Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Here are three shots from beyond my narrow field of view.
Think of these as if changing channel at news time or perhaps reading a different newspaper. The media you consume is as biased as the way you perceive it. Most such filters are subconscious else you’d call it propaganda.
‘Gaps are what you make of them.’
That’s how I concluded what I wrote about gaps a few days ago (Posts and Gaps). And gaps as lacunae have been on my mind ever since. One space holds a story a colleague told me a few years after he retired. It’s a topic that didn’t come up at his funeral though it passed though my mind on the way to the service.
‘I see there’s a gap in your CV’ is what he said to a very strong candidate during an interview for a senior management position.
Dear Reader,
I thought I’d let you know how I perceive our planet is doing this Earthday. I can only see a few things from where I sit and while there is much to celebrate, there seem to be some incongruities. I thought a couple worth mentioning.
I looked up and out to see a rainbow. The merest hint of a fleeting rainbow dragged a memory of red from deep within me. The memory was of an essay that Arthur C. Clarke wrote. The Light of Common Day was published in 1963 and he made a point that fascinated me when I read the essay many years later as an adult.
We were living in Texas when James Burke’s The Day The Universe Changed was first broadcast. The Cold War was still a thing and truth was one of the biggest casualties. Some would say that the Cold War was a modern form of the Dark Ages. That’s useful to consider since the Dark Ages in western, Christian cultures were not quite so dark elsewhere else on the planet.
I had an epiphany of sorts in the first year of my career. In fact, I had quite a few revelations as I learned what wasn’t taught in three levels of education. In my first office job, I was being taught practical things by Dalziel, a phonetically correct abbreviation for a very tolerant teacher. I asked how to calculate the length of a geophysical profile and his answer was to ‘count the posts not the gaps’. A few days later, I asked him to explain what ‘mistie’ meant. I pronounced it misty. He laughed and said ‘put a metaphorical hyphen in it’. I was learning about seismic recording techniques from a man who did the Daily Telegraph crossword in twenty or thirty minutes every day while enjoying a pint (or two) of plain and a toasted cheese sandwich (or two) in a Dublin pub. In the realms of onshore geophysics, the listening devices are arrays of geophones, centred on ‘stations’. A billable length, like a fence, is the distance between two stations or posts. Sometimes, for reasons due the geometry of echoes from sloping subsurfaces, two readings might mistie due group azimuth or line bearing.
