There’s a lot of formication going on at my place at the moment. It’s a condition which should not be confused with fornication, which is something quite different (if you don’t appreciate just how different, the right kind of therapy will improve your sex life beyond your wildest dreams).

​Formication, from the Latin for ant, is the feeling that insects are crawling over your skin, a tactile hallucination which can be a symptom of fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s disease, drug withdrawal or severe anxiety.
 
In my case, it isn’t the anxiety that’s causing the formication. It’s the formication that’s causing the anxiety. And it’s no hallucination. Over the last month or so, implacable hordes of Argentinian ants have invaded my home.

It’s bad enough to find them in the dog’s bowl, the microwave, or swarming on the bench. It’s really infuriating to have them crawling and nipping at you in bed, or clambering up your arms and down your neck when you are innocently reading a book or working at the computer. 

In an effort to find a peaceful solution - Donald Trump take note - I’ve circulated the following Open Letter in English and Spanish to all ants:

In early December I came to a stop in a dark pre-Christmas wood. Which fork should I take? The path that leads to Scrooge and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas? Or the path that leads to Harassed Christmas List-making and Gift-shopping! ​I chose The Way of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, because Christmas is a snow job … and even the snow is fake. 

Census results show that fewer New Zealanders identify as Christian than ever before, and more of us admit to having no religious belief at all. Growing numbers of us are Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. Rugby and the America’s Cup probably inspire more zealotry in New Zealand than any God. Which means that not many of us believe that a supernatural birth occurred in Bethlehem on the 25th of December 2017 years ago. ​ 

​Santa is the real God of modern Christmas. Images of the baby Jesus in a stable are displayed in shop windows almost interchangeably with images of Santa wreathed in holly and unreasonable, unseasonable snow. I imagine that some kids these days are so confused that they think it’s baby Santa they see napping in the hay. They may well think that the baby, grown paunchy and whiskery with age, has simply moved to cooler climes and swapped his swaddling clothes for red, fur-trimmed long-johns. 

It was the curious incident of the dog (almost) exploding in the night time which suggested to me a revolutionary way to improve science teaching in New Zealand. I have high hopes that our new Labour-lead government will be eager to trial the idea I am about to propose.  

First, some background.I did poorly in maths and science at school although my failure can't be attributed entirely to the education system: I spent a lot of class time digging holes into lab benches with the spiked end of a compass, or melting ballpoint pens over a Bunsen burner.

It might even be possible that my brain function was reduced by mercury poisoning. The  dental nurse at my primary school rewarded us for not screaming blue murder during her ministrations by giving us a drop of mercury in a little plastic box. Returning to class with stretched lips and a mouth full of amalgam, you'd would immediately tip out the mercury for the fun of watching it roll about your desktop.

It was by observing the melting, silvery, slither of the mercury that I learned what “mercurial” actually meant.

​I believe that if such connections between real life and taught fact had been forged more frequently in science classes of my youth, ​​I might now be in charge of the Hadron Collider or the recipient of a Nobel Prize for mathematics. 

Which brings me back to the incident of the (almost) exploding dog which occurred last week ...

​A couple of years ago I wrote a profile of Hone Ma Heke AKA Lewis Stanton in this blog and in my Nelson Mail column.  He'd been a controversial figure for so long I was curious to find out more about him. At the time, he was camping with his Horse in Neale Park and so was actually a neighbour. 

Clive now camps out on Nelson's main street (minus horse and cart) and has become the subject of renewed controversy during the lead up to the City Council elections. This republished profile is my contribution to the debate.

It's taken me all day to write this little post because I interrupted myself so often: I took the dog for a walk, went to the airport to farewell a visitor and spent time with a friend I haven’t seen for a while. Oh. And I made endless cups of tea, propped up the collapsing trellis in the garden, flipped through a few magazines, cooked dinner etc etc etc. 

The only reason I can indulge in such mucking about is because I work from home. A home office has much to recommend it BUT every silver lining has a dark cloud. Let me walk you through the pros and cons: 

NO COMMUTING REQUIRED
This is one of the purely positive aspects of working from home. Regardless of the traffic or the weather, getting to the office may involve only a leisurely one-minute stroll past the wardrobe.
 
CLOTHING OPTIONAL
As you get older this perk becomes slightly less attractive.  However, workdays spent in bare feet and pajamas or a sarong has a perennial appeal. It’s comfier and less costly than kitting yourself out in proper office attire.

There is a brass band though. They are playing something vaguely Pomp and Circumstance from within the barricades which stretch from the church steps, along Hardy street and then dogleg through Montgomery Arcade into the Saturday Market. 

The green-painted Spud Cart, a potential hotbed of IRA sympathisers, is not under any kind of surveillance. Beside the ANZ, there’s a small cluster of people including a child in a glittery wig and another dressed as a tiger. A woman in a peasant skirt sits smoking on a bench outside the museum. On the other side of the street, there’s another woman waiting for something to happen. She’s sitting in a striped folding chair, knees pressed against the barricade with a Fox Terrier on her lap. She’ll have a prime view of the royal entourage as it strolls by, but at the moment it’s a lonely vigil she’s keeping. A couple of women stand chatting outside Cruella’s Natural Fibre Boutique. One of them is clacking away at some knitting like an antipodean Madame Defarge. 

Even with human subjects informed consent is not mandatory. Thought experiments cost absolutely nothing to conduct and so the results are unlikely to be corrupted by pharmaceutical lobby groups or other questionable sources of funding. 

All that is required for a thought experiment is what - if you were telling a joke - would be the set-up, plus some imagination and wild surmising. The set-up can be very simple or mind-bendingly elaborate and aimed at illuminating the farthest shores of philosophical and  scientific thought. Apparently Galileo didn’t actually lob tennis balls and refrigerators off the leaning tower of Pisa in order to conclude that that objects fall at the same speed regardless of their weight. He saved himself all the hard yakker by coming to the same conclusion via a thought experiment.

And of course Herr Schrödinger, in his famous thought experiment, only had to lock an imaginary cat in a box with an imaginary Geiger counter, some completely non-existent hydrocyanic acid and a dab of fictitious radioactive material, in order to elucidate his argument about quantum mechanics. Whatever that was.

I’ve devised a few thought experiments of my own – necessarily constrained by the fact that this column is intended for a general readership. So please, come along with me to the Thought Lab and apply your imagination, intuition and reason to the following three thought experiments. The first couple of experiments are pretty straightforward. The last one though … well, let’s just say it allows plenty of room for thought. ...