Physics has become boring (by alaric)

A common trope in contemporary science fiction is a small team in a lab somewhere (be it academia, industry, or just a hobbyist in a basement) fiddling around and discovering some new science - usually, some way of travelling to other universes or something (and then a whole load of plot unfolds as they accidentally unleash some terrible evil or whatever).

But... that kind of thing just doesn't happen any more. Sure, back in the 1600s, you might sit in a lab and discover electricity; back then, many of the fundamental forces that bind the Universe together were ripe for the discovering. As the centuries passed, the easy stuff was cleaned up bit by bit; in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory cleared up the last mysteries that were easily recreated on a hobbyist budget. There was some fun to be had in nuclear physics, which could be experimented with if you had institutional-level funds to build particle accelerators and atomic piles; but since then, all the really cool peeling-back-the-mysteries physics requires vast financial resources.

What, then, for the nerd in a basement? Not only is exciting physics beyond their grasp, but the escapism of science fiction is dulled by the difficulty of suspending disbelief when our plucky heroes rewire a microwave oven to generate a disruption field that prevents the formation of a super-wormhole to R'lyeh. There's no shortage of fun things that can be built to demonstrate known physics, such as a desktop fusion reactor; but that's just an engineering challenge. There's no new science. Wikipedia's excellent List of unsolved problems in physics is sadly short of things that can be explored from one's bedroom; they're mostly highly theoretical problems, for a start. Perhaps a better-funded amateur could tinker with high-temperature superconductors, but the others on that list seem to either require vast machinery, or just pondering mathematical solutions to problems...

Sudden Snow (by alaric)

When we went to bed last night, it was raining hard. So I was pretty surprised when I got up in the morning to find the world covered in about ten centimetres of snow.

And even more surprised to find that the awning over the back door had fallen down, blocking it so I had to get out via another door to investigate:

The weight of the snow had been too much, causing the bracket on the left to shear off:

This, in turn, pulled the bracket on the right out of the wall:

And the falling awning crushed our little table:

Jean and I managed to undo the surviving bolts and get it off the wall without further destruction. The wall is undamaged at the left bracket:

But the bricks are cracked where the bracket pulled out at the right, and the mortar has plenty of cracking too, so this will need some work:

Also, our outside light is mangled and just hanging on by the cables, and will need replacing:

Miscarriage (from the father’s eyes) (by alaric)

My family is the single most important thing in my life. I grew up lonely - it was just my mother and I, and I always found portrayals of "typical family life" in popular media slightly painful to watch; I wanted that bustling house, full of children, with grandparents and aunts and uncles visiting. Sure, I'm mad about creating things; I love tinkering with computers and electronics and metalwork and DIY, and designing things around a table with my friends, but my biggest and best creation is my family.

So, I was delighted when, a couple of weeks ago, Sarah decided to do a pregnancy test; and it came out positive. We'd put if off for a while; we had some false starts when conceiving Mary, so we didn't dare get our hopes up too soon. We waited until it looked like the periods were definitely staying away, when it started to feel like if Sarah was pregnant we'd best be getting set up with a midwife and all that. I'd already been rather hopefully resting my hand on Sarah's belly on the sofa; but once the test came back positive, it was time to start snuggling down and talking to her baby. Partly soppiness on my part, and partly because I'm told that even after the first few weeks, babies start to learn their parents' voices (and it's never too early to start learning Lojban).

However, we only had a few days of that before things started to look a little wrong. I kept talking, telling the little grain of rice that there was lots to live for; it would have two siblings, three cats, two chickens, a mummy, a daddy, and a lovely house to live in, and I had so many wonderful things to show it. But the poor thing was probably already dead by then; a few days passed before everything got a bit medical, and I was carrying a bowl full of chunks of womb lining while a nurse wheeled Sarah through a hospital in a wheelchair, wondering if I was (in some grisly sense) at least getting to carry my child in my arms, for a while.

As is usual when things go wrong, Sarah was too ill to do anything, so I went into Caring Husband mode; looking after Jean and Mary, organising meals, cancelling things, supporting Sarah. I'm not shy about my emotions, as many male people are; but while there were things that needed doing and nobody else to do them, I didn't have the mental energy to feel them, so I just got on with it all. But once Sarah was home again and I didn't need to worry about her health all the time and things had settled down a bit and I had time to think about it (thanks to my lovely colleagues at both jobs, who covered for me), I finally had my chance to cry; Sarah was working on her picture, and wanted me to choose some colours for the rainbows in the lettering. I put together a spectrum (my choices are at the top of the first L, by the way), and I remembered being a little child, choosing that my favourite colour was blue; I went for sky blue and sunrise yellow at the time (although I've since moved towards darker, purplier, blues), and I wondered what this child's favourite colour would have been, and then all the pain came up and I cried on Sarah's shoulder. I still feel a lot of pain, but a good long sob helped me to heal a lot.

Now, I just want to find ways to record the existence of the little thing. When we had the initial scan, I wrote down the dimensions they told me on the appointment letter, because I feared that and the memory of seeing it, fleetingly, on a screen might be all we got to keep. When the ashes have been scattered, I'll try to find the memorial garden in Cheltenham, and go and visit.

I wrote a poem, in Lojban of course. I could translate it to English, but I'd have to either drop all the rich attitudinal indicators (which would make it rather boring) or try and explain them in English (which would make it long and convoluted), so I'll just leave it as-is.

.i .u'anaisai mi ba'ozi te tarbi
.i .uinai mi na ba pamjai le .iu tarbi
.i .uinai mi na ba tavla le .iu tarbi
.i .uinai mi na ba bevri le .iu tarbi
.i .a'onai mi na ba zgana lo nu le .iu tarbi cu ke banro
   joi cisma
   joi klaku
   joi cadzu
   joi tavla
   joi prami
   joi jmive

.i le .iu tarbi na ba djuno fi mi

.i co'o tarbi

Processor architecture (by alaric)

The current state of the art in processor design seems to be a reasonably complex instruction set, which is interpreted by a thing that translates it into a series of more primitive instructions which are then fed into some kind of multiple-issue pipelined thingy with speculative execution. You know, the kind of stuff x86 has been since the 386. 64-bit instructions, vector SIMD instructions, lots of cores and all that are just variations on the theme.

I'm sure this is a local maximum in the space of processor designs. So few of the transistors on each chip seem to be actual ALU doing something useful. All this translation and pipeline control seems to be a lot of logic that's just adapting to the impedance mismatch between the ALUs and instruction set...

So, I'm always interested in more exotic processor architectures, and there's two different threads I'd love to explore (as in, design and simulate in an FPGA) if I had time. The common theme is simple control logic; this means you can fit in more ALUs, or wide ALUs and registers, in the same space - or just fit more cores and more cache on the same die.

Zero-operand stack machines

The idea here is to use a stack instead of a register file. This means that instructions just need an operator (eg, "add") as the operands are implicit - the stack always provides the inputs and outputs. This means that the instructions can be very small due to the lack of operands; generally, much smaller than a machine word, so each word loaded can have several instructions in. This can mean that the memory bandwidth required to feed the chip with instructions is reduced; and since the decode and control logic becomes very simple, you can sustain a high clock rate with minimal pipelining, so reducing the memory bandwidth consumed by instruction loads is handy.

That means you can't fit literals or static addresses inside instructions, though, so you need something like a "load immediate" instruction that fetches the next word from the instruction stream and pushes it, rather than treating it as instructions. If an instruction word contains several "load immediate" instructions, then that many subsequent words of instruction stream could be literals!

One example of this approach is a Minimal Instruction Set Computer, but the concept is broader than that. Large instruction sets can be easily supported.

The control logic boils down to loading an instruction word, then treating it as a FIFO of smaller instructions to execute while the next instruction word is loading. Most instructions just engage an ALU circuit hardwired to the top element or two of the stack, whose output becomes the new top of stack. A few might transfer data to/from a memory access unit or a register, including the instruction pointer to change the flow of control. Not many gates are needed to decode an instruction, leading to the short cycle time.

Instructions that can't complete in a single cycle present a problem, though. The use of a stack tends to mean that an instruction depends on the result of the previous instruction, so it's tricky to execute several instructions in parallel and thus make progress in the presence of weighty multiply/divide instructions or memory reads.

I can think of three ways of overcoming that, and you can combine all three:

Multiple stacks

The approach taken by the 4stack processor is to have four stacks, each with its own independent ALU. Each instruction word has an instruction for each ALU in, and they execute in parallel on each clock tick. Presumably, there's some means to transfer results between the stacks - I imagine a bus joining them, an instruction to pop a value from the stack onto the bus, and an instruction to push from the bus. The timings of the bus reads and writes are such that it's possible to have an instruction word with a pop->bus from one stack and push->bus for one or more stacks that do such a transfer in a single cycle.

Due to the synchrony of instructions feeding into each ALU, we can't "stall" an ALU. If one of them executes a weighty instruction or has a cache miss on a memory read, we either stall ALL the ALUs at once, or we mandate that certain instructions are followed by a fixed number of NOPs before another instruction can execute, to allow time for it to complete.

This puts the onus on the compiler to schedule instruction-level parallelism, and means that the compiler needs to know the precise timings (and number of ALUs) of the target CPU - we can't use the same instruction set for a broad range of implementations!

Result registers

Weighty instructions might not put their results straight on the stack; instead, the instruction might cause the inputs to be pulled from the stack and the instruction starts executing. When it completes, the result is latched into a result register, and a later instruction pushes the contents of the result register (stalling if it's not ready yet). This means that the instruction stream can get on with other stuff while the lengthy instructions run. However, it requires such multi-cycle instructions to inherently work differently; and it puts some onus on the compiler to know how many instructions to wait between starting these instructions and trying to access their results for best performance.

Virtual stack

Finally, we can virtualise the values on the stack. A division instruction, for example, might read two actual values from the stack and then push a token that means "Wait for the result coming from division unit 7". If the next instruction is an addition, then it would read that token and (say) a literal value from the next stack position; since one of the inputs is a token it can't execute yet, but it still assigns an addition ALU and loads the literal value. But it tells division unit 7 to, when it completes, push the result into port 1 of addition ALU 3; and it pushes a token that means "Wait for the result coming from addition ALU 3", and so on. Basically, rather than waiting for operations to complete so you can push a value to the stack, you can instead push a reference to an operation in progress; a cluster of ALUs and memory access units connected by suitable buses then becomes a kind of dataflow machine which is fed connections from the instruction stream, in effect taking the condensed zero-operand instruction stream and using it to assign dependencies between instructions, rather than using virtual registers to assign dependencies as in current CPU designs. But this requires the kind of complex control logic that I feel current CPU designs are drowning in.

Transport-triggered architecture

Another way to simplify control logic is to build your CPU as a bunch of modules with input and output ports. Arithmetic and logic operation modules have one or two inputs and a single output; a memory reader has an address input and a data output; a memory writer has address and data inputs and no outputs; registers have an input and an output; and so on.

Each instruction contains a few bits to control whether the instruction executes conditionally on bits from a flag register, then an output port to read from, and an input port to write the result to. The decoding consists of checking the conditional execution flags then either doing nothing, or pushing the input and output port IDs onto two address busses and toggling a strobe line that causes the output port to write its contents to a data bus, and the input port to load from it.

As with the zero-operand stack machines, the instructions are small, so can probably cram several into a machine word - maybe split into groups that share a single set of conditional execution bits, for even more compactness. These instructions are all operand and no operator!

To insert literal values in the instruction stream, one can again have an output port on the instruction fetch module, that when read pulls a literal value from the instruction stream and stops it from being interpreted as instructions.

The output of each module is a register, where a value appears as soon as it's ready and waits until it's read - so there's no need to explicitly store it in a general purpose register. However, the CPU might have a few general-purpose registers anyway to store stuff in, as well as the usual instruction pointer, flags, and machine control registers.

This makes it easy to exploit parallelism; the instruction stream can trigger lots of modules and then come back later to read their output registers. The compiler might need to know the cycles required to do various things and not read the outputs until they're ready, or there might be handshaking on the internal bus so that instructions stall until an output is ready, which makes it easier to deal with things like memory reads that can take widely varying numbers of cycles to complete. Even then, the compiler can still benefit from knowing cycle timings in order to schedule stuff better.

Modules could be pipelined. Rather than having four multipliers, you might have one that you can feed (say) four sets of inputs into and then, later, read the output register four times to get the results. The compiler might need to know how deep the pipeline is to avoid overflowing it with results; or the hardware spec might mandate that up to sixteen multiplies can be pipelined, and put a FIFO on the output register to make up the extra capacity needed beyond the number of pipeline stages it has.

The downside is that the compiler needs to know how many modules there are and what port numbers are wired up to what. This, again, makes it hard to have a single executable that can run on a wide range of implementations of the design.

However, this looks rather like the execution model behind the virtual-stack machine discussed above - so perhaps we could have a generic stack-based instruction set that is executed by a virtual stack to generate instructions for an underlying transport-triggered machine...

Modules could be quite complex; for instance, an index register module might comprise a register coupled directly to a memory access system. By accessing different input or output registers, it could update the contents of the register, or write to the memory address stored in the register, or read from the memory address in the register; and different input/output ports could be accessed that cause it to pre- or post-increment or -decrement the index register at the same time, allowing for efficient operations on contiguous blocks of memory. Also, the internal data bus might be arbitrarily wide, allowing ALUs to operate on, and registers to store, vectors of several machine words; modules that only operate on a single word at a time might sacrifice a few input-port-select bits in their instructions to select which word from the vector on the data bus to read into their input port.

To save on space taken up by literals, we can have a simple module with output ports that produce some useful constants (0, 1, -1); or dedicate a single bit of the instruction to selecting whether the input port number field specifies an input port, or is a literal to just load onto the data bus. An input port number will be much smaller than a machine word, so this will only cater for small literals, but most literals are small and we can fall back onto fetching an entire word from the instruction module for larger literals. We might want to sign-extend a small literal, however.

The data bus might become a bottleneck, but that's OK - we can have several of them, and make the instructions specify an input and output port number for each bus; we then trigger multiple transfers in each instruction cycle. This is very similar to having several instructions in a machine word, except that they execute in parallel rather than serial. We just now need to specify what happens if the same port is read or written by two parallel transfers!

Conclusions

A general theme with many of the above approaches is that the compiler ends up needing to know more about the details of the chip implementation, because the compiler is responsible for more scheduling.

Perhaps this is no bad thing - runtime code generation is becoming the norm anyway, and it would be possible to bootstrap the system by having an initial "minimal instruction set" which is standardised, and allows access to a description of the current chip architecture; the runtime code generator can then be compiled (using a compiler written in the minimal instruction set), and then the processor switched into normal mode. This might even be implemented by having a simple version of the stack architecture as a front-end processor that starts executing code while the main CPU is dormant; it then has an instruction that hands an initial instruction pointer value to the dormant main CPU and starts it up. Multicore systems would need only one front-end processor to bring the whole system up!

Another approach might be to have a transport-triggered architecture with a small set of guaranteed modules available at well-known port numbers in every implementation, with variation occurring in the rest of the port-number space. But this requires the instruction format to have enough bits for the port numbers to allow for the largest imaginable processor, leading to unnecessarily wide instructions for smaller devices. Perhaps this can be handled by having the instruction decoder support both standard narrow instructions and implementation-specific wider instructions, again starting off in standard mode and allowing switching to wide mode once the processor definition has been read and used to compile the compiler that can exploit the full capabilities.

Either way, I think that future processor architectures might be more tightly coupled to the compilers than we're used to.

Shame (by alaric)

I'm at the pub for a meeting, but there's a minor commotion from next door; I hear a glass smash and some amused voices. A regular, a well-known local in his nineties, has had too much to drink. A party is organised to walk him to his nearby home; everyone responds with good-natured smiles. "Aw, bless him."

But I am transfixed with vicarious shame. I feel horribly embarrassed for him, and my stomach churns with stress about it. I find everyone else's reactions jarring; they seem mildly jealous of him if anything, while I find his situation absolutely humiliating. If something like that happened to me - no, let me be clear: if I did that to myself and people saw - I would not be able to look those people in the eye ever again. I don't know if I'd be able to leave my house.

I have a mental model of the world, which gives me expectations about what counts as "normal" behaviour for the people and other objects in the world. When I see things happen that are consistent with my model (objects fall to the floor when released, people are happy with they are given cake, that sort of thing) it is unremarkable; things that are inconsistent attract my attention, as they indicate either that I have incomplete knowledge of the situation or a problem in my mental model. As I've built this mental model over the decades of my existence, I've checked every new thing I incorporate into it for logical inconsistency with something else, so I'm reasonably confident that it's consistent and a correct approximation to some kind of objective reality.

The majority attitude towards inebriation contradicts my mental model, but I can't just incorporate it, because it's inconsistent with other things in my model.

For instance, people are critical of flaws in others. As a child, if I made a mistake, I'd invoke the wrath of my mother. At school, if I made a slip and broke the myriad and shifting social contracts, I'd attract the attention of the bullies. In my career, if I make a mistake it will have consequences for my colleagues, the company I work for, and the users of the products I work on. If I make a mistake in my domestic duties at home, my children won't get to school / their clubs / parties they're invited to, or we won't have food for dinner; and they will be angry with me. If I make a mistake while driving, I will injure or kill myself or others. I often hear people complaining about other people who have made mistakes, even if those mistakes had no actual negative consequences; they are criticised for making mistakes as a matter of principal.

Mistakes are very easy to make; a moment's inattention can result in something important being forgotten. Slip-ups attract ridicule and disapproval.

But the way people react when somebody has deliberately made themselves into an idiot through inebriation starkly contradicts that general trend. Why is there an exemption made for this case?

I had a dream, when I was aged somewhere between eight and ten or so years old. In this dream, I'm on a huge futuristic spacecraft, of a similar scale to a cruise ship, full of passengers, watched over by a team of sinister police robots. I'm in a fancily-decorated room with little tables dotted around, with passengers sitting at them and chatting. In this room, little drinks are available, in tiny glasses the size of my little fingertip; barely a cubic centimetre each. There is something seedy about this; the drinks are handed out covertly, with much glancing around, out of sight of the police robots. I decide to try one, and the effect is instant; my point of view moves backwards slightly, and I become a third-party observer of my own actions, a passive rider in my own body as I circulate in the room and chatter with people, with this big idiot grin on my face. But the idiot grin attracts the attention of the police robots; scowling and disapproving, the corner me and shoot me with a dart gun which dispenses an antidote, meaning I am instantly myself again. But I feign innocence; I claim I was grinning because I was happy, and that their accusation that I had consumed one of the tiny glasses was unfounded, and act all offended. Even remembering that dream now, thirty years later, causes my face to flush with shame. It's taken quite a lot of bravery to publish it here. I had to build up to it in stages. What I'm ashamed of is that I had a dream in which I was affected by some kind of drug, because it acknowledges the concept of me being so affected even exists.

But far worse than my shame-by-proxy is the sense of alienation, because I'm having this strong emotional reaction that's completely absent in the people around me. It's like everyone around me is laughing and cracking jokes while eating babies. I feel like there's something terribly wrong with everyone around me (which is scary), while logic tells me that the problem is clearly with me. Which is even scarier.

I try and avoid situations where I might be reminded of this. Pubs are risky places to go, but only mildly so; there isn't a strong culture of inebriation in most of them, so I just avoid places like student bars. House parties are far riskier, and I dread being invited to them; accepting the invite may lead to pain, but refusing it means sitting at home on my own knowing what's happening anyway (well, not really knowing; my imagination instead provides a stream of worst-case scenaries), and being on my own while everyone else is having fun (in a way I find inexplicable and distressing) hardly makes a sense of alienation any better. It's worse when the party is at my house (I never hold parties, but people I live with do), because it's harder to hide from a party in my house, people will ask awkward questions if I leave, and I have this feeling like my "safe place" is being invaded; I make my way through life by, where possible, shutting all this stuff away, and it being in my own home makes that harder.

But avoiding situations where people might drink alcohol isn't enough, anyway, even if I could do it perfectly. People still talk about it around me, and thus, I am forced to confront the concept. I can think of no way to avoid it without isolating myself from all people and all mass media.

To be honest, I feel pretty angry about it all. Why do I have to hide, and be an outsider, flinching away from this concept? People around me can, just through saying a few words, hurt me. When a group of friends or colleagues organise a group social activity, I have to choose whether I'll suffer for going or suffer for not going. What's more, I've been told that if I don't go to an event I've been invited to, I'll offend the person who invited me. Apparently this is more important than the pain I'll suffer.

My attempts to tell other people how I feel have often ended badly. Responses tend to be either:

"You're weird, that freaks me out, go away"

"Whoa! That's weird. So does related concept X upset you? How about Y? Really? Hahahah! X! Y! That actually makes you feel ill from me just saying those words? X! Y! Z! This is fun!"

"How dare you criticize my actions! It's my choice what I do with my body, and your choice whether you put up with it or go elsewhere."

Most people just seem confused by it, and then seemingly forget I ever mentioned it. A few people have actually tried to avoid saying things that will upset my in my presence, which is heartwarming, but the concepts are deeply embedded in our culture and are impossible to avoid: attempting to avoid them just leaves awkward gaps, and I know what would fill those gaps. The best that can be done, I suppose, is to say what needs to be said, but without the assumption that everyone feels as the majority does, so I don't feel neglected. But that's not an easy thing to ask.

I don't want to be like this. I can't change the world, so I need to change myself, but how do I do that? It's hard to think about the underlying sense of shame, because the feeling of alienation is too painful; and it's hard to think about the feeling of alienation because the anger clouds it, and anger is such a destructive all-consuming emotion. Indeed, it's taken me years of careful reflection to even isolate the other feelings. My emotional response to exposure to inebriation was basically "Confused burst of painful negative emotions then ANGER". Pulling apart that little burst of emotions before the anger wins out has taken a lot of careful detective work, feeling a bit like a physicist deducing the presence of the Higgs Boson by looking at the trajectories of particles streaming out of a hadron collision. But now I'm aware of the shame at the root of it all, I can feel it. I just can't stop the anger coming in and clouding it.

So perhaps I can address the problem indirectly. What else gives me similar feelings of irrational shame, but without the complexities of alienation and anger on top?

One answer comes to mind: Dancing. I'm usually one of those people who professes he can't dance, and only tries to when under duress; at which point I just find an action and repeat it until whoever's forcing me to dance lets me stop. I have no enthusiasm for it, and struggle to understand why people do it.

But occasionlly, if I'm in a really good mood, listening to dancy music that I have happy associations with, I feel a faint glimmer of a strange pulse-quickening excitement that it might be nice to dance to it. The thing is, if I hold that thought, a flash of embarrassment comes and destroys it, so I need to keep it just out of mental reach. Perhaps if I could overcome that, lesser, shame, I would weaken the greater one. The problem is, I don't know how to. It's not like I'm standing there thinking "I want to dance, but don't know how to"; I mean, I want to dance in the sense that I usually feel very lonely and left out and forgotten when everyone is dancing apart from me, but my problem is that I want to want to dance, and I don't know how to want to.

What else is there that's similar? Oddly, there's something I have the anger about without the shame or alienation: and that's coffee. Around the time when Starbucks was really invading the UK I had a girlfriend who thought Starbucks was great, so I was always being dragged into them. The thing is, I don't like hot drinks at all, and I find the taste of coffee absolutely disgusting. At most, Starbucks could offer me over-priced orange juice, and I got sick of that pretty quickly. This touched a bit of a raw nerve: coffee wasn't being presented as something some people like, as an option; the ubiquitous Starbucks (and their competitors), the attitude of people towards them ("Let's meet in Starbucks", "Fill in this quiz and be rewarded with a Starbucks voucher"), and the decor and advertising all seemed to draw on an assumption that everyone liked the foul stuff, while I didn't.

And, of course, I have a massive chip on my shoulder about that from the alcohol thing. So being offered coffee, or having to go to coffee places and get coffee, gives me this little jolt of irritation. I used to just bite my tongue and repress this, but over the past few years I've decided it's probably healthier for me to let a little bit of snark loose. As a Repressed Minority Coffee Disliker, I probably shouldn't feel I have to put up with everyone assuming I don't exist; so I'm trying to actually say that I think coffee tastes awful and that I hate coffee shops when it comes up. It's cathartic, but there's a lot of pent-up bile left; this will take a while to finish... And I don't think that fixing that will do all that much to fix my anger about alcohol.

There's one more thing that I think might be related. I really like funny things; as a kid, I really liked surreal comedy, and could easily end up laughing so hard I could barely breathe. These days, I've lost that; I feel too much shame about the thought of somebody seeing me laughing like that. I've come close, but then I feel a sudden chilling fear that I'm going to irritate people or that they'll think I'm an idiot. But the difference here is that I can remember not having that fear.

If you'll permit me an aside, I've been teaching my daughter how to ride a bike. I did this by holding her upright and pushing her forward as she starts to pedal, so that she can get going on the bike and learn to balance, because she was struggling with getting started at all. I decided to hold her up and skip the getting started part, because learning to keep balancing while the bike's moving and you're already pedalling is a lot easier - but once you've got the feel for that, you know what riding a bike is supposed to feel like. So then you can learn to start, because you know what state you're aiming for when you push off. Trying to ride a bike from nothing is a lot harder, because you push on the pedal and wobble and fall over, because even if you push off right you don't know how to ride a bike so you'll fall over - so you can't tell if you're learning to push off right or not.

So while I can't imagine dancing in front of people (as opposed to going through the motions of pretending to dance, which is different), or even doing that unspeakable thing with alcohol that could never be in any way associated with me, I can actually imagine myself having a really good laugh about something hilarious. And, just like how knowing what riding a bike should feel like helped my daughter to quickly learn how to start from standing, I think that means I have a chance of being able to overcome the shame and recover that ability.

And maybe learning to deal with that shame will be transferrable, and I'll be better able to deal with other kinds of shame.

So, who is willing to help me overcome a crippling phobea that's causing me untold misery, by coming around to my place and watching Monty Python DVDs? Soft drinks only, I'm afraid.