Podcasts: Get Thee Behind Me August 21, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: podcast, podcasts, time management, waste of time, wasting time
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I appear to be a junkie. A podcast junkie that is. Stealthily, insidiously and silently this addictive media form has crept up on me and is more or less dominating my daylight hours. For those that may not know, a “podcast” is simply a segment of video, or more usually, audio content in digital form that is produced on a regular basis – daily, weekly or monthly. This digital content may be streamed for immediate listening or downloaded for subsequent playback on the computer or MP3 player.
There are thousands of podcasts available on almost every conceivable topic. Everything from low carb dieting to buddhist tech. Most of them are produced by ordinary individuals who have a particular interest they wish to share and impart to others. To create a podcast all that is required is a microphone, some audio software and something to talk about. In addition to individual producers, most audio broadcast media organisations make their programming available in the form of podcasts. Certainly the BBC makes its output available in this form.
Doing a quick count it appears that I have subscribed to over 100 different podcasts and am listening to or watching around 35 a week. A few of them might only be 10 minutes in duration but for the most part each is around 45 minutes in length. Little wonder then that recently I have been wondering why I am not getting anything useful done.
There are some things you can do, and enjoy, whilst listening to a podcast. Gardening is one. DIY is another and, on the rare occasions I actually do any, housework is yet another. However it is my experience that reading and writing are not things that can be done whilst also listening to a podcast. Either one or the other is possible but not both. The effect is that the podcast content is heard but not listened to. Or, and this is the real problem, the task of reading or writing goes into suspension whilst one concentrates on the audio.
Having thought about it I have decided that if I wish to write more then I need to seriously reduce the number of podcasts I listen to. I need to take a set of digital secateurs and prune away the least useful and the least interesting. This will not be easy but I am going to have to be ruthless. There may be some withdrawal effects. Even now I am wondering how I am going to cope with not having my weekly shot of tech info on Windows 7. And what about the world of commodities? What if I want to buy some soya bean futures?
If I succeed in reducing my consumption of these digitised time thieves, my expectation is that I will be able to improve my use of time. Ironically this brings me nearly full circle as it was a desire to learn and understand more of the world that led me down the slippery slope of podcast abuse in the first place. Oh dear. I seem to be backsliding already.
Perhaps just one more hit of scepticism. Just one more taste of livin the vida lo-carb…
What’s The Rush? August 12, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: 2012, asda, time speeding up
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Does time move at a constant rate? I have always believed so but recently I have been struck by what appears to me to be an apparent speeding up of the passage of time. What was once an ambling, slow moving stream is now a fast running torrent in spate. It may well be another of the many surprises that life has in store for those of us who have survived beyond middle age. Even so it is remarkable how rapidly the weeks and even the months seem to fly by. And it’s not just me who is seeing this effect.
I remember reading an explanation suggesting that to a younger person any unit of time represents a much greater percentage of their life thus far than the same interval represents to an older person. So I would perceive a month to be a much shorter period of time than would a 12 year old. This does seems to me to be quite a reasonable explanation and perhaps I should just leave it at that.
However, just recently this perceived increase in the passage of time seems to me to be much more pronounced. Sometimes it seems I watch the passing of weeks and months much as the H.G. Wells time traveller might have done, as the date dials of his machine spun blurringly into the future.
So is it a real speeding up? Or yet another side effect of the ageing process? There are those, admittedly people of a more fanciful persuasion, who argue that its not just a perception problem caused by a personal instrument malfunction but is in fact caused by real physical changes in the world. Some of them seem to think that this apparent speeding up will increase and culminate in 2012 when, apparently, the planet passes through the galactic plane. Strangely this speeding up of time is said to result in an increased consciousness and “awareness”. Contrarily I would have thought that increased awareness of the world would arise from a slowing of time rather than a speeding up. Just imagine the detail, normally going unnoticed, being laid bare by a world in slow motion.
In any case for most of us, any increase in the rate of the passage of time that also has a corresponding effect on the rate of mind and body ageing could only be considered distinctly negative. Speaking for myself I’m bored with ageing anyway and would be much more impressed if time would actually slow down a bit.
And to this end there are places you can go where time itself, whilst not actually standing still, does seem to slow to a crawl. Places where we can all get a biological break from the onward rush of bodily decay. Foremost amongst them for me is the checkout at Asda. This supermarket, in all its wonder, has deployed a time distortion field such that a 10 minute wait is made to appear to last very much longer. I admit, while I’m waiting, I’m not always best pleased at the delay. But on subsequent consideration, my time driven biology and I can offer thanks for the recuperative effects bestowed, albeit inadvertently.
Hold Very Tight Please! You’re Flying Ryanair! July 6, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: blakey, bob newhart, grace l ferguson, london buses, ryanair, standing room only
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Don’t you just love Ryanair? If I ever feel a little down and upset with the world I can always count on the boys at the worlds favourite low-cost airline to rekindle my sense of humour. This they can do by demonstrating the obvious respect they have for their customers by announcing, for example, charges for the use of on-board toilets.
Their latest jolly jape, this time concerning providing in-flight standing room instead of seats, brought to my mind the almost forgotten Grace L. Ferguson Airline (And Storm Door Company). Those, like me, old enough to have been around in the sixties may remember an American comedian by the name of Bob Newhart. Bob’s comic style was to portray stressful situations encountered by, for example, driving instructors or, as is relevant here, by budget airlines. Younger readers might not fully appreciate Bob’s work as his use of four letter words was negligible. In spite of such an obvious handicap I thought he was pretty funny.
Bob’s characterisation of the low-cost airline of the time included a nervous pilot whose navigation skills were tested by not knowing what “shape” Hawaii was. It also featured, as with the Ryanair news, the provision of standing space for passengers rather than a somewhat more traditional aircraft seat. There was, however, a whiff of luxury provided for the the first class flyer in the form of a hanging strap that he or she could hold on to – a bit like we used to have on the buses and on the Tube.
Bob’s humour was based on the fact that he portrayed the behaviour of human beings in stressful circumstances and in absurd situations. At the time the notion that an airline was so “cheap” that it would provide standing room to it’s passengers rather than seats did seem very absurd. However today Ryanair seems to want to bring the “absurd” into the commonplace.
In their defence, and speaking as an ex long distance commuter, the prospect of having to stand for a couple of hours during a journey doesn’t seem so unreasonable. Especially as apparently it will be the choice of the passenger who can elect to stand during the flight in exchange for travelling for free.
Free of booking charges as well? On Ryanair? Now that really would be absurd.
Soixante? Moi? June 23, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: 60, getting old, sexagenarian, sixty, soixante
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I have just turned sixty years old. (No – please. Don’t stop reading, this is not a job application). And it’s not as if it was unexpected. Any tomorrow, when it arrives, is fairly well anticipated and it’s appearance is never a surprise. Likewise one’s birthday. But the day I actually became sixty years of age did give me cause me to stop and consider.
I watched it’s approach rather as a turkey might contemplate the approach of Christmas. Assuming it had access to a calendar the turkey could, if it so chose, contemplate the possibility of escape, hopefully, sometime before December. For me however there could be no escape from the onward march of time. Old Father Time had a sixty year birthday present specially wrapped up for me and he was going to hurl it towards my folded arms it whether I wanted it or not.
Over the years one always adapts to the changes that come, both to oneself and the world around you. It’s a slow dawning realisation. When I became thirty I noticed that wow, indeed, the party was more or less over, man. When I entered my forties I think I was working too hard to notice much of anything. At fifty I certainly did raise a quizzical eyebrow to the persistent passing of the years but dismissed it as some kind of illusion. A glitch in the fabric of my personal space-time.
But sixty. That can’t just be ignored. Even the government writes to you, desirous of giving you stuff. The basic assumption being that now you are obviously in need of help (dear). I now get free prescriptions. I get cheaper haircuts without even having to ask. And, of course, there’s an all I can eat buffet on the local buses with my new pass.
So I think I will do what I usually do when I am confronted with unpleasant realities. I’ll go into denial mode. If, due to some cosmological administrative error, I am deemed to be sixty years old then I will simply carry on pretending otherwise. I’m going to continue walking long(ish) distances in the countryside. I’ll keep on riding my bike for miles at a time (sort of). Perhaps I will even get a FaceBook account. Better yet – go on Twitter.
But in all of this ghastly, self indulgent introspection perhaps the most surprising thing I discovered is that, according to my dictionary, the word that is used to describe being in one’s sixties is “sexagenarian”.
So that’s fine. Business as usual there then.
Ouch! That Was The Gas Bill! May 25, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: cash, cashless society, credit cards, debt, fora.tv, money, pain, pleasure
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I often suspected it. I often felt that the process of spending money using a credit card was somehow less painful than the handing over of physical cash. With plastic there seemed to be a certain detachment from the transaction that was, after all, just as much a depletion of wealth as the transfer of real physical money.
It is interesting therefore to have these feelings explained by research into related human behaviours. Scientists at MIT and Carnegie-Mellon have apparently noted that an area of the brain associated with, amongst other things, the pain of paying for goods, is far less active when the payment is made with a credit card than if the payment is made with hard cash. This fact is related by Jonah Lehrer in a fascinating video interview on Fora TV (the credit card discussion is seven minutes and 30 seconds in) and is further discussed in his blog post.
There has been an undoubted move to a so-called “cashless society”. For many of us today, cash is used for only the smallest of purchases such as newspapers, cafes or car parking. The majority of domestic transactions are already cashless and don’t even involve plastic. Electronic transfers of funds to pay for mortgages, utility bills and, of course, credit cards bills themselves are very much the norm.
Variable direct debits are good examples as they detonate, silently, mechanically, and mostly unnoticed somewhere in the dense undergrowth of our personal financial ecosystem. So if the “abstraction” from reality caused by the absence of physical money is true for credit cards then how could it be any less true for these other, even more abstracted forms of payment.
If it is true that, when not using cash, our brains are somehow less sensitive to the pain of having to pay for things then perhaps this is also a contributory factor to the current credit crisis. Perhaps the fact that many people have entered into huge levels of, what has turned out to be, unsustainable levels of personal debt is due to this same detachment. If so then to regain our sense of financial propriety should we return to hard cash once again?
Undoubtedly not. But how about a system that delivers a mild electric shock for each payment going out. Serious adherents to such a mechanism could opt to vary the voltage applied in line with the amount. They could also, not unreasonably I think, expect a stimulation of their chosen pleasure zone in line with payments coming in.
A new twist, I think, to the notion of financial stimulus.
Don’t Beige Me, Bro April 30, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: beige, old, square, young
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It is going to be hard to write this without sounding a little like the High Court judge who, long after Sergeant Pepper, famously demanded of his Clerk of the Court …”who are the Beatles?”. Even so I’d like to briefly discuss here the words often used by younger people to describe groups of older people. Usually the words used are less than flattering but yet contain elements of humour and even, amazingly enough, truth.
For me the original was “square”. Back in the sixties you were a “square” if you weren’t “with it” and the image of a four sided regular figure gave an added depth to the intended description. Even if you were seriously “without it”, it didn’t take a great imagination to see what meaning the word was meant to deliver.
I recall also an early episode of Star Trek in which a group of space travelling young hippies liked to use the word “Herbert” to insult older Star Fleet Commanders. Being younger when I saw it I have to say that I found this particular characterisation of long haired, anti-authoritarian youth, buttock-clenchingly ghastly. But that is another story.
The latest addition to this rogues gallery of attack-dog words is “beige”. According to a young person close to me I am, apparently, “beige”. If you are “beige” you travel through life firmly attached to an invisible centre rail straddling the middle of the road. You strive to conform at all times and only break cover in emergencies or when directed by the Daily Mail.
Having had to endure being referred to as “dude” during the last years of my working life I can only say that “beige” now seems somehow comforting and even reassuring. I’ll take it as an inadvertant compliment from the young that they see us as dependable, non threatening and probably minus the capacity to surprise.
So there we are then. Beige – the perfect disguise.
Astro What? April 27, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: astrophysicist, nasa, spelling
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Writing about the woeful state of spelling today is, I recognise, likely to involve some personal risk. After all if during the course of this missive I make any kind of spelling mistake then what I have to say will be rendered even more irrelevant than usual. It is also true to say that, sadly, any personal ability to spell correctly will not of itself make my writing any more interesting.
However some occurrences are just so dire that they simply cannot be ignored and the case in point here involves the word “astrophysisits”. I came across this word in a scientific article. Because the context concerned the physical make up of the universe you would be correct to infer that the writer was intending to express the word astrophysicist but wrote astrophysisits instead.
This would have been just another spelling error had it not been for the fact that it appeared in an otherwise authoritative article on the NASA website. Because one might have reasonably expected better of NASA I admit to being a little shocked by this and so did what I always do in cases where I have doubts about words or phrases: I looked it up on Google. There I found 332 other occurrences and this leads me to conclude that, perhaps, sometime in the future this alternate spelling might actually become more widespread. Perhaps copy and pasting is an accelerant in the engine of written language development.
I have to own up to a high level of intemperance when faced with spelling errors. I can be reading a post or a comment and be interested or entertained right up to the point where the author has written the classic “there” instead of “their” for example. At that point, and in spite of perhaps finding the content useful, I will usually stop reading and discount the authority of the author. I will emit a silent tut tut and move on to the next item.
For me this is an automatic response to poor spelling and I don’t easily defend it. However it requires an act of will on my part not to let it interfere with a balanced view of the message the writer is actually trying to deliver. I worked for many years in the corporate world and remember several examples of memos and emails sent by senior managers that were effectively neutralised in their intended effectiveness by having embedded howlers. I used to wonder who of the managers many underlings would be brave enough to point them out.
It is also undeniable that poor spelling indicates neither low intelligence nor low competence. I can recall at least one individual I worked with who could scarcely compose a single paragraph without serious spelling mistakes but whose intellect far exceeded mine and most others around him. However in spite of these qualities, it is likely that he was, even in some small way, diminished by his weakness with the written word.
Perhaps we need to be more accepting of things like spelling errors when they come from ordinary bloggers, lest we extinguish voices that deserve to be heard. But astrophysisits? And from NASA? Surely not.
Asteroid Snooker: Maximum Break Required April 24, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: apophis, asteroid impact, asteroids, snooker
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There are times when my fevered thought processes give rise to ideas I really don’t welcome. One such, and there are many others, is the 2am, unable to sleep notion that perhaps there is a large asteroid-like object out there somewhere making it’s way slowly but inexorably towards us. My understanding of the topic is that although, at the moment, no dangerous objects have been detected, it is still possible that an undetected one might just turn up and turn an otherwise nice day into a bit of an extinction level event.
Of the ones that are known, concern arose over the near Earth asteroid Apophis which, at first examination, appeared to have a relatively high risk of impact with us in 2029. However subsequent investigation has revealed that the risk is actually very low. The resultant collective sigh of relief was believed to have measured 3.2 on the Richter scale.
In the event that there is sufficient warning of an impending collision then there are various prevention scenarios which could be considered. The often discussed suggestion of blowing up the object with a nuclear device is usually dismissed due to the possibility that all this would do is transform one large object into many smaller, and only slightly less dangerous, ones.
However a new proposal from a scientist at the University of Glasgow is altogether more civilised it seems to me. Rather than attempting to blow an approaching object to pieces this proposal suggests using a nuclear explosion to “nudge” it from it’s trajectory. This could be described as deflection rather than destruction and is to be welcomed as being the thinking man’s approach to preventing physical contact between any Earth bound asteroid and the Earth itself.
The only misgiving I have about this deflection technique is that the object lives on to threaten us again. Unless of course the snooker-like nudge is so subtle that the object can be “potted” into a large, accommodating and terminally consuming planet: Jupiter for example.
I wonder if NASA would like Steve Davis’s phone number.
Twitter Education: Device Of Mass Distraction March 26, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Uncategorized.Tags: blogging, education, history, schools, twitter
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A new draft curriculum for UK primary schools proposes that children should no longer be taught about certain historical topics such as the Second World War or the British Empire. Instead it proposes that more focus should be placed on internet studies such as Twitter, Wikipedia and blogging.
Three things occur to me about this. Firstly, it is yet another example of the use of technology as a distraction device. Technology used as a means to create a diversion and to switch attention away from real underlying problems. It’s government saying ‘Pay no attention to that problem over there. We have a lovely, bright, shiny new thing here for you to play with’.
Secondly, does anyone really think that children will need to be taught how to use Twitter? Did they really need to be taught how to use mobile phones or to send text messages? New social media technologies are self propelling and will become more important as time goes on. We couldn’t stop children getting involved with them even if we wanted to.
Thirdly, and most importantly, events such as World War Two and historical figures such as Churchill and Hitler are important for children to know about and to understand. These events help to put our country and our society in context and to help us appreciate who we are today in the light of who we were yesterday.
So, please, save the techno toys for play time, after the real school work of learning has been done.
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