursively defined over an alphabet X..." The poor undergrads, still in their first week (and quite possibly at their first class) of their undergraduate careers, must have started to entertain grave doubts about their ability to handle this "Oxford" place. When the WPoL was eventually informed of the mistake, he is supposed to have meditatively said "I thought they seemed rather ill-prepared..."


• "Elements of Deductive Logic", taught in the second term to those studying (Maths|Physics) and Philosophy. This bumped the mathematical content up a notch, covering (for instance) completeness and consistency theorems for the languages that had been introduced in ItSL. There was also a rather handwavy treatment of modal logic, and lots more philosophical wrangling about what it all meant and how relevant it was to the broader philosophical project. This was one of the most intense courses I did in my four years as an undergrad.


• There was an introduction to symbolic logic buried somewhere in the first-year computer science course - without the philosophy, I'm assuming.