Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

The rainbow bubble of inspiration burst.

11 Aug

Posted in Rants, Six Word Ideas | No Comments »

Sorry I’ve been quiet for a while. I had a run-in with twitter and the account was temporarily suspended (only a week to ten days while I appealed). This meant I couldn’t participate for a couple of weeks but had another, unexpected and unpleasant side effect. My creativity and enthusiasm evaporated. I was really enjoying this project and several new ideas a day but twitter’s intervention for “aggressive following” really took the shine off things and put a damper on my mood. Their rules are undoubtedly necessary to prevent advertisers jamming the whole thing up but whatever algorithm they use seems to miss the point. It appears to be based purely on the total number of people you follow with no reference to how many people follow you in return. This is a critical detail. If you’re doing something other people like (or, dare I say it selling something people want) they should leave well alone. Over 80% of the people I engaged with for SixWordIdeas have followed back and joined in with the spirit of things. To me that is an indication that we’re all enjoying the idea. I’ve bounced back now and will be tweeting blog entries like this again for the foreseeable future. Sorry to anyone who missed out on a re-tweet or a reply to a DM, I’ll try to go back over the backlog over the next couple of weeks.

Namaste, Chas.

Why don’t politicians give straight answers?

02 Apr

Tags: honesty, integrity, media, politics, society
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Why don’t politicians give straight answers? Could it be because we won’t let them? They can’t ever be wrong – or admit they were – because the media will call them incompetent and we all shake our heads and tut disapprovingly and mumble into our collective coffees. They can’t change their minds because the media will say they are indecisive – cue another bout of head shaking and coffee mumbling.

So how are politicians supposed to learn and adapt? Take the enormously unpopular “Poll Tax” here in the UK. We used to set local tax based on the size of the building you lived in. This meant a person living alone in a large house paid a huge amount for local services like refuse collection of which they used only a fraction. In contrast houses with multiple occupants crammed into a modest home (for which read poor people splitting the rent) produce more waste than might be expected for a house that size but don’t pay extra. Getting individuals to pay seems like a fair idea doesn’t it?

When the initial figures were calculated it seemed to support this fairness as it appeared we were all going to pay a fair share. But in reality was four times as much as the calculation. It turned into a train wreck because we were all paying more and the lack of means testing meant low paid people rammed into tiny bedsits were getting demands for money they couldn’t possibly afford. The policy could have been altered or abandoned at this point but it was a “flagship policy” emblematic of the Conservative values of fairness, independence and responsibility. The media would have had a field day.

We should have a “just culture” like the RAF where admission of failures is encouraged. Honest errors are accepted as part of the endeavour, investigated and lessons are learned which prevent a repetition. Flight training of course involves making in flight mistakes in order to learn how to recover. Blame and recrimination are not part of this recipe; an acceptance of human frailty and acknowledgement of a problem to be fixed certainly are.

It is worth noting that we aren’t talking about people who hide their mistakes and get caught. We are discussing people who show integrity by admitting a mistake and who show a sincere desire to rectify it and learn from it. I heard another, possibly apocryphal, aviation story a few years ago. A ground crew member used the wrong fuel in an aircraft and the takeoff was aborted, safely on this occasion. The pilot located the guy, who naturally figured he was in for some abuse. But the pilot said he understood that mistakes happen, confirmed the guy was highly unlikely to make the same mistake twice and asked him to be his personal re-fueler in future.

This makes sense to me – I wonder why it doesn’t to journalists?

It’s a no ring, ping thing…

01 Apr

Tags: bing, ding, fnoise, noise pollution, ping, ring, vigilante, zing
Posted in Rants | 1 Comment »

I think we should have an international No FNoise Day where we turn off all the things which ring, ding, bing, ping, zing and vibrate to get our attention.

I spring cleaned the Notifications on my iPhone because it seems to spend all day alerting me to things I really didn’t need to know but even now it’s an all too frequent interruption.

Then there’s the landline phones which ring all to frequently, alarms I set in my watch, the door knocker (which I shall treat as a bell for the purpose of this blog) and my WiFi detecting underpants (currently set to vibrate).

I feel we need a little peace and quiet in our lives just one day a year… any takers?

Get things wrong: set a deadline.

01 Apr

Tags: budgets, concept, deadlines, deadlines management, money, people, prototype, resources quality, scope, time
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Make it so...

I worked on Millennium Bug projects so I can appreciate a genuine deadline when I see one (let’s skip the fact it was either mostly a waste of time and money or a spectacular success which saved us all from disaster). Given the collective legislative incontinence of governments worldwide there are often regulatory deadlines to be hit.

But – let’s face it – most deadlines are set for an entirely different reason… money. People get paid by the hour, week or month and the longer things take the more it costs. It therefore, follows that to save money, you save time and to save time you set a deadline.

Problem solved. Errrr… no. This is where the problems start…

You have the following levers to fiddle on any endeavour: People, Money, Time, Scope. By setting the deadline you’ve locked one of your levers leaving only People, Money and Scope.

The “resource pool” (People to you and me) is usually fixed so that lever is usually locked – or at least needing four or five people leaning on it to get it moving.

Now we’re getting down to it – Money and Scope, plenty of room for adjustment there. Think again. All companies use budgets at every level so you can safely assume that once your estimates are in and the Project Budget is signed off that lever is super glued, end of.

Scope. That’s it… the only lever you have left. But there’s great news, that lever moves really easily. It has a hundred different settings you can prioritise and chop around, postpone, amend and simplify. You can grab that lever and waggle it around to your heart’s content.

But will you? Dare you? Whether internal or external you have a “customer” and you have made an undertaking, a commitment, a promise to deliver this thing, whatever it may be. Now you want to change it and deliver something else… but it is the only way if you want to hit that deadline.

But wait… there’s another lever, look down there on the floor… that little stubby, dangerous looking red one with the sign saying “QUALITY CONTROL, DO NOT TOUCH”. Why don’t we just give the customer what we’ve got on the due date and call it a proof of concept, a rapid prototype or a parallel run… Yes! Yes that’s it, that’s what we’ll do… we can get the bugs out after go live.

Of course, you could just move the date…

Make digital books cheaper than paper.

25 Mar

Tags: book, cd, copyright, ebook, ereaders, green, insulation, paper
Posted in Rants | No Comments »

At the time of writing the Amazon Kindle edition of Sarah Pain’s book “Going Rogue” is selling for $14.09 and the hardback edition for $13.50. This is utterly ludicrous – it’s a rip off and it’s bad for the environment. Amazon’s capitulation to Macmillan over selling eBooks (at a loss!) for $9.99 as a Kindle loss leader is a disaster for the customer and the planet… now Rupert Murdoch has sniffed an opportunity for increased profits price gouging us, the consumer, while his print media empire inexorably collapses around him (along with everyone else’s) [ref 2]. And all because the currently mythical iPad will apparently let publishers charge more… cheers Steve.

They’ve done it to us with music and now they’re trying to do it again with books. A CD had to be pressed, packaged and transported to the point of sale then collected and taken home by the customer [ref 1] this last step contributing a significant amount to the energy cost. A digital download is loaded onto a server and is ready to go… only the vendor has to be paid. Server farms certainly consume energy in substantial quantities, however, they are becoming more efficient with each improvement in technology and monetary and energy costs are tiny compared to shipping a physical product.

With books the gap is even more pronounced as the finished physical product is bulkier and heavier than a CD and the digital download is tiny compared to music at a high sample rate [ref 1] shows bandwidth is a factor with music, not so with books. Also a book was often read by many people particularly if a copy is released to the library system so the author got paid once and once only – well protected digital books vastly reduce this ability for people to share and they therefore sell more copies. There is no justification for using this huge reduction in overhead and the improvement in profitability to make a killing at the expense of the customer.

eBooks reduce the need for paper, power and water.

Please hug me...

There are other reasons to encourage people to use digital books rather than paper. Paper, even when recycled, is a very expensive resource in terms of materials and water consumption – 3 times the raw material and 78 times more water than an eBook [ref 3]. Don’t misunderstand me here – it’s still better to take an unwanted book, pulp it, clean it, bleach it and make it into another book than it is to burn it or kill another tree. It’s also highly desirable to stop creating new paper and process what we have it into insulation and use it to build a low cost well insulated home.

But any way you look at it paper is a dreadful waste of energy and water. Publishers, therefore, have a moral duty to discourage the use of paper and encourage the use of eBooks. Stick a little advert at the bottom of the page to make it worth your while… I’m really not bothered.

References

1 Relative cost of CDs by retail method

2 Rupert Murdoch gunning to raise eBook Prices

3 Wikpedia eBooks

Belief: what trusted sources tell you.

09 Mar

Tags: belief, humanity, psychology, trust
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I’m not only talking about religion here I’m talking about everything. The TV program QI (Quite Interesting) has a round called “General Ignorance” where they ask questions you think you know the answer to but virtually every “common knowledge” answer turns out to be either completely untrue, wildly inaccurate or superseded by the progress of human knowledge.

Philosophers have been debating the nature of “truth” for years with the best known protagonist being Martin Heidegger who called it by the Greek word for truth “aletheia”. It’s heady stuff but my take is put in a simpler way: we believe what trusted sources tell us and continue to believe it until evidence to the contrary changes our minds.

At school I was taught that glass is a viscous liquid and that the “sagging” you see in the glass of old buildings is caused by it imperceptibly “flowing” due to gravity. Modern thinking is now that glass is an amorphous solid which doesn’t flow and that the sagging phenomenon was always present as a result of crude manufacturing processes in the early days of glass making. Until the subject came up in the pub I was unaware of my flawed belief and defended it vigorously. My opponents weren’t giving me scientific rebuttals – just a gut “that doesn’t sound right” and I hit Google feeling confident I could persuade them to my point of view. Humble pie was consumed in some quantity. This is a perfect example of the progress of knowledge leaving you behind.

A lighter example some data tables for the mineral content of vegetables briefly over stated the iron content of spinach by a factor of ten and Popeye was born…

My favourite example is the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. If you look on Wikipedia – Light you will find the history of understanding the nature of light has (at the time of writing) eleven different theories about light from particle and wave through to quantum theories. Add to this the increasing knowledge of the spectrum of EM radiation. Initially we could only detect radiation visible to the human eye and we were unaware of its component colours until the invention of the prism. Later we could detect heat (infrared), ultraviolet (UV) and ultimately radio waves, microwaves, X-Rays and Gamma rays. The history of EM radiation is littered with the certainties which always precede discovery…

Science then is a work in progress which means something we believe “true” today may not be “true” tomorrow.

Given most of us don’t have the time or inclination to apply a rigid scientific or philosophical framework to our every belief; how do we as individuals decide what’s true and what isn’t? The answer, as far as I can see, is trust. The most nebulous and fragile of mental constructs based on a combination of instinct and knowledge from different sources, averaged, weighed and analysed.

So, finally, to religion. A set of never changing beliefs with no underlying evidence or proof. Beliefs which often do not allow the possibility for change, development, expansion or adaptation. Systems where the ultimate penalties are often reserved for those who question or choose not to believe the current “truth”. I don’t understand that – but if you want to try to explain it, I will listen.

I can accept that some percentage of my beliefs are, or have become, objectively incorrect without my being aware of it. I can also accept my trusted sources make mistakes and revise their views. I’m comfortable with that, far more comfortable in fact than I am with dogma.