Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

Archives for July 2020

Saturday Pencil Blues

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Saturday started badly. I had a bad night’s sleep and then the TV locked up before we could watch the breakfast news. I was already grumpy and my coffee mood boost was still in the cup when there came a glitch that became a technology challenge.

I should explain that we have a streaming service that provides our ‘terrestrial’ TV. It’s a service that comes bundled with our broadband via a DSL router and a set-top box. We’d surrendered a satellite service once we lost sight of the satellites beyond the growth of neighbouring trees. Copper wire transmission was all that was available as replacement. Indeed, our road is only now being upgraded with suitable fibre-optic connections.

I was watching a small holding farmer tend to a flock on our willow tree …
… this day six years ago.
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Three Links

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Burglar: a story involving sleep where we used to sleep.

Methane: an article about a hidden threat.

DNA: a disease mitigation hint from genetics.

Each of these links that came via my email in the last 24 hours. I thank my suppliers for the food for thought and absolve them from blame for my derivative musings.

The iPhone found Six Optimists Becalmed and Betowed in Scotsman’s Bay
while the optimist in me hopes for similarly good outcomes.
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Laden Bin

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I know there are people out there who think that calling something a ‘first world’ problem is elitist. The real ethical dilemmas are often the reverse of the correction. Does a quota system that manages for inequality discriminate against those that formerly had the upper hand? Does labelling for first or third reinforce the stereotypes? Probably but what other language do we have?

Another Strange Gift – from my 2017 blog post Loops
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Radio Condor Skiing

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Three words to start today. Skiing came to mind when I was listening to a discussion about the Andean Condor on the car radio the other day. The enthusiastic recommendation was to go see a Condor on your travels. The reason the Condor was being discussed was the recent publication of studies based on GPS tracking plus a motion sensor that counted the bird’s wing strokes. There’s a science alert you can read on this subject if you want more. Meantime, for me, the most interesting part is not that a condor flew for more than five hours without beating its wings once. Sure, it flew over 170 kilometres using nothing but air currents. I’m pretty sure this has been happening for millions of years. What I want to know if it ‘sees’ the thermals or relies on something else entirely?

Albatrosses fly huge distance too. Same kind of problem. Dovetail this with how both species manage to stay aloft and you have an interesting chance to find something new. New ways of seeing our world perhaps?

Volcanoes of food sustained my writing today.
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Where are all the Curies?

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In a normal world, there are people who study deviations beyond the standard. There’s a conventional heuristic (rule of thumb) that our most significant interests fall within three standard deviations from the meanest of any measure.

I journaled here of a corporate presentation I titled ‘To 3σ and Beyond’. That, together with the opening paragraph today, are (bad) statistics-based jokes intended to refer to new learnings that may lurk within less than 6.7% of a range of products or data.

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