Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
‘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.’
I can type because there are proteins that help me do it. The proteins in question enable my muscles to contract and slide over one another among other mundane tasks. They do the same for you and all of our proteins deserve enormous respect. And despite enormous research efforts, we don’t yet know enough about proteins.
We were sitting eating our lunch earlier today when there was a percussive thud from the the French door at the end of the table. A recently fledged Robin hadn’t seen the glass. No immediate or obvious harm, the little bird turned and flew back into the undergrowth. Sheepishly, it seemed to me. Perhaps such a stunning might temporarily cause an avian to adopt mammalian ungulate behaviour.
Texas was almost my first thought because of the memory of a Painted Bunting that crashed into the window of my office long ago in Sugar Land. Almost the same sound today resurrected a long parked memory.
Intro: I stumbled onto the notes for this post on a back-up disk. I’ve re-worked and expanded them today. The 15 year old grandson is now 19. He just built himself a new rig for gaming. A lesson in delayed gratification, it took months for all of the parts to be delivered in this era of pandemic.
Back in the 1980’s, I was involved in a group charged to implement three-dimensional seismic imaging technology for a service company. My qualification for membership in the team was the prior two years working in another seismic 3D start-up company, where innovation and determination became failure and frustration which manifested as constant corporate re-organisations.
