Archive for the ‘General Rambling’ Category

I’ve never really understood why people should want to feel a million dollars… I mean, assuming we’re talking US Dollars, which each weigh 8.1g (thanks Wikipedia) then you’re going to weigh over 8 tonnes.

So, I’ve managed to hammer out a few ideas about what I can actually do with a blog, and why I’m maybe not getting anywhere with the one I’m doing now. My conclusions thus far:

• You can’t be too sarcastic – blogging is all about being vaguely offensive.
• You can’t do comic timing on a blog – until I develop a special notation for jokes, I’m guessing jokes are out.
• A nice pattern to the titles is fun – Like the way Friends episodes were always “The one…”.
• Being rude is fun – especially towards people who are reading your blog.
• Talking about maths and science isn’t fun – this one came as a blow.
• Being personally identifiable from your blog is probably dangerous – so I’ll need to start carrying pepper-spray, or learn not to hit like a girl. Probably a good idea anyway though…

• Bullet lists are cool

So with all that learning done, I think it’s probably time to go and start writing my new, sarcastic, rude, and clever blog.

Oh, and, you might like to know, the puppies are still being noisy and trying to eat each other (puppies are also fun).

I have nothing to write a blog about. I guess that much is evident. After all, so far it’s mostly been a combination of my wild and incomprehensible ramblings about computers and whatnot, or else puppies.
So far I’ve reached a couple of conclusions:

1. I can’t write about my life – it’s not very interesting, or to put it another way, the most interesting thing that happened to me today was discovering that iPods have no off button.
2. I can’t write about computers, because it’s boring.

So I need an idea for what to blog about, or, failing that, a life, please…

Or The Benefits of data sharing

I know I sound like a complete technophobe when I talk about computers, which I’m not – I think. Computers are still really stupid. I mean, there’s a program for email, for browsing the internet, for taking notes, and for organizing photos. These programs have no connections – my email program has no idea that I did visit a website which has sent me a confirmation email, and so it treats it as junk and puts it away in a folder wit various tempting offers from Nigerian business men. My photo program might very well know who’s in a photo, but since it isn’t linked to my address book, it can’t give me their email address easily, can’t link me to their Facebook account, and can’t do anything clever.

All of this sounds abstract, but the thing is, my mobile phone can already do quite a lot of these things, but my more technically advanced computer cannot. There are lots of rather clever things a computer could do if all of this information was linked up as well; it would be far easier to find information, and it would make developing applications much easier, and it would make switching to a different piece of software an absolute breeze, since such a system would force all data on a computer to be held centrally in a database.

Hmm. Well, anyway, that was an exciting post, wasn’t it…

I happened today to stumble upon what is possibly the most famous and lasting idea one of my favourite writers came up with: the “Three Laws of Robotics” – the idea that at some point in technological advancement humans will create robots which are self-aware, and created with three unbreakable rules hardwired into their (positronic) brains. They read somewhat exactly as so:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A pretty useful idea really – after all I’d rather the robot which is going to be the first thing to succeed in tidying my bedroom didn’t turn murderous and kill me for leaving an odd sock under my bed. But the thing is, in a way we do already give a group of people the ability to conduct extreme measures for the good of the public. So I’d like to hope if humanity ever develops a self-conscious politician like Asimov’s robots they’d be given some hardwired instructions, something like this:

1. An elected representative of the people may not injure a constituent, or through inaction allow a constituent to come to harm.
2. An elected representative must obey any orders given to it by constituents, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. An elected representative must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Okay, so those are pretty poor. But they’re better than the ones which politicians seem to follow at the moment, which go more like:

1. An elected representative of the people may not injure its party, or through inaction allow a business of interest to the party to come to harm.

Well, okay, that’s just a waffle; obviously I know we’ll never be able to hardwire politicians into being decent people – we’ve just got to hope some of them are.

Just unloading some madness

I remember a couple of years ago there was a television programme which aimed to teach – let’s say rather uncouth – young ladies how to hold teacups, and how they should address a member of the Royal Family. The most distracting thing about this programme was the etiquette trainer, who looked like a female Ian Paisley, somewhat ironic.

Right now I’m staring at what is probably the rudest thing in my house – and I’ve got five cats. Considering how much time most people use computers, whether wilfully or not, it’s quite appalling that nobody seems to have ever taught them manners. The rude response which you get when you try to put a file onto an already full disk, “Cannot complete, Disk Full” or something along those lines is about as civilized as what I’d expect to have barked at me by an angry drill sergeant.
The problem isn’t limited to everyday computers. All of the big supermarkets now have these self-service checkouts, always commanding you, with the same voice, to place items in the bagging area. There’s never a please, or an “Excuse me, I need you to place your items in the bagging area, thanks”. Come on, for the thousands of pounds these things must cost to install and develop you’d think they could have a selection of voices; one would be selected at random when you use the checkout. I’m thinking Joanna Lumley and Morgan Freeman would be a good start, but some regional variants would add a bit of interest to what is otherwise an uninteresting, and often insulting process.

So, computers, you need etiquette training; Channel 4, I think I’ve found you a replacement for Big Brother.

For a while now I’ve wanted to use Linux. To be honest, I’ve wanted to swith over entirely to it in some ways, as a matter of principle as much as anything else. The upshot of all this was that I bought a magazine with a live CD distribution of Kubuntu. That’s to say I bought a CD which would run it without needing to be installed on my computer. I tried it, liked it, but found it a bit slow – not only was my computer at the time slow, but Live CDs work out of RAM, and are only as good as its speed. My experimenting with Linux went on like this for a while, but it’s never come to fruition.

Yesterday, however, was to prove a day of minor discoveries. I’ve toyed with the idea of using a virtual machine to run Linux in, and when I got my new computer a month and a half ago, I decided to download VirtualBox, which is the software which does all sorts of fancy things to allow you to run a computer inside another computer. Where is this entry going? I hear you ask. Well, there’s no bread in it, and I have no intention of including Sammy Wilson either…

To cut a (very) long story short, I am now running two operating systems, on the same computer, at the same time. Pretty useless, really, but it looks clever, and keeps me idealogically happy.

Bread: Friend or Foe?

It’s a decent question: most of us eat it every day. A lot of it. Toast, sandwiches, hamburgers. But why? It’s scarcely the easiest thing to make – well, not from scratch: you’ve got to grow corn, wheat or a similar cereal, then you’ve got to mill it, sift it, and that’s before even thinking about starting to bake it with other things. Then you’ve got to get yeast: Saccharomyces cerevisiae to be precise, which means either leaving your dough in a warm place for a period of time, or adding a preharvested yeast to it. It then has to be baked at fairly high temperatures for a relatively long period of time, before finally being anywhere near an edible state.
Alright, so perhaps that’s not so bad, especially in the modern world, where it’s easy to walk in Tesco and choose out a presliced loaf of bread, or, for the more adventurous, to buy a bread-oven, and mix the ingredients together and then come back a few hours later to find your loaf ready to eat (but unsliced).  Yet it’s easy to forget, or just to ignore the amount of work involved in your loaf.

Bread: The Backbone of Technology?

To make bread you need flour. Unfortunately, Tesco didn’t exist when bread was invented, so they had to find it from somewhere else… That was of course, by milling grain. There is evidence to suggest that humans from across the world have used flour: it was used by the Mesoamericans (the Aztecs, the Mayans, and others), and it was used by the Egyptians. The earliest means of producing flour was simple: two large flat stones, which you rubbed together: the top one had a hole in the middle, which you dropped the grain into, and it got ground out into flour. It sounds simple, it is simple, but there are a few problems.

1. The grain builds up between the two stones, forcing them apart, and eventually stopping the grinding.
2. To get the grain out you have to stop milling, lift the top stone up, and clear the grain out.

Some clever individual, however, spotted a way to fix this: why not cut deep channels into your top stone: this provides a sharp edge to grind the grain, and channels to carry it out from the inside of the stone to the outside. It’s a pretty simple way to solve two problems: bread’s first technological advance.

That’s only the start though, because soon our ancient baker discovers that he’s getting more orders than he can easily fulfil by milling all of his flour by hand. It’s pretty hard work too, because the stones are heavy, and he has to move them quite fast to get a nice even grain texture. He’s got to get more energy, and it’s going to take more than just manpower.

The rise of energy production

Our baker now lives in a big society: a civilization. He runs a successful business, selling bread to hungry bypassers and residents. He’s too popular, and he can’t produce enough bread.

One day, as he’s walking along the Tigris, he has an idea. The water is moving: he needs his stones to move. The water’s moving quite fast, he needs his stones to move quite fast. There’s a problem though: he needs his stones to move around, and water moves along. He also doesn’t want the water moving over the stones, because then it would mix with the flour, and make sticky dough. Mr. Baker invents the waterwheel. Now he can make as much flour as he wants, as long as he builds a big enough mill, and has enough millstones. Great: now he has a way of making all the bread he can out of the grain he receives. His new problem comes in storing the grain, but, living in a hot country he has no problem just putting it into a building and leaving it for the winter, or years when he can’t get any fresh grain. Now, not only has he solved the problem of market demand, but he’s also eliminated the problems of starvation. It’s a big step in technology too, because now he can generate energy – this won’t be utilised for very much else until the 19th century. Today the same mechanisms are used in cars, power stations, and most other mechanical devices. The same concept is used in hydroelectric power production.

Perhaps it is this property of the materials in bread which make it so important to humanity: it is preservable – a fall back.

Of course, when Mr. Baker expands his business empire away from the river he has a problem: does he transport flour from his big watermill by the river out to his new bakeries, effectively limiting the distance which his business can travel; does he only build bakeries by the river; or does he find a new way to make flour. It’s a difficult decision, so he goes out on a walk in the hills. He soon gets cold, because in the hills its windy. Wind moves, his mill stones move… well, you get the picture: he invents the windmill, expands his business, and provides the means for Holland to stay dry a couple of millennia later.

Now, Mr. Baker’s son has taken up his father’s line of business, but he’s sick of living in the same place, commuting between the river and the hills. He wants to move to a new coastal resort. This is where one of my two inspirations for this blog article come in: he invents the tidal mill.

I’ve never heard of a tidal mill I hear you say… Well, I’ll show you the remains of one.

Down the right-hand side is Nendrum’s tidal mill, and it’s about a mile away from where I live. Discovered in 1999 it is the oldest tidal mill to have been excavated anywhere in the world. It’s ajoined to a monastery on an island in Strangford Lough. Unfortunately this technology hasn’t really been capitalized, with only a few modern tidal power plants in the world.

Let’s look back at what Mr. Baker has done for us: he’s invented the windmill, the waterwheel, and even the tidal mill. He’s invented most of the parts of a car and power station in the same process, and he’s started one of the first industrial processes. Pretty clever, only I’m sure that there was no Mr. Baker, at least, not one who invented all of those things.

Economic Bread

Our aforementioned baker built a business empire out of bread: for all we know he was the Alan Sugar (or, more likely, Alan Bread) of his day, and it’s not for me to speculate on, but he probably sent budding business hopefuls out on missions to market pyramid schemes, whilst followed by a few thousand theatre goers looking for some entertainment after a hard day’s mill building, yet, by the Mediaeval period bread had crossed the world, and was being used as tableware by the subjects of the kings and queens of massive castles: it had become a staple food.

The farmers of Great Britain relied so heavily on grain production by the 19th century that the government of the time introduced import laws on corn from outside the island, which became known as the Corn Laws their repeal was perhaps the first step towards free trade, and the common market, which the English government had taken. Under the laws the price of corn rose to levels which the poorest could not afford. Today we see this issue of rising bread prices again, as developing markets import more grain than ever before, reducing world stock-piles, increasing prices, and we all know what happened next…

The Credit Crunch: Is bread to blame?

To grow corn or wheat you have to start with seed, and you’ll have to buy that off somebody. The growth of the American Grain Belt required a lot of seed, which farmers couldn’t afford without first selling a crop. With no means to get an ordinary loan they looked to a system developed by an ancient Greek, by the name of Thales. He had forecast the success of an olive harvest in a year, so he negotiated the use of olive presses in exchange for money in advance. Glad of the guaranteed income the olive press accepted, got their money upfront, whilst Thales waited, running the risk of a poor olive harvest and a loss. His powers of forecasting, however, are said to have served him well, as when the large harvest came, and many presses were needed he let them back out at much higher rates than he had paid the previous spring. From this idea the modern futures market was born, hedges invented, and nobody really understood what they would do. Now, however, we do.

Don’t cry over broken bread

I’ve followed a very circuitous route to get here, and thought of some things I never thought to think of, but finally, I will return to my original idea.

Today is Palm Sunday – the day when Christ entered Jerusalem on a colt. It’s also the day when my church holds a service at the ruins of the aforementioned monastery at Nendrum. That service is a Eucharist service, which involves, yes, bread. It’s also the only service in the year when dogs attend: more precisely Ajax, our Jack Russell attends it.

Our dogs like to eat toast. They were given toast by their breeder when they were tiny little puppies, and they’ve never grown out of it. At breakfast they crowd around the table, or, more frequently me and my father, in order to receive their daily toast. It’s an interesting ritual, but even when we’re eating breakfast at seven in the morning, and they are still asleep, the sound of the toaster springing up will instantly rouse them. They see it as an important occasion in their daily schedule of sleep-eat-sleep-walk-lick-sleep-bark: their masters giving them small fragments of crust. It is somehow reminiscent of a couple of lines from the book of common prayer:

“We are not worthy so much as to eat the crumbs under your table, O merciful Lord…”

“Give us this day our daily bread”

The second quotation is interesting, as the word we translate as daily, in Greek – ἐπιούσιος – only occurs in Luke and Matthew’s versions of the Lord’s Prayer. It doesn’t occur anywhere else in Greek. It almost certainly refers to manna from heaven. The first, and more cynical (ie. canine) is a slight rehash  of Mark 7 v 28

²⁷“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

²⁸“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  NIV

So, clearly dogs and the Eucharist are inextricably intertwined. I, however, digress.

Today, as the Eucharist was celebrated our Jack Russell’s nose began to sniff the air: he’d smelt bread – he had recognized the importance of the liturgy and of Holy Communion, and was put out when he was left out. So does the Eucharist play on an instinctive desire to be fed by our masters? Why else would the proposition of eating “the body of our Lord Jesus Christ” not be off-putting, or, indeed, repulsive?

Collecting the crumbs

I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that bread really has made our world what it is today: a mess, yes, but ultimately a success. It’s given us a financial crisis, but it’s keeping hundreds of mediocre journalists in highly paid jobs. Bread has such an important role in modern life that it slips into many frequent expressions: “the best thing since sliced bread”, “bread-winner”, “dough”. But look at all of the bad things that it’s done: a financial meltdown, the Great Fire of London, and Hovis TV ads.

So bread: evil or benign?

It has scarcely been three weeks, and yet he’s at it again. Sammy Wilson has denied the accepted national policy on climate change, this time going as far as to suggest that he is more knowledgable that Central Government at Westminster, and misrepresenting the Scottish parliament.

This comes only days after he “slams climate change deniers” in what his website seems to be using to spin off the recent press coverage of holocaust denial, and its condemnation by the Pope. At the risk of this article becoming a rant (which I think happened around about the seventh or eighth word anyway), I can only suggest that Mr. Wilson is deliberately trying to be contravercial. His website, indeed, states that he is in westminster this week, supporting proposals for Heathrow’s third runway, and sixth terminal – a cause, doubtless, close to Mr. Wilson’s heart.

Just to add insult to injury, Mr. Wilson has also banned the broadcast of the new actOnCO2 Adverts on local television, calling for them to “not even be leaked” into the province, and that westmister should foot the bill to ensure that this remains the case. This, therefore, is my effort to defy Mr. Wilson: