I thought I should point you in the direction of a new anthology of blog posts, written by some of the leading online proponents of ancestral fitness. It’ll soon be available at www.ancestralfitness.com and will make the ideal gift for the Neanderthal in your life in need of a little self-improvement.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of ancestral fitness, it describes a lifestyle philosophy which attempts to incorporate diet and exercise regimes consistent with our evolutionary biology. That translates as a diet avoiding “easy” carbs, and exercise revolving around high-intensity workouts. There’s more to it than that, naturally.

Of course, top of the list of contributors is Professor Art De Vany. But why they roped in the last guy is anybody’s guess. I bet he’s pleased to be in such illustrious company.

Welcome to the Knackered Hack. If you're visiting in search of my paleo lunch with Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, you'll find it in three parts here. If you enjoy what you see don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, so you don't miss an important update and can more easily forward those salient posts to your friends and business contacts, sign up for my regular email service. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. Thanks for visiting!

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Flatland: A Journey of Many Dimensions (US edition) is a short book, but I read it very slowly. It’s less than 100 pages, and it took me six weeks, I think.

Perhaps if I had studied more than school-house geometry I would not have felt the need to spend so long pondering the perceptual consequences of living in two dimensions, as the characters in Flatland do.

Then again, there is the more frightening thought that I am in fact living a single dimensional existence without realising it. To understand how stupidly comic the book makes that idea seem you’ll have to get hold of a copy. It is a book that encourages humility in our understanding and yet aspiration to higher knowledge at one and the same time.

Written by Victorian London schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland was a mathematically-inspired parody of the restrictions (social, intellectual and philosophical) of the era. Abbott created an alternative two-dimensional world, expounded by geometrical observation and hand-drawn sketches to attack in allegory the conventional wisdoms of that hierarchical 19th century society.

But it barely takes any imagination to transpose the ideas into our own era. For it must ever be the case that a battle is going on within society between those who want to push our understanding upward, to challenge orthodoxy, and those whose economic benefit resides in the status quo. Quite literally these days our quantum friends ask us to consider many more dimensions than most of us have the faculty to conceive of.

The main protagonist and narrator of the story is A. Square, who is…a square; this makes him a professional man, or gentleman in Flatland. The middle classes are equilateral triangles, the lower classes isosceles. And in this world the women (ladies, you’ll not like this) are straight lines.

Remember, Abbott is describing a highly structured society. Social mobility in this world is generationally dependent. Deviations, if not correctable at birth, are extinguished. Squares beget pentagons, pentagons beget hexagons,etc etc. Regularity matters above all else.

The angularity of one’s body dictates not only your station in life but is also mirrored in your IQ; the pointier your angles the thicker you are. But Abbott’s protagonist from a middling station nevertheless demonstrates, through a combination of curiosity (his own and that of his hexagonal grandson) and through the revelation of a visitor from the higher plane, that there is a third dimension (and possibly more). He ends up challenging the established order held in place by his intellectual and geometrical superiors — the top-most of which are the priestly circles.

But this is more than just a reprint of Abbott’s text because the book is republished to accompany an animated movie(US DVD version). The narrative has been updated to account for a more contemporary sensibility and bring this geometrical allegory to life for a new generation, and one very easily turned off mathematics. So purists for the old story should get over themselves and help celebrate — if they were otherwise so inclined.

The movie was an instant hit with the two knackered chips off the old hack: one 13, the other eight. So if you are a secondary or junior school teacher tasked with enthusing children with the idea of maths and geometry in particular, there could be no better investment. And don’t worry about the women being lines; that liberal poster-child Martin Sheen plays Arthur Square in the film, and the precocious grandson, Hex, becomes a girl and is given voice by Kristen Bell.

The DVD extras also provide some great computer-generated animation that shows how three-dimensional shapes would be perceived in just two dimensions, and then, by the same logic, how higher dimensional objects might present themselves in our three-dimensional world.

And pay attention for the line in the trailer here: “Oh dude, you’re freakin’ me out!”, for that is the Line King talking.

What is particularly cute to my mind about the animated characters is that, while their outward form is two-dimensional, their insides are all revealed to be Mandelbrotian fractals. Now, there’s a truth we should all ponder.

Thanks to the movie’s animator Dano Johnson for providing the above on YouTube.

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A few weeks ago, at an EBDM seminar at the London Business School, happiness economist Bruno Frey put up a slide entitled:-

Television weakens the will of active people.

I know that feeling. Professor Frey does without television completely, from what he said, as a route to optimising his own happiness function.

I asked Professor Frey if any similar research has been conducted in relation to the internet: as to whether the internet might do the opposite. He was not aware of any. It’s hard to tell from personal experience; I’m still in the process of evaluating whether or not extensive interaction on the internet is a time-sink or a route to more expansive individual productivity. No doubt there is an optimum balance, and discovering it may be more a matter of luck than judgement. The galloping growth of social media is frequently disdained by professionals in the mainstream media; the glib response, shared by a good number of ordinary friends and acquaintances, is that these social media types (to which I now increasingly actively belong) need to get a life.

But a couple of weeks ago I interviewed Matt Mason whose book The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists, Graffiti Millionaires and Other Youth Movements Are Remixing Our Culture and Changing Our World (Allen Lane/Penguin) I’ll be reviewing sometime this week, alongside some interview snippets. You can get hold of the US version here. Matt recommended a new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Allen Lane/Penguin) (US version available here) by Clay Shirky.

From the following video, it’s clear why Matt is recommending Clay’s work. Clay quantifies rather neatly in an historical context what is going on in terms of shifting patterns of behaviour, and why Wikipedia is so important to understand in a more positive light than many do. Above all, in a very amusing way, he highlights why the old-media perception of this phenomenon is so often wildly misconceived in terms of how attention is distributed these days. Of course, what Clay does not highlight is the malign possibilities of this cognitive surplus combining in the wrong way.

Thanks to Dave Morin for the pointer.

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Having indicated a while ago that I would plump for an iPhone, I chickened out the other day and defaulted to my previous rule of thumb which was buy the best Nokia. But this also satisfied that other aforementioned heuristic, i.e. the gift-horse mouth-staring one. The cost to replace my existing pda-phone was less than zero, because they offered me a contract better than the previous one, and much better than anything I’d seen advertised on any network.

Sometimes I wish I had not bothered, because having had the device nearly a month, I have not had time to programme it or migrate contacts. And the storage card is delayed, so loading music, podcasts, portable Russian lessons and other audio joys has had to wait.

And yet. The thing has a 5 megapixel camera in it with Carl Zeiss optics, which Apple’s Steve Jobs is dismissive of, having made the iPhone’s camera to a lesser spec. There may be nothing to choose between the two really, but I’m strangely overjoyed and inspired to photograph any time, any place and in a way that the graininess of my old phone discouraged. I’m a fully-fledged Flickr fan.

Fortunately too, the phone has an FM radio in it, which sounds a bit retrograde in this day and age. But over the past week or two I’ve been looking for inspiration and concentration. The BBC’s classical channel, Radio 3, has been providing it, offering as ever a wide range of frequently unfamiliar classical music of all centuries. And it stops me from listening to Pink Floyd when I’m out running. Shine on you crazy diamond. Auditory variation indeed.

Trees and woodland seem to do the same thing for me visually, and the phone camera now means that I capture some of that stimulus for posterity, and the limbic of you, my long-suffering reader. Excepting the flower, these pictures were taken Monday at Claverton Manor (AKA The American Museum) near Bath, which overlooks the Avon Valley. Topographically, I think it may be true to say that this is one of the most varied landscapes on the planet, and readers of Simon Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World: A Tale of Rocks, Ruin and Redemptionwill know of its crucial contribution to geological and subsequent evolutionary theory. It floats my boat.

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