Taking comfort where I find it

One of the things which regularly helps to restore my faith in human nature, after it has taken a kicking: the way even the most aggressive and selfish car driver usually pulls over immediately to make way for an ambulance or fire appliance running blues and twos.

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 Continued, three days later...

Ray Girvan's comment to this post seemed important enough to justify promotion into the body of this post – especially as I've been thinking about it seriously since he left it.

“Well, maybe. My feeling is that the selfish and aggressive are very quick to obey when it comes to overt appearance of authority, such as fire / police / ambulance. That evaporates when no such authority is in sight - and that's the true test of positive human qualities: when you're not being watched.”

I have to say that I agree with most of that – especially the last bit. 

The submission to visible authority factor was, in fact, the reason that I referred to “an ambulance or fire appliance” and left out police vehicles which are indisputably symbols of coercive authority. I'm not convinced that most aggressive/selfish drivers would be cowed by ambulance or fire appliance.

But ... it may well be, I concede, that the selfish and aggressive driver who pulls over may be responding at a gut level. The sound of a siren and the flashing of blue lights in her/his mirror, may well be readi instinctively as potential police signals before conscious identification.

It could well be that how one weighs this depends on one's exact location (at any given moment) on the cynical/credulous spectrum.

Being a fundamentally optimistic (or credulous) soul I cling to memory of an incident on a bus, some years ago. The passengers on the bus ranged from elderly pink rinsed matriarchs through young mothers to two known low level drug dealing thugs who would happily have broken my legs if I'd looked at them the wrong way.

On a fairly narrow estate road, where he could easily have pulled over but passing was impossible otherwise, the driver (an exception to my observation) steadfastly held his position on the road and blocked an braying ambulance for about wo hundred metres. Without exception, the reaction of all the passengers was outrage: the driver was subjected to a barrage of entreaties and abuse aimed at getting  him to pull over and clear the road.

Perhaps, again, though, finer feelings are not the most likely reason for this. Perhaps, rather, each passenger selfishly imagined her/himself, at some future time, in that ambulance. Perhaps that, too, applies to car drivers. When it comes down to it, all I have in support of my original warm glow is the fact that I prefer to be warmed by one interpretation rather than chilled by the other. As a scientist, I have to confess that Ray's view of things has the balance of probabilities more on its side.

Good grief, Charlie Brown...

Wanting to check the spelling of Ephraim Mirvis' surname, I did an online search for "new chief rabbi".

The first entry in the resulting hit list was...

A line dotted with shimmering pebbles

Julie Heyward's blog, Unreal nature, has comments turned off at the moment* so there is no way for me to express, in situ, my delight at the following metaphor for an individual life:

"...a line dotted with shimmering pebbles..."

It is taken from Multiple Arts by Jean-Luc Nancy (2006); you can find Ms Heyward's full extract here

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*I confess that my own inclination is often to switch comments off, too. Most feedback comes by email. I was persuaded by Ray Girvan of the importance of comments to transparency, early on, but have never really warmed to them...

Sam-sung blue...

A somewhat disgruntling day.

The Samsung Note 10.1 tablet which has become one essential keystone of my persional ICT ecology (if I may mix metaphors) has never had any security on its startup screen. The whole point of it is instant access; switch on and swipe the screen, or just pull out the stylus, and hey presto I'm working. Content is all on the cloud, not the device, and anything confidential is password encrypted anyway. If I lose the tablet itself, or if it is stolen, I lose no data security.

This morning, in an idle moment, whilst adjusting another setting entirely, I suddenly decided to explore the startup security options which I have never used.

First I tried pattern locking. Select one of over 4500 ways to connect dots in a grid; give a four digit PIN as a back up access method; repeat same pattern to unlock. This worked well. Having tried it out, I switched it off again.

Next was signature recognition; I was asked to sign on the screen three times, so that the machine could store a generalised version. I switched off, then on again, and tried to get in by signing the lock screen. No dice: however many times I tried, it wouldn't recognise my scrawl. Ah, well, no matter ... after five failed attempts, I just entered the four digit pin and got in that way, then removed the signature lock.

Finally, what should be simplest and most secure option: password locking.

Since this was only an idle experiment, I entered a simple, impossible to forget sequence of letters ("abcdefgh"), wrote it down on a slip of paper to be sure, confirmed it when requested, exited settings, and switched off. Switched back on again, entered my sequence. And ... it was rejected.

After five abortive tries, I thought I would be offered the PIN option ... but no. I was made to wait thirty seconds before trying another five times with equal lack of success.

On my twenty seventh try the same sequence was, suddenly, accepted and I was in. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I went straight to settings to remove the password locking option ... but, to do so, I had to first reënter the password which was again rejected repeatedly.

Finally (to cut a long, tedious and tearstained story short) I was forced to hard reset the tablet. That lost me all data ... nothing irreplaceable, but it meant spending the rest of today reinstalling applications, altering settings, and generally recreating a working environment evolved over the last year or so.

All's well that ends well ... but this is, nevertheless, my first black mark against Samsung and I shall never again play with a setting I don't need.

New kid on the blog

Just a quick alert ("be alert – the world needs more lerts!") for a new addition to my "Other voices" blog roll on the left.

Kate Raynes is a seriously interesting and impressive person ... I've referred to her before in The Growlery ... though under another name (this one is her arts persona), so you'll not have a lot of luck finding her ... you'll just have to take my word for it, and keep an eye on her blog, instead:

http://www.kateraynes.com/blog.html

Of clouds and silver linings

I've resisted writing about feeling ill, other than briefly mentioning it as a reason for not writing.

Partly this is because me being ill just isn't interesting. More important, it seems criminally self indulgent to whinge about something which is, in objective terms, trivial – a purely temporary state of inconvenience, from which my path is inevitably upward – when there are so many people for whom it is not.

On the other hand, as time and a half goes by and the result is that I write nothing at all for weeks on end, it begins to seem slightly ridiculous to keep on tiptoeing around the elephant in my room. So, I was pleased today to find my mind running a train of thought which offered a way of turning the elephant into a jumping off point for something positive.

I have always been grateful for my unusually strong constitution and resilient immune system; but I have taken it for granted, too. When flu hit, I always planned on bouncing back to normal (or something close to it) within two or three days at the very most. After three weeks of virus driven fugue from which I can remember only short flashes, followed by another three weeks of extremely slow recovery which is still far from complete, that has changed. And that change is the silver lining.

I know an elderly man, Mr O, who takes twenty minutes to walk the hundred metres to his nearest bus stop. I have, in the past, been full of admiration for his grit, determination and unceasingly indomitable cheerfulness as he insists on catching three buses to the venue where his chosen sport is played, and three buses home again (a total travel time of nearly five hours, including sections which he must walk, for the round trip), sometimes several times in a week. But, while admiring him, I have never put myself in his shoes.

Now, as I carefully husband depleted energy reserves, my usual six or seven kilometres per hour cut to something more like two or three, I find myself thinking what it must be like to do have this as a permanent state. I am fortunate to be able to dismiss my crawl down the road as something which will be gone in a month or so; what would it be like if I had to see it as the future? I see Mr O in a new light; as well as admiring him (which is an easy and cheap response), then thinking of something else, I find myself understanding, at least a little, what it really is that I am admiring.

And then there is Andy, who can't walk anywhere at all, pinned down by emphysema which makes my cough seem an embarrassing affectation.

I have never been one of those who scoff at CFS/ME sufferers, dismissing their condition as “yuppy flu”. But nor, to be honest, have I thought more than briefly about what it is that they endure for years on end – even in a couple of people I knew well, and one close friend. Now, as I sit or lie still for a day recovering from three or four in which I perhaps overexerted myself. I think of how it would be if every day were like this one.

By the time summer begins, I shall be back to my usual active, busy, rock hopping, mind buzzing, distance eating lifestyle; this very small grey cloud dispersed and left behind. I very much hope that i won't have forgotten its silver lining: a replacement of gratitude for my good fortune by genuine understanding of how very fortunate it really is.

Work

“He did not work for money, anyway; his work was a way of thinking, a way of life.”*

I just ran across the above sentence in one of my "timeslips" rereadings, and felt the delight of something perfect.
Of course one needs to be paid, in order to live; but living is the point.

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• Philip Halvorsen, fictional character, in: Theodore Sturgeon, The [widget] the [wadget] and Boff,1955, Garden City NY: Doubleday.

A nice thing...

...about a day in the University of Westminster is a lunch hour in The Photographers' Gallery.

Dr C rising

This probably sounds a bit strange, coming from me who hasn't written anything at all for nearly three weeks, but … I'd just like to draw everyone's attention to the welcome resurgence of Dr C who has (after an overworked period taking care of his community in Maryland) made three posts in four days.

Two of those posts are very substantial ones, too, returning to the Doc's long term themes.

• What can one say?
  Visits nuclear weapons, global warming, consumerism, and political process.
• Oh those Bartonella!
  From the first world war trenches to cat scratch fever, courtesy of a microscopic guide.

But don't, in going to those, miss the shorter and lighter piece, Chinese cowboy.

Going down...

At Paddington station, the down escalator for the underground is out of action. People are packed onto it, jostling between its narrow side walls, tripping over each other as they bump their luggage down its cramped metal steps.

I am the only person on any of the three wide, spacious conventional stone stairways beside it.

People are funny, in some ways.

In a better world...

...a very large man in a dark business suit on the cross town bus would not have sat on my banana.

From the expression on his face, I'm sure that he thinks so too.

Enigma

“The two men disliked each other but only one of them knew this and he was the one to whom it didn't matter.”

(P D James, An unsuitable job for a woman. 1972, London: Faber and Faber.)

Attention to detail

We have had a week of extremely unseasonable warm, sunny weather, with daytime temperatures more typical of August than March, and in the last lecture of the year everyone is in summer clothes. Teeshirts and shorts are everywhere

Students behave differently in lectures. Some listen intently, never taking their eyes off me. Others talk amongst themselves in whispers which seem to have no obvious connection to what I may have to say. There are those who go to sleep, usually waking with uncanny accuracy as the lecture ends but occasionally dozing on in an empty auditorium until the premises staff come to lock up. Some hover intensely over notepads, never looking up, their pens scribbling and highlighting furiously.

Saoirse, today, is making different use of her ballpoint pen. Over the course of the lecture, in a process which has the sort of bizarre fascination which is impossible to ignore (both for the students immediately around her and from the lectern) she draws with the same total attention as the note takers; not on a pad, however, but on her limbs. By the time she leaves the room she has decorated her arms from clavicle to fingertips, and her legs from the hem of her shorts to her toes, with an intricate and exquisitely executed William Morris style ink tapestry of plants and birds.

You have to admire such dedication to an ephemeral enterprise, which can't last more than a few hours. Imagine what might be achieved if the same focused dedication were applied to her degree.

Do I trust myself?

A pet hate about Windows 7: the frequency with which it tells me that I don't have the necessary privileges to view one of my own documents and then invites me to give myself those access privileges before continuing...

Bizarre.

Easy does it

Having recently had a big crash, I've been gradually reinstalling programs as I need them. The day before yesterday, it was Easy Thumbnails from Fookes Software.

Which had me thinking that we really ought (or, at least, I really ought) to more often give public credit to those utilities which other people freely provide to make my life easier.

Easy Thumbnails is, for me, about far more than thumbnail images: it's an essential part of my life. When I reinstalled it the day before yesterday, for instance, I was preparing a slide show. I wanted to reduce several dozen images to a maximum of 1024 pixels wide or 768 high, whichever was smaller, to match the resolution of the digital projector in use. I could, of course, do it easily enough in a paint package ... but Easy Thumbnails does the whole lot for me, without fuss, after six mouse clicks, while I get on with something else.

There are other utilities which perform equally valuable service ... I must mention them, in time ... but today it's Easy Thumbnails' turn.

Of course, Fookes offer free utilities to attract you in to their (excellent) paid products ... but they don't make a big deal of it, and you are perfectly free to walk away with the freebies under no obligation.

So ... this, by way of belated (I've been using Easy Thumbnails for years) thank you, is a recognition of a wonderful and free essential utility which I unreservedly recommend.

Jus' browsin'

I don't know how it is in the wider world, but here in the Growleryverse there is a continuing trend for Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, to lose ground while Firefox gains it.

Forty three browsers are currently in use amongst my visitors, from Android and Blackberry to Wii and Yeti, with one person (I am delighted to see) still using Blazer on a Handspring device.

Five of those browsers clock in at more than one percent of usage, and their proportions are:

Firefox: 46%
IE: 33%
Safari: 11%
Chrome: 5.3%
Opera: 1.2%

I'm sorry to see Opera so low on the table ... it's a good browser which deserves to be more widely recognised.

Of the Safari users, the vast majority of visits are, unsurprisingly, by Macintoshes. Just under 1% are from an iPhone or similar Apple portable device. One and a half percent of them, however, are from Windows platforms and there is a lone Linux user running it as well.

Little things...

You learn something new every day.

Today I discovered that, when preparing a PowerPoint slide show and checking whether the transition between slides 83 and 84 works correctly, it's not necessary to click through the whole file frame by frame.

Press Ctrl-S in slide show mode (I did it accidentally, absent mindedly trying to save the file ... which is not possible without exiting slide show mode first) and up comes a "Go To" box where you can go straight to slide 83 and ... bingo.

Isn't life sweet, sometimes, when you suddenly realise that for years you have been doing something the hard way and no longer need do so?

Like banging your head against a wall, as they say.

Nice when it stops.

Where art, science and squeeze box meet

To how many natural scientists can you write at 6:45pm on a Sunday evening for advice on a point of critical theory, and get an almost instant yet perfectly formed reply despite the fact that they are “just off to an accordion gig”?

Ray Girvan: take a bow.

A wordle in your ear

These days, it seems, everyone who is anyone must have a Wordle (especially if they are to any extent involved in education) and some of my readers have been pointedly commenting on my lack of this essential accessory.

So, here is a wordle based on a recent atom feed from The Growlery (as always, click it you want to see a larger view).

Interestingly, "Ray" of JSB fame appears prominently but not "Girvan" ... the queen of Unreal Nature, on the other hand, reverses this with "Heyward" immediately spottable but not "Julie". why that should be, I've been too lazy to investigate ... Dr C (but without the "C") nestles between the "T" and the "o" of the word "Toss".

Update, 2012/01/29: Just to show what an exciting life I lead ... this is a Wordle compiled not from text but from the first ten thousand digits of π.

Tomorrow, the heady delights of the exponential function, e... [only joking]

A bestiary (1)

Olly the tawny owl was rescued by Karen, elder sister of my schoolfriend Dave when I was fourteen. Finding him unfledged and half dead on the road in daylight, she took him home and weaned him from milk to household scraps. By the time I met him, he was a young adult with an established place in the household.

Olly had, despite Karen's best educative efforts, never learnt to fly. The nearest he got to it was a frantic fluttering as he descended from his favourite perch atop the stairpost just inside the front door. Getting to this perch was a laborious matter of climbing first the stairs (gripping the carpet with claws and beak, falling back often), then an ottoman and the back of an upholstered chair on the landing. By this process he reached the top stairpost, from which a scrabbled slipsliding descent of the bannister led (barring frequent accidents) back down to the lower one. Watching this process, I understood how Robert the Bruce felt about his never-say-die spider. When Karen came into the house, Olly would fling himself off the post in a tumble of feathers. As long as she was at home, he would waddle about the house in faithful pursuit of her. When she left the house he started the long trek up the stairs and down the bannister, back to his perch.

Karen fed Olly on raw meat scraps. Since Olly had never learned how to stand on one claw and eat with the other, as owls are supposed to do, these scraps had to be placed at just below beak level; a modified shoe rack sat in the kitchen, for this purpose.

At some level, Olly knew that he was a bird. If Karen was in the downstairs living room during daylight hours he would scrabble his way up onto the window seat, then the sill. Through the window he watched the starlings pecking industriously at the lawn. On fine evenings the family took him out into the garden where he waddled about, taking the air and fluffing his wings. After a while, on these outings, he invariably stopped and examined the ground fixedly for several minutes. Then he tried to peck at it like a starling, fell on his face, couldn't get up, and had to be rescued.