The Fat Tom Weight Loss Plan

I'm posting this to answer the occasional kind enquiries that come my way.

What I Did

Over three years, I reduced my weight by six stones, from a bit over nineteen stones to a bit over thirteen. I'm still letting it decline.

How I Did It

I accepted that I was eating too much. Over time I developed sheaf of technical and psychological (oooh!) strategies to adapt to eating less. Most of this post -- the Plan sections -- is about that, because that's what people want to know!

Why I Did It 

I had occasionally lost weight before, but never very much, and I think that was because I had neither strong reason nor good intellectual model of weight loss. But this time, I've found that a host of reasons, leaving me feeling that I've released a long list of concerns that had been brewing up:

• As I get older, I don't want to find that I've been de-prioritised for medical attention or processes because I'm too obese. Anaesthetic risk is not what it used to be, but if I need an op, I want to have it, and no excuses from the doctor!
• Alongside that, I would like to live longer. Mainly, I didn't want to get diabetes.
• M&S have taken advantage of online shopping to stop carrying 44" waist trousers in the shops.
• I was hoping that I could stop snoring at night, and in meetings. I'm not sure if I snore at night now, and in fact I was never aware of sleeping badly, but it turns out that the meetings were just really dull. No improvement there. 
• I was becoming aware of fat as a constraint and a presence.I couldn't touch my toes, or put my shoes on without sitting down. My arms bound against my breasts.

There are some traditional reasons which didn't really work for me:

• I didn't want to get fit. I was fit. I used the stairs, I walked, I used the public bikes, I swam a thousand metres twice a week.
• I didn't want to look better. I thought I looked OK. I was right: My face has aged ten years in the last three. And oh GOD my neck!

Plan: The Model

Every best-selling diet plan needs a simple model, and this is mine: If you are too heavy, and sustaining or increasing that weight, you are eating (or drinking) too much energy (calories).  I may patent that.

Corollaries

• To lose weight, reduce the amount of energy you swallow. If your weight does not decline, reduce the energy intake further.
• You don't, as a nineteen stone person, immediately have to adopt the diet that would just sustain you at thirteen stone. That would be painful. All that's necessary is that you reduce by enough to keep losing weight.

I started by abandoning mid-afternoon trips to the vending machine for a Double-Decker (my favourite.) Not complicated, not all that hard.

So this is how it works:

• Be clear you want to lose weight. Pick a weight in the middle of the 'healthy' region of the NHS chart. Accept it may take years.
• Review your routines. How do you eat on working days? How do you eat at the weekend?
• Weigh yourself every morning immediately after voiding your bladder. That's when the figure is most repeatable. Even so there's not much to learn from daily weighings but you will see how your body responds to fibre or alcohol. 
• Once or twice a week, at a fixed point in your routine -- perhaps after the weekend -- graph your weight. Look at the trend. Is it declining? Fine -- carry on. Is it growing (and above your target weight?) Then you need to review what you are doing and find some way to reduce your energy intake.
• Stretches, touch toes, knees bends, sit-ups, press-ups, a dozen of each, weeknights and mornings. There is a risk of wasting your muscles: You lose weight, but it's not a good outcome. Fat people have big muscles, from doing all that work, and it's worth trying to keep them.

So that's the basic cycle. Now, what do you actually do differently?

• East less food, obviously. You are gradually working your way down to the diet which will maintain the weight you want.
• Identify something to give up. Start with that afternoon snack waddle. Watch the graph to see if that starts to shift weight. As and when needed, give up something else. My list, not all at once but over the two years, looked something like:

1. Give up snacks
2. Give up second helpings and large portions
3. Give up takeaways
4. Settle for two pieces of fruit with dinner
5. Exchange porridge from the canteen for oatbran in yoghurt at home
6. Stop making pasta, risotto, x on toast -- all sorts of starch 
7. Regular lunch
8. I'd probably put boozing in here somewhere, except that I'd mostly stopped anyway. Same goes for pizza.

• Exercise may be necessary but it is certainly not sufficient. Exercise plenty to enjoy your body, and control muscle-wasting. Allow extra protein of exercise days. But don't use exercise as an alternative to eating less. When I ate what I liked, I exercised plenty and I was fat.
• Calorie counting is too much hassle, but it helps make tradeoffs and avoid surprises like hummus

Plan: Thoughts About Being Hungry

Here's a secret: It's OK to be hungry, and normal to ignore it. Be clear that I'm talking about "first-world" "I wouldn't mind a fig roll, or, indeed, steak and chips, right now" hungry. Third-world hungry is different, and one of our many blessing is that we don't know what that feels like, don't need to, and never will. I'm talking about those occasions when your internal arrangements pop up in your mind to remind you to eat.

When that happens, when you feel hungry, it's not a crisis, not a problem. You don't need to do anything. You won't die, you won't fall ill. It'll go away after a while. If you use it as an excuse for bad-tempered or deceitful behaviour, you are deluding yourself.

All that it means is that your body is moving from very immediate energy stores on to slightly less immediate ones, fat, the very situation you are trying to deal with. Hunger is, EXACTLY, what weight loss feels like. And, it goes away. Your liver cracks open a few grammes of fat, converts it to glucose in your blood, and the pang vanishes. This is a good mechanism, IF you are living close to starvation. It's like a text from the bank when you're close to overdrawing. But it's not designed to deal with people who have plenty to eat. No-one wants a text from the bank merely because they've processed a small debit on a large balance, but hunger will tell a 19-stone man that he should go and find something to eat, when that is really not something he needs.

So, yes, get used to hunger. Learn to recognise it, learn to welcome it, learn to ignore it. If you've ever wondered what's different about thin people, it's not, really not, their metabolism or inefficient digestion, or anything else. It's that they have learned or are intrinsically prone to respond to hunger much as you respond to being a bit too warm, or vague concern that you ought to fill in a tax return. They leave it to later: perhaps an opportunity to eat something good will come up, or it can wait until dinner time. It's not a big deal, nor should it be for you. This takes practice, and a few mental techniques, but there will be plenty of chances to practice, and it will get easier. Even when you are eating to maintain your current weight, you'll still get hungry sometimes because it's part of the normal cycle of nutrition.

The other side of that is that even when you are eating to shed weight, you'll still be replete, sometimes. That's necessary because a) why would you want to have a miserable life? b) you have nutritional requirements other than calories, so if you starve for long periods, you'll harm yourself, and c) as your intake declines, you get easier to satisfy. Being full of broccoli may not have the same allure as full of flapjacks, but it's still just as full.

So where does that leave us? Well if hunger is weight loss then:

• You don't need a snack. That gap between meals is a prime opportunity to be hungry.
• Plan to go to bed hungry. If you're going to be uncomfortable, you may as well be asleep. Getting used to hunger includes not being woken by it, and there's no conceivable evening meal that could entirely prevent hunger over the next ten hours, so what's the point?
• Don't make a huge effort to get all your meals. Any given meal is optional. If you run out, social arrangements fall through, or whatever, skip the meal. Just have the next meal when that falls due.

Plan: Mental Tricks

• Plan your meals, on whatever cycle is convenient. Shop to the plan.
• Plan it tight and just go hungry when it's too tight.
• Understand that you are giving up eating what you want. You are making a choice, for sound reasons, to renounce something good.
• Remain, or fall, in love with yourself. Eating more than you intended is a pleasurable inconvenience, not a sin. You are not sticking to a diet, after all. You are losing weight, which is a different thing, so it doesn't matter if you go off your plan, provided you go back, and you continue to approach your target weight.
• It's much easier to live by yourself, for as much of the week as you can. Plan your meals exactly in those periods, apply moderation in the rest.
• Shop for yourself. It's easier to be moderate in the supermarket than the kitchen.
• Eat only what's planned, social, or the best sort of its type. Practice declining routine office cake. Refrain from gluttony just because it's something you like, but don't deny yourself an opportunity for really good food.
• Have a hobby or an interest to keep you out of the kitchen.
• You need much less food than you have grown used to. Really surprisingly less. The diet to sustain nineteen stones seems to have been about three times the energy for thirteen.
• When you select something, have a plan for how you are going to use all of it, without leftovers that will need tidying up.
• Don't buy food treats -- anything that's not part of a plan --  for yourself. That's fucked up. Let other people lead you into treats, if they do.
• Farting is someone else's problem. See vegetables.
• Don't make recipes that produce more than your portion unless it's to keep for a later, planned, meal.
• Don't bake.
• It's perfectly reasonable to have no biscuits, sugar, bread, cheese or potatoes at home. Before you go shopping it's reasonable to have no food more tempting than canned tomatoes and pepper at home.
• Give away your clown suits when they get too big. Charity shops reclaim gift aid now, so it's coming out of the Chancellor's pocket. 
• Keep an eye on the savings. Give them to hunger, water or sanitation charities. Or buy socks for street people. Or buy yourself some clothes (try the charity shop you gave your clothes to, and try not to buy your old clothes back.)
• I haven't finished. I am learning that you never finish.    
• For all I know, it gets easier. I'll let you know after ten years or so.

Plan: The Food

• Breakfast is yoghurt with oatbran.
• Lunch is more optional than you might expect. Nowadays I have lunch if someone gives it to me. But I make sure of a small breakfast. And nearly always have dinner of some sort. 
• Skipping meals in a family or social context is too weird, so skip bread, potatoes, second helpings instead. 
• Have a starter before dinner. Sauerkraut. Pickled cucumbers. A boiled egg. But don't be led into having tempting open packets. (Sauerkraut jars aren't that tempting -- I can't imagine why.) 
• Be flexible and creative. Two boiled beetroot with yoghurt, two smoked mackerel fillets and a tomato salad looks odd but is a meal. The remaining beetroot and fillets aren't tempting because they're the day after tomorrow's dinner.
• Fibre needs planning. Oatbran in breakfast yoghurt. Oatbran in anything. Isphagula husk in tomato juice with soy sauce or balsamic vinegar with a celery stick makes a starter. 
• Gee up the protein. Soybean granules in anything stewy. Make yoghurt with skim milk fortified with milk powder -- put it in a coleslaw dressing. Boiled eggs in the salad. Eggs. Beans.
• Avoid 'reduced fat' and 'low calorie' stuff. (Skimmed milk is OK.) It's all horrible (and futile.) Avoid artificial sweeteners. You'll appreciate occasional sugar more.
• Avoid pure starch. Pasta with seafood sauce becomes seafood stew. Toast and jam becomes jam in your yoghurt. Mushroom risotto becomes mushroom omelette.
• Go large on vegetables. Make a meal of a broccoli head with soy sauce and rooster sauce. Grate a carrot salad with cooked mustard seeds and yoghurt & balsamic vinegar dressing. Capers cheer up a salad. (NB see Farting.) Vegetables don't stimulate the snack reflex, so you can keep them in the fridge -- and if you have reached the point where you are snacking on vegetables, you are an ADVANCED STUDENT and you needn't bother about what I say!
• Celery adds distinction to anything stewy.
• Cheese can be surprisingly satisfying. Good cheese is an actual treat. Try Borough Market -- the range is staggering, and if you explain what's happening, and pay cash, the stallholders will cut you tiny quantities so you don't have a big block in the fridge.
• Don't be afraid of frying, or butter or good oil, but don't use a speck more than you need. Sliced carrots fried in butter. Mushrooms. Onions. All excellent fried. Black pudding. Omelettes, fried eggs and scrambled eggs need butter.. 
• Eat some meat. Avoid preserved pork, generally, because there is so much salt. If you are looking at a six hundred kilocalorie steak, cut it in half and have steak twice in a week.
• Eat less sweet fruit. Eat some sweet fruit. Eat plenty of tomatoes. Don't put tomatoes in the fridge. 
• Don't have dessert. Finish your meal properly though - make a cup of tea with a cardamom. It draws a line.
• Drink tea or water. Avoid sweetened stuff. Avoid smoothies. Avoid booze. Avoid coffee shop drinks. 
• This is not the time to reduce your salt intake. Use the best brewed soy sauce - Kikkoman. 
• Find flavour: Balsamic vinegar adds energy but is good in all sorts of things. Use soy sauce instead of salt. Tamarind concentrate. Worcester sauce.

The Fat Tom Consumer Credit Plan

In hard times the activities of the payday loan companies are news. And my eyes have certainly been opened by the debt collectors' mail that arrives at my current flat (for the previous occupant) and the lenders' solicitations that come, unaddressed, through the door every week.

I'm not one to want this closed down. I think that if a lender and a borrower agree on an interest rate of 50% pA or 99% (Vanquis Bank credit card cash advances) then they should be allowed to make that deal. Credit is a useful way to advance and improve life, or minimise crises, and people with no money should not be kept down by denying them access to it. If a lender can be found, and the repayments are agreeable, then they should get credit if they want.

But experience shows that lots of people get into trouble. Rolling over loans intended for a few weeks into insane annual interest rates. Terrorised by doorstep agents, from the legitimate to the loan shark. Dragged into court and too paralysed to open their post. Some people should not be borrowing, but there's no way to tell in advance who they are.

This is not necessarily a moral fault on the part of these people. We must never forget that money, and especially credit, is a technology, and failure to master one technology or another does not make you a bad person. Just as there are some people too blind to drive, there are some people who cannot see the nature of a debt with interest. For those people, a credit card with a £300 cash advance facility and a 99% interest rate is just a free gift of £300 with some vague future obligation. There are people whom I would trust with anything I possess and any sum of money in cash, but for whom I would never write a credit reference for a debt of £50, or £10, or a penny, not because I would resent the loss, but because I would not want to be responsible for causing them pain when, once again, they confront the reality of debt.

What's more, much of the lending that's offered is completely wrong. If you are paid annually or quarterly, then perhaps a credit card makes sense, but for a weekly or monthly payslip it's madness. What you need is a bank account with a payment card. A loan for an asset -- a car or a house -- can make sense, if you need the asset and you can afford the payments, but store credit for a new sofa, valueless the moment it's delivered, when you already have a manky one, is an inexplicable choice.

There is room here for the educational system to step in. The lessons are not complicated:

• Lenders are not your friend. Their purpose is to make money out of you.
• They can make a small amount of money if you can afford to repay. They can make much more if you can't.
• Compound interest, yo!

But these lessons can't alter the fact that one of the loans that can make sense for some people, on some occasions is "until the end of the month." It's dangerous, but payday borrowing can be the right way to deal with the garage bill on top of the maxed-out overdraft, or forgetting to set up payments for the water bill. Some people will recognise the danger, decline the loan, and let their creditors -- and credit rating -- take the hit. Some people will take the loan and repay it. But some people will take it and fail to repay it, and it is very often not their fault in any reasonable sense, because, as I say, loans are a technical matter and need a certain cast of mind to understand them.

But the law takes no account of that, and nor should it. Adults can borrow in the same way they can do anything else. If they don't repay, the contract allows the lender to use the courts to force them to repay, and if the court would be too expensive the debt can be sold on to people whose speciality is making life so hideous for a delinquent debtor that they will do anything to try and make it stop. With interest and collection fees, this can go on forever, turning a small loan into an endless money stream -- a much more profitable business than lending. The standard proposal in response to this observation is anti-usury laws:- Controls on interest rates. But this is economically stupid and somewhat unfair. People should be able to borrow and able to lend at whatever rate they can agree, if they want. Price controls cause shortages, and access to credit is more important in the final analysis than price.

So, we need a change. We need to allow those who can handle it, to freely agree prices to borrow, without destroying the lives of those who can't. Thirty years ago that would have been an impossible dilemma, but it's not any more. The Fat Tom consumer credit plan is simple:

• Interest rates are uncontrolled. Anyone can lend (if they have a consumer credit licence) or borrow at any price.
• Unsecured loans (or loans on impaired security, like a second mortgage, or hire purchase where the security won't cover the whole amount) from companies whose business is lending (so not your landlord or e.g. the water company, or the person installing your heating or anyone who has to give credit to do business) cannot be enforced in the courts provided the borrower entered into the loan in good faith
• Such loans cannot be pursued in any way more than one year from the first missed payment.

This sounds like a recipe to close down consumer credit as lenders struggle to get their money back. Thirty years ago, it would have been. Who, after all, would ever bother to repay? But today, the courts are only a secondary defence of the right of lenders, and almost completely irrelevant to small lenders. The first defences are the credit reference agencies and their own risk management, and the plan lets all of that carry on as they and in fact makes it central. It hardly matters if you can be forced to repay a loan, provided anyone who might lend to you knows, reliably, how it turned out last time. That reliable knowledge is what the credit agencies do, and what they have got so good at lately. Those tools are all lenders need to lend responsibly, so giving them access to the courts as well is unnecessary and oppressive. I am claiming that people who can handle credit can be adequately controlled by the knowledge of the consequences that default will have on their future ability to borrow, because lenders will be financially unable to lend to people who can't afford to repay.

Some people will regard forgiveness after a year as morally weak. I don't think it is, but it's certainly no worse than bankruptcy. Some debt can only be dealt with by writing it off, and the excellence of the modern credit reference system means that we can achieve the desired effect quite simply, without the legal process and the irrelevant disqualifications.

People who can't manage credit will fail to repay, and they will be more or less permanently excluded from borrowing, while still able to get a bank account. Default on shop credit, followed perhaps by default on a high-rate loan, will be the end of it, as the red flags go up on the credit reference. It's horrible not being able to borrow, but better, overall, than being pursued by collector after collector, to the grave or bankruptcy, for a debt that can never be repaid. The cost of the most defaults will be quite small, and it will be covered by a general increase in unsecured credit rates, which I think is fair place for it. Capable borrowers may pay a little more and that may seem unfair, but they benefit from their greater financial skill. The greatest single benefit is that lenders, losing the protection of the courts and the indefinite collection value in a bad loan, will have to take all the more care care to ensure that their borrowers can afford to repay. Fewer unsustainable loans will be made although some marginal borrowers will be refused loans that they might have repaid. There is another sneaky little benefit as funds withdrawn from consumer credit seek commercial lending as an alternative.

Now there are some questions here. What would stop someone borrowing with no intention to repay? Simply that like the mythical nuisance dog, they only get one bite. Lenders will demand that credit reference agencies keep on top of borrowers' identities, so that £250, which might be the maximum starter loan anyone with certain demographic profile can get, would be the last loan as well, unless it was repaid. The crafty development of a trustworthy profile by borrowing and repaying gradually increasing sums is something that data systems can spot, and mark down (or up, it's a statistical business so if that's the way the outcomes go...) And, while it might be even harder for people with skimpy personal histories or foreign connexions to which they might return, to get unsecured credit, then I think it should be. A bad risk is a bad risk, regardless of whether you can go, futilely, to court to get an unenforceable judgement.

Bank overdrafts are a little tricky. The unapproved overdraft -- actually drawing beyond whatever sum is agreed, isn't really a loan so much as a cockup and I think banks should be able to recover it. But the agreed overdraft is a consumer loan and should come under the plan.

The other question is the fate of someone who failed, years ago, to repay. Are they locked out of credit forever? Will they ever be able to get a mortgage? But this is exactly the same situation as it is now. Some lender will discover that it is worth taking the risk. Some borrowers will have to get guarantors next time. We don't want default to be consequence-free, but nor do we want people bankrupted for £500.

This is not a complete plan. We would need to ensure that secured loans were sensibly relating the asset to the loan to prevent lenders switching to a general charge as a replacement for unsecured lending. The look-through provision of the consumer-credit acts would need attention to stop personal lending being disguised as small-business. Lenders would need to control their products to deter fraudulent borrowing. The credit agencies would need to further improve their hygiene and disclosure processes to ensure that only the right people were denied. Schools have a huge role to play -- I don't have much time for teaching children to be good consumers, but we teach them road safety , and credit safety is hardly less important. We would need to ensure that unlicensed credit was efficiently suppressed to prevent sharks using their brutal extralegal enforcement. And we must continue to ensure that bad credits still have access to the payment system -- basic bank accounts -- without exposing the banks who we will require to provide it.

But as a defence of decency, and the possibility of a reasonable life for simple people, the credit reference agencies are a better tool than anti-usury laws could ever be.

Added 25 August 2013

Feedback has been on a couple of themes: Firstly that consumer credit agencies are irrelevant to lenders like Wonga who don't use them, and second that the CoE's plan for church credit unions makes a plan like this irrelevant.

Credit unions are an interesting plan, and all competition is good. But unions can't avoid the risk management question -- is it wise to lend? They sidestep it by rules about membership, regular deposits before loans, maximum loan sizes and others, but these are really just stereotyped risk management. The rules select people who are very likely to repay -- settled people who can make regular payments and will join the scheme before they need funds. More people should join credit unions but they don't remove the need for payday loans, and the obvious ways to abuse credit unions means that they'll never get very large.

Wonga's willingness to avoid credit references makes me admire them, but does not affect the plan. Any lender can decide to lend on any criterion they want. If some lenders decline to update the bad-debtor lists, that's not fatal: It will slightly increase the price of credit, but as it's happening now, that increase will already have taken place. The limitation of bad debt age to a year still works -- it might prompt maverick lenders to use credit agencies, or it might not, but it will still stop lives being wrecked for £200.

Second Line

Americans are famously prone to be armed. Pistols in the desk drawer, rifles in the hall cupboard, Mace in the glove compartment. And that is none of our business. They are foreigners and entitled to live their lives in that odd way that foreigners do. Of course I have my own view on gun control which is the same as it is on any other topic -- always just a little looser than whatever is controlling me at the moment. But my view certainly doesn't matter.

But regardless of the way I feel about profuse firearms, I am baffled by one aspect of the whole US gun control argument. How does what American say makes guns legal, actually make them legal? If it is the second, why aren't all weapons legal?

The idea of a right to own weapons comes from the US federal constitution -- this fundamental law is apparently the reason why weapon control laws can't be enacted. The relevant text is, strictly, an amendment, the second amendment, to the the basic document. But it was adopted alongside nine other amendments, collectively called the Bill of Rights, which are intended to defend the individual against what the drafters of the constitution feared might be an over-powerful state. The rights defended in the Bill are effectively those of free speech and religion, access to a fair and efficient legal system and a limitation of the state's scope to that explicitly granted in the constitution. But alongside them is the second, and it reads:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

That seems clear enough, and historical context makes it clearer. The idea was to erect another reason for the state to fear the people. That the people could own arms, and if necessary organise themselves as armed forces to defend themselves against its improper actions, and perhaps even overturn it. Ever since, the basic idea that people can own firearms and edged weapons has been unchallenged, and the highest federal courts have confirmed, in this century, that it's the second amendment that protects this ownership.

But that is puzzling, mad.

One objection can be disposed of quite quickly. People who want gun control in the US have argued that the second amendment right would only apply to arms held by an 'official' militia, but the Supreme Court doesn't agree, and since that interpretation would pretty much gut the whole thing, it's not surprising that they don't. The second amendment is entirely about deposing the government, and probably any other official structure too.

My puzzle is different. The point of a militia is to enable irregular troops to engage in combat by providing training and command structures (and equipment, when that's needed.) Depending on the circumstances that have called citizens to assemble as a militia, the fight may be with federal troops, or the troops of a foreign invader. Proper troops that is, regulars, in properly equipped, trained and commanded formations. And that's a bit of a problem, because war isn't about light infantry with foxholes and rifles any more. Regular infantry have helicopters or armoured personal carriers which can provide immediate support with rockets or heavy belt-fed machine guns. Each platoon has recoilless rifles and light machine guns. Section commanders can call in artillery missions or mark targets for bombs and drones. Their logistics deliver adequate supplies and ammunition. However bold the militia may be, however well they know the country, irregular riflemen cannot possibly hold territory -- they may not be defeated, but they can be ejected.

Now it seems as if I'm wrong. Afghanistan shows lightly-armed irregulars holding on regardless of efforts to get rid of them. They take casualties, but they'll still be there when NATO troops have gone. But we should be clear. Their weapons are not their knives and rifles. The mujahideen make their impact with rockets and home made bombs, and through terrorism against the local people. The lesson from that is that the RPG, the grenade and the IED -- not the automatic rifle -- are the basic minimum equipment for militia.

But mines and military rockets, are not, as far as I know, easily legal, by constitutional right, for private citizens to own in the US. The situation is much the same as everywhere else: Arms dealers need a licence and private citizens are -- in fact if not in law -- completely barred. And the situation is the same with any other weapon that would permit people to sensibly call themselves militia: Heavy machine guns (or any machine gun beyond an auto rifle with a big clip) grenades, artillery of various sorts and all the rest. It's all inaccessible and the second amendment has no effect.

And that's my puzzle. Doesn't this mean that the second amendment fell into desuetude years -- decades -- ago, when the people abandoned whatever appetite they had to establish or prepare for any militia worthy of the name? If you want a militia, why don't you allow private citizens to buy an M242 Bushmaster and mount it on the SUV they drive to church? The answer is simply that no-one, even among those who think they care passionately about it, really wants to take the steps necessary to own the weapons that make militias effective. When warfare changed, the people didn't, and as a result, the right to challenge the state's monopoly of violence has been replaced with a shadow that permits toys and hunting guns. And nobody says anything.

Lasting Fame

The top item in today's news is Bob Diamond explaining to MPs that he was easily worth £20M pA to Barclays -- but really couldn't be expected to know about all the ways his staff were poisoning the public fountain. Immediately below it is the announcement from CERN that the structure of the world contains a Higgsish resonance at about 135GeV. It is obvious which story carries more weight with the editors.

We may remember Diamond for a few years. The politicians whom he embarrasses or confuses may last a little longer. But for certain, everyone concerned in this shamelessness will be utterly obscure by the end of the century. Names on an archived web page.

It is different for the physics. Today the incontestably pre-eminent intellectual programme of the postwar period came to an end. Sixty years of continuous, shared, effort. The mid-century struggle to tease out the structure behind the stamp-collector's paradise of nuclear physics. The floods of new particles poured out by the early accelerators. The unification of the forces of nature and the conceptual reversal of the asymmetry that created a universe. Data to theory to hypothesis to experiment to data and round again and again, culminating in the LHC, the most extraordinary instrument ever built.

No-one knows if this is the Higgs or a Higgs. So we don't know whether this will crown the standard model of physics or make its difficulties unmanageable. Either way, the physics that happens now, the new observations, are new. Gravity and general relativity haven't gone away. Neutrinos have mass, but why THOSE masses? and where do all those arbitrary ratios come from anyway? Why does all the really weird stuff always tie in with the electro-weak force? The universe is too heavy, too: what's that about? Deliciously, the LHC is not running anywhere near full power. There is a lot more data to gather from protons, and then they can load the beams with lead nuclei to make great gobs of quark soup, or feed in electrons from the LEP in the same tunnel. It all works, the first fruits are gathered in, but the tree will yield for years yet.

Regardless of discoveries to come, today, this year, is a milestone. If the civilisation of Earth endures, then 2012 will be will be taught to generations of bored teenagers as one of those rare moments when physics reaches a conceptual unity. And if it does not, if all our learning and skill lead into dust, then the historians who discover us will write, at the head of the epitaph they raise over our ruins, that we experimentally explored the whole of the standard model.

Africans

If you're like me, you feel a bit unsettled when some form or other asks your race. That worsens to outright dismay when you see a list of options like "White British Heritage (Non EU)" or "Asian." The whole thing crystalises into a resolution to have absolutely nothing to do with such bollocks.

This is not a question of denying that horrors like this are real. But they'll never stop being real until we stop allowing people to use "black" or, let's say, "traveller" as a logical category with explanatory power. If explanation is what you want, try: "He stopped reading when his friends told him it was stupid." That gives you a way forward, something to work with. But: "He's a young black man" is just an excuse to give up, and we shouldn't use it.

But you have to put SOMETHING on that form. There's generally an option for "Other" with a write-in, but this fails because it because it admits the validity of the exercise, and it creates a risk of offending people who care about, who are even proud of, their "race identification". "Other - Human" seems like a weak joke or a failure to understand the question. "Pinky grey-green" is true, but is an even more extreme form of separatism than "white." And what you do put has to have a logic, a rationale, that will allow you to indignantly over-rule any zealous attempt to insert a conventional answer. You have to have truth on your side.

Thank heavens for science.

Biologically, a race, if it's anything, is a subdivision of a species where the individuals are identifiably different from members of other races of their species, and interbreeding between members of different races, while as fertile as any other intraspecies breeding, does not normally occur. That absence of interbreeding has to be real -- without it, you just have members of the species in mutually inaccessible conditions, and mutual inaccessibility means speciation or nothing.

This suggests that the human species, homo sapiens, has no races -- or perhaps we should say there is one. We have caste, cultural and geographical restrictions on mating, but I've never seen a shred of evidence that individuals won't have sex because of racial incompatibility. Just writing it down betrays the nonsense. And in fact, the genetic variation within the whole range of people living today is said to be less than that even within a single race of honeybees or herring gulls.

Is that a surprise? We perceive races as looking totally different, and that's the key. Human "races" are all about appearance, and our minds are hypersensitive to appearance. We can only see skin, faces and hair, and it's no coincidence that that's pretty much exactly where all the difference is. We all have the same spleens, brains and bones in our feet, and I think that's BECAUSE we can't see them. I suspect there has been an advantage in the past to looking the same as "us" and different from "them", and, left by itself over another few thousand generations it might result in proper biological races, but it's not race now. At a pinch, it's family, but even that doesn't really push the right semantic buttons. That's why those forms are so absurd and nasty. They boil down to asking what excuse we use to dislike other people.

So. One human race and an offensive form to fill in. What to do?

Over the last thirty years, careful analysis of genetic & archaeological evidence has told us a fascinating story. Living humans are all descended from a population that was resident in Africa a hundred thousand years ago. There were other human races at that time, in other parts of the old world, the Neanderthals and the Denisovians, and interbreeding did occur on a small scale when migrating groups encountered each other. But the other races have all gone now, eliminated by crime, competition or disaster. There's nothing left except us Africans.

Yes. What would the Neanderthals have called the people they met in Europe, or making their way up the Yellow river? What would the Flores hobbit people have called those same travellers island-hopping along Indonesia? If they'd known geography, there would have been just one possible name for those lanky hairless longheads: the Africans.

Each of us is descended from those people, the Africans. We are all African. And "African" is an option on most race forms, and if it isn't you can -- proudly -- write it in.

I put "African" on my census. I put "African" on service profiling forms. And when I get complaints, I explain, in as much detail as necessary, that this is the only possible answer, and it is the racial identity I identify for myself.

Which, after the thought and reflection appropriate to such a serious matter, it is.

A Human Buglist

When I was about eight years old, two crosses on a page in a "Boy's Book of Wonders" showed me that my eyes were blind, right in the centre of my visual field, AND that my vision was lying to me about what was in the spot. (You can see - that is, fail to see - the blind spot yourself with the demonstration on the Wikipedia.)

This is a fault. A bug. It's not the only one and together they tell us something about what we are.

Bugs have different causes and the blind spot falls into the category of bad engineering design. The eye is a camera made out of jelly and paint, so you wouldn't expect it to be good, but it's still a surprise to find that  something we experience so richly is even worse than it needs to be. The blind spot happens because that's where the optic nerves carrying signal from all the retina sensors bunch together to head off to the brain. The centre seems like a logical place for that to happen, except that because the light sensors are installed on the wrong side of the retina, the nerves have to be in front, blocking the view. It really is a bit of a bodge.

Want some more bad engineering? How about our structure? There's obviously something rather provisional and desperate about our spines. Something that hurts that much can't be right. And what possible purpose can flat feet have?

Of course the classic example of specifically human bad design is childbirth. How many women have been killed - or will die today - through breech delivery, head too big or infection? Other mammals don't get this: When humans got huge heads to fit all the brains in, there should have been a design review of parturition, but that obviously never happened.

So there's plenty of bad engineering, and I would call it buggy, but really that's not what most people mean by a bug. A bug is a software fault: information processing by a program that's written wrong. Software bugs are sometimes caused by poor communication between the designers, imprecision in the specification, lack of skill or inadequate testing, but the classic cause is just wrong assumptions, and it seems to me that all our software bugs are this type.

Optical illusions show this nicely. Starting with the raw images, visual processing detects edges, orientations, movement and higher-level interesting constructs like faces or nudity. But to work under under harsh time pressure it needs to assume that the images on the retina are caused by looking at a physically consistent world. Artful graphics exploit that to confuse one or more levels of processing: The lines are parallel, the image is flat, the circles are stationary, there is no face on Mars and the models are decently dressed (sort of.) Any perception to the contrary is the result of your visual cortex struggling with perverse cues.

OK, but we just identified that our eyes are badly made. Perhaps other senses are better?

It doesn't seem that way. Unlike our eyes, ears are really clever engineering. We have direct and precise frequency analysers in our auditory canals, but we can still be deceived by a Shepard tone -- a mixture of sounds that would never arise in the natural world. And your nose contains a fabulous chemical analyser -- possibly not as good as a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer combo, but a lot faster, so it's a shock that a plant hormone can make sour seem sweet.

The same basic problem - failed assumptions - throws out more trouble in our behavioural choices. The assumptions we make are the those self- and mutually-aware people living in the wild.

• We assume that there is no law. On that basis, honour-based choices - irrational, boundless escalation in the face of any slight or conflict - are a smart move, especially for young males. You get hurt sometimes, but the respect protects you against casual try-ons. But in our society of laws and state-monopoly violence, defence of honour is harmful or horrifying.
• We assume that we're living in an extended group of one or two hundred people. So when we hear of something bad happening to someone, we think it might affect us. That makes us too easily cowed or amazed in a culture that has access to all the interesting or noteworthy events that happen to a global population of billions. We react as if something that has a one-in-a-billion chance has happened to a member of our family.
• We assume that a woman who has sex with a man will bear his children. So, if she's "easy" she's competing - blacklegging - against women who demand a price in fatherly attention for their offspring, or she's sponging his unknowing care on other men's children. And that's why men and women hate slags, even when they benefit from their attentions, or are fond of sex themselves. (I find this quite the most depressing entry on this list.)
• And our appetite assumes that food is scarce, we will do hard physical work most days and you can never get too much sugar, lard or meat. It's no wonder we get fat.

It's worth saying that these are behavioural explanations, not justifications. It's immoral to defend your honour in violation of the law. Natural, thoroughly human, and grossly wrong.

You'll see that I'm going "up the stack" here, from the raw neuronic signals up to more sophisticated processing. There are assumptions all the way, but I'm going to finish with some judgements, with things that as slightly rational thinkers we really might expect to get right, but are still undone by our design assumptions:

• We don't believe in small effects accumulating over a long time, or even small things at all. We have to learn it: "Many a mickle makes a muckle" is wisdom, not intuition. That's why we have to explicitly learn about regular savings, or geology, or washing hands to remove invisible microbes. (And it's why I struggle with computer memory.) We're making judgements in the face of a high assumed probability that we'll die before next spring, so small things really don't matter.
• In the other direction, we care about things that we are aware of, regardless of their actual impact. So when vanishingly small concentrations of pollutants show up on a mass spectroscope, we worry - foolishly.
• We're terrible at statistics. We simply can't do random - we always assume there's a meaning and do what it takes to extract it, even where there is none, with the same avidity that we identify faces on Mars. That's how we end up with webs of belief about magpies or turning three times before looking at the moon.
• Our intuitive metaphysics: cause and effect, things and relations, is an assumption. It works well enough to get through the day, but it has almost nothing to do with the integrated mesh of resonance which is the the way the universe is actually made.
• We think natural things are good and right. But they're not. Which I suppose is my point with this list. We go the wrong way a lot.

I could go on. But I hope this is enough to show that we're a bit of a hack. Stay with me and I'll try and explain why I think that's interesting.

As humans, we cannot really understand - intuitively - what human beings really are. We're too close. But study allows us to see that we are mechanisms (perhaps mechanisms among other things) and what's more, be certain that the mechanism is assembled by natural selection of inherited variations.

Be certain? Certainty is a strong claim. Surely there are other possible explanations, no matter how implausible, for  the excellence of our bodies and the power of our perceptions? There have been many offers: divine design, a striving life force, even alien intervention or ancestor simulators.

I don't think that we can pick between these explanations based on how well we work. Some are more plausible than others, but any of them might be the one. There are lots of reasons to be designed right. What I like to see is where we're working badly. That's interesting.

Tools and limits shape designs. Compare the buildings (or cars) of thirty years ago with those of today to see the effect of full 3D computer design tools. Or study a cheap toy to understand the limits of something designed to be assembled by ill-equipped workers in Chinese sweatshops. (Clue: too many screws.)  It's the flaws and the limits that reveal the capability of the designer. They're side effects, and the only reason for them to be there is because the designer didn't perceive them, didn't care about them, or couldn't get rid of them. Defects and limits speak of necessity, and necessity is hard evidence of identity.

So that's what interests me.

Natural selection never gets to redo from scratch because each change has to be an improvement, no matter how tiny, in one generation. It can make big changes, but only if each step on the way works better in the current circumstances. It has no foresight at all. All the other candidates have a chance to fix what's wrong; God doesn't do mistakes. Simulation authors want to save processor cycles. The aliens can spot the faults just like we can. The life force is defined as striving for perfection. Natural selection is the only really foolish designer.

The mammalian eye is an unfortunate fluke -- mollusc eyes have it the right way round without difficulties. Natural selection can't move the data connections to the back of the retina, because the first intermediate stages to correct it will be blinder than the current design. In the same way, my back hurts because my body plan is a quadruped that has been bent hard wrong to go on two legs all the time. Nothing said "OK, another ape, but this one walking upright." A redesign for two-legged life could have addressed the "big brain delivered through the pelvic girdle" issue too, but it'll never happen because natural selection doesn't do redesigns.

The wrong assumptions come down to the same thing -- a designer utterly lacking in foresight. If God had meant us to see, he would have given us a dedicated GPU, rather than using a brain that can't keep up. Would God have given us an inbuilt honour code when the real moral challenges facing the human race are the global tragedies of the commons, and easy nuclear weapons? (Mind you, I can see simulation authors trying that -- one of the uglier ways to look at the world is that it is a psychology experiment by someone pushing the most vicious and perverse circumstances he can.)

All the stuff we get wrong -- dietary choice, physics and metaphysics, racial distaste, even exotic things like economic fallacies -- all make sense, albeit a bitter and immoral sense in the context of an evolved social species living on the plains. That is who, that is what, we are.

Is that depressing? I think it's rather fine to be a great ape that got lucky; if you don't, that's OK too. But if we can jointly say that there is a mechanism here (whatever else is here too) and that the mechanical works themselves have no special status and many obvious screw-ups, then  there is a way forward. We can try, perhaps not to fix them exactly, but make ourselves the masters, managers and controllers of their harm.