The Philosophy of Dating

28 August 2010, Bedlam Theatre's Fat Cat Cafe. As suggested by Richard Davies - Edinburgh University student originally from Paarl, South Africa.

Performance Notes
This was the last of the limit run of Fringe performances before I start looking for a venue in London. There are leads already, thank goodness so hopefully it won't slip away into nothingness.

Many thanks to the big supporters of Phil Mann's Full Mind in Edinburgh - Christopher Bailey and Chris Eastwood who worked on publicity, flak-taking talking around the venue to allow me to do it. Their selfless support of such a minor project is gratefully received.

Lecture Notes

Love

What is love? Is love conceptually irrational? Is love an ejaculation of emotion that defies rational explaination?

The English word "LOVE" comes from the Germanic form of the Sankrit "LUBH" meaning "desire." But there are also roots in our cultural understanding of the term "love" in the three types of Greek love "eros," "philia," and "agape."

• Eros / erotica (or to the Greeks, erasthai and eratikos) is what we commonly refer to as sexual desire. But to Plato (who else?) it also referred to the idea of transcendental beauty - that romance is above the physical expression of love - that there is a perfect love jsut out of reach.
• This of course referes to the platonic cave - an allegory whereby all we experience of life is the shadows cast on the wall in front of us by a fire behind the real physical objects.
• Philia is a fondness or appreciation. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics Book VIII, this could be motivated for the sake of something else but then such love is "a sort of excess of feeling."
• Agape - a brotherly of avuncular love (I tried to look for a female equivilent but I cannot come up with a feminine avuncular. I'm looking for this and the feminine equivilent of "phallic." If you have either please let me know.) This is similar to what Kant and Kierkegaarde assert: you should love another person because they are a person. 

Behaviourists (who reject Cartesian dualism) would contest that love is a series of actions and preferences that manifests as behaviour observable to others and would suggest that you can't tell the different between a lover and a good actor. Some (not least Cher) would contest you can see it other ways - in the eyes, or perhaps in his kiss.

I contest that love is axiomatic - it is a self-evident, self-explanatory state of affairs. To put it a Platonic (no pun intended) way - that only those who have love can truely understand it. To coin a phrase, there is no calculus for love.

The Difference Between Courtship and Wooing

COURTSHIP:

1. Meal
2. Movie
3. Dancing
4. Picnic
5. Shopping
6. General Companionship with Activity

WOOING:

1. Internet dating
2. Virtual dating
3. Instant messaging
4. Text messages
5. Telephone calls
6. Letters
7. Gifts
8. Flowers
9. The writing of songs

Courtship (measured here as the distance between dating and engagement) on average lasts 2 years 11 months, but research suggests that women like it to be two years and seven months.

An engagement, on average, lasts two years and three months.

Samurai Dating
The Japanese miai (trans. looking at each other) or Chinese xiangqin  (trans. mutual familiarity) was divised as a dating scheme for the wealthy and powerful upper classes, especially the samurai. A person looking to get samurmairried needs to meet several iegara or criteria under the following headings:

1. Education
2. Income
3. Occupation
4. Physical Attractiveness
5. Religion
6. Social Standing
7. and Hobbies

A matchmaker will usuall set you up and you get three dates to decide whether you want to marry this person, so you'd better make them worthwhile.

There are many modern forms of this, natch. In fact in Singapore the government Social Development Unit even has facilities in place to set you up on dates as they run their own government-sponsored dating service.

In the modern day we have internet dating, put what's next? Well, there's always GenePartner - a scheme that matches you up based on your DNA.

Sex

Ovid's Ars Amatoria written in 1BC lays down some rules for dating. He says that

• If you're at the Circus Maximus (horse racing) with a woman. Brush some dust off her dress. She'll like that. He is at pains to stress that you should do this even if there is no dust on her dress.
• Even a beggar can be rich in promises, so make sure you promise your date the moon on a stick.
• If you're a small woman, try to meet your date lying down, preferably covering your feet with your dress. This way your true size will not be disclosed.

Ovid even has something to say on men that are selfish in bed:
"Odi concubitius qui non utrumque resolvunt. Hoc est cur pueri tangar amore minus." 
(I abhor intercourse which does not relieve both. This is why I find less pleasure in the love of boys).

Some final tips from Ovid for men:

• Don't forget her birthday
• Let her miss you (but not for long)
• Don't ask her age

And for women:

• Make up - but in private
• Beware false loveers
• Try young and old lovers

There have been many sex guides over the years. Here's a run down of some of the better ones:

Mallanga Vatsyayanas's Kama Sutra
Covers desire, all types of embraces, marking with nails, biting and marking with teeth, slapping by hand the the correct type of corresponding moaning, advice on conduct for the chief wife and the other two wives.

Kalyana Malla's Ananga Ranga
Covers the various seats of passion in women and the general qualities, characteristics and temperments of women. Also discusses the treating of internal and external enjoyments.

Muhammad ibn Muhammod al-Natzawi's The Perfumed Garden
Contains the usual sex advice you'd find in any 15th century Arabic sex manual, but with two interesting addintions. A list of names for the penis and the vagina, and the sex life of animals.

Ladder Theory

I was asked to cover ladder theory and I'll try and get it out of the way now as I find it quite repulsive. The main idea is that men have one ladder whereby they rank women on the following criteria

• Looks (60%)
• Estimated chance she'll put out quickly (30%)
• Other (10%)

This ladder progresses from the top (actively interested), through to only interested when drunk, down to shameful drunken fumblings and into the abyss (the very bottom of the ladder)

And women have two, one "real" ladder on which they rank their prospective partners on these factors:

• Money / Power (50%)
• Attraction (40%)
• Physical looks (50%)
• Competition (20%)
• Novelty (20%)
• Other (10%)
• Things They Say They Care About But Don't (intelligence, humour, honesty, sensitivity, etc.) (10%)

But instead of progressing downt he ladder into where it becomes shameful, women offload onto a second ladder called the friends ladder, this is men that women only consider as friends and as a result can never jump onto the "real" ladder.

When two people are interested in each other, their two ladders compare the magnitude of disparity (how highly they rate each other) and see if they can't get it on a bit.

As I mentioned, this doesn't reflect my opinion, I've only been asked to report what's out there. Although if you do have any doubts, I did find an FAQ which contains some important information and justifies the entire ladder theory premise:

LADDER THEORY FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q: That's not true
A: Yes it is.



Any mistakes? Corrections will be credited.

Stay tuned to find out when and where the next episode of Phil Mann's Full Mind will be.

Déjà vu - or - Didn't I do this talk yesterday?

As suggested by Laura Burdon-Manley actor and director from London, voted for by the audience.

Performance Notes
Many thanks for attendence by all who came, including the continued support of the cast of The Wake, Billy the Kid, all the Butlers from wearebutlers.co.uk and the on-going support of the venue. 

A warm thanks to anyone who was fooled into thinking I was a lecturer at Edinburgh University, sorry to disappoint you. 

You can follow on twitter @pm_fullmind
Or Facebook Phil Mann's Full Mind (group)

Lecture Notes
(I start with these but they may not reflect the content of the performance)
 
Deja vu (I put the accents in the title, you can be damned if I'm doing it on every instance in the body of the text) from the French for "already seen" is also known as paramnesia or promnesia. The term was coined by Émile Boira in this book The future of Psychic Sciences.

Deja vu is the phenomenon of remembering that you have experienced the current moment before. It is often accompanied by a sense of eeriness, strangeness, weirdness or Freud's "uncanny." (or as a friend said on Twitter: @MattPlatts Deja vu for me is accompanied by feelings of dread, uncanniness and depersonalisation. Wonder if this is universal.)

Freud's uncanniness (although boo for Freud) is a useful term. It is the idea of something being familiar yet foreign. Although he inevitably went too far by claiming it caused cognitive dissonence that is a form of symbolic castration. But then he wouldn't, wouldn't he?

In scientific terms deja vu is an anomaly of memory. There are many theories as to why this might happen:

• It is caused by an "overlap" of short- and long-term memory, so when the short term memory tries to pass information to the long-term memory, it finds the memory already there.
  
• Another theory goes that one eye is seeing things faster than the other (although this does not explain experience of deja vu where the other senses are involved such as taste, touch, texture, sound, smell...)
  
• It could be a form of temporal lobe epilepsy, a form of mild seizure - as epilepsy alters consciousness, it's not a big step to imagine how it could alter the perception of reality.
  
• It could be a form of hypnagogic jerk (the jerking sensation you get whilst falling asleep as the sleep spindles wake you up).

One scientific subject found that taking a mix of amantadine and phenylpropanolamine gave him constant deja vu and agreed to run the course of the drugs under scientific study.

A severe form of Deja Vu is Reduplicative Paramnesia in which one become convinced that things have been duplicated. One man lay in hospital convinced that he'd had the same accident and recovery twice, but this time the entire hospital was located in the spare bedroom of his house.

There are a few syndromes and disorders related to Deja Vu, I will mention a few:

• The Capgras Delusion - One believes their spouse or close family member has been replaced by an identical impostor.
  
• The Fregoli Delusion - Various people that you meet are actually the same person in disguise.
  
• Intermetamorphosis - that people appear to stay the same but are actually swapping internal identities with each other.
  
• Doppelganger syndrome - That you either believe that you have a doppelganger somewhere in the world acting independantly, or you have a clone somewhere that is living exactly the same life as you.
  
• Mirrored self-misidentification - The person you see in a mirror is actually someone else
  
• Syndrome of Delusional Companions - Belief that inanimate objects (such as soft toys) are sentient beings

Voulez Vous?
There are more than one "vu."

Deja vu - "seen before" as previously discussed.

Jamais vu - "never seen" That you have come to somewhere familiar and are experiencing it as if for the first time - that it all seems new to you. Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds led a study by getting participants to write out the word "door" 30 times in 60 seconds so eventually the word lost all meaning - this is called semantic satiation. (technically words have three operations: function, form and meaning. In semantic satiation such as this, we lose all meaning and function and retain only the form.). The Hare Krishna mantra is another example.

Presque vu - "almost seen" Something is on the tip of your tongue. Although I am warned that presque vu rarely leads to epiphany.

Deja vu² - "deja vu squared" Coined by Terry Pratchett in the Discworld series of novels - the experience of experiencing deja vu about experiencing deja vu.

Special mention should go to the Rapport Congruency by which is you play a role (such as bad-guy, suave man about town, superbitch, girl-next-door) the first time you meet someone, people just accept that role and assume that you are always that time of person.

Beyoncé

...released the single Deja Vu in July 2006, a single off her second solo album B'Day. The song is in G-minor, replaced Shakira's The Hips Don't Lie and was replaced by Justin Timberlake's SexyBack in the UK charts.

It runs like this (I have provided some handy notes in italics)

Baby I can't go anywhere
Without thinking you are there (a clear example of erotomanicphobia) 
Seems you're everwhere (the Fregoli delusion)
Gotta by having Deja Vu (actually not, the song doesn't really cover much deja vu)

Because in my mind I want you here (she now moves into erotomania herself - commonly known as stalking)
Get on the next plane I don't care
Is t because I'm missing you
That I'm having deja vu?

Boy I try to catch myself (mirrored self-misidentification)
But I'm out of control (a disassociative disorder)
Your sexiness is so appealing (well this seems innocent enough)
I can't let it go (oh wait, Stockholm syndrome)

Voting Results
The crowd turned down a lecture of Nikola Tesla to hear about the philosophy of dating. 

Any mistakes? Corrections will be credited.

The Science of Sleep - What Happens to Our Brains When We Sleep?

This talk selected by Zoe Hinks, director, writer, actor and designer from Brighton and voted for by the audience at the Fat Cat Cafe, Bedlam Theatre 25th Aug 2010. 

Performance Notes
This show was particularly packed as several people have started hearing about it. 

The pitch

Lecture Notes
Sleep is neurologically very busy - people used to think it was a period of mental and physical inactivity used to recharge. We do recharge but it is far from inactive. In fact we only save about 50kcal by being asleep.

We have discovered 5 stages of sleep based on brain waves using Electroencephalography otherwise known as EEG. It is measured by electrical activity on the scalp produced by neurons firing in the brain.  

Each neruon is too small to measure - therefore synchronous activity is monitored of millions of neurons (later corrected by an audience member to tell me that this year they have developed a system for monitoring individual neurons - apparently it is something frightful involving needles).

There are 13 billioni neurons in the brain which react to stimuli (senses) and also to internal stimuli such as meditation, relaxation, stress, sleeping, calculating or just being conscious. These are known as Spontaneous Brain Potentials.

There are many different types of brain waves:

• Delta: 3hz frequency range for deep sleep and babies
• Theta: 4-7hz, young children, tired adults and aroused/horny adults.
• Alpha 8-12hz, this is the posterior basic rhythm - awake but relaxed
• Beta, 12-30hz, active / busy / anxious

 Stages of Sleep

1. Light Sleep - half awake half asleep (literally - 50% reduced brain activity) . Muscles slow, small amount of twitching, easily awakened. Brain produces high-amplitude slow waves. Lasts for a few minutes up to 5% of sleep time. Weird dreams as pulses of "awake waves" happen. If person is woken 80% of people will say they are not asleep at this stage.
   
2. True sleep - lasts about 20 minutes. Breathing and heart rate slows. Body temperature drops, brain still registers slow waves but with occasional spikes known as Sleep Spindles (staying at 7hz and then spiking to 12-14hz during a spindle). This causes body to twitch and shows that either the subject is entering stage 2 or entering stage 3.
   
   As we move into stage 3 the pons (part of the brain stem that connects to the spinal cord) signals the thalamus and cerebal cortex to star dreaming and turn off motor signals. But light, caffeine/alcohol and stress can prevent you from sleeping.
   
   The eyes send signals to the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the centre of the brain where the optic nerves cross and then to the pineal gland (also called the third eye) which produces melatonin and affects our sleep.
   
   For caffeine or alcohol - up to half the amount consumed can remain in your system up to 6 hours after consumption.
   
   Stress creates cortisol which normally naturally declines toward the end of the day.
   
   Stage 2 accounts for 44-55% of sleep.
   
3. Deep Sleep - Brain produces delta waves (same as a baby). Dreams more common here than in previous stages but still not hugely common. Children sleep more in this stage than adults (maybe that's why they sleepwalk more? More on that later).
   
   Stage 3 accounts for 15-23% of sleep.
   
4. Deeper sleep - Blood pressure drops, muscles relax but blood flow increases to the muscles. This is the most restorative type of sleep..Body releases growth and repairing hormones and refreshes energy. Bedwetting, sleep walking and night terrors are more common here as this is when the brain can forget to tell the body not to respond to the dreams and so the body thinks that everything is really happening to it.
   
5. REM - A sudden blast of activity! The brain seems awake - dreams most often remembered in this stage and you have the highest chance of dreaming. The body adds cortisol to keep the body alert for waking.

Brains cycle through these 5 stages at 90-110 minute intervals 4-6 times a night (audience member noted that this might be why popular films and plays are this length).

Also during sleep the digestive juices change, reproductive hormones are released (especially in women) and the kidneys shut down meaning you have more concentrated urine in the morning.

What are Dreams?

A succession of images, sounds and emotions. Humans spend 6 years dreaming. Scientists don't study the content of dreams as they are rarely remembered.

Theories on why dreams happen:

• Brain interpreting internal stimulus as projections
• Freud (boo) said they were internalised "forbidden" thoughts
• Short-to-long term memory transmission
• Processing long-term but rarely retrieved memories
•  Removing junk from the brain

 Animal sleep hours


Python - 18 hours
Tiger - 15.8
Cat - 12.1
Chimpanzee - 9.7
Human - 6.5
Sheep - 3.8
Elephant - 3.3
Giraffe 1.9

Records and Side effects

Longest time without sleep was 11 days (under scientific conditions without drugs) was 11 days by Randy Gardner (yeah, I know...). Started hallucinating after 4 days but still, on the 10th day, beat a scientist at pinball. 

He hallucinated he was Paul Lowe (American footballer) winning the Rose Bowl and that a street sign was a person.

Normal humans don't die from sleep deprivation (although it can cause diabetes) because the human brain protects itself by a series of microsleeps where even the subject may not know s/he has been asleep.

Unless you have Fatal Familial Insomnia - a rare genetic disease - so far incurable that manifests around 30-50 and will kill you in between 7 and 36 months.

It has four stages

1. Insomnia resulting in panic attacks, paranoia and phobias
2. Hallucinations and extreme panic attacks
3. Complete inability to sleep leading to rapid loss of weight
4. Dementia and the patient is unresponsive. 

Not sleeping will make you tired, grumpy and lose your concentration and make it difficult to remember things.

People who sleep less than 6 hours or more than 9 have a death rate 30% higher than those who sleep 7-8 hours.

Calvin S Hall collected 50,000 dreams between 1940-1985 and discovered that people all over the world mostly dream about the same things:

• Mostly dreams feature anxiety or negative feelings
• 10% of the dreams are sexual

Lucid dreaming does exist and if you manage to lucid dream you can call yourself an Oneironaut. 

As a society we sleep on average 3 minutes fewer than in 1965 and scientists say we haven't changed much in our sleeping patterns in 2,000 years.


Any mistakes? Corrections will be credited.

Occurances in Currency - The History of Money

This talk selected by Ashleigh Thurlow and Johnathan Brittain, actors from London, voted for by the audience at the Bedlam Fat Cat Café on the 24th Aug. 

Performance Notes

This performance was prefaced by a visit from ARTIFICE's Fletcher the Butler (www.wearebutlers.co.uk) who will provide any task such as Level Certification, Aesthetic Purveyance, Missive Carriage, Cognisance Enhancement and General Factotage. A friend had employed Fletcher to deliver me a missive providing extra information on the history of the £5 coin (pictured)

As you will see from when the videos are uploaded, the request for tonight's lecture was on the history of the £5 coin - to follow up  on the £2 coin. I took a liberty to extend this to the whole of the history of currency in the interests of, well... interest.

I do get to the £5 coin at the end, by reading and commenting on Fletchers excellent letter.

We also instigated a convention whereby instead of clapping, the audience waves to show their appreciation. This keeps the noise down for fellow performers RashDash (http://www.rashdash.co.uk) who are doing their show Another Someone in the space next door. It also looks very amusing.

Lecture Notes
(I start with these, but they may not represent the actual content of the performance)

• Money has four functions: medium of exchange, a unit of account, store of value and standard of deffered payment. Or as textbooks pre-1970 remind us
• "Money is a matter of functions four:
  A medium, a measure, a standard, a store" 

Medium of Exchange

• Avoids pure barter in a system where there exists a coincidence of wants. 
• Permits the value of goods to be assessed and rendered in terms of an intermediary. In this case - money. 

Unit of Account

• A measure, that is, it makes sense as a base unit that is unchanging
• This is paradoxical of course, as inflation destroys this idea. 
• Without constant correction and monitoring, traditional of "classical" methods of accounting can become void of meaning.

Standard of Deffered Payment

• Money can also exist as a debt - you can have a negative amount of money. 

Store of Value

• So money can be saved and retrieved at any time. 
• Alternative stores of value include real estate, gold, silver, previous stones and metals, art and collectables, stock and livestock.

When currency is stable it serves all four functions.

Going back to the start...

• Barter has been proven to exist 100,000 years ago. 
• There has been no society with pure barter, instead societys tend toward gift economies where real estate, gold, silver, previous stones and metals, art and collectables, stock and livestock can be traded, but also marriage, friendship and social networking. 
• Here  I made a gag about Twitter embodying the anga fakatunga - the spirit of the Tongan people
•  I also went on  to say that there is a Kashmiri tale about two Brahmin women who only tithe to each other and become reincarnated as two posion wells
• In folklore, gifts are for giving and giving on, people who try to keep hold of gifts always die. 
• I closed the section by mentioning that previous "anicient" societies always considered themselves to live in abundance, and scarcity is a modern concept. 

• Eventually a system of commodity money evolved
• Such as the shekel (180 grams of Barley) 
• This comes from traders stamping the weights and values of metals or bags of goods onto the stock themselves, eventually tokens that represented these weights evolved. 
• Herodotus reminds us that Croesus was the first to use "real coins" (whatever that means)
  
• This then became representative money as the banks issue receipts for money stored in them - people started trading the receipts as bank notes.
• This is not the first time this has happened. China issues bank notes in the Song dynasty in 960 AD. But banknotes didn't hit Europe until 1661.
  
• Finally fiat money came about. 
• This is where a government declares by fiat that the bank notes they have produced are legal tender, even though they don't neccessarily represent something like the gold or silver standard. 
• Fiat money cannot be converted into any other thing but only exchanged for other things.
  
• Some advice on hyperinflation: always pay off your debts in hyperinflation.
  
• The Bretton Woods System ensured fair trade on money overseas after the Wall Street Crash
• Where big states of the wiorld negotiated rates and banned Charles DeGaulle's (boo) discriminary currency practices.
• The Bretton Woods System collapsed with Nixon and Vietnam (boo again) and had to be rebuilt.

To finish on some interesting coins and banknotes:

• Somalia has coins shaped like guitars, motorcycles, cars, wild animals and even 3D objects
• the Ivory coast 1,000 franc coin contains pre-historic fossilised mammoth tooth
• Palau Silver 5 dollars each have a unique smell (scratch-n-sniff)
• Cook Islands have a holographic coin to celebrate the history of the TV
• Liberia has 2.5 inch coins for the World Cup
• Kurdistan spelt their own name wrong on 10 Dinar Coins
• in WW2 Nazis created new current in countries they invaded (but so did the Allied forces when we invaded Iraq) 
• The Serbian Dinara was created by printing over the Yugoslavian dinara
• The Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Morava (previously Czecho-slovakia) had its own currency created for it
• Due to a shortage of metal at the end of WW2 Japan produced clay coins for only a couple of days and in Manchuko they produced fiber coins
• Niue has Snoopy on their coins
• Vanatu has Barack Obama
• the Crescent Islands have Day-Glo coins
• and the Isle of Man has a coin celebrating the Lord of the Rings 

The Five Pound Coin

Finally I got to this. And read Fletcher the Butler's letter. It reads as follows:

The Five Pound Coin
By Fletcher the Butler, from Research by Tony Clayton

Crown coins are generally issued for major royal events. By 1990 inflation had meant that to issue a large coin with a value of 25 pence (5 shillings) would result in a large portion of the income being taken up in minting the coin, and the purchasing power of the first commemorative crown of 1935 was well over ten times that of the 25 pence coin in 1990. As a result it was decided that the futre issues of crown-sized coins would have a face value of five pounds.

It is a misnomer to call these five pound coins crowns, however, as the crown has been valued at five shillings since 1551. They are instead correctly reffered to as crown-sized coins.

A crown's weight is 28.28 grams and its diameter is 38.61mm. It is generally made of cupronickel, although silver and gold proofs are known.

Although technically five pound coins are legal tender, banks and traders are often reluctant to accept them. They are officially known as non-circulating legal tender (NCLT).

So far there have been 24 crown-sized five pound coins issues these are:-

1. 1990 Quuen Mother's 90th Birthday
2. 1993 40th Anniversary of the Coronation
3. 1996 Queen's 70th Birthday 
4. 1997 Royal Folden Wedding
5. 1998 Prince Charles' 50th Brithday
6. 1999 Princess Diana Memorial Cornw
7. 1999 Millennium Crown
8. 2000 Millennium Crown
9. 2000 Millennium Dome Crown
10. 2000 Queen Mother's 100th Birthday Crown
11. 2001 Victoria Anniversary Crown
12. 2002 Golden Jubilee Crown
13. 2002 Queen Mother Memorial Crown
14. 2003 Coronation Anniversary Crown
15. 2004 Entente Cordiale Anniversary Crown
16. 2005 Admiral Nelson Crown
17. 2005 Trafalgar Crown
18. 2006 Queen's 80th Birthday Crown
19. 2007 Diamond Wedding of Queen and Prince Philip Crown
20. 2008 450th Anniversary of Accession of Elizabeth I Crown
21. 2008 60th Birthday of Prince Charles Crown
22. 2009 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII Crown
23. 2009 Countdown to London 2012 Olympics Crown
24. 2010 Restoration of the Monarch in 1660 Crown

 Voting Results
The crowd voted against the Dewey Decimal system to hear about "What Happens to Your Brain When You Dream" as proposed by Zoe Hinks, writer, director and actor from Brighton. This will be presented as The Science of Sleep, 9:30pm in the Bedlam Fat Cat Café, Thurs 26th August 2010

Any mistakes? You will be given credit for corrections. 

The Complete History of the £2 Coin

24th August 2010 - Bedlam Theatre - Fat Cat Café

LECTURE NOTES
(I start off with these, it may not reflect the actual content of the show).

• There have been 7 £2.00 coins between 1986 and 1996. 
• It is not, however the first bimetallic coin which was the bimetallic tin farthing in 1692.
  
• £2 coin outer ring:
• Colour: Yellow nickel
• Composition: 76% copper, 20% zinc, 4% nickel
• Inner disc:
• Colour: Steel-coloured cupro-nickel
• Composition: 75% copper, 25% nickel
  
•  Weight: 12g; 28.4mm diameter
• Edge stamped before centre is attached so text may appear either way up
• If you place the Canadian bimetallic coin in the freezer the centre will pop out, not so with the British £2.00
  
• Design trialed in '94 but never released as legal tender - some have appeared in display sets though.
• 97 saw the release of Raphael Maklouf's coin but it was delayed due to technical difficulties and released simultaneously with Ian Rank-Broadley's. 
• On regular issue coins the design represents technical development and features 19 cogs - this odd number of cogs means the machine would only function on a mobius strip (discovered by August Mobius 1858)
  
• Between 1997-2008 353,145,250 £2 coins were made. Average 29 million/year
  
• 19 special designs issued, most notably:
• Discovery of DNA
• The Gunpowder Plot
• Birth of Robert Burns
  
• Previous unimetallic coins have been made for special occasions which have the same metallic composition as a £1.00 coin but twice the metal. Designs include:
• The end of World War 2
• Tercentenary of the Scottish Claim of Right
  
•  This year's coin celebrates 150 years of nursing and the death of Florence Nightingale.