Fishing for Trousers

Give a man a fish, possibly delicious and upon some kind of table, and he will eat for about 1 minute per unit fish volume, as the saying goes. Give a man half a fish and he will eat for a similar amount of time, including that spent pondering on what you've done with the other half of the whole sea bream for which he paid. If one continues this process then a point is reached at which the man cannot even tell he has any fish, because technically he doesn't - all he has is an atom which happened to be part of a molecule which happened to be part of a protein which happened to be present in the fish before it was diced so very thoroughly. There's also a fairly good chance he won't be leaving a generous tip.

Whilst it is likely that complaints over a lack of fish will be prevalent following this asymptotic meal, it is not so likely that the man, whose hunger is matched only by his anger, will marvel at what he was given - a brick.
The effects of hunger on object identification are well understood. In dire enough circumstances it has been noted that a great many people will mis-identify the clearly inedible kebab as an item of food. In this case, the apparent plate of nothing was in fact a brick. It's the kind of brick from which not only buildings, but the bricks, cement, builder, and most (if not all) Barry Manilow records are made.
Bricks, traditionally speaking, shouldn't be particularly mobile without significant assistance. It's how you can always infer that there was at least an arm of some sort masterminding the flight of that lump of baked clay which careened so carelessly through your patio doors. In addition to their predilection for being static, it's generally accepted that bricks are made of something, as opposed to nothing. A brick made of nothing is a gap, and gaps are what walls are there to prevent.

The problem is that in the realm of quantum physics, tradition is ignored like human rights in one of the friskier third world nations. And where do we find our plated up brick? Making itself at home on quantum physics' sofa with a copy of the radio times, spilling gravy on all of the soft furnishings.

As such, our atom breaks each of these rules for good brickitude with nary of a thought of how quickly it will forgo its next scout badge for construction.
It's not entirely fair, since atoms are made of two main parts whereas your common-or-garden house brick is considered as a single lump of happiness. And it's from here that the problems arise.
In the middle is the main bulk of our fish-meal. It's a pile of neutrons and protons chumming about together as a nucleus and acting like a group of students with no concept of personal space playing strong nuclear-force twister. The remainder of the atom is a number of electrons who whizz around the outside in various rigidly defined orbits without a care in the world. they whizz so much in fact, that rather than being a physical thing in space, it's sometimes more convenient to think of them as a probability distribution of negative charge spread around the entirety of the three-dimensional orbit. The candidacy of our atom for full brickhood is beginning to collapse, since motion at extreme speeds and uncertainty as to where the brick is at any given moment are generally a little taboo when it comes to satisfying building codes. Homeowners like to know that their bathroom door is going to remain in the doorway and not trundle off into the space behind the fridge.
The issue is then compounded by the consideration that the orbitals of these electrons form the boundary of the atom, loosely speaking. So, travelling from one end of the orbit to the other, the diameter of the atom is generally of the order of 0.1 nanometres, or one thousandth of a millionth of a metre. This kind of journey is unlikely to be expensive on the bus. The diameter of the nucleus is typically of the order of 1 femtometre, or a thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a metre. This is also going to be an economical trip.
The ratio of the volume of the atom compared to that of the nucleus, ends up as approximately 1:10^15, i.e. 1 with 15 0s behind it. i.e. 1:1000000000000000.
The nucleus contains around 99.9% of the mass of the atom. (Oprah Winfrey contains around 99.9% of the mass of the occupants of her studio during recordings).
The upshot of these short holidays and huge (tiny) numbers is that the vast, staggering majority of the atom is not in fact made of something, so much as nothing at all. Everything around you is as close as makes no difference to being entirely gaps. Even if the man had received his whole fish, he would have had only 1 part in a thousand million million of a meal. No matter how many sea bream he orders, his plate will always be empty; just like his wallet if he keeps paying for restaurant meals before they are served.

Complex Trousers

                The world is a complex place. A very complex place. In a vote to determine the most complex thing in our 4 dimensions, probably held by the editors of the Daily Telegraph, the world be would sure fire winner - even without canvassing or a campaign endorsed by a professional wrestler. You may very well be of the opinion that setting up your wireless router is fairly complex, but the world is at least 3 times as complicated as that. At least. (Upon the inclusion port blocking the iPlayer, this comparison is of course reversed.)
                What makes the world complicated is that there an awful lot of things in it, and all of them are vying to be continue being in it. Some of them even want to be able to have access to online tutorials on how to get salsa stains out of the curtains from anywhere in the house, which only makes things worse. As one of these things, we take our competition with the other things to extreme levels; we have long since won our war against the insidious Dodo and are well on our way to crushing the last dying breaths from the dangerous and vitriolic practice of being nice to one another for reasons other than personal gain. We raise our arms to the blackening sky with each victory, safe in the knowledge that simplification is under way, and no-one needs to be helped out by anybody else with anything, or heavens forbid smiled at by a stranger.
                As the dust settled on the last remaining Dodo skeleton (because the nice lady who volunteered to clean it was executed as a war criminal) an observation was made by a manipulative bastard, who was able to alert his networked acquaintances from the comfort of the space behind the boiler. The observation read thusly - the removal of some elements of a very complex system makes the other aspects of a very complex system behave differently, in a very complex way. After waving his networked device around a lot in order to find what paltry signal he had available, this particular bastard played no further part in proceedings. We shall assume he contracted typhoid.
                The problem with how certain people perceive this observation is the same problem that the same people have when trying to unwrap sweets with their mouth, namely that they have everything the wrong way around and paper tastes awful. They remove one element from the overall system and watch as the butterfly effect takes place, causing the extinction of a subspecies of bee, begetting a fall in the numbers of rare flora and a sharp increase in the number of people willing to sit in a coffee shop to exploit the free wi-fi and discuss the lack of bouquets available to bribe their partners into forgetting that they shot the dog last weekend. At this point they make a bold declaration, a challenge to fill the gauntlet before it is cast down . "It all relies on a few too many coincidences doesn't it? This can't all have happened by chance or mistake?". They are taking something from the end of the system and saying that they could never work out how it affects everything else, let alone build the entirety of the rest of the system from it, therefore it can't be done. They're not so much putting the cart before the horse as taking a newspaper which happened to fall into one of the boxes being transported, looking at the horse and claiming the situation could never have happened by chance because they don't know what a cart is. They are expecting to be able to take a shiny new wireless router and infer the existence of the dinosaurs which must have died to become the oil which is manufactured to produce the plastics moulded to form the casing of the router itself.
                The interwoven cycles and creatures are not cosmic coincidences, neither is the suitability of Earth for the life on it too convenient to have happened by chance. The wrapping paper is stuck between the teeth of ignorance, but it just so happens that there are toothpicks on the table. The life on the planet exists because it is one of the possibilities opened up by the presence and proportions of the chemicals on it and the conditions that they produce when coupled with the positioning and behaviour of the planet in the solar system. The various species are interwoven because they co-evolved that way and anything which didn't fit into the harmonious plan was incapable of continuing to exist because it didn't fit in, and nothing else wanted it to (see also: Jim Davidson).  The complex relationships we observe are the result of a set of billions of criteria and how they interact, what they allow and what they don't. You can look at a piece from a jigsaw but you can't infer the whole picture from that one piece. Tragically, and as with so many otherwise perfectly interesting subjects for an infographic passed around at the kind of dinner party you wish you were invited to so that you could detail why you don't want to attend, it just comes down to statistics and very, very, very big numbers. Like, 6 or something,  I don't even know.
                So yes, everything may seem like an incredibly unlikely series of coincidences at this stage, but only if you're looking at it cross eyed and through a mirror behind wrong-tinted glass.

Lazy Trousers

                Humans are pretty lazy. Almost everything we do is motivated by making things easier for ourselves such that we have ample time to spend looking at our pre-made sliced bread and wishing that someone would cut the crusts of for us. This pastime has of course fallen out of fashion recently since crust free bread has now become available, at the cost of any self respect our society could possibly have had left.
                The oft' referenced industrial capacity of the ant world seems positively burgeoning with energy and enthusiasm by comparison; they use their bodies as building materials, work incessantly for the good of a single all powerful matriarch and never once stop to complain if their personal tastes force them to take ten seconds to cut off the edges of their sandwiches. They might even just eat around the crusts and leave them looking sad on the plate, they simply don't perceive it as too much of a trial. Yet the ants in their autocratic wonderland are, fundamentally, just as lazy as we are. The problem doesn't stem from a reliance on technological solutions or a society of entitled facilitation however. It doesn't even have its roots in some bunch of hippy insectoids claiming that life is too short to cut your own carrots into sticks, like some kind of chump. The real culprit is far more dedicated to the art of the sloth. You have to literally make the course of action you want it to take into the path that requires the least possible expenditure of energy. It's mother Hubbarding physics.
                It's reasonable to think that a set of rules which is terribly busy enforcing exactly what should happen in every situation at every time simultaneously would want to take the shortest possible path to its goal. No-one sees water flowing uphill or cake cooking itself by sucking heat out of the freezer because thermodynamically that requires one not only to remove their own crusts but possibly eat them afterwards anyway, like some kind of barbarian playing a sick mind game, and physics simply doesn't have time for that - much less any inclination to be so vulgar. Everything that has ever happened has been the result of that action being the path that thermodynamics  thinks is of the least resistance. It's the reason firewood will lay motionless at it burns to death rather than stop drop and roll. It would sooner be incinerated than move. All the while physics sits there in its entropic reclining chair of questionably initiated heat exchanges, flopping its arms over the edge to reach the remote as the last few scraps of cosmic background microwave ravioli slide off its distended belly and onto the carpet. There they shall remain.
                So if the laws that govern how our world revolves and our chins hang are based on the principle of laziness then why should we hold ourselves to a higher standard. It'd all be far too much effort. Especially when you consider that at some point in our past, way back when no-one had disposable plates and bread was scarcely pre-sliced let alone de-crusted, the path that caused the least resistance somewhere for even a minute amount of time was to create life. The origin of every species was the course of action which required the minimum possible effort to be made, the ground state of the system. I can't be sure of what else was going on at the time since I was otherwise engaged as a series of mineral deposits across the prehistoric globe, but if everything that lives around us is the result of the easiest path then the other unrealised options would certainly have made for a fine series of postcards.

Trousers in the Bargain Bin

                He's not so much half-heard and half-seen as fully perceived and consciously dismissed, lacking in the ethical hurdles and staggered viewpoints associated with the beggar and altogether less of a political minefield than the outwardly and obviously disabled. He causes them to vicariously live a life of ridicule and misunderstanding for which they resent him, doubly when the resentment turns to guilt. Not enough to make them act upon it, never enough to prompt a display of sympathy or an offer of help but always too much to be forgiven completely. Guilt feeds back into exclusion and revulsion gives way to verbal assaults directing themselves at someone who is already, in essence, a series of red, white and blue concentric circles.

                Our parenthetical pariah patrols the perimeter of the place, praying for pleasant perceptions, pitying pathetic prejudices and passionately pleading, pre-emptively predicting the persecution people pour prosaically upon him. But it's not enough and it's far too much, his voice won't be heard if it hides forever under his breath but the words it says, alternately venomous, wise, understanding and naive are trying to force too many things into a box which just won't fit them and refuses to open its lid far enough to try.

                 Weary beyond words without altering the situation, the routine orbit continues unabated hour by day by week until he's a regular fixture like the filth in the streets and the vermin in the periphery. He's gone so far into his own head that he may very well be out of his mind. It stops seeing each person as a new opportunity for relief so much as yet another faucet of dismissal. They blur into one constant stream of loathing and ignorance and like a current shearing against a rock they gradually wear him down into a pebble underneath the surface, barely causing a blemish in their surface and certainly not doing anything to alter their path.        

                Until, at last, during the march for want of anywhere to remain, a pair of broken eyes meets a pair of shattered irises. An oppressed body approaches an avatar of suffering at the hands of those with the neglected power not to cause others to suffer. The journey ends. They see something in each other that no-one else sees in either of them.  A kinship neither one thought possible but both had clung to as the dearest dream and ambition they had left, ever since true acceptance was made an impossibility. The walls flex, the boundaries grind together and the gates bend until the two who were forced to the outside, staring inwards, become the sole inhabitants of their private paradise with the fetid world that they rejected breaking against their fortress in futility.
                But wouldn't it be a shame if they were paedophiles. 

Trouser Farming

                One of the more appealing sights to be seen in the universe would be a farm. Not just any old farm to be found in the outskirts of Northampton or Windsor but a really quite incredible farm to be found in the in-skirts Sol. With so many solar systems cluttering up the galaxy and so many galaxies cluttering up the universe it is difficult not to call anyone who thinks that Earth is the only life sustaining planet in all of existence a bit arrogant. They probably think everyone else is selfish for being ahead of them in the queue at the checkout or for wanting to sit down on the same crowded bus that they want to sit down on. When you get a get a reasonably priced bag of apples from the supermarket and one of them is rotten you must suspect the others to be suffering the same fate, and likewise with a discounted bag of planets like the Milky Way, you've got to be a bit worried that there may be something similar to our own carbon based monkey rot going on in some of them. Steps should likely then be taken to purge these samples from the bag and perhaps even encourage the storage of unaffected specimens in a refrigerator to preserve freshness. Thankfully empty space is pretty chilly, noticeably more so than a commercially available personal fridge, so one may be forgiven for thinking this advice can be disregarded by any exoplanet not currently invading the personal space of a star. However, it takes a packet of meat roughly a day to fully freeze in the freezer at minus 20 degrees Celsius or thereabouts whereas Earth has been a planet in a cold sink of about minus 270 degrees Celsius for about 4.5 billion years and most of it is still pretty cosy, as evidenced by the existence of humanity, the oceans and reasonably priced beach holidays in Majorca.

                In the face of this monumental sanitation crisis, we gather up the various residents (or plagues) from the affected planets and stick them in a farm within our own solar system because we're a) lazy, b) incapable of reliable space travel over large distances and c) probably the nicest hosts who would cater for various differing dietary requirements with a minimum of snide comments. We would be given a window into the nature of life if we could witness its other forms which have evolved under conditions entirely separate to and different from our own. Would they have overcome issues like situational awareness with absorption of electromagnetic emissions and reflections in the same narrow band and detection of longitudinal air vibrations with their ears in the same range as us or make the same unforgivable mistake of adopting pebble dashing as an appropriate method of decorating a homestead exterior? Would they have also suffered mass extinctions and resurgences of life like we did? Space dinosaurs are unquestionably an appealing prospect so I for one hope so. It would be best not to tell any survivors that I hoped for their mass extinction however, it's exactly that kind of thing that causes first impressions to go badly.

                Why a farm and not a zoo or a lab then? Well, when your daughter's dog catches a serious case of "got into the cupboard and subsequently full of bleach" you tell them that he's gone to live on a farm. It comes across like the disappearance of the dog (and stark reduction in the cleanliness of the toilet) is less traumatic because a farm is a wonderful place for the dog to be, with lots of space to run around in, lots of affection from the proprietors of said farm and so much food that trying to eat cleaning supplies is barely an afterthought. Nobody ever tells the little girl that the dog has gone to be gawped at in a zoo and they certainly don't elucidate the child to the lack of canine companionship by telling her it's gone to a lab to be experimented on, tortured a little bit and ultimately dissected by the kind of man who thinks sliding a scalpel through a puppy is an acceptable afternoon occupation. Likewise then if we were to tell the owners of the other worlds we're taking their wildlife (and possibly them too) to a farm just outside Mars then they'll take it far better. The gawping and dissection can happen in the barn -  anything goes when you're in a barn.

A time before trousers

                It was a time like no other, I'm sad to say. Myself and Smythe used to frequent all of the most fashionable gentlemen's clubs in those days. The war stopped all that of course because I had to pretend to be bed ridden to avoid conscription. I'd swallow small shards of glass to cough up blood and fool the doctor which worked wonders for me until I had to pass them through the next day. I learned to sit down carefully back then, I can tell you. I remember one day after lying to the officers, Smythe was being a sport to one of the local urchins and gave him a playful clonk on the noggin with his walking stick. It was most comely and charming but the boy just couldn't take a joke, and rather childishly bled to death through a crack in his cranium. We still laughed however, right up to the night we tossed his defiantly dour body into the canal and spotted a tyre that some inconsiderate vagabond had fly-tipped. That spoilt the evening something rotten as I'm sure you understand.

                We often had our evenings spoilt, Smythe and I. I think it was something to do with the vast amounts of opium we used to consume but one can never be sure. Not of anything once the opium kicked in. There was one occasion when we had just won a sum of money betting on dogs and we celebrated by letting loose some rounds from a hunting rifle into the masonry of a greengrocers. Everyone around us was livid that we'd got brick dust in the artichokes and we would have been arrested if Smythe hadn't had the quick wit and diplomacy to shoot the arresting officer in the shins and make a run for it.

                There was a period of laying low after that. It simply didn't do to embarrass the family by being party to discharging a firearm into a man at so few paces so I elected to spend a few weeks in my rooms, sulking and stamping around until everyone got over it. It was a bloody good sulk too, you just don't see that quality of frowning any more. When I eventually resurfaced into the public eye everyone was more concerned with the coronation so I was able to resume my dealings un-harassed. Quite why a man who was party to shooting an officer in the street was allowed to return to those same streets when the monarch was passing through is something I chose not to question. It would only arouse suspicion and my face was awfully sore from all the previous grumpiness.

                My doctor recommended that perhaps I should sulk more often, since he suspected my facial soreness was simply muscle fatigue rather than permanent damage and it seemed to have cleared up my bloody cough. Thankfully the war was over by then and I was once again found in chairs up and down the country. Smythe was less fortunate however, as he was held in the grips of quite catastrophic haemorrhoids which threatened to rend his very life in twain. We tried to comfort him by saying that standing suited the cut of his suits but it was no use. He cheered up for a week when he discovered the lost art of falling face first into the armchair and contorting his neck around to greet his guests but it made it all the harder to have a glass of brandy and laugh at the poor.

                Eventually Smythe took to wailing over the wireless at all times of night and we were forced to break his front door down and slaughter his house staff. It was the wakeup call he needed in many ways, especially when we pointed out that his house staff seemed to be the monkeys which had been missing from the zoo for the better part of a year. You could tell by the way they gripped the silver service and had the anatomies of chimpanzees. He never did explain how they'd managed to come into his employ, nor how their union had always managed to negotiate so masterfully with him but life has its little mysteries and it's not our place to intrude on them.

                It was, however, our place to intrude on the local by-elections and have Smythe made MP for Prestwick. He was ever so proud of himself and really made a difference to that community. It was almost exclusively negative, his influence, but it was his pet project and he wasn't doing harm to anyone that really mattered so we let him have his fun.

                It all ended in tragedy of course, as with everything one is trying to enjoy. Smythe decided to run for Prime Minister and we couldn't very well let him do that. He'd already led Prestwick into a brief but exceedingly bloody war against Sudan, claiming his divine right to "reclaim the homeland" and if he tried it with the whole country it would disrupt the cricket to no end. In light of this, we had him kidnapped and stripped of all power. When he managed to escape our custody by opening the unlocked door to his cell we let him go about his business uncontested, he couldn't do any serious harm anymore. To this day I still read about small skirmishes in the Sudanese capitol and smile, knowing he's out there and doing just fine.

Do dogs like trousers?

                Imagine a dog. Any kind of dog you like, but it has to be a really good one. I don't want you to be sitting there imagining some kind of low quality, pitiable dog without any sense of right and wrong. It just wouldn't be very nice for you to be put through that. If the dog is sitting down then grand, he or she is comfortable and possibly well behaved to boot. Unless it's sitting on something unpleasant in which case I would call into question why you have placed your mental canine in that kind of situation. If the dog is not sitting down then I suppose the previous couple of sentences bear little relevance to your life and you're free to disregard them.

                There, I'm glad that's out of the way. We are free to get down to the business at hand now. We need not feel captivated or restricted by a lack of imagined dogs in this instance because we have taken steps to do away with such unpleasant, unnatural and crude shackles. You may not have even been aware that such shackles existed but you can now feel reassured in the knowledge that they definitely do not exist any longer, for now at least.

                The lack of shackles can be misconstrued as freedom, but we shouldn't be fooled into thinking we have very much of that. We're bound by our own inadequacies as a species for one thing, needing to pour liquids into ourselves, gorge on mountains of food, sleep for a third of the time we have available, suck in vast quantities of air for a small component of it and exercise ( becoming out of breath as we do so and needing to suck in even greater volumes of air) to stop  the food and liquid that we need from preventing us to move around and exercise in the first place. Also, there are health and beauty concerns to running about a bit, but I mostly enjoy the mobility thing because it sounds more tautological that way.

                These bindings are less unnatural than the dog situation but I'd still like to be rid of them. It's essentially impossible because we've evolved in such a way that these things are vital and going a few days without them will lead to our service being discontinued indefinitely and any unaffected parts being sold for scrap, buried or burned.

                Evolution isn't clever. It's not dumb but it certainly isn't an intelligent process. It blindly stabs around with its mutation stick, clobbering genes in all directions into infinitesimally different shapes then lets the victim get on with its life as best it can. Sometimes the change will be a great success, well reviewed by The Spectator and given a 6 month slot in the west end. Other times it will do less admirably and wind up rotting in a ditch just outside of Birmingham.

                The little changes give certain examples of a species an advantage. They're more adept at eating berries, seeing prey in the dark or designing comfortable yet affordable cottages in the Derby area.  They then have the means to not die horribly and even propagate their own genetic wonders for some new mutation to tinker with and ruin, like some kind of savage using a brandy glass to serve sherry. In other words, they are more fit for the task at hand, namely the task of survival. Survival of the fittest. It's an easy concept but one which seems to elude people as it's treated like a radically complicated theory just because it takes millions of years to see any effect from it. By that logic we should be confused by coastal erosion or internet petitions about how some people in a country very far away are treating other people in a different country slightly further away, over a difference of opinion which couldn't be culturally further away from us if it tried (and if I was a culture, I would certainly distance myself from the kind of people who think that it's a good idea to invent a seven day week and then declare that they should work for 5 of them and only have 2 off).

                You can't make a pair of shorts evolve into trousers, nor can you make a cat evolve into a pie. One requires tailoring and the other baking, with moral issues possibly making themselves known if the cat is not your own and the shorts are being worn by someone at the time. You can however take a moment out to appreciate the gigantic sample of random changes which must have occurred to allow any of your biological faculties to be suitable for the environment in which you live, let alone idealised for it. You're an incredibly complicated series of squishy and hard bits which pump out and suck in goo in order to keep you trundling about, unfathomably interrelated and interdependent, all of which came about by chance at some point down the line and all of which is easily rendered useless by an improperly applied screwdriver.