Never switched this on before, but have more mobile mail / messaging options these days, so worth a try.
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Brain Connections
Spooky experience today … I was immersed in my new UK rail (north-east), “free” wi-fi, new HP laptop, new iPhone, blogging, facebook, work-email, learning experience, from Darlington en-route to Kings Cross, Heathrow, Terminal 3, SAS to Stavanger business travel, when the seat beside me was occupied at York by someone reading Sacks “Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat“.
I had to say to her – you don’t often see people reading that, one of my favourite books. Anyway, she had almost finished it, and – blow me – two minutes later she starts reading Jill Bolte-Taylor’s “Stroke of Inspiration“.
Oh, by the way, did I mention ? I’m back to being UK-based, and …. self-employed.
[If you do nothing else, follow that link to Jill Bolte-Taylor’s TED presentation … literally inspiring.]
[PS – SAS from LHR Terminal 3 ? – Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently reference gets me every time. A meme of limited circulation]
Computer Theology ?
Sounds like my kinda guy. Bertrand du Castel was speaking at Semantic Days 2010 which I was unable to attend. Notice he was chair of POSC for a while too, missed that. Thanks to Leon for the Link.
Damned If You Do
Interesting headline / byline on this story … the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster … the more information is made available the less people are happy with what they “know”. Less is more. It’s complicated and scary techno-environmental problem BP are dealing with and they need to be allowed, encouraged to focus on that, rather than a complex PR & education problem. There will be blood, already
Dreadful self-destructive meme to assume maximum openness is demanded whereas maximum trust is in fact needed. Add to the “too-much open communication is bad for us” stack.
[Post Note … interesting NYT piece on our faith in technology fixing problems of the day. Hat tip to Matt, in philosophical mood – again.]
People vs the System
Much debate (here Thinking Allowed) since the recent financial crisis on the future of capitalism and global industrialisation, and the failure of economists to keep their eye on the underlying “systemic risks” in the trading of ever more convoluted financial derivatives. (Watched that excellent dramatisation of the Lehman Brothers demise just a couple of evenings ago too. Quality stuff.)
Anyway, talking of systems, I was reminded by David Gurteen that in 1923 F W Taylor wrote
“In the past Man has been first.
In future the system must be first.”
Scary ? Like shooting fish in a barrell to ridicule Taylorism nearly a century on for the excesses of scientific management and it is of course where my agenda started. As David points out, context matters and no surprise, Taylor’s next sentence starts:
“… however …
… the first object of any good system, must be
… first class [people] “
The reason David’s quote caught my eye was a (cover to cover) re-read in the last few days of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig is often cited as being against “social programs” – in polarizing Capitalist vs Marxist slanging matches – a meme which usually takes about three dialectical exchanges to sink to the level of Hitler & Nazism or Stalin / Mao & Totalitarianism. Bad people. Of course Pirsig too was careful to qualify what he meant:
” … [No] enthusiasm for big programs
full of social planning for big masses of people,
that leave individual Quality out.”
Oh, and how could I forget, the subject of the Denning piece that David Gurteen quotes is Dilbert or maybe Dilbertism. How often Dilbert mirrors real organizational life … now that is scary.
Blues & Twos
It’s a standard joke or maybe urban legend that people in emergency vehicles switch on their sirens and lights to beat the traffic and get home in time for dinner; a perk of the job.
I recall this impression vividly from a very exciting trip to Moscow earlier in the year, that there were an inordinate number of “emergency” vehicles demanding high-speed passage and even jumping the lights at will – traffic was already scary enough and gridlocked with both sheer volume and the number of accidents – at junctions.
More than an impression apparently.
Cameron Egoistic Start
Yeah, great Mr Cameron, man of the people, dispense with outriders – brilliant – be the hero yourself, tighten “your” belt.
It’s not about you, you bloody dipstick, it’s about the Prime Minister, the institution of the head of the UK government, we’ d like it to get where we need it when we need it and not lose it (and innocent bystanders as collateral damage) before the next election.
Bloody ego. What a start. What do they teach people at Eton ? I thought these people were groomed to lead ? Still chinless wonders after all.
Pirsig Connection
I don’t read any more than coincidence into this, but spooky none-the-less,
I’ve been in Oslo, around 20 months so far, and have been aware, from mentions by colleagues, of a bar on the other side of town, Grønland on the east side, we live in Majorstua on the west side. The place is Olympen (or Lompa to its friends) … originally a traditional Oslo Brun Cafe, but famous for keeping a great selection of Norwegian and imported beers – hundreds of them, though only a handful on draft. I’ve even walked past the place a handful of times, visting the ethnic shops in Grønland for spices, teas, etc, but visited the place only very recently, 3 times the last week or ten days. (Does great food too.)
Anyway, I was talking to an(other) engineer / project manager at the bar, discussing the engineering / ingenuity / quality angle – she was bemoaning male prejudice and the irony of the classical objectivity impression that engineering has. And the (Brit / brewer) barman having worked out what I liked – by trial and error, you understand – brought up a bottled beer and said, “Here, try this one.”
It was Red Seal Ale from the North Coast Brewery in Mendocino Co, CA (!) Of course I said instantly, that’s weird, do you guys know Pirsig ? (They didn’t as it happens, so I had to explain the significance of the climactic scenes on the Mendocino bluff / cliff-tops. In fact that particular brewery is about as close to the scene as it’s possible for a brewery to be, alongside Fort Bragg, just north of Caspar, now that is spooky.)
Anyway probably because of that I picked-up my first-edition / first-impression copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) on Sunday and started an umpteenth re-read from the beginning – never actually “read” this particular copy – I have several.
Monday morning Christof sends me a link to his design/engineering and quality lecture video (never even been aware of it before now) – I post the link below. This morning, Tuesday, on the way to work I’m reading towards the end of Part One of ZMM, about the never ending possibility of subdividing the classes of things in the world we perceive – Pirsig using his physical / functional / systematic breakdown of the eponymous motorcycle and Aristotle’s analytic knife to illustrate the dangerous illusion that creates.
This same morning a US colleague sends me a link overnight to a database of (tens of thousands of) distinct piping material components – as if to prove the point, part of our day job – and Bob (Pirsig) responds to yesterday’s post – a very rare event. My colleague here in Oslo, who overheard my exclamation (something less polite than “Good Heavens”), now wants to borrow the book. He’d not heard of it either. Dilemma – to loan the prized first edition … or bring in another copy tomorrow ? … but he’s on holiday after today for almost two weeks ….. aaagghh!
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Post Note : And ….
the brand of beer the travellers refresh themselves with early in Part 2 … Olympia
Hailstorm Kills Hundreds
Stop press (1200 years ago) … never heard of this before. (via Rivets)
And with Rivets one is never enough, so this is nice too, if completely different.
Oh, and I couldn’t resist this one, chemical weapons in the bedroom !
Where were you ?
When you first heard Nessun Dorma ? Nope, not the world cup / championships / olympics / whatever, watching The Killing Fields, that’s where. Nice touch where Sydney just turns up the volume to bring it from incidental background to explicit foreground.
Rewatched on DVD over the weekend. Don’t know whether it was a director’s extended cut, but the balance was quite different to my earlier recollection. The killing-fields sequences are actually quite brief – enough to shock – but most of the film is the interpersonal responsibility and cameraderie of the groups of multi-national journalists helping each other out, and later Pran taking care of the young son of one of the Khmer’s factional leaders as he escapes.
In fact the words trust and (nothing to) forgive stuck in the later episodes, even the US engagement in Cambodia is treated as a pragmatic tactic of war. The naive doctrine of the Khmer – anyone old enough to remember pre-revolutionary life is part of the problem – is clear and briefly dealt with. The cheesiest moment has to be the irony of being helped by the young guy who remembers being given the iconic Mercedes star. John Malkovic (great character BTW) returns to voice Sydney’s responsibilty.
And, I didn’t even recall the somewhat cheesey use of Lennon’s Imagine in the closing scenes. Maturing with age, the viewer that is.