Vague – where should it go? – Page 28 – Fooyah

September 19 2011

Hot Air Balloons

Here’s a photo of four hot air balloons gliding over the Kentish sky one evening. Trust me, there are four. See if you can spot them.

September 19 2011September 19 2011

This is another of those annoying language things that stems from my rather literal language processing unit. See my previous post about starting letters. I am not far enough into the spectrum to follow instructions or comprehension literally but I do struggle trying to answer negative questions in a true manner. Once again there common usage issues that I believe to be amazingly wrong but most people seem to accept them.

If something is amazing then the following:

Is that an amazing aircraft manoeuvre?

is easy to answer. Yes for agreeing with the statement and no for disagreeing. However the question:

Isn’t that an amazing aircraft manoeuvre?

is remarkably hard to answer. I believe the vernacular is to answer “yes” if I am saying that it is an amazing manoeuvre. But if I answer “yes” then I think I am agreeing with the statement which is

Is that not an amazing manoeuvre?

and that reverses the meaning of my answer. Arrrrggghhh! Similarly other questions can confuse me enough that I answer very differently. So, if I had just seen an amazing manoeuvre then the following would be the conversation:

“wasn’t that an amazing manoeuvre?”
“It was amazing”

This means I have not answered an impossible question and also managed to keep my head from exploding with diverse logic implications.
Other examples are:

“aren’t you going to the cinema?”
“isn’t that band great?”

So, please don’t ask me perfectly normal questions, it just hurts.

September 14 2011

Red Grapes

Here are some red grapes, spotted while walking the dog.

September 8 2011

Yellow flower

Just a nice flower plant on the dog walk.

September 7 2011September 8 2011

Looking in the mirror

Here’s a tip for some of you drivers out there. It stems from my experiences as a motorcyclist and now as a driver, although now I’m not travelling quite as fast. The bike was an 1100cc machine and my car is a diesel estate!

I noticed in the past that whenever I was coming up behind a car on a motorway and that car was indicating to pull out into my lane that the driver would (I assume) check the rear view mirror or door mirror. Now, if the driver looks once and gets a snapshot of the road they would see me in the outside lane. What would be interesting is that the driver would have no idea of how fast I was travelling unless he/she spent a long time staring in the mirror. To get an impression of speed the driver would have to look again in the mirror to see how my position relative to him/her had changed in the time that had passed.

I believe it is for this reason I had cars pull out in front of me causing me to brake many times. It is quite simple that to judge a speed you need two reference times to see position change. Hence drivers need to look in their mirrors twice before pulling out in front of traffic in the next lane. Most drivers are ignorant of this fact of physics given that cars still pull out in front of me and I’m now in a car.

Perhaps drivers don’t care about other road users and I’m in the minority. Gosh, I think I’m better than most.

August 28 2011August 29 2011

Now I’ll have to keep going!

Just put an iPhone dock in the kitchen and cleaned the microwave top as that’s where it goes. Then looked at wall and thought I’d wipe it. Whoops! Now have to clean the whole wall! Shouldn’t have touched the wall.