For those in peril ...
I have a semi-allergic reaction to sounds bites that appear to lack thought before propagation. Its a part of my general complaint about modern politics. It used to be the case the politicians had to be able to hold an audience for a substantial period of time and deal with hecklers. Now they carefully craft the soundbite, avoid exposure and questioning. So as in politics so in the world of consultancy and I afraid the allergy clicked in when I picked up this tweet from Jurgen Appelo. He said Nobody _is_ a professional. But any person at any time can choose to behave like one. I responded The implication being that one should choose one's Doctor on behaviour rather than qualification. I'm afraid that upset Jurgen a little and I was accused of unsubstantiated criticism.
No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.
I've always argued that that Margaret Attwood's
Today I met up with our current guest blogger Iwan Jenkins at the
We passed the half way mark today on our journey from the source to the mouth of the Thames. We won't know the exact half way point until we complete as there are northern and southerly options within London itself that effect the overall length. However somewhere between Pangbourne and Shiplake we reached that milestone - I set it at Tilehurst to give us a notional transition point. I must admit to some annoyance with the intransigence of local landowners which have resulted in several on-road diversions from the River itself. The first of these before Lechlade is the most irritating in part because it is a dangerous and lengthy road diversion but in the main because it misses that point where the Thames moves from a stream to a river. We had another today on the approach to Tilehurst where a glorious bend in the river has to be missed for want of a bridge over a Marina exit.
It's not often that I agree with Richard Dawkins, but his article in today's New Statesman on "reasonable doubt" is interesting. He speculates that in a two jury system you would not get a coincidence of verdict and that in consequence the assumption of "beyond reasonable doubt" cannot be sustained in consequence. Now running a two jury experiment over a series of trials and seeing what happens would be an interesting experiment. He suggests that running a parallel experiment with two judges might produce a better correlation. The experiment would be interesting and there is good reason to apply scientific method in social systems when we can.
Around two decades ago I was arguing that object orientation was not just a way of creating reusable code, but was a more profound shift to enabling architectures that could combine people and technology in evolving systems. The first part was generally accepted, the second more controversial. I then seemed, in the words of Mark 1:3 to be The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Mind you I have been there a few times before and plan frequent visits in the future. Around a decade later having left IBM I sketched out a text based object description of what was to become our contribution to the Singapore RAHS system and which in turn gave birth to SenseMaker®. Basically we build a demo system post IBM, created v2.0 around the RAHS system and then sat down and decided to start again from scratch and build SenseMaker® 3.0 as an architecture, based on how we thought things should be, rather than as constrained by the expediencies of a client delivery.
I have always rated Yiannis Gabriel's writing and the various conversations I have had with him over the years. Of the major academics involving in narrative I think he has the surest touch in understanding the essential subtleties of the field.
I've spent most of the day sat at a computer, aside from a bath, brunch and the final episode of Sherlock on BB1. I've handled multiple tweets including some fairly childish allegations (see tweets from me to @tetradian if interested) which involved
After sitting in front of a computer for the best part of twelve hours a day for over a week it was a real pleasure to get out for the latest section of the Thames walk today. We had made it to Benson Lock on the last section and were prevented from making our target of Wallingford by the closure of the lock. Given a long road diversion was in place we had decided to start from Wallingford next time and fill in the gap. Over the week before my obsessive nature got to me and I ended up getting up very early, leaving the car at Tilehurst station and then using a combination of train and bus to get me to Wallingford bef sunrise. A torch assisted walk got me out to Benson Lock as the sun came up and I met the rest of the party in Wallingford some time later. I simply couldn't cope with leaving a gap in what is meant to be a continuous walk, and I even walked upstream of the lock to the old ferry landing point to compensate for not being able to walk across the lock itself. The
I realised today that an awful lot of the best (or at least the classic) literature (which is not the same thing as stories) comes from the Edwardian period. Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Just William, The Jungle Book, The Hobbit and many others. Of course this may just be my age but I think they win out on the quality of the English and the degree to which they depend in imagination. None of the books I have mentioned compromises on vocabulary, and certainly as I child I remember learning the meaning of words such as sinuous from their context use in Wind in the Willows.
A few days ago I posted on
It's not often a month goes by without one Gaping Void's cartoons providing cause for thought. This one came in before Christmas and i have been meaning to use it in a post for some time. Like all good cartoons it takes a bit of time to unpick but I think there are some key lessons and questions that come out of it.
In between my own backlog of work and dispatching son back to the University of Warwick I have been listening and occasionally contributed to discussion around my daughter's two final year essays for her Anthropology Course. One of those is on the power of the container that is the Coca-Cola bottle. I'm learning through the process - for the first year and a half my own reading over decades kept me ahead of her but I am now falling behind! The subject is all about how objects mediate messages across space and time between people who are not co-present.
The title of this post is drawn from the tenth novel, and the first of the fourth movement of Anthony Powell masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time. Its the one with Erridge's funeral and Pamela Widerpool's disposal of Trapnel's manuscript in the canal. It's use by Powell references a quote from Lindsay Bagshaw and was a satire on various journalists of the time.
For over a year now I have been playing with differ ways of representing the complex domain of Cynefin. As a result of that process I have been growing in my conviction that we framework for complexity and its three boundaries (to chaos, to complicated and to disorder) is key to working through intervention models beyond the generic safe-to-fail probe approach. I've got a whole moleskin notebook full of sketches on this and its still got a long way to go.