Endings and beginnings: always good times for leaning back in one's chair, squinting at the middle distance and indulging in turgid wiffle. CiB'll hopefully get back to actual topics at some point, but for now I've just got to go with the turgid.

A little over two weeks since the thesis got handed in, the ol' noggin is starting to poke a whimpering nose out into the world again. Five years, that trip was. Learned stuff? Probably. Mostly I just majored in the universe.

Well, that's not strictly true. Exactly the opposite too: something so arcane ended up in the thesis that I can't really explain it to myself, let alone anyone else. Having no viable answer when someone asks what your PhD's about: fairly normal while you're doing it. I'm finding people to be less patient with non-answers now I've actually written it all down and handed it in. Still, I'll leave talking about all that until after the viva. Who knows how that'll go?

In the meantime: what the hell happened to the world? I was tunnel-focused on the PhD for a while there, and when I looked up, everyone was running round in circles wailing. Is the world ending? Yes? Oh. Well... I shall manfully, er, man the keyboard, up to the power outages at least. They'll take my cordless mouse from my cold dead etc. If the power does go, I'll probably just sit here anyway. What else am I gonna do?

You can tell there's a crisis brewing: there are gurus everywhere. Pontification indices are through the roof. A marketplace of Ideas and Systems lines the walls of the black hole we're being sucked into. You can pick n mix any bunch of them: who knows what might work? What I like about the Occupy Wall Street movement is its simplicity. It trails all the usual protest baggage, and I sincerely hope the SWP are still doing their sterling work of bus-putting-on while wondering whether it's that shift in class consciousness they've been so patiently waiting for.

But the simplicity is inescapable. There's been a massive, furrowed-brow pause after everyone - everyone - saw the financial sector get thrown truly unbelievable amounts of money. The numbers were large enough that it didn't seem possible it was real: surely just created by fiat, not the same stuff used to pay for healthcare, jobs? The effects, of course, have turned out to be quite real. One of the most collosal state bailouts in history (proven effective) has somehow segued into Attack of the Tories, and not just in the UK.

I understand almost none of it. I've been trying, but there are still wopping great blobs of ignorance stuck to my visor of, er, understanding. Heh. It's taken two weeks, as I say, for me poor brain to develop any sort of curiosity, but - wow - it's improving a bit now, and isn't the world offering up a whole heap of brain-food? Well done world for all that collapsyness.

The most fundamental question is still as I nihilistically moaned after watching Age of Stupid: are we any better than bacteria in a petridish? It's a nihilistic-sounding question, but it isn't. If it turns out our intelligence helps us not at all, we'll just enter into a collapse phase - maybe a death phase if we're ingeniuous enough to properly sterilise the planet. Our ability to see it coming or invent ways to avoid it may have zero effect. We'll just get to watch. We'll combine that with a little denial that any limits exist at all: some of the bacteria in the petridish will argue the petridish itself is a socialist subterfuge that does nothing but limit true bacterial potential - shortly before they run out of nutrients or choke on their own waste.

After the Indonesian Tsunami, there were no shortage of clerics willing to blame their flocks for straying from God. No amount of actual physical evidence is going to convince some people. Perry doesn't feel obliged to pause even for a moment, despite his state burning (though it's good to see scientists boycotting his state's attempt at direct scientific censorship. I'm sure WUWT would have covered such a blatant, direct attack on free scientific speech... oh, no, turns out they didn't.)

Ach. None of that helps, does it? The gurus are all shouting at the same time, power structures are doing what they do. People like me are here blogging, or knocking up goodies for our own guru CVs, depositing at the bank of whuffie. How - how - do we get from here to... where? A hundred year's time with carbon output stabilisation well behind us? There's probably enough carbon in the ground for us to carry on if we like: peak etc won't save us. Easily 1000ppm by 2100, and who knows how high we can aim if we really put our minds to it?

As Denning so awesomely spent 15 minutes at Heartland pointing out, too many people are AWOL from the debate: `the petridish is socialist'. It would be good to have them back. (Or it would be good for someone to convince me that somehow heading towards 1000ppm co2 by 2100 is just fine, we need do nothing.)

I found myself looking back to old journal after I finished and was rather surprised how much I wiffled about God. The whole God thing's cropped up before, but only because atheists are angry at God for not existing - and that gives secret pretend atheists like me cover for writing about it. What's odd is - talking of beginnings and endings - I started this ridiculous academic trek from South to North over fifteen years. 1996, a box-room in Bournemouth, winter drizzle on the skylight, just getting ready to go the job-centre having moved there the week before. And through so much of that time, up to relatively recently, I'd openly use the word, and clearly didn't consider myself an atheist. I look back and wonder: did it all just fade away?

It's probably more just that the word has too much baggage. But I thought I'd better mention it cos I suspect there's going to be more wiffle about it here. To quote Vinay: 'When they say `why?' what am I supposed to say? That I thought that the god I saw in all beings needed a place to live and something to eat?' Hmm, dunno if that's it. Dunno what I'm on about really. Brain bit like porridge.

Weeelll... not going to go down as the most eloquent blog post ever, but thought it best to get the fingers moving. I'll try and focus a little more from now on. Must do better.