The Story of Enos the Chimp

...So I had a few hours to kill this morning, and I was browsing the shelves in this bookshop, and I came across this book by Tom Wolfe. Called 'The Right Stuff', it tells the story of NASA's Mercury Program, which got the first American into space, and included a few spacewalks and stuff too. And being a sucker for anything to do with the space movement, I opened it at a random page. Now I can't quote exactly, but I'll give you the gist of the story I read:

At the time of this particular tale, the Russians were the masters of space. Under the guidance of the anonymous Integral Designer, they'd first put Yuri Gagarin into orbit, and then put Alfkjsdfgkjsdgj Titov (can't remember his first name) into orbit for an entire day - seventeen orbits! The Americans were badly shaken. Kennedy was furious. He puts a rocket under NASA's ass, and they start planning to get their first man in orbit. Under pressure, the scientists dig their heels in and insist that before any human can go up, they have to send up an animal - specifically a monkey. They put a whole squad of chimps through the whole astronaut training program - centrifuges, jet flights, the works - and also train them to operate a special monkey-friendly space capsule. This consists of various tasks like pulling the right lever to indicate the odd one out when a series of symbols light up, and so on. Training them is done on a punishment system; get it wrong, and the monkeys get electric shocks applied to their feet.

Top candidate for the job is Candidate 85. He's a complete whizz at the control board. None of his colleagues are anywhere near as fast or as accurate... but none of them could be less cooperative. From the moment he's taken from his cage, he fights the scientists tooth and nail, biting and scratching. At the controls, he withstands the electric shocks and grins fiercely at them. He'll do just enough to get by, then as soon as he's finished he'll turn round and fight and bite and scratch all over again. He's the prisoner-of-war who can't be broken.

Eventually,the scientists put him in a box for a week, with only his own urine and faeces for company. That calms him down a little. He really doesn't want to go back in the box. By now he is definitely top candidate, and finally he's ready for launch. His blood pressure is dangerously high, but this is a problem for all the monkeys. They reckon it's the blood pressure cuff they're using which is scaring the little animals. Candidate 85 is renamed Enos, which I believe is Greek for 'man'. They stick needles in him, monitoring blood pressure and lots of other medical stuff. They put a urinary catheter in. Finally they strap him into his little capsule, and wham, off to the final frontier... Where no man (from the free world) has gone before.

For the first orbit, everything goes smoothly. Enos performs perfectly, the ship is fine, all goes well. But by the time they're going round a second time, things are going badly wrong. The punishment system is malfunctioning, so Enos gets shocked whether or not he pulls the correct lever. Worse, the boosters on the side of the ship are spasming, causing the ship to rotate alarmingly.

Enos,though, is still performing like he's on rails. He's ignoring the punishments and pulling the right levers anyway. Every move he makes is perfect; even though he's getting random shocks through his feet and the capsule, in zero gravity, is spinning madly, it's still better than the Box. The ship is clearly falling apart, though, and the mission is aborted.

Enos' capsule ditches in the sea. The explosive bolts which are supposed to blow the hatch off, don't. By the time they pick him up, Enos has pulled out every single catheter he can reach. His monitoring jacket is scratched to ribbons and torn apart. The needles he can't pull out he's damaged irreparably. Most amazingly of all,he's pulled out the urinal catheter, which must have been an incredibly painful process.

Enos fulfilled his mission. More importantly, though, his experiences led to the first real research into the link between stress and high blood pressure. The ordeal of punishment that all those monkeys underwent, and the amount of rage that Enos had to swallow, made scientists wonder about his permanently increased blood pressure. Monkey-in-space had an important lesson for man-on-earth.

I'd like to think that Enos went to some Happy Home for Retired Astromonkeys. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

Why am I telling you this? Because I got halfway through telling my Dad this story over lunch, and got so choked up with emotion I had to pause to get control again. Is it just me? Or is this the sort of story which men get emotional over? I don't know, but I remembered some clip from a comedy show years back, about weepy movies; the girls are discussing Sleepless in Seattle, and sobbing buckets. The men watch in incomprehension, until one of them mentions the Great Escape, and then they're off, quoting Donald Pleasance ("I can see. I can see perfectly") between hiccuping sobs...

Flying is dull

I am starting to really dislike flying. This morning's flight will
be just over an hour, but the whole process, from leaving the house to
arriving at the other end will take three and a half hours. That
doesn't include hanging around for luggage at the other end, which I
don't do because I won't have any.

By contrast, the train takes seven hours... but there are a few
other factors which, for me, tip the balance in favour of staying on
the ground.

First, I like train stations. They seem to me to be places of
infinite promise, where one can step onto any platform and go anywhere
at a moment's notice. There is nothing regimented about a train
station, the whole place floats on a tide of people. At an airport, by
contrast, the moment you check-in you are processed, searched,
channeled, ticketed, watched, searched again, and finally let onto a
plane like it's some great privilege.

And planes don't even look like they should fly! Oh, intellectually
I know they work - I studied as an engineer, for goodness' sake, I know
lots of things about planes, including quite a lot about crack
propagation and fatigue failure (don't ask), so I know they work. But
as anyone who has watched a jumbo jet lumbering into the air will tell
you, it just ain't right.

Now I know, of course, that it's different for long flights. But for
the sort of short hops I'm always doing, flying is an extremely
frustrating form of transport, because the time is all chopped up.
First you have to travel out to the airport, then hang around for an
hour or so at the freakin' place, then climb onto a plane, then after
you've reached altitude you're allowed to get all the toys out again,
but by that time you're only forty minutes' away! It's all wasted time.
Whereas on the train, it may take twice as long, but once you're safely
esconced in your seat, that's you until you're at your destination. You
can work, rest or play the whole time. So much more civilized.

Then there's the environmental argument. Planes deliver NOx and all
its other evil exhaust stuff into the upper atmosphere, right where it
can do the most damage. Global warming kept me awake when I was twelve
years old. That was seventeen years ago, for crying out loud. I don't want to talk about it.

Finally, there's the fact that on a train you feel like you've travelled. You go through places.
You watch the countryside whipping by. People get on and off. On a
plane, the sense of movement is so distant that I always get the
distinct impression that we've just gone up and circled round for a bit
while people on the ground rearrange the furniture.

(This isn't what I wanted to write about at all. I was planning a
long rant about capitalism and its nature as an inherently unstable
system, but I appear to have got distracted)

And then, of course, there's the travel horror stories, which mostly
seem to involve flying. My own best one was the time Ryanair cancelled
a flight back from Paris (or at least, from the distant provincial
airport that Ryanair laughingly call Paris) on a Sunday night at 3am,
and couldn't find a replacement until Thursday. I finally ended up at a
different airport, two buses and a train later, flying with someone
else, but it was an entertaining twenty four hours. (Actually, I've
just realized I can beat that with a story about trains from when I was
16 and traveling on my own through France, but that was through my own
idiocy so it doesn’t count). I'm sure people have better horror stories than that, though. Anyone care to share?

WOW! We just flew over an offshore wind farm! A neat little grid of
tiny wind turbines in the middle of the sea! I was peering out the
window, looking for oil rigs (I know they're around here somewhere),
when suddenly this wonder of modernity caught my ear! Eye, sorry.
Caught my eye. That is SO COOL. Stupid thing to get excited about, but
really, wow. Brilliant. I've seen plenty on land, but seeing them in
the middle of the ocean is really something else. I sincerely doubt
they'll ever pay back all the effort that went into putting them there,
but as a symbol of mankind looking for new wonders to create, that was
pretty powerful.

Home

At the end of my street flows this.. well, it's either a very small river or a rather large stream, I'm not sure which.

I move out in a fortnight, so it's time to take a few photos before I go. I'll stick some more photos up here later.

Planets, aliens, etc.

Listening to a journalist interviewing some astronomer about this new rocky planet
they've found orbiting somewhere else. I just had to sigh and roll my
eyes when the interviewer said "I remember a time when astronomer
weren't even sure if there were planets outside our solar system."



Yeah, 'cause we'd be that special.



It's a breathtaking bit of arrogance. It's tantamount to creationism,
in my not-so-humble opinion. Why on Earth (no pun intended) should we
be so unique? Why should we consider ourselves the most important
things in the universe, when we live in a backwater solar system,
orbiting a sun which is identical to millions of others? What's so
special about our situation? Nuthin. So what's so special about us?



Which leads to a rather scary set of options. .

Halfbakery

Illustration for this idea...

Things I shall have when I own my own flat

1. A wooden toilet seat.

2. Concrete work surfaces in the kitchen.

3. A robot to do all my vacuuming (well, probably not, but I can dream).

4. A heated towel rail







Incidentally, I have come to the conclusion that I write better with a
cheap biro than with any expensive pen. You don't know how distressing
I find this discovery. I love pens. I have a serious weakness for nice
stationery. And now I discover that I'm better with a sheet of lined A4
and a biro. I guess I should be pleased, but I'm deeply upset. It's
kind of hard to explain why this should be such a deep and terrible
thing, but it is, okay? It strikes deep at the heart of my self-image
as the sort of well-dressed man-about-town who tosses off deadly
bon mots while sipping tea with racy aunts.



Which sounds ludicrous, when you actually come out and say it. And
anyway, I have none of those qualities. If I popped up in a PG
Wodehouse novel it would be as a loopy, absent-minded (but sarcastic)
cousin who gets into a fearful scrape in the Metropolis and whose
affairs will be in dire straits indeed unless Jeeves can come up with
one of his schemes to extricate me from my engagement with a chorus
girl and retrieve my laptop on which I have written many incriminating
blog entries, mostly concerning Tara and her habit of wearing
a hat while driving.

Hats

Never trust anyone who wears a hat while driving.

Success, Failure, and exceedingly good cakes

There
seems to be a regular fuss over what a terrible thing it is for a child to
consider itself a failure. If they don't pass an exam, we mustn't tell them
that they failed - they simply didn't pass. Just lately there's been a whole
spate of people queueing up on the radio to say that (a) they were scarred for
life by failing the eleven plus, and (b) it spurred them on to show the
authorities they were wrong, and probably meant they were more of a success
than they otherwise would have been.

There
is a rich, rich paradox there. But before I dive straight into it, I want to
say this: on the subject of success and failure, I think Kipling had it right.
They are both imposters. In this life, we try things. We start as soon as we're
born, our tiny hands gripping whatever they can reach, and stuffing everything
into our mouths. Nobody calls a baby a failure because it tries to eat
something which tastes horrible. But strangely, as we grow up, and try things
which don't work, these things become thought of as failures.

But
how do we measure success? How do we decide what doesn't work, how we've
'failed' when we try them and they don't work out? I think we do make our
personal judgements, which can be based on lots of different criteria - whether
something was fun, whether we made valuable friendships doing it, whether we
gained valuable experiences. the problems come when these personal judgements
are slowly drowned out by the sick judgement of our 'success' culture. This
culture of 'success' has only one criteria on which judgements are apparently
based. That criteria is money.

That
criteria is ludicrous. If you do a job you love which doesn't pay much, are you
a failure? Would you rather be doing something you hate but which earns a lot
of money? Some people may say 'yes' to that, but before you do, consider - a
miserable job means you're miserable for some, I don't know, a third of your
waking life. That has health issues, both mental and physical. It leads to
extra stress, leads to health problems, an early grave, and a lot of bad karma
which you will inevitably offload onto those you love. I see more and more of
my peers moving away from high-earning options into careers they think they'll
enjoy, and they have to be right.

If
we try to apply this to schools, then it's very tempting to think: hey, if
success and failure are both imposters, then why would I worry about failing
at something I haven't even volunteered for? I didn't ask to be here. Why
should I expect to succeed? Why should I want to succeed? Why should that mean
anything?

This
sounds familiar to me. I'm sure I heard it in the mouths of kids when I was at
school. It's a difficult mindset for me to get into - I was always good at
exams, schoolwork came easily to me. It never occurred to me to worry about
success or failure, because I had a lot of success, and I got to like the taste
of it. I chased it for its own sake. It was only much later, when I started to
struggle at university, that I started wondering about what success and failure
really meant.

Success
and failure should be personal. They should be your own judgements, not those
imposed on you by society. But you don't make them up in a vacuum. Things which
offer instant success, instant enjoyment, often pall and lose their attraction
very quickly. Often, we enjoy doing things simply because we're good at them,
and if we're instantly good at something then that probably means it's too easy
and we'll be bored of it within a week. So in deciding what we want, we have to
look beyond the moment. That might mean looking at some distant goal - for
example, saying 'I want to be able to juggle with flaming torches, even though
at the moment I can only just catch a hackysack.' But it might mean something
rather more analytical.  There's nothing
wrong with saying 'I want to be good at this, because I can turn professional
and make a decent fist of money at it.' That applies just as much to maths as
it does to football.

And
enjoyment now doesn't mean anything in the long run. My main hobbies are
singing and sailing. I was forced into both of them, loathed them when I was a
child, but now I get an enormous amount of pleasure from both. I haven't been
brainwashed - I just got good at them. They became fun.

Anyway,
this is getting off the point a little. All I wanted to say was the Kipling was
right - success and failure, when judged by outsiders, are both imposters. What
matters is what you take away from an experience. And that always - always -
depends on what you put in.

Phew. Right. Got that off my chest.