Yogi

Faith in God through Jesus Christ may appear harmless or even beneficial, but it is encouraging people to think that there is a way to wholeness of body and mind through human techniques - whereas the only true way to wholeness is by yoga. No, that is just ridiculous.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2358035.ece

An apology

Remarkably perhaps, nobody has yet asked me to apologise for any of the content in this blog. Give it time.

However, in a pre-emptive strike, I am going to apologise for some of the tone here. Because I am conscious that some of the articles may seem to have an "aren't I great" feel to them.

But there is a reason for that. I am running a small consultancy business and the main commodities sold are my knowledge and experience. I don't shout much in the real world, and the business has done minimal advertising. Even at the current client, there are those in marketing who can see my skills in number-crunching and analysis but perhaps assume lack of eloquence. If the client asks for routine tasks then there may be little scope for real creativity. Likewise those working in technology may see me in marketing and assume I have no IT project experience. I am conscious that anything I say here may help to confirm or upset those suspicions.

So I am sorry.

The Office Joker

There was no post yesterday, got home late, went for a drink after football as it was the last game here for an old friend. He was a client manager on a project with me a few years ago and we have continued to meet each week. Now he's off to another job.

But as I periodically emphasise, despite the consistent format, this is not a diary, it is more an offbeat look at business, management, economics and marketing. For example, if we can find unlikely parallels to office management style in the fictional world of Jake Bullett, House MD or Edmund Blackadder, then we can surely find some in The Office.

In many respects, David B of the office was a fine manager (the writers used different names outside the UK). He did not seem too involved with details but tried to focus on the necessary higher level strategising. However he knew it was important to motivate and enthuse his team. And he genuinely cared for them, not just around their day to day tasks but also by encouraging them to develop and grow. But despite his qualities, it seemed that some faceless bureaucrats in the corporation never really appreciated him.

Of course that was only a fictional character from a television show.

Integrity

I have read more than a few of them, but I will not quote from business books here. They tend to either be obvious platitudes on working harder or more efficiently, self-help style psychology lessons, pleadings for unfettered capitalism, or biographies of people who have run out of new ideas. Scott Adams is a glorious exception. But the notes here are my personal ideas.

In a recent interview for a fairly junior position, after the standard gentle interrogation, the candidate was asked if he had any questions for us. He asked "what are you really looking for in a candidate?" It's a good question, and all that earlier stuff about detectives and traffic lights is still completely relevant. But what I gave him was a one word answer, though I followed it up with an explanation.

What I told him was that "we have obviously done an initial assessment based on a CV that lays out skills and experience, and what we are looking for is the integrity that the person genuinely matches that. And we are looking for the integrity that if people are asked to do something, that they will try it honestly to the best of their ability. We can't ask for more than that."

It was a gut reaction, but I don't regret what I said. Of course we would have other criteria for more senior roles or more creative roles. And what I said was surely obvious anyway…

Full House Team

Let's pull the recent strands together. The house detective had a team of three classic muses, it worked for him. It is too soon for me to talk about my current team.

But I have managed many in the past. What is the ideal composition for the small team?

I was one of five consultants managing a trade processing project for a global merchant bank. Five apparently random names. But remarkably, in order of seniority, the surnames of the five of us ended with the letters A (the managing partner), E (me), I (the lead technical analyst), O (the lead business analyst), and U (the lead programmer).

In my mind, it was the ideal management team for an IT project. What were the chances of five people having abilities that complemented so perfectly? What were the chances of our surnames ending with those letters in that particular order? Multiply up the probabilities and we get one in zillions. It can't be a coincidence that we all seemed to gel so well. It was pre-destiny that brought us all together. Same conditions apply.

Real House

God has spoken to me. It was barely 48 hours ago that I wrote:

Typical scam, point to a loose tile on the roof or a damp patch on the wall, warn about tremendous potential damage unless hundreds of pounds of remedial work is performed as soon as possible.

Today, after literally years of exchanging nothing more than an occasional "hello", the guy from the house opposite us knocked on our door, showed me outside, and pointed to my roof. I was shocked. I took a picture...





A couple of rows of tiles had somehow worked loose, and were only being stopped from falling onto my car (or anyone close to the house) by a bit of guttering. If they dropped and shattered then next door's windows would be smashed too. It was very dangerous. I agreed.

So I spent an hour trying to phone every local roofer in the book. Bank holiday weekend, all either busy or absent. So I eventually plucked up the courage, found a very long ladder that seemed far too light for the task, and slowly went up to fix it myself. Well it's not completely "fixed", but I lifted the broken tiles out of their precarious position and brought them down safely. They aren't half heavy when carried in one hand when you're hanging onto a ladder twenty feet up with the other hand. But I did it. It's safe now. At least until it rains.

But back to the start, I'd just written about this very event. It is too much of a coincidence. It would only need one more condition to prove that everything happens for a reason, that there is someone watching over us, that there is a god, that there is a purpose in life ...

House MD

Here in the UK, it was the season finale yesterday. Well done Channel Five.

I've indirectly referred to the protagonist a few times now. I don't aspire to be the guy, we know he is an asshole. We are so different. I can't imagine him striving for honesty and integrity. He has no life outside of work whereas most of my life is outside of work. I watched it for entertainment, not do draw parallels. But something resonates...

He is rational and sensible but seems incredibly radical. He is sometimes wrong, of course, but he is right more than anybody else. He is right partially because he has far more experience and much greater breadth and depth of knowledge than the rest of the team. But mainly because he seems to be the only one who can make the necessary decisions without prejudice or superstition. The only one who seems able to resolve the myriad conflict pressures without freezing. It is a demonstration of management decisionmaking under pressure.

Incidentally the doctor had a team of three. A gentle young lady who seemed pure niceness but she hid a turbulent past. And two very different young men, one of whom at first appeared to be a mini-clone of the boss, but actually turned out to be a very different character. But the team has broken up now ...

Education for real life

The GCSE results were released today. We got the annual predictable complaints, linguists say that not enough people are learning languages, chemists say that not enough people are learning chemistry, historians say that not enough people are learning history, and the same for every other subject. With whom do I agree? All of them! Maybe kids should never be allowed to leave school until they pass?

But I agree with the modernisers too. In the age of the internet, there is no need to learn so many facts by rote. What is important, regardless of subject, is the scientific method. Being able to analyse increasing numbers of apparently contradictory facts, opinions, trends, facts, customs, superstitions, developments in a critical manner, then being able to draw sensible conclusions.

But sometimes even the archetypal creative ends up doing fairly routine office tasks … maybe there should be special training just for bengalis to learn british bureaucracy … there used to be!

Rogue Traders

The Office of Fair Trading has many functions of the US Department of Justice, it exists to protect the consumer from anti-competitive or fraudulent behaviour.

On a smaller scale, there are plenty of televsion programmes in which fraudsters and con artists are exposed. Often it's a cross between extortion and theft, so a harsher term than hustler is probably needed. These people exploit victims who are confused and vulnerable.

Typical scam, point to a loose tile on the roof or a damp patch on the wall, warn about tremendous potential damage unless hundreds of pounds of remedial work is performed as soon as possible. The victim is initially scared, but the problem is fixed, the money is paid, and the victim feels better. We see even swifter results if the initial diagnosis was ridiculously overblown or maybe just a simple lie, then no real work at all needs to be done, but the victim can still pay their money and then be reassured that the house is structurally safe (again). The hustler gets his money and the victim feels better. Great?

But those cowboys practise theft and extortion. They should be locked up.

Swap victim's house for victim's health in this story. Would you care for some "alternative" medicine or "complementary" therapy?

ODI

It's late, watched the sorry end of the cricket, now too tired to think of anything original. Played football too, but a few players are off on holiday or injured, so more running around than I really wanted.

At least it wasn't too hot. In fact it was cold, damp, windy, a typical autumn evening.

Hell. It's August.

The enemies of common sense

A few years ago I was speaking outside work with a senior manager in a large consulting firm and the subject somehow came round to organ donation after death. He genuinely said that he would not allow anyone in his family do it, even to save another life, because his religion had prohibited it. Was he pious or stupid?

Anyway, there are other kinds of madness...

Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.

Well I don't. "Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

That was Charlie Brooker previewing tonight's TV. Hmmmm.

Facebook

Facebook is reaching critical mass in my generation. Once the majority of us have it, once it becomes the obvious place to see if someone has gone away on holiday, then the rest of us will be dragged in. Good.

Facebook is being corrupted. Too many loud pictures. Too many random things being thrown. Just too much activity. It will go the way of myspace. Bad.

So my blog notes stay in my blog.

But I brought this one here from Facebook.

Jhal

A lot of curry is eaten in the English-speaking world.

Completely obvious - English is adept at incorporating words from other languages, a fact that is splashed all over every one of the books listed here and surely in many more besides.

Slightly obvious - even if English is your mother tongue, there are moments when a word or phrase that is still technically "foreign" is the most obvious and most precise label for a particular thought. The more other languages you know, and the better you know them, the more often this happens.

So this is my suggestion for the OED. We really need this word. The word hot is the one usually used. But it is open to confusion almost every time it is spoken. Chilli is the other common adjective. But that doesn't seem right either. It's a very broad category of vegetable, and the sensation from a jalapeno is very different to that from an Indian pepper (perhaps only to the native, but I think it's fact).

The word should be used on restaurant menus. Then it would take off. It's the particular kind of hot caused by a particular kind of chilli. A madras is more jhal than a korma. It's a Bengali word, but most "Indian" restaurants are owned by people who speak a derivative of Bengali anyway. If tikka masala can enter the English dictionary, why not jhal?

Abolish Inheritance Tax?

Today the front pages of the UK press splash age-old conservative proposals as though they were news.

People say that a tax of 40% on the dead is unfair. Yes, surely a tax rate of 100% would be more fair.

If you want to give money away when you are alive, fine, you should not be penalised for doing it. But if you are dead then you don't need money.

It's a line that's been used before in a different context, but how can you say that every child should have equal opportunity if you also say that some children should have privileged opportunity.

If someone's ancestors gathered a large amount of capital illegally, for example by leading a norman invasion of a largely anglo-saxon area or by conducting other illegal wars, then does that mean that the descendants of the invaders should forever have a better start in life compared to those who were here first?

There are countering arguments. No-one should have to move out of their home just because a loved one has died. But remember that what one generation thinks is perfectly moral wealth acquisition is not always considered the same way a hundred years later. So if you should not be punished for the sins of your forefathers, then the converse must also be true.

And I know you disagree with this. Everyone seems to. But these pages are for thinking about alternatives, not for parroting predictable political policies.

The Language Instincts

Our brains work differently as we get older. Not just in the obvious things, but also I think in the fundamental structure of neurological connections. I threw in a bit of German a few notes ago. I found it very easy at school and did the GCE after just two years. Perhaps it was the rules and the logical structure, after all maths and science were also very easy. Yet I struggled in French. I never knew why. If this post is wrong, then I still don't.

Yet now I can converse ok in French, and albeit more slowly, can also read and write Spanish without any problems. More practice is a partial reason - most German speakers that I have encountered over the years have been fluent in English, whereas a fair proportion of the French and Spanish have not been. And I spent far too long at school concentrating on my French teacher's cleavage instead of her lessons. But that does not explain it all. I simply find languages easier now.

We rarely get something for nothing in this life, so I can no longer do complicated equations in my head. This is apparently normal, revelations in maths or science are rarely made by older people. But that's a fair swap for me, I'm a more rounded individual now…

… not only in the beer belly :)

Democracy

Yesterday evening, I watched some TV.

Imagine that you are a normal schoolkid. Imagine that you and your family have lived in the same neighbourhood for hundreds of years, in the same house for generations. Your parents have jobs. Your friends live nearby. Maybe you were once in that position. Maybe you are now.

Then imagine that you are suddenly told that because you are part of a "minority" (even if that minority is many millions of people) you must leave immediately. You are not told in so many words, but your house is burnt down by a mob, and if you are lucky then you are not beaten to death. You cannot take anything with you, you have no money and no food, and you will have to walk hundreds of miles to reach relative safety. As you walk for week after week, many of those who escape mob attacks will die of exhaustion or starvation.

If you make it over the border to safety, then what's left of your family has to start again from nothing. It has to battle with a million others in the same position. No job. No land. No home. No money. No support. No history.

I also spoke with my parents yesterday.

There can only be one

One of those occasional random personal posts. Top five reasons why Highlander is the best film ever.

1. The story. Perhaps it is not just a great long fight, maybe it has a deep resonance with ancient Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, trying to escape from an endless cycle of rebirth to strive for nirvana.

2. The casting. Christopher Lambert carries this constant air of unworldly detachment, and you can never quite place his accent. But that is only what you'd expect for a five-hundred year old global wanderer.

3. The cinematography. Phenomenal. It never just fades normally from one scene to another. It fades, it flicks, it flashes, it astounds.

4. The action. No magic wands, no ugly guns, no fluffy lightsabres. These are heavy metal clashes, heads really roll.

5. The soundtrack. On top of everything else, one of my favourite bands ever did the music. You can't ask for more. Simply magic!

Sorry lorry tax attacks

I guess my previous post was not obvious enough. There is only so much explanation you can do in about a hundred words. But even the little clarification in the comment didn't seem to clear it up.

What I learned in economics class was that road taxes should contribute to not only the cost of resurfacing but also towards external costs such as pollution, congestion, noise, and in general any external disruption to those affected by the road.

And comparing lorries with cars, even if we assume that the relative weight on the tarmac is ten to one, the relative weight of knock-on disruption is much more than ten to one.

How often does a shed load from a car close off the entire motorway? How often does a jack-knifed car close all three lanes? There is a certain amount of revenue to be collected, there are arguments for raising or lowering that. But to reflect disruption effects, proportionately the lorry drivers should pay more. Car drivers and other taxpayers should pay proportionately less.

So I do not agree that we'd all end up paying more. It's just redistribution of society's charges to more accurately reflect society's costs.

If it's still unclear, then I can always bring in some maths ;)

Moniker

Maybe I need to change my name to get more recognition.

After playing football this morning, I settled into a convenient position where I could watch the first live games of the premiership season on TV while also following the cricket on the internet.

Apart from Cricinfo, the Guardian does the best updates. And what do I see as soon as I log in:

5th over: India 10-2 (Dravid 0 Tendulkar 0) You get some pretty glorious names coming through your inbox when you do an OBO, but there are none better than Shubs Golder. "Is Ian Howell the worst umpire you've ever seen? I personally haven't seen an umpire so bad in a long time..." He has indeed been consistently awful Shubs. I'm just going to type that again - Shubs Golder. Wow. A maiden from Anderson.

I've known Shubs since he was a toddler. I still see him regularly. That is his real name. It seems a pretty ordinary name to me.

And he gets published, not because his comment was particularly witty or insightful (though it probably was) but because the person doing live text commentary liked his name!

That's all for today from me, Rayban Bannerboy.

What is common sense?

Although the prompts for writing are only the humdrum daily stimuli received by a self-employed marketing consultant, this blog is an ongoing attempt to expose genuine original ideas, or at least to provide an original way of looking at things.

I expect that within a few seconds, a typical post may make you think "no bloody way!"

I hope that within another few seconds, you should think "actually, it's obvious!"

All within about a hundred words.

And I may throw in a bit of random personal stuff too.

Lorry tax

There was a major accident on the London orbital motorway today. Two huge lorries were involved. The entire clockwise section around junction six was closed off for ten hours. Luckily I escaped today, I drive home anticlockwise. But this type of incident is not uncommon. A few weeks ago there was a major shed load on my stretch.

The lorry drivers often complain about road and petrol taxes. Firstly, a point I have seen in print before, why shouldn't a forty ton trailer pay forty times as much as a one ton car, it causes forty times as much damage to the road.

The second point, I haven't yet seen in print. Not every lorry driver has accidents. But when one does, the disruption caused is orders of magnitude greater than the disruption caused by the typical car accident. Either we charge the unfortunate. Or we make the lorries pay more to compensate.

Self Help

I don't usually talk about personal stuff here. This blog is mainly about common sense, not personal opinion.

It is obvious that I despise the fatuous meaningless platitudes that pass for all unscientific spiritualism and most scientific "counselling". But could even someone like me do a deep meaningful concise message of personal philosophy? I can try.

For everything I write here, I sometimes hope that certain people don't see it, but I accept that those people may see it. It is the same for every conversation that I ever have with anybody, at work or at home or at the pub. Sometimes, inevitably, talk is about people outside of those in the discussion. And I am completely prepared for anything that I have ever said about anyone, even in a private meeting, to be relayed to the people discussed in that meeting.

If you say or do anything anywhere, would you feel any guilt if it was made public?

It's a way to live. It may sound very obvious on reflection. But then so should everything else here.

You don't think

in English.

I speak plenty of languages with varying degrees of fluency. I'm sometimes asked what language I think in. A ridiculous question. For the first few years of my life, I only spoke Bengali. But I don't think in Bengali. I don't think in English either. And, whoever you are, neither do you!

The whole concept of "thinking in English" is nonsense. No-one does it. You think because you are human, and the language is universal. If you want to go somewhere, you don't translate the feeling of wanting to move into English before moving. When you are choosing things, you have the concept of what you want and then you search your mind for it. Sometimes you can't remember the precise word and stumble for a longer phrase or foreign expression to express the thought. But obviously the thought came first.

You see kids in Southall speaking a mixture of Punjabi, Hindi and English. They aren't thinking in any one of those three. As their mouths catch up with their thoughts, the first word that drops in is usually from one of those three languages. Some struggle with all of them.

It is so obvious. Yet people still use the phrase "I can think in x languages" as though it made sense.

Bharat

Within much of the world, there is a tendency to categorise anyone with brown skin as simply an "Indian" Today, on British educational forms, there are sometimes separate tick boxes for "Indian" and "Pakistani" and "Bangladeshi" recognising the noticeable differences in average academic achievement between these groups. I did not say academic potential.

But even a categorisation as broad as "Indian" is a bit ludicrous. India is much better compared to Europe than to any European country, each state has its own history, languages, cultures and communities. If you had to describe the people of each state in just a few words then you would have to resort to very broad strokes indeed.

Punjabis are the Germans. Hardworking. Efficient. They do like a drink. Yet they still maintain the largest farms and industrial production.

Those from the south of India are the Scandinavians. Civilised. Tolerant. Productive.

The Gujratis could be the Italians. Usually appear as a stylish, refined, united culture. But you feel there could be riots seething just under the surface.

And the Bengalis are the French. Birthplace of modern scientific enlightenment. Centre for the arts. They think they are the intellectual and spiritual centre of modern civilisation, most others think they are a bunch of talkative radicals who are always going on strike!

There is no match in today's Europe for Bihar. And of course those are all just outdated stereotypes, innit?

Price Fixing

British Airways got hit with a very hefty fine last week. It was for colluding with another airline to add on exactly the same fuel surcharges . Virgin Atlantic was equally guilty but so far as I can tell they got away with paying nothing because they reported the offence. Things don't work that way here, if you are equally culpable of a crime then admitting it provides mitigation and can reduce the sentence, it does not eliminate it. If individual criminal justice worked like that, imagine what you could get get away with …

Yesterday I went to PC World and bought a printer for the business. £29.99. Perfectly reasonable. Looking around any shop or site these days, that's a fairly normal price for a mass-produced shoebox-sized block of shaped plastic and metal with a few electric motors, transistors, integrated circuits, some consumables and a small book of documentation. The costs of production, transport and marketing must be fairly close to that. So I don't bother hunting around online to save a few percent.

At the checkout, the cashier told me that I also needed to buy a cable to connect it to the PC. The cable probably has less than a thousandth of the materials and complexity of the printer. They said the only cable available was £14.99. Eventually, when I had finally stopped laughing, I walked next door to Currys Electrical. You can guess the price there.

Nylon

There were a lot of words yesterday, at least according to my own artificial target. Time for a picture. But I'll maintain my principles, only a picture where it is an original creation.

A friend from New York came to visit us in London recently. I know the two cities well, having lived for extended periods of time in both, so I drew up a little map that would help to orientate someone who knows one city but not the other.

There have been plenty of articles written in plenty of magazines comparing the two cities. But they tend to concentrate on the central tourist areas rather than the suburbs where most people actually live, and so far as I know nothing has been presented in quite this manner.

There is a remarkable coincidence in the geographical juxtaposition of corresponding demographic localities. Or to put it another way, if you turn one city on its side then you get the other one, as simple as that.

Do mind the full stops

Each blog note could be a short review of something that I have seen or read, although that would not be very ambitious. However, a few days ago I quoted Melvyn Bragg, Bill Bryson, Robert Burchfield, Anthony Burgess, Lewis Carroll, David Crystal, George Orwell, Stephen Pinker, John Simpson and Lynne Truss all within one short note. I also said that I didn't entirely agree with them. That needs clarification, even correction.

It's probably best if I go one author at a time. Conveniently enough, my list was alphabetical.

Melvyn Bragg wrote The Adventure of English. An excellent book, and an excellent TV series to go with it. Very erudite and very entertaining. Facts. Nothing to disagree with.

Bill Bryson is probably more famous for his travel writing and his countryside campaigns, but I know him best for writing a book called Mother Tongue. Absolutely fantastic writing. Not only informative, funny and educational, but also very easy to read. And I completely agree with him.

Robert Burchfield has written wrote more scholarly accounts of English. I have found them tough going, but they are probably written to be reference guides rather than leisurely reads.

Anthony Burgess, better known for mangling futurespeak in his Clockwork Orange, wrote an awesome book called A Mouthful of Air. It has a very different tack from the others mentioned here as it concentrates on how words developed, how they are spoken instead of how they are written.

I leafed through David Crystal's books expecting a very prescriptive approach, and instead got a refreshing emphasis on clarity and precision of meaning, not an edict on grammar. Excellent.

Lewis Carroll was in the list on behalf of his alter ego, the legendary Humpty Dumpty. Jabberwocky is perfect poetry. Words can mean exactly what you want them to mean. A genius. The Douglas Adams of his generation.

A very different kind of genius, George Orwell is a true inspiration. Keep it simple. Never use a long word or a long sentence when a short one will do. Every journalist and politician and management consultant should pass a test in this before any public pronouncement.

And so to the books of Steven Pinker. In my opinion simply the best non-fiction written in America since 1792. The pages are fairly dense but the ideas, like all great ideas, are blindingly obvious. They are not specifically about English. But they are about grammar, about language, about communication, about what it really means to be human.

So we have had the clarification, what about the correction? Lost for Words echoes George Orwell in its hatred of deliberate obfuscation, but it also has a load of grumpy old moaning thrown in. It was written by John Humphrys. Did I really say John Simpson? How could I have confused the two? One is a highly-respected deep-voiced silver-haired BBC journalist …

It's almost lunchtime and I have a busy Saturday. I need to eat, post and leave. So I will conclude this little note by quoting some Pinker: Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since ...

Re-source

We are struggling with resource issues. Every project manager needs to juggle people, money, and time.

I've been there before. I've been on projects where the shortage of skilled people meant that the whole team had to work until ten every night. And every weekend. I've been on projects where the physical shortage of equipment (basically just PCs and desks within a secure environment) meant that the entire project had to operate in shifts, some people starting before sunrise and handing over to the second batch in the afternoon. I've worked all night to meet deadlines.

But that was with previous clients, those were big infrastructure projects, the teams were large, and everybody seemed to be fully in it together. The whole team worked those stupid hours. Teams split up. Times change. Demographics change. Interests change. Remuneration changes. So it doesn't happen any more.

But the budgets and deadlines just keep coming.

Ce soir

I advise on European marketing. We are always dealing with customers, prospects, suspects, in fact consumers of every variety and nationality. Sometimes messages can be confused in translations.

In French, a consumer is a consommateur and to consume is consommer. However the same verb can have another meaning.

We work with the London office of an international marketing agency. Leaving the agency today is a young lady from France, and her leaving drinks are this evening. In the note she sent out yesterday inviting us to them, she mentioned the alcohol and encouraged us all to "consummate" in moderation … hmmmm.

Jake Bullett, part two

A while ago I compared being a manager with being a traffic light. The analogy remains valid, a good traffic light should help you to go where you need to go with minimal disruption.

But I do not like traffic lights. To be more precise, I do not like the fascist implementation of traffic lights currently prevalent in the UK.

Except at peak time, they slow traffic and cause congestion, they do not relieve it. If you come to a junction and there is no-one there, why shouldn't you cross it? If you wait, traffic just stacks up behind you.

I hope this blog is never only a complaint, there should always be a positive suggestion. Every light-regulated junction should be more like the flashing yellows in the US - of course you must be careful, at some points you may have priority, at others you may need to pause briefly to enforce a look around. But if there is no-one crossing, then surely it is better to move on rather than let traffic stack up behind you.

It's hard to be objective about this. My wife got a hefty fine and a quarter of her driving license was removed because she did not wait unnecessarily at an empty crossing. A few months later, perhaps overconcerned about this, she braked hard at another traffic light where it would have safe to continue, and a heavy 4x4 ploughed into the back of her. Unfair? Dangerous? Criminal?

Never mind the full stops

Something is shared by Melvyn Bragg, Bill Bryson, Robert Burchfield, Anthony Burgess, Lewis Carroll, David Crystal, George Orwell, Stephen Pinker, John Simpson and Lynne Truss. They all seem to be passionate about clear communication. But I don't entirely agree with them.

I agree that incorrect spelling is ugly. Misplaced apostrophes are hideous. So I do preach the gospel of clear English. I hope that when I want a statement to say something then it does so without equivocation. Unfortunately I sometimes aspire to hide sub-texts, and a punny word will often jump in place of an obvious one, but the principle holds true.

Yet as I have admitted before, I know very little formal grammar. I was never lucky enough to learn Latin at school. I did not even get the chance to study English Literature beyond the age of about fourteen. I found Dickens and Hardy to be impenetrable. Yet I genuinely like the sound of Shakespeare and Chaucer. Perhaps it is because they played so loosely with the rules of grammar, perhaps it is the patter of iambic pentameter, perhaps it is the tortured rhyming, perhaps I just like the stories!

So I will never get there, but I will aim in that direction. Sorry the grammar may slip, forgive me my trespasses, is it really obvious that English is not my mother tongue?

Not Charlie Brown

A daily blog note starts with some little trigger that I have seen or heard or done within the last 24 hours, then heads off to some generalisation or attempted witticism about the world. It is not often that trigger leads back to little old me.

Yesterday I met up with a few old friends from school. Which school? About two years is the most that I ever spent in any one. From east London to Essex to southern Africa to south London back to India to the north of England, I've experienced every different kind. And I got on ok at every single one. I was not bullied. I have no traumatic childhood experiences to relate. Yet when I refer to my school, there is only one that I mean.

Woodstock is a strange little community in the hills of northern India. Though only a tiny fraction of the size of any comprehensive in the West, it housed the most diverse group of kids from every corner of the globe. From children of christian missionaries to Indian expatriates to foreign diplomats to refugees to locals to those who just couldn't cope in the lowlands, we had every kind of freak that you can imagine.

And so it fit perfectly :)

More than a PLC

I'm going to stick with this advert theme for a moment.

This morning, like most Sunday mornings, I played football on the other side of London. Unlike most Sunday mornings, I came back on the tube.

As I travelled up the Victoria line in my amateur football kit, I was struck by the huge numbers of people in Emirates shirts, presumably heading up to the Emirates stadium. The league season has not started yet, and they didn't look like they had their footie boots on so I guessed they were not players, and were going up to contribute money to the impoverished players and sponsors at that new stadium in Islington.

I'm probably being harsh on the genuine fan who supports the club not the sponsor, but when the name of the sponsor is so much more prominent than the club badge then it is a fair target. Though it is probably not fair to only pick on Arsenal. They play great football. And all big clubs sell out nowadays don't they? No, not all do.

This is not an advert

Despite what my wife thinks, I do not watch much television. But after dinner almost every weekday evening, I will sit down and wind down in front of the set for an hour or two. And I always have something interesting to watch.

We had the full cable package for a while. Hundreds of channels. But the old cliché felt true - there was so much choice but it was all rubbish. You could never find exactly what you wanted. And when you've just plonked down on the sofa, do you really want to get up again and go ploughing through stacks of video cassettes or DVDs? And even if you could find something to watch on one of the more obscure channels, the programme would have already started or be so littered with advertisements that watching would become a chore.

I am not here to recommend specific products, but a Freeview hard disk recorder really does change your life, well your TV viewing life anyway. You do not need Sky+ or V+. Integrated boxes from Humax or Sagem cost barely more than a basic Freeview receiver. Flick through the weekly schedule, tag things that look good, a few will be. Watch what you want, when you want.

Never hire another DVD for the rest of your life. Never sit through another television advertisement for the rest of your life.

No wonder the marketing industry is worried.

Ha ha lal

It does not happen often, but I'm going out for a meal this evening, hence an early posting. When choosing somewhere to go, if the menu proudly displayes a "halal" message, should that affect your decision to eat there?

Most of us care about the welfare of animals, how they live and how they die. Halal meat is not killed according to the latest things that we have learned about pain and consciousness, but instead killed according to an old superstition.

Would a cut to the throat, however clean, stop pain as quickly as a bolt to the head? Think about it. Can cells continue to function for at least a few seconds without a blood supply? Use your brain.

A one page blog is not evidence. But even if all scientific and medical officers said there was evidence of less suffering to the animal if it was stunned before cutting, would you believe them, or would you wait for a mullah to give you his new enlightenment first?

This is a mad way to leave

My company exists, in the words of its own slogan, to help companies change to be even more successful. It is what I do.

I was working in a leased building, an old factory recently converted to offices. The advice that I gave inside that building must remain confidential - the client paid for it! But I also gave them some advice outside the building, and it is far too obvious to be confidential.

On leaving the car park, security insisted that we drive all the way around the building to exit. Presumably they blindly followed the dictum that one way streets are safer than two way streets. But driving round the back, you were forced to drive through a giant lorry park and right past the entrance to a very busy warehouse. This immediately struck me as madness. I wrote to the building supervisor with a diagram proposing a new route out, and a couple of weeks later new markings and signs went up instructing traffic to go exactly as I had suggested.

Is it only a few odd people who always look to make things better? Who knows how long workers had put up with a ridiculous system simply because "that is just the way things are"?

Reason or treason

Things that are valued are limited. Most people value uncluttered fields and woodland, the traditional British countryside. But if you believe that some people should have privileged access to that woodland just because their ancestors beat up your ancestors, then you are denying us those limited resources. You cannot claim that every child should have equal opportunity if you also claim that some children should have privileged opportunity.

By the way, tourists do not come to Britain to see the royal family. Tourists do not see the royal family. But imagine how many more tourists would come to Britain if they could walk around the actual rooms where the royal family used to live!

The Queen may be doing a good job, a well rewarded job. But imagine that the Queen, Charles and William were in a terrible accident. I'm not sick, you're only imagining, not hoping. I guess then we would be subjects of King Harry. Would you bow before him?

No title here

Someone may be born into royalty but not deserve national adulation, but someone deserving national adulation may need to accept royalty to accept the title.

Just as when eating somewhere new I am searching for the perfect meal, when standing on the edge of the penalty area with the ball at my feet I am searching for the perfect goal, so when writing here I am searching for the perfect way to blog.

Many people would say there is no perfect way to blog, every meal ends up in the same place and every goal counts the same in the end. But I still believe that it is worthwhile to strive for it.

And I have said before that I am concerned about the placement and usage of every word in every post, but unfortunately that has not always been the case with the titles. I tend to write what I need to say, then slap a title on at the end.

However, occasionally some titles just fit properly. Just look at the last few. The last question tied in the hype and mystery surrounding the last Harry Potter novel with what I think is the epitome of the short story. The dyslexic Belgian was a term coined by the Bengali comic who was the subject of the post. And Representation was perhaps the purest example of a word that exactly conveyed the essence of the article.

But I still haven't got a title here. A tabloid editor would have started with one, and a big donor to the ruling party would have ended with one.

The Last Question

There was apparently a long-awaited children's book published at the weekend.

A few years ago, I did read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Sorry JK, but it was tedious crap. And so so obvious - the evil house had slithery names and malformed badguys, the good house resonated with heroic imagery, supposed difficult incantations just looked like mis-spelt Latin. It was as if the whole thing was written for 11-year-olds.

Apparently the later books are a bit more sophisticated. Anyway, some children's writing is great. The curious incident of the dog in the night time was a blaze of magnificent writing. Yet Harry Potter just seemed like a kids' version of Lord of the Rings.

But Lord of the Rings was tedious crap too. I barely got a hundred pages into the book or an hour into the film before nodding off. I just don't get the fantasy stuff. Keep it real.

Yet the best fiction is not real. It does expand the horizons of the mind. So maybe I should read some Asimov. Does a bee care if the last question is not answered?

The dyslexic Belgian

Last night I went to see the comedian and if.comedy.award finalist Paul Sinha give another preview performance of the show he is presenting next month at the Edinburgh Festival. I cannot really give an objective review - my parents have known his parents for forty years and we were part of the same little community in South London in the 1970s. So I'll just say the show was bloody excellent ;)

The title of the show is "king of the world", not a grand analysis of global empires, but reflections on those brief instants when you've just pointed out something funny that no-one else had noticed or got a little personal compliment, and just for a second you felt absolutely untouchable.

My thought for the day - I think everybody has those moments. We all have new and strange experiences every single day. But the main difference between the good comic, or the good blogger, and everyone else, is that they store that little nuance and share it with the world - most of us just grin and move on.

Time for me to grin and move on.

Efficiency at work

One thing I dislike about pictures on the web is the size of them compared to text - it all comes down to usability again - when it comes to loading pages, we all like speed.

Despite the usual absence of pictures, I do care about how these posts look as well as how they sound and how they read.

But occasionally a picture helps to prove a point. So I drew one.

We had an all day workshop today, in a room that we often use for meetings, and one thing that I keep saying in these sessions is that my team is there to help to make things run more efficiently, like good traffic lights.

The details of how today's action points will affect our work will be picked up again next week. And they may be company confidential anyway. But I can't help myself on this efficiency thing, just look at how the room is laid out...

Now the presenters are always at the head or point of the table near the screen, otherwise everyone would need to keep turning their heads

but the layout of the table, narrower at the big screen end and wider at the back, makes the presenter constantly obstructed by other people's heads

the screen can't be easily moved, so why the hell don't they just turn the table around?

To HR dept, managers and colleagues

The Prologue

Whan that cliente, with hise offeres soote,
The droghte of cashe hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

At nyght al come to that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, an droydes were we alle,


The Captain's Logue

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, followed chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.

Ful worthy was he in partneres werre,
And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre
And tho his port not meeke as a mayde
He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde.


The Epilogue

For by my trouthe, if that I shal nat lye,
I saugh nat this yeer so myrie a compaignye
The sothe is this: the cut fil to this knyght,
Of which ful blithe and glad was every wyght.

So lat me wend, and herkneth what I seye.
And with that word I ryde forth aweye,
As we bigan with right a myrie cheere
Our tale anon, and seyde in this manere.

How to leave

It's not easy to know what to say when leaving somewhere after being employed there for the best part of a decade.

If leaving voluntarily, you are likely to have been offered more money elsewhere, but it's not easy to say that in a subtle manner which would not sever any ties. Perhaps you could also briefly describe the things that you have liked and disliked about your job. You should probably also welcome everybody for a few leaving drinks.

It might even be possible to place into your leaving note the precise trigger that made you depart, and maybe even refer to the actual time and place where you made your decision.

And all this should ideally be said within about three short paragraphs, my self-imposed "haiku" note ideal. Oh, I've past my limit now, will have to give an example tomorrow…

Usability Sex Speed

We have recently heard a lot about the different preferences of men and women when it comes to designing and viewing web sites. I do agree. Perhaps this is oversimplifying, but women generally like bright colours, curved lines, organic forms, pictures of people, smiling faces, while men tend to prefer clean straight lines. Any commercial mass market site should ideally appeal to both.

This isn't exactly a web site, but in terms of the guidelines presented to us, I don't suppose you can get any more masculine than this. And the real websites I created earlier have followed the same lines. Does that mean that to broaden appeal I will be sticking in reams of poncy graphics to fluff up the site and slow down page loading? Does it hell!

Every site has its own style. Mine is simple. Plain. Fast. The ultimate male ;)

Der Inder und das Bier

The recent stuff has been all about big issues and deep questions. Time for a genuine little aside about the family.

Not having a proper pension, since retiring my dad has kept afloat with the odd minor role in a few TV shows such as Eastenders and the Bill and the League of Gentlemen, adverts for Natwest and Drifter, and also the occasional one-off such as the Moonstone and Murder in Mind and Syriana. But he's not famous, no-one outside our community would recognise him.

He recently returned from a short trip abroad with a few press cuttings. Attached. The text is in German. The contents slightly surprised me.

A colleague and friend recently left here to return to his home in Germany, and he just called me from his office in Munich and confirmed it. My dad is apparently very well known throughout Bavaria as the star of a major advertising campaign that has been running for five years!

Not bad for a formerly homeless penniless refugee.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranaban/822982146/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranaban/822982308/


Probably back to serious issues tomorrow.

Flesh and blood

OK, a "cheery" thought ;)

Imagine someone you know is in a monstrous accident. I'm not sick. You're only imagining, not hoping.

This is not your average car crash , but an enormous splurge of blood and guts, the like of which is only seen in X-rated movies and video games. Perhaps one saving grace, the head and brain are instantly crushed to a pulp, so instant death and no pain.

However, the rest of the body is splattered into a thousand pieces, with bits of flesh and bone and bone marrow all over the place.

Now, if you are the sort of strange person who thinks every potential human life is a life worth saving, then every bit of that bone marrow needs to picked up and cared for separately. Because each individual bit could have individual stem cells that could grow up into completely independent human beings.

Dumb eh?

Liars and jokers

Yesterday I got some serious questioning along the lines of "just because the Astrology didn't work for you, does not mean that it doesn't work for anybody".

However unpleasant and smelly the word, that is bullsh*t. I'm not weaseling out with "maybes" and "probabilities".

If you say that you have a special superpower, that you've received the divine gift of flight or telekinesis or telepathy or you've decided that an ancient public book correctly predicted the exact date and time and location of all of today's main news, then you are joking. Or lying.

And sorry but I am not going to examine mental illness and psychotic delusion here.

I have not tested you, I have not seen the evidence with my own eyes, I have not read every line of text and studied every chart that you claim is proof. An anecdote is not proof. What you are saying is scientific nonsense and therefore it is nonsense until proven otherwise.

Sorry this was a predictable post. And I'll try to stay off this subject for a while now; it's crap, that's it.

The value of clear space

These are short paragraphs, words should have room to breathe, but I also value clear space in a more physical manner.

For example, if you keep a non-running non-classic car on your driveway, it simply gets in the way.

Perhaps your argument is that if you eventually found the time to get it going again or tart it up a little then you might be able to make a few bucks out of it.

But why wait for that time instead of disposing of it now? Think of the value of the freed space. Don't people pay a lot of money in search of extra living space?

Isn't the value of that space likely to be more than any notional value you might get from selling what is a basically a ton of scrap?

Quite apart from the aesthetic value of seeing a ton of slowly rusting metal outside your door for months on end.

Information at work

It is true. I like collecting data. I have epic spreadsheets full of data.

But I don't really like collecting data. That is just an essential prerequisite. What I like to do, what I need to do, what any manager needs to do, is to be able to process vast reams of information - to filter it, to sort it, to categorise it, and then to work out where it is leading or where it is all coming from.

I am not very good at collecting data. But I am good at spotting or working out the trends and the policies from it.

That is management, and the more senior your role, the more information you have to process and the harder it is to pull out the key messages. And the better you are as a manager, the more information you can process, and the more likely you are to be able to work out the necessary direction.

It's sometimes called "being decisive", it's sometimes called "cutting through the crap", but the key point is that you need to have absorbed the data to do it, you cannot have ignored the data to do it.

Jake Bullet, Cybernautics

I've already written a second post describing my detective work, but as we get more senior in organisations, more time is spent working in traffic control rather than in the CID.

Business school and business books have spent a lot of time on the differences between being a manager, a delegator and a leader. Ideally more emphasis should be on the third.

Is that really like being a traffic signal?

You have to choose the appropriate direction for the cars or people or information to travel. If you choose the direction well, then they will get where they need to go without noticing you. But if you were not present, they would not know where they were meant to be going, or they would crash.

Equally, when there is a blockage in your path, then a good traffic signal at that location should allow the obstructions to clear permitting you to continue your journey with minimal delay.

Isn't that the type of manager that you would like to see?

Venomous verbs of ruthless candour

Generally speaking, this is a blog for original thought. And generally speaking, it tries to cover big issues or new ideas. Occasionally though, somebody else manages to capture a trivial little sentiment so perfectly that it seems right for me to simply quote it. So this is the DJ, professional comedian, and star of the "Now" show Mr Jon Holmes referring to his most significant musical memory …


It was called Assassing, and it was spat out of the mouth of a 6ft 5in Scottish former lumberjack called Fish. The band were Marillion. It was 1984, and Duran Duran were still poncing about on a boat, but everything was about to change. In front of us, a great big sweating jester with a terrifying painted face burst through a wall (of paper) and screeched into the camera that he was "the assassin, with tongue forged from eloquence". It was rock music, and it spoke to us even though we didn’t understand a word of it. "Listen as the syllables of slaughter cut with calm precision," whispered Fish. "Patterned frosty phrases rape your ears and sow the ice incision." Do they? Blimey. We had to be a part of this. Mr Le Bon could take his Rio and her dancing on the sand and shove it up his upturned yacht.




From: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/live_reviews/article1861509.ece

It's elementary my dear wilson

A few days ago I mentioned the fictional detective disguised as a TV doctor. And around the same time I also described my work. And I regularly refer to the power of spirituality.

When there is a problem at work, whenever you need to figure something out, when there is no obvious answer, there is really only one way to get to the bottom of it. That way is the scientific method.

Even if the whole issue appears unsolvable, you need to break it down into smaller components. You cannot always replicate history to fully prove every theory against every scenario. But if you have a hypothesis that could explain the result, it is only worth anything if it can be replicated or tested. The problem must be reduced to common sense.

Professional scientists might grumble about the broadness of my definitions. And I'm only talking about how to resolve the daily questions of "my report shows 250 units, I was expecting 200" rather than the direction for evolution of the human race.

Or am I?

Beyond double deckers

It was a few weeks ago that Airbus unveiled their new jumbo aircraft. Initially the hype was not so much about carrying more people per aircraft, but mainly about getting double beds and casinos and bars for long haul flights. Well airlines could easily put those extra amenities onto planes right now, but instead they would rather squeeze on more passengers.

When the airlines squeeze on more passengers onto each plane, the flying experience becomes more unpleasant for each passenger. Obviously. Tall passengers get their knees thumped, unless in a premium priced seats, you can't recline as far as you'd like, it's almost impossible to squeeze past the people next to you unless they get up. You could be losing hours of sleeptime anyway, yet you are regularly told to straighten seat backs and buckle up for takeoff or landing or turbulence. If perchance the guy sitting next to you does nod off, he will inevitably spill into your space.

Is there another way?

In the centres of crowded Japanese cities, there are a number of "capsule" or "pod" hotels. If each flying customer was in an individual pod, these could be stacked up against the sides of the plane at least three or four high. This gives each customer more privacy and also the opportunity to stretch out and sleep for the entire journey. Certainly for the "red-eye" flights, I'd prefer that. Even without the space or weight or cost of individual pods, why not have stacked bunks as they do on some sleeper trains. Then there should be no requirement to be forced to sit upright for takeoff and landing if you accept being strapped down at those times.

This idea has got to take off. The only question is what they will be called. Skypods? Flypods?

Flying Windows

This is certainly not about Bill Gates' damn screensaver, in fact it is not about computers at all.

Recording the highest pre-order numbers ever, Boeing have just released their new "Dreamliner". It does not look like a revolution in design, but it is expected to be lighter, faster, safer and more economical than current planes.

The first modern jet airliner was the De Havilland Comet, and every structural engineer today knows that they crashed "because they had square windows". Probably not the full reason, but the tiny cracks of metal fatigue were initiated and exaggerated around the window corners where the sheet metal had been cut. Basic science. That is why modern planes tend to have rounded windows.

But even circular windows are not ideal. Obviously the pilot should have good all-round visibility, but the many windows down the side of an airliner are a major inconvenience for the aircraft designer. An aircraft wall with windows is much heavier than an equivalent one without. It would be cheaper to build and cheaper to fly. An airliner without side windows would also, remember the Comet, be less prone to structural failure and therefore safer too.

On the ground where we spend most of our time, natural conditions are a good thing. Broadly, we should be more in tune with our local environments. Maximising natural light and minimising energy consumption are fine goals for your home. However when flying through the air at hundreds of miles per hour in a giant metal tube burning gallons of fuel every second, then a little extra power to light inside the plane is insignificant. And we have already said the plane would be less heavy thus more efficient anyway.

When we travel long haul, our body clocks are invariably disrupted. Jet lag is not pleasant. During a long east-west flight, day and night lose their meaning, or at least become severely distorted.

It would be good if the lighting in the plane could help us to compensate for that. Imagine, the whole ceiling of the plane could be a uniform grey as it leaves the UK and gradually become a bright blue as we near the tropics.

With fewer windows, we wouldn't have people with blinds open with searing sunlight spoiling our inflight movies.

And we would have cheaper, safer air travel.

Working in your footsteps

Part of my job is to be the guy who minds busy intersections, critically there to prevent accidents and to direct the traffic, but the more unobtrusive that one can be there then the smoother the process will flow. Ideally I should be barely noticed but people should still end up getting where they need to go, and then wonder how they got there so quickly.

Another major part of my job is to be a detective, called in when things go wrong to try to find out the cause. This is probably the most difficult part; needing the most experience, the most application, and the most rational thinking in the face of irrational pressures.

There is also a small part that needs to be the enforcer, hauling people up to face the consequences of their actions.

Of course I'm not in the police.

From houses to holmes

Hugh Laurie stars in a TV show, he looks like a doctor but it is a well documented fact that he is basically following in the tradition of Columbo and Poirot and Morse and CSI. And I was reminded that there is something great about detective shows.

I don't pretend to watch these shows to try to figure out the crime before the detective does. It is just entertainment. But the entertainment only works because the process works - unless the writer can provide enough rational steps to the conclusion, the viewer will feel cheated.

Basically, as Grissom keeps saying, it's all about evidence. These shows all have the same formula, but there is infinite variety. There is always something incredible, something that defies explanation, something that might have been caused by some supernatural freak occurrence. But there was none.

There is always a logical explanation. Yes the final explanation can be complicated and tortuous and involve the strangest aspects of our fleshy bodies and animal desires. But ultimately the answers are all in there.

Fit women in short skirts

In the occasional break between rain delays, the tennis at Wimbledon plods to its million dollar conclusion. I'm not going to compare the general level of pay for top sports performers with that for soldiers or nurses, nor discuss the effect on society of such gross differentials. But this is the first year that Roger Federer (I'm going out on a limb here) is going to receive the same prize money as the winner of the competition that is restricted to ladies. Can that be right?

The usual justifications were about 3 sets versus 5 sets. Anyway the first few matches for the top female players often end 6-0 6-0 within 30 minutes. That doesn't happen in the men's game. Adding another set would achieve nothing in those circumstances. Sound reasoning, old arguments.

At a more basic level, isn't it still nonsense to insist that a competition restricted to ladies should have equal pay to a competition that is simply designed to find the best tennis player - regardless of age or race or gender?

There should be equal opportunity, in tennis as in virtually everything else. It's true that some women can beat some men. So if a woman wants to compete in an open tournament and wins, good luck to her!

But the ladies cry foul. Because on average the typical man is faster and stronger than the typical woman, then there must be a separate competition for them. So should we have a separate competition, offering equal prize money to the main one, for those who are born with an extra X chromosome? Or for those born with Down's Syndrome? Those are genetic differences too. But there aren't so many of them so it doesn't matter?

There are loads of Chinese and Indians though. So if the average one is at a disadvantage to the average white or black guy, does that mean that we should have a separate competition for those ethnic groups? Well isn't that broadly the same principle as giving their own tournament to those missing a Y chromosome?

If ladies want to have a separate competition, fine. If men want to watch them, fine. If they want to dress in revealing attire, fine. But if it's a separate competition, judge it on its own merits. Reward it on its own merits. Does it have the same value?

HiQ

It probably looks like I haven't got the hang of this instant posting thing. However I carry the baggage of many old-school journalism lessons. Even in this new webworld I cannot "publish" anything without being reasonably confident of the spelling and the grammar and also the general "sound" of the piece.

As I think the finest English writer since George Orwell said in the preface to his latest book, in writing as well as in speech, sentences should still resonate to "the music of language". Whether you read it out to yourself in your mind or get your gorgeous wife to read the draft to you, that flow is still important. Experts in English literature (I am not one) would probably refer to iambic pentameter and suchlike. I don't know about that, but I can still sense a rhythm.

And looking back (again pretending to be the literature student that I am not), perhaps my last note did follow some kind of extended haiku structure - three or four little paragraphs each starting with a different slant but ending on the same theme, with each getting more and more pithy, ending in a single wrap-up line. Perhaps that is the ideal structure for a blog post?

But that's all style bullshit - what really matters is content ;)

Representation

I recently showed a friend some ideas that I had for explaining some basic concepts in data analysis. He told me, quoting exactly, that he "showed some of it to my colleague and she says you've got a job if you want one!". Of course that's just friendly banter and not a formal job offer, but I appreciate the sentiment.

We all absorb and consolidate ideas from different sources, but I would be perturbed if a whole presentation of mine were to be shown to someone else without at least some acknowledgement.

There is a fine line between representing earlier research and re-presenting earlier research.

The hyphen is a fine line.

I still haven't figured out RSS

Another little note about this facebook thing. There are people who make films about the making of films, there are people who write books about writing books, so this is just another post about the art of posting. As a start, perhaps I should clarify the references in the last note.

Firstly, Milan Kundera wrote a famous novel in the early 1980s, and the English translation was called "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I never finished reading it, but got far enough through to understand that the main obsession of the narrator was the issue of sentient existence and in particular the living nightmare of not being able to know the true consequences our decisions until they have actually been played out. Hence the need for a second life. Hence the reference to the internet. Bring on Web 3.0

I suppose I should mention at this point that my actual posting was spurred by a comment on my facebook wall. In the world described by Roger Waters in an album released in 1979, the Wall is a barrier behind which we can stay isolated from the "cruel world" outside. But once again the internet has caught up with us. The wall is now not just a place to hide behind, but a place for the world outside to record their thoughts too. So it is a way of letting people in and not a way of keeping people out.

Anyway, although this particular comment on my wall was a single four letter word that is shocking and offensive - no problem, it was perfectly fair and true! Though I had a valid explanation, I couldn't explain myself in just another word or two, so it needed a full "note" for it. And then I think that note might need explaining… it goes on and on… yes I see how this blogging idea could really take off :)