Communications

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Pigeon Check

This is a picture of the building where I predominantly work. You can see I have labelled certain parts of the building.

Over the last few years I have been here I have become aware that before I enter the building (through doors labelled A) I check the roof line (labelled B) for pigeons. This is because they poop over the edge of the building and I don’t want to get any of that on me. If I look at the floor underneath the eaves I can see a distribution of pigeon poop along the length of the building. If I spot pigeons directly above the doors I will adjust my approach to the building. In the picture the birds sitting quietly (labelled C) would not be considered a threat unless it was a windy day.

 

Pigeon Check
Pigeon Check

Don’t get me started on the seagulls on the other buildings!

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Just Wrong

Maps eh? This is the picture of a wall chart by Michelin (the French company but for their English cousins). It is a Van Der Grinten projection with changes made by Michelin. I’m not sure it’s ethical to change a map projection but they did.

This map makes Great Britain look the same size as France. The real multiplier is that France is 2.2 times the size of the UK, let alone GB.
Spain is really twice as big as Great Britain.
Although it’s not on this picture Kenya looks about the same size as GB but is in fact 2.4 times bigger.

What have Michelin done? They’ve made it appear that Great Britain is larger than it is really. Oh dear. Perhaps we should all watch the

Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail

episode of the West Wing. It will explain it all, I assure you.

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By the way, the last time I saw this episode of the West Wing was summer 2013 in Keswick while I was visiting penguin.

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Umbrella

In 1988 I went to the British Formula One Grand Prix with my sister and friends. We were four in total, Nick, Andy, Tracy and me. It was pretty exciting and one of the first “big days out” I had done as a teenager (I was 16).
I remember about five things about the day:

  • It rained
  • We watched from the Hangar Straight
  • Nigel Mansell came second
  • Andy and I bought an umbrella
  • We couldn’t hear the radio commentary because the cars were too loud
  • A car came to a stop right in front of us

Ok, wow, that’s six things about the day. I also want to say that we drove there in an Austin Allegro but I don’t think that is correct. I shall check and get back to you.

According the to Wikipedia page on this race it did rain, which is reassuring for my memory cells and Mansell did come second. It’s the umbrella I want to focus on.

As it rained so much Andy and I decided to buy an umbrella. We didn’t have enough money to each buy one so we put our funds together and bought a Marlboro McLaren umbrella from a stall. This umbrella served us well during the day and from then on we agreed we would share the umbrella between us as we both owned it.

I think this arrangement may have lasted about a year until I lost the umbrella. It’s something I feel a little bad about even to this day [when I remember to]. I had a strange canvassing job for Eissman who were trying to build a business of home delivered frozen food. A group of us would wander crappy (and some not-so-crappy) housing estates delivering the catalogue of frozen delights and then two days later we would ring every door bell and see if we could have the catalogue back, preferably with an order. It was commission only.

For this particular week I was getting a lift with the son of the vicar of Ugley in Essex. We were working in Letchworth in Hertfordshire. The weather must’ve been bad because I had the umbrella with me and then left it in his car when he dropped me off from another unsuccessful day at work. I’m pretty sure he quit and didn’t turn up again. As a job it was pretty bad, I lasted two weeks. What is more annoying is that I lost the umbrella which meant quite a bit to me.

I remembered this recently when I was teaching ratios to a class of mine. I told the story and then text Andy about it. He had forgotten what happened to the umbrella, but for me, I feel the loss nearly every day!

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Gravity

I went to see this film and was rather excited about it. When I go to the cinema I generally don’t watch the trailers. Most trailers seem to give too much away about the film and if you see them once then you don’t need to see them again. If it is a film of which I am already aware and am looking forward to then I won’t watch the trailer and I will continue to read my book (on the Kindle app). Occasionally there’s a trailer that makes me look up and Gravity was one like that. Firstly it’s in space and I like space stuff. Secondly it was directed by . This was enough to make me very excited. Since I first saw the trailer I have avoided seeing it advertised since, I don’t want to know any more about the film.

I was rather worried that my expectations for this film were going to be too high. I have seen a number of films where I have been overly looking forward to them and have ultimately been disappointed as the film didn’t live up to expectations.

I needn’t have worried.

The opening shot was awesome [literally]. The rest of the film was beautifully filmed. It looks just stunningly gorgeous. I even decided to see it in 3D and in the past this has tended to remove something from the film but this was really well done. I won’t write too much because the trailer is so minimal and I don’t want to give anything away up in this section. Basically, apart from some simple scientific issues, this film is absolutely brilliant. I’d even go see it again. I am happy with the scientific short-cuts, as the film would not have worked or flowed as well if it had been truly simulated.

Go see this film. I dare you to be disappointed.

SPOILER ALERT

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of errors I picked up on. You can’t get out of a space suit in about a minute. It takes about an hour to get the whole thing on so this was a little imperfect. When returning to Earth the astronauts have their backs to the ground, Bullock’s return was filmed in such a way as to imply she was heading face down, or facing the direction of motion. There’s more analysis over at Phil Plait’s blog pages at Slate.com

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Ender’s Game

Wow!

I have bought the book but will read it after seeing the film. I’m currently working my way through Ringworld by Larry Niven. Back to the film:

It was ace. I really enjoyed it. I didn’t know a great deal about it before I went. I’d had a small synopsis from a friend and so went with a complete open mind. I loved it. The visuals were really good and the story was rather excellent. Go and see it.

I’m trying desperately to not give anything away but for me there were two moments when my jaw hit the floor. I guess if you’ve read the book you’ll know what these are.

It was great.

 

I don’t like the descriptions by the press of it being Harry Potter in space. That’s not what it is about. It’s a story with a wonderful political background and reflects on the politics of the time. Whereas Harry Potter is just the latest in a long line of book series that sell lots, it a generational thing. Every generation has “their” Harry Potter, or Famous Five, or Swallows and Amazons. My main issue was that Ender looked like a young Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory and I had to work hard to remove that thought as I watched.

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Personal Air Conditioning

Last June I was in a new lecture theatre at the University of Kent in Canterbury. It was a nice room and well designed, apart from the positioning of the projector screens. One thing that I found surprising (and expensive) was the personal air blowing device. It’s either that or the designers have included some form of personal-gas-recovery-system to save attendees from other people’s smells!

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Such A Waste

I had a lovely time at a wedding in June or at least people tell me so, I don’t remember much of it at all. Anyway, the hotel room had sugar lumps for coffee and tea but each one was individually wrapped in plastic. What a waste!

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Who shall I address this too?

Yes, I know it’s grammatically incorrect. But that’s the point, read on dear Fooyah follower. I am sure that this is wrong and someone should be sacked for putting this on posters [if this poster is written correctly then tweet me or something and I’ll withdraw this post in shame]:

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The correct version of this is:

Who’s stolen our lions?

I’m never really sure who to blame in these situations. It’s a bit like the problem with sign writers. If they are given instructions telling them what to write and it’s grammatically incorrect do sign writers have a duty to correct the English or to put what the customer has written on a sign? It probably doesn’t matter as most people wouldn’t be bothered by something as trivial as a spelling mistake or grammar. But these things are important. There’s a proper way to write information to ensure that meaning is as accurate as possible.

Language is there so we can communicate effectively. What happens to society when newspapers are unable to write properly?

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H.G.

It was nice to see a plaque up on the side of a building in Baker Street that wasn’t dedicated to a fictional detective.

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I have to say that for half the time I was looking at this I had an image of H.G. from the television show Warehouse 13. A good programme.

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The Devil Is Female – Reaper

Reaper is a DJ whose music comes under the genres of aggrotech or hellectro. I like that sort of music and have done since I saw Combichrist play at Wembley Arena supporting Rammstein. The Benelux countries have some excellent things of which to be proud and this music style is one of them. What else would you expect from an area of land that has been conquered and fought over so often.

The Devil Is Female is an awesome album. I love it. The album cover is scary enough to make me feel uncomfortable – just the point of art (create emotion). The opening song is a good old dance-floor filler. Good beats and a simple repeated melody. The album makes the most spectacular turn upwards with the second song:
X-Junkie
The happy dance beat and melody underlie disturbing lyrics. I am not going to go into much detail here. You should listen to it. What you should most definitely not do is listen to the song on the tube with any women around you. Just listen on your own, somewhere.
Now, the album does include a number of remixes of X-Junkie and I can forgive that as the rest of this guy’s work is really good. Happy for him to indulge himself a little on this album.
Other highlights:
She Is A Devil And A Whore
190
Execution Of Your Mind

Hellectro isn’t for everyone. Thank goodness. I like how exclusive it is.

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