Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
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?
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?
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.
The moth is still on our window, clinging on in death.
It seems to me, somehow, that the dust of death is enough for one journal.
[Read more…] about The MothContinuing from last time, you’ll recall that we were in a desert dealing with a health and safety policy that mandated a full test of an emergency response plan within four weeks of setting up operations. We were in week four and about to create a cautionary tale of ill-considered independent action that rivals Hilaire Belloc’s lion-eaten Jim.
‘And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse’
Richard Brautigan once misled me back in 1974. I enjoyed Trout Fishing in America so much that I read everything he wrote. At one point, he wrote that he didn’t write. His mental blocks were such that he typed, stopped, scrunched up the paper and threw it into the wastebasket. There, in the basket, the words reassembled themselves into a story he never wrote. I put many words in a bag and despite nearly thirty years of incubation, nothing much has hatched.
