2012: avoid the haters

It’s much easier to be hateful in 140 characters than it is to be constructive. And evidence on Twitter seems to support this.

Whenever someone puts a foot wrong, people are baying for their blood. Ashton Kutcher was a recent victim of this, many of his 9 million followers reacting hatefully to his tweet slamming the firing of Joe Paterno. He clearly didn’t have the context, and withdrew the tweet moments later.

Twitter gives people a medium on which they can readily slam people they don’t know, generally those in the public eye—celebrities and politicians. It allows this to be done in an unregulated way, allows libel and defamation of character, and unless it becomes sufficiently high profile (it rarely does given the limited audience of those tweeting the abuse), doesn’t really provide a workable mechanism for the abused to answer back.

I assume that the laws around defamation of character and libel are as relevant and enforceable on Twitter as they are for other media. But the opening up of the publishing medium to millions of people makes it next to useless. Nobodies will abuse and the Twitter river will continue to flow, with that drop of acid flowing largely unnoticed into the sea of history.

Sometimes criticism is constructive, and I value that. (After all, if all you do is mouth off about Jan Moir without any reasoned argument, you’re no better than Jan herself.)

But in 2012, I’ll be making efforts to avoid those that hate for the sake of hating. Because as well as being destructive to those targeted, such negativity can only be destructive to the reader. Negativity wears off. Let 2012 be the year of inspiration.

January 1, 2012 | Filed Under General, Random thoughts | Leave a Comment 

Could a tree grow upside down?

Imagine a piece of land three metres square. Imagine it’s suspended 50 metres above Earth. And imagine its soil is kept together by a cradle underneath.

Imagine a set of solar panels positioned on the ground, angled to point sunlight to the underside of the suspended earth. And imagine irrigation systems are in place to keep that land well watered from above—excess water falling from the platform back to Earth.

Now plant an oak sapling in the underside of the suspended platform, such that it is unhampered by the cradle.

How high would the sapling grow? Indeed, would it grow?

So long as it didn’t rely on the traditional direction of gravity in relation to itself for water to pass down its trunk and branches, my view is that it would grow. Being upside down, the water would instead travel from the root to its branches. Whether it would suffer from a surfeit of liquid at the end of its tiny branches, who knows?

But if it could grow upside down, would it grow more rapidly given that it would be growing with, rather than against, gravity?

And would this offer a solution, admittedly a far-fetched solution, to allow richer crops to grow in shorter time windows?

July 23, 2011 | Filed Under Random thoughts | 2 Comments 

Fuel prices vs. car prices

I filled up the hire car today. It had a quarter of a tank remaining, but my obligation as a hirer is to fill it up if it dips below that level. So I did. It cost £67 for standard unleaded, at 137.9p per litre. (BTW, that’s £6.27 per gallon in old money, as my dad, and oodles of other dads, still say to this day.) That would make it around £89 for a full tank by my reckoning. Ouch.

I got to thinking about what fuel efficiency was worth when purchasing a new car.

Having done the analysis it seems that, to me, marginal fuel efficiency has a surprisingly small impact on the cost of car ownership. At 12,000 miles per year, a car running at 40 miles per gallon will guzzle 300 gallons per year at a cost of £1,880.72. At 41 mpg, the cost will be £1,834.85, an annual drop of a mere £45.87, less than a pound a week. And obviously, as the mpg increases, the marginal price differential of a single extra mpg reduces. So the difference between the fuel costs for a 50 vs. 51 mpg car falls to £29.50.

So assuming depreciation over five years and other things being equal, a new car offering 45 mpg can justify being priced £1,044 higher than one offering 40 mpg.

Now switch your attention to the gas guzzlers. A car running at 10 mpg will cost £2,507 more per year to run than one running at 15 mpg, so the more fuel-efficient 15 mpg-er can justify a price tag £12,538 higher than the 10 mpg-er. As an aside, for such cars to average 12,000 miles per year, the school to which the car is driven twice daily would need to be 15.8 miles from the home. ;-)

(Environmental arguments were left to one side in the writing of this post.)

March 7, 2011 | Filed Under Numbers and stuff, Random thoughts | 5 Comments 

The fluorescent man outside the Treasury

HM Treasury’s head office is a very grand building on Horse Guards Road. A man stands outside it wearing a fluorescent bib throughout the business day. He blocks the left-hand door which is itself locked, and people are forced to use the right-hand door to both enter and leave the building, often causing confusion and blockages.

Yet I am uncertain as to his role.

Whenever I enter the building for a meeting, I always treat him as a greeter. My aim, purely for my own amusement, is to get past him without being challenged. Nine times in ten, I succeed. I always use the gently-inclined ramp rather than the steps outside the building. I walk with purpose, say good morning/afternoon and waltz in—figuratively—and skip my way up the stairs—less figuratively—en route to reception.

Occasionally, there is an awkward moment where the chap looks like he may be challenging me as to my purpose, but nerves seem to get the better of him and off I skip. In some respects, I regard this scenario as an even greater personal success than the uninterrupted walk, as the very possibility of challenge was averted.

And on very rare occasions, he asks as to my purpose. I say I’m there for a meeting, which more often than not is true, and breathe a sigh of relief at having secured entry into the building, albeit sporting a face of defeat.

(Note, I’ve never been refused entry. Not yet, at least.)

So for people intent on entering the building, his presence is useless. Unless other people arriving to attend meetings are treated differently to myself, of course, which I very much doubt. Which suggests that his only purpose relates to those people not intent on entering the building. Or at least those not intending to enter to attend for a meeting.

Perhaps his very presence is intended as a deterrent to those intent on entering the building for nefarious reasons. But if that’s the case, you’d have thought he’d do a better job interrogating the innocent to at least give the impression that the soon-to-be-guilty will have an obstacle to negotiate before doing their dubious deeds.

This is what keeps me awake at night.

March 1, 2011 | Filed Under Life, Random thoughts | 1 Comment 

The seven day working week

The five day working week simply isn’t long enough. It’s not about the amount of work you can get done per se. It’s about the amount of time between weekly status updates. You see, more often than not, project status updates occur weekly. And for one project I’m working on, I have to allow time to compile data for the reports, and time to socialise and agree it with the US taking into account a five hour time difference, all of this while working part-time on the project.

Together, these factors mean that an inordinate percentage of time is spent reporting, with too little time dedicated to the “doing” that makes this week’s report different from last week’s.

Rather than eat into weekends, which would likely be an unpopular move, I’m proposing that the full week is increased from seven to ten days in length, three of which will form the weekend. There will be 36.5 (or 36.6) weeks per year. Let’s leave the months as they are—don’t want to go too wild.

Weekends will make up 30% of time (up from 28.3% under the current regime). The weekdays will be named Monday, Pluday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Bacday and Friday; the weekends Saturday, Danday, Sunday. Wednesday will still fall in the middle of the working week with Pluday (named after Pluto, the God of Wealth, a day of earning) being slotted in before Tuesday and Bacday (after Bacchus, the God of Wine, an evening of drinking) being slotted in after Thursday. Bacday will be the new Thursday. Danday has been named after me in honour of me providing everyone with an extra weekend day. Everyone must raise a glass in my honour at least once during that day.

It will be a long working week, but the three day weekends will make it all worthwhile.

Who’s with me? We’re looking to re-baseline on Monday 1 January, 2012. (It would have been a Sunday, but we’re re-baselining, remember?)

January 19, 2011 | Filed Under Good ideas?, Random thoughts | 1 Comment 

A brainful of tut

My brain is filled with tut.

I know 25 digits of pi.  I know the first 21 powers of two without skipping a beat, a list of numbers that I can recite digit by digit, 75 in total. I know all of the American states, although for a long while I used to pronounce Arkansas as it’s written. I can tell you which US towns lie in zip codes that are themselves powers of two (Plymouth, FL; Lebanon, MO; Yarmouth, ME; Mansfield, MA).

I love knowing this shit. (For shit is what it is.) But I sometimes wonder whether something else should be there in its stead.

January 16, 2011 | Filed Under Life, Random thoughts | Leave a Comment 

Google autocomplete’s 15-step infinite loop starts and ends with love

While walking up the high street this morning, I suddenly wondered whether there was an infinite loop triggered by following autocomplete results in Google. The methodology would be thus.

  1. Type <Google> into Google and take a note of the first autocomplete suggestion.
  2. Type that extension into Google and see what that term’s first autocomplete suggestion was.
  3. Repeat step 2. until the loop was closed. I.e. the same term occurred twice.

If you type <Google> into Google, its first autocomplete suggestion is for <Google Maps>. Search for <maps> and you’re prompted with <Maps quest>. And so on. Below is the full set of results.

And here we loop back to step six.

(For the record, this post was autocompletely useless.)

January 15, 2011 | Filed Under Random thoughts | Leave a Comment 

GCSE scoring: #fail

The school examination system is fundamentally broken: the way in which marks map to grades is wrong.

This year, the percentage of GCSE passes increased for the 23rd year running.  While the percentage of A*–C grades increased by two percentage points from last year—to 69.1%.  Meanwhile, the A-level pass rate increased for the 28th successive year.  (They last  decreased on the same date as compact discs were released in Germany!)  And 29.9% of those sitting the exam achieved an A* in Mathematics (Further).

In my view, the percentage of entrants in a subject achieving each grade should stay static year-on-year.  So, for example, 16% of Maths entrants should be awarded an A grade.  Period.

Only through evolution are we becoming more intelligent as a species.  And the rate at which evolution, er, evolves is sufficiently small for it not to affect exam results across a generation or so.  As such, a gradual increase in people’s success in exams merely serves to penalise the old, at the same time making it more and more difficult for prospective employers, universities and the like to differentiate between pupils.

If a paper is easier than last year’s then by maintaining proportions as proposed above, the mark necessary to achieve a certain grade is pushed higher.  I’d be happy for the percentages to change from one subject to the next—one may choose for a higher proportion of English exams to score well.  But changing them year-on-year serves no purpose whatsoever.

Seems simple to me.  So why so hard for the politicians?

August 25, 2010 | Filed Under General, Random thoughts | Leave a Comment 

Everybody move

If everyone inhabited a strip of the earth 15 degrees wide stretching from the Arctic to Antarctica (I’d suggest Europe/Africa to maximise land; N and S America are deceptively not on top of one another latitudinally), then we’d all be in the same time zone, and no other time zones would be of interest.

Here’s the maths to support the argument:

It’s quite a big project to make this happen, but I think I’ve presented enough of a business case for someone to start running with this. High-level plan anyone?

July 21, 2010 | Filed Under Random thoughts | 1 Comment 

The River Twitter

My good friend Alan wrote:

Twitter, for me, is a river.  Every so often you step in and watch the flotsam drift by.  Sometimes there is stuff that you pick up and look at, rarely you keep it to examine later.  But what came before and came after is lost to the ocean of debris.

I love the analogy.  Your Twitter feed is like a river.  Whether or not you’re present to witness it, it keeps on flowing.  And for anyone following more than a hundred or so people, keeping up with every snippet every day is a pointless goal.

Instead, just as with a river, you pop along every so often—to admire the view, to watch the boats pass, to see how the sun is glistening on the water.  You might even take off your shoes and have a paddle.  But however often you go back, the river will always be flowing, there’ll always be something new to take in, and you’ll always be welcome to get your feet wet, skim some stones or dive right in.  That’s what I love about Twitter—and rivers.

July 12, 2010 | Filed Under Life, Random thoughts, Tech stuff | 1 Comment 

Next Page →