Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
We watched Leinster Rugby host Ospreys for a very rare home loss. We can’t go to home games due to the pandemic and so we watched on TV. There was a degree of horror for home supporters as Ospreys scored 21 points in the last twelve minutes to win by 24 point to 19. Leinster had the game in the bag from half time but did nothing to consolidate their 19-3 advantage.
I was much taken as a teenager by Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead. I was at an age of searching for the self I might become by finding what I couldn’t see of myself in the words of others. And Howard Roark came into my life at that nexus. I thought I wanted to be able to say that ‘I recognise no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.’
‘When British mathematician Clive Humby said ‘Data is the new oil‘ back in 2006, he meant that data, like oil, must be refined and transformed to make it into useful products and services.’
Tim O’Reilly quoted this to open his recent article Data Is the New Sand for The Information. He concluded that data isn’t oil, it’s more like sand.
And that got me thinking, as I suspect O’Reilly wanted: his very first line was that ‘The metaphors we use are like a map. They can guide us or lead us astray.’
Green exists between blue and yellow on the rainbow. It’s odd think that the rainbow might be a few kilometres away but the green is only a colour of the light with a 495–570 nanometre wavelength. It isn’t possible to be sure how far away a rainbow might be because it really only exists in your head. The rainbow is dimensionless, having no weight, size or physical manifestation. Your eye is what receives the rays of light refracted by the millions of droplets of water as they fall from the sky. Transience amplified. But the green is real.
I was sent home by the police recently. I was stopped at a road block and in truth, I couldn’t justify my travel as essential. I explained that I was less than 5 km from home and that I was headed for a walk in order to take photographs of trees for an upcoming book. ‘That’s hardly essential work’ he said while his colleague was clearly issuing a fine to the driver ahead of me.
‘I’ll go home then’
The Dissident is a movie that you should see. We watched it in the Virgin Media DIFF (Dublin International Film Festival) which was streamed to our living room. You may be able to catch it online from Prime from April 1st.
