One of the things that being a parent has shown me is how disconnected my thinking can be. As a parent of 2 I have an utter disconnection between my expectation of their behaviour and relationship, and my entire experience to date of siblings (mine own and others).
So, when No. 1 came along, he’s very much his own person, but with elements of me and A. clearly visible. No. 2 comes along, he’s also his own person, with elements of me and A. clearly visible, but is completely different from No. 1. I don’t know why I was/am surprised by this. I am very different from both my sisters, who in turn are very different from one another. My wife is very different from her sister. All my friends at school are different from their siblings. All my friends’ kids are different from one another. My many Aunts and Uncles on my Dad’s side are all completely different. Sure there is a strong familial resemblance. You wouldn’t question that No 1 and No 2 are brothers, yet they are so different. I’m surprised that it surprises me, but it does. Somehow I expected someone – especially of the same gender – born of the same stock to be the same.
But it hasn’t stopped there. I also expect them to be able to get along and play nicely (like A. and I do). Where does this expectation come from? I can’t imagine anyone I know of that age playing voluntarily with their sibling, expect perhaps a specific card or board game. When I was that age, friend’s brothers or sisters were largely to be ignored. If I think of No 1’s school friends, there is no example of any I can imagine playing with their sibling. I think I imagined that brothers would automatically be friends somewhere, but I have no idea where this notion came from.
I rub along well enough with my sisters now, but when I was growing up given the choice between doing almost any other activity or spending time with them, I know which I chose! When I was with them, I seem to recall being extremely annoying to them. Mind you, that hasn’t changed.
The one exception to this rule, at least when I was at school (and a teenager!!), was my friends with younger sisters. These magical captivating creatures were usually far more fun to be with then their boring older brothers!
I’ve been thinking about the assertion that everybody has 15 minutes of Fame.
I’m sure this isn’t true, but it’s actually quite hard to disprove. If you find a counter-example, then they automatically become famous for not being famous – a bit like a googlewhack.
I wondered if you could get anywhere mathematically? We know the world has approximately 7 billion people – let’s assume that this is static for now.
This means for you need 7,000,000,000 x 0.25 fame hours, or 1,750 million fame hours, or 199,772 fame years for everyone to be famous for 15 minutes. However, the average life expectency is only about 70 years.
So if fame is exclusive, only 1 in 2,854 people will get their 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime, disproving the assertion.
On the other hand, if fame is non-exclusive, that means 2,854 people need to famous concurrently every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, to satisfy the fame requirements of the current population. Or, over a given 24 hour period 274,000 people would need to be famous.
Clearly universal global fame is out straight away – 2,854 people is a lot. To list the names of the famous people on a given day would require around half a million words, or 5 normal length novels’ worth. In newspaper speak, perhaps 17,000 column inches, or 700 pages, and that’s without any sort of indication abut why they’re famous. And that’s each and every day, just to cover the current population of the planet.
So, let’s assume that fame is regional, but still exclusive (i.e. only one person can be famous at once). Let’s say that for me to qualify as famous, everyone else in my town needs to know my name for those 15 minutes. There’s about 160,000 of us in Harrogate, so this suddenly seems a bit more manageable now! If we assume each of those 160,000 people will be famous for 15 minutes, and let’s limit it to waking hours (10 hours a day), we now only need 4,000 fame-days for everyone to have their 15 minutes, or a little over 10 years. Clearly we can relax down to having 1 famous person per 7×15-minute slots to meet the life expectency figure.
If we go back to our non-exclusive example – we require 2,854 have to be famous concurrently every 15 minutes, and this seems reasonable at a global scale. There are something like 200 countries in the world, so that’s a mere 14 or so famous people per country per 15 minutes. It’s still a fairly unmanageable 336 people per day though – so we need to break it down a bit more.
Let’s take cities with more than 500,000 people, of which there are ~1,00 globally. That’s only 3 people every 15 minutes! Go down to cities of 150,000 people (i.e. about 3,000 globally), and we now need less than 1 person to be famous in a given city at any one time to meet the ascertion. Of course, we still need someone to be famous each and every 15 minutes. But also bear in mind that by limiting ourselves to cities, we’ve accounted for less than half the world’s population as consumers of fame.
So, yes, it is entirely possible for every person on the planet to be exclusively famous for 15 minutes in their lifetime, as long as they only need to be famous to people in the nearest city!
So I’m off to Amsterdam tomorrow, for a work meeting all day Thursday. I’ve been acting cool about it at work, but I’m actually as giddy as a kitten. I’ve been to Schipol a few times in transit, although the last time I was there it wasn’t in transit when it should have been, but that was my Boston adventure back in 2006/7. I’m not particularly giddy about the meeting, but I love travelling and flying, and don’t do it much these days.
The meaning itself is actually outside Amsterdam, pretty close to Delft / The Hague, but my geography of that part of the world is pretty poor.
Anyway, one result of an all day meeting is that my colleague and I have to go over the afternoon before, which means we should be able to jump on the train into the city itself for our evening meal. Last time I was there it was a cold drab January, so I’m hopeful that a sunny June evening will be a different story altogether.
I have a 1Tb partition on my hard disk that I’ve reserved for storing my photos and videos (such as they are). When I specced the drive out I thought “that’s loads of space – PC will need replacement before I run out of space.”
I’ve been noticing that I’m down to my last 100 Gb – and put it down to my increased numbers of photos. But at 5Mb a shot, that’s still a lot of photos, and I have started being more ruthless with my deletions, and avoided taking video off the camcorder, and even then storing it lossy compressed. It’s also meant I’ve not seriously thought about off-site backup of my photos, because the only way to do it would be an external drive of at least 1TB, and than that would be full almost before I started.
However, it’s been nagging away at me, particularly the thought that if we have a house fire, we could lose every photo we’ve taken over the last 10 years. We also have a fire-proof safe, and so I decided to bite the bullet and get some USB memory sticks as an emergency (sort of) off-site backup.
I went to work out how many I would need. Size of “Photos” folder – 50 Gb. H’mm smaller than I was expecting. Must be all the video files. Size of “Videos” folder – 50Gb. That’s weird. I also store backups of miscellaneous documents on this drive.. Size of “Backups” – 1Gb. Few other system folders kicking about, but they are all empty / 0Gb.
So, where has the other 800Gb gone?
Turns out that Windows backup has filled up almost the entire disk with backups – I turned off Windows backup some time ago as I go my own way (gotta love cygwin), nevertheless there was a whole collection of 20Gb files which were hidden from view at the root. I don’t mind system files being hidden (although it’s the first view option I switch off), but I do mind Windows storing 800Gb of data on my disk without me being able to determine where!
So anyway, only 64Gb memory stick will sort out my photos, and I can now suck across the video (in raw) from the camcorder.
There’s been a couple of quite interesting posts by Bishops recently on the changing nature of the clergy in the Church of England, and I wanted to bookmark the links, as it can be horrendous finding these things again!
I realised recently that I have more or less achieved my last list of photographic ambitions I set 2 years ago (Picture This), and I’ve added some new ones to it since then.
I don’t know that there’s any photos that I’m burning to take, but I do still have a few ideas I’d like to do. This is not a definitive list, but my thoughts are currently, in no particular order;
Coffee beans
Light spirals
Portrait
Good lighting
Selfies
Food
Macros
Street photography
Flash-freeze (drips / splashes again).
I think that’s enough to be going on with for now. The main barrier to any of these is just time – I even have a packet of coffee beans just waiting for the time and inspiration to hit.
In any case, my current projects is a broad bean plant we’ve got growing on the windowsill, which I’ve photographed every day since the first shoot, and I think this still probably has a few weeks life left it in as a daily project.
Went to see “Into Darkness” at the weekend. What an awesome film! I love what J.J. Abrams (and others) have done with this franchise, and the first outing was fabulous. At the time I commented about my appreciation of the fact there was no cheats way out of the paradox. Vulcan really was destroyed. Spock really was set adrift in time and ended up in a parallel timestream.
The casting is superb, and the action relentless. I have a few quibbles (would Kirk really be the only person to think that all the senior starfleet officers would be gathered in one room?), but in general it was very easy to suspend disbelief and get drawn into the action.
My favourite thing about the film is probably the parallel storyline to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It’s not really a secret that the chief antagonist is Khan, and I don’t think it really spoils the film to know this in advance. But this film ends up being almost the same film as “Wrath”, but with several crucial differences and switched roles. You could see it all coming a mile off, but it didn’t spoil the enjoyment all.
One of the positive aspects for me is the respect with which the original series is treated. You recognise the characters and their characteristics, while they still manage to be fresh and new. And the trekkie in jokes are there too, as is the humour.
The special effects are also spot-on, and Sci-Fi in general is a genre that particularly benefits from special effects. I saw it in 3D – mainly because of the times of the showing – and it’s just nicely done. Not in your face, but generally more immersive.
Summary – fantastic film. Go see. (but see the first one first)
Four and a half months into 2013, and I thought now was a good time to take stock.
Continue climbing regularly, 10 times over the year, and improve by a grade (to 6b+, think)
– Pretty good so far, 4 times this year. The significant thing here is that I’ve learnt how to lead climb! I also have a fingerboard to attempt some training.
Take a photo got every day
– Yup.
Go to the cinema
– Not yet, but holding out for the new Star Trek in the next week or two…
Go camping
– Not yet – probably summer holidays.
Cook something I’ve never cooked before
– Yup – Jamie’s Lamb pot-roast. I’m still holding out for something a bit more dramatic though.
Go to Spring Harvest (yay)
– Yes indeed – fantastic time.
Maintain weight at around 72kg
– Moving swiftly on.
Pray and read the bible every day
– More or less.
Put my boys to bed every evening
– Pretty much.
Complete a Times crossword (electronic aids allowed)
– YES! I can no normally finish them, giving long enough.
Continue blogging and twitter-ing (20 blog posts)
– Not so good. Blogging definitely down.
Take C# and HTML5 MS exams (towards the new MCSD qualification)
– HTML5 qualification in the bag. C# hopefully in a few months.
All in all not a bad stab so far. Could do with blogging a bit more, and losing some weight, but otherwise pretty much on target.
Wow – not blogged for ever. Been so busy recently, and I think my all out assault on the Times Crossword has sucked up more of my time than I realised it had.
Anyway, about to go to bed, so no time for a long one, but I wanted to at least put down a couple of markers.
First of all, a Twitterless Lent. It wasn’t actually too hard, in the end, although I had removed the shortcuts off my mobile devices, which I’m sure helped. The interesting thing was how out I touch I felt with what was “Going On”. I discovered I was finding out the news a day later by reading the paper at work. It was very strange to come into work and see the headline “Pope Francis”, when I’d expected the conclave to last for days.
The weather also caught me out – I was surprised when it snowed, which hasn’t happened for a long time.
On the other hand, being back on Twitter at Spring Harvest was great. The hashtag #sh2013 was the “official” one for tweets, and while the Minehead Jonny-Come-Lately’s kept interrupting, it was an extra dimension to see people’s comments on the same talk you’d been in, or even just the weather. It was a connection between the cyber world and the real world, and Twitter often feels pretty disconnected.
Ah yes, Spring Harvest. Just back from an awesome 5 days or so in Skegness (photos on my 365). All about Jesus as the Source, and how we can “Be”, “Say”, and “Do” the Good News. The main thing the week did for me wass remind me that actually I’m all about Jesus, and advancing his Kingdom – everything else is secondary. I’ve been reading various bits and pieces about mission recently, and this week really helped focus my thinking and bring it all together. I honestly believe (if I was a preacher!), that I could preach for the next 12 months on the material we covered this week, and still not get through it all.
Ness Wilson (the main speaker at the morning bible readings) was fantastic, and I could have listened to her for hours. She really brought 1 John alive, and gave us plenty of food for thought. The “Think” Seminars were spot on, with even more food for thought, and significant challenges, as well as some relaly good ideas (which I intend to pinch for this year’s Growing Leaders).
Add every afternoon at Splash Waterworld, and you’re pretty much onto a winner.
I cannot recommend Spring Harvest highly enough, in case you hadn’t already guessed. I will probably unpack my thoughts a bit further in due course.
I think No. 2 son has his first bad dream last night (at least the first that we were able to discern).
He awoke in tears, crying out “the saucepans have gone, the saucepans have gone.”
Given he doesn’t (typically) go to bed with saucepans, or indeed have them in his room, I can only conclude that he was having a culinary dream that went horribly wrong!!
