December 2005 Archives

I was going to write a lengthy 2005 retrospective/new years resolutions kind of entry today, but I'm afraid it's going to have to wait, because I'm recovering¹ from some hellish cold/flu/chest pain/stomach bug/sleep deprivation combination malady that has essentially reduced my normal chipper self to the role of 'possibly contagious walking illness with an uncontrollable and uncharacteristic propensity toward depressingly pessimistic self-analysis'. I'll be fine after I get a good night's sleep. Wish I knew when that would be.

¹ 'Recovering' is a bit of an exaggeration, 'hoping to start recovering sometime soon' is more accurate.

I know I've been talking up this series at every opportunity, but if you haven't yet overcome your reluctance to watch a remake of a bad 1970s space opera, take note of the fact that Time Magazine has just named Battlestar Galactica their #1 TV show of 2005. This show is exceptional -- sci-fi TV for grown-ups, and I can't praise it highly enough.

How many generations separate you from the inhabitants of the earliest human civilisations? How far back in your ancestry would you need to go to be concurrent with the emergence of civilisation? Take a guess, intuitively, without trying to work it out (resist the temptation please). I'm interested to know how your initial guesses compare to the reality, which we'll work out now with the help of a bit of back-of-envelope calculation and search-engine-fu. Think of it as an experiment.

Wikipedia says that the earliest human civilisation is possibly Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia, though some historians believe the Harappan civilisation of the Indus Valley is slightly older. (Egypt was just a couple of centuries behind.) The earliest civilised artifacts have been dated around 3500 BCE.

The average length of a generation (birth to reproduction) today in the western world is a little under 25 years, but over the course of human history, with everything that that implies, it's certainly much lower than that. I couldn't find any good data to base this value on, so I'm wildly guessing. It's pretty likely that the average length of a generation over the last 5500 years is somewhere between 15 and 20 years. I guess the number 18 will do for our purposes since the result is only going to be a very rough figure anyway. (Tangent: try googling for length of a generation sometime and see just how much fundamentalist Rapture analysis pollutes your results.)

5500 years @ 18 years/generation = 305 generations

Anyone else as surprised as I am by that? My intuitive feeling (though I didn't think of a specific number beforehand) was that it would be much greater. Having said that, I've asked other people before and they didn't seem too surprised by it. Grateful for your thoughts on this one, and particularly interested in your initial guesses -- is it just me?

Doesn't look like there's much chance it'll be anything but a grey one this year, unfortunately, but I hope you all have, or are having, or have had, a gorged and satisfactory and thankful Christian Christmas or secular christmas or Hannukah or Kwanzaa or Saturnalia or Yule or Solstice or Festivus or Decemberween or other recurrent midwinter celebration or ritual or tradition or festival or observance (depending on your personal inclinations), and a meaningful and adventure-filled and giggly New Year (regardless of any of your personal inclinations¹).

The concise and inclusive version: Happy!

¹ Well okay, if you're Chinese your new year is in about a month and if you're Jewish it was like two months ago and there are probably others too. Feh.

I've been playing with the iTunes Signature Maker, which is a scarily clever Java web-app that dives into your iTunes library and mixes a surreal 'signature' of the kinds of songs you listen to the most (or rate the highest). It pretty much sets itself up (I didn't even have to point it at my iTunes directory) but the output is highly configurable, letting you play around with options like number of tracks sampled and length of each sample. (Requirements: iTunes and a well-used library with play counts and/or ratings, and a Java VM -- runs inside IE or Firefox on Windows or OSX)

40 songs in 27 seconds, 627KB of mp3: my iTunes signature. My musical tastes definitely verge on the obscure so if my readership in its entirety (meaning all three of you) can identify more than about 5 tracks I'll be amazed (I know exactly what's in there and I can't make most of them out) -- consider that, if you wish, a challenge.

From the 'curiosities found on Wikipedia' department: Warner Brothers' dark secret, the Censored Eleven, a set of politically incorrect Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons that haven't seen a television broadcast in more than thirty years.

We all learned how to write in virtually identical classrooms using the same methods and the same pencils and the same flash cards, but when was the last time you saw two people with the same handwriting?

Strange as it may be for a computer geek to say this, I'm quite enamoured with old-fashioned ink-on-paper writing. Typing something into a text file is quick and easy, but it's not very tactile and the whole experience just reeks of impermanence. That's fine for most things of course. But taking time to write something on a page, or reading a letter from someone with beautiful handwriting, these things are sensuous and gratifying. Anyone can use a word processor, but penmanship is a learned and practiced skill, and when something is handwritten, it's unique.

I'm curious about the influences that have acted upon each of us to make our handwriting individual. Did our teachers have a large effect? Is our hand musculature a major factor -- and if so, is there an element of heredity at work? Do we imitate our parents' letterforms or those we see around us? Are there slow paced fashions and fads in handwriting when observed at the population level? How much influence do mood and personality have upon our style?

I have no answers, I'm just curious. I was thinking about this subject the other evening and I realised that my own handwriting has a lot more in common with my father's than with my mother's... even though it was my mum that taught me how to write. Furthermore, my handwriting at this point is nothing like my 'natural' handwriting at school, it's predominantly a result of decisions I made just last year (when starting to file job applications) to try and improve its readability -- I started to write entirely in small caps and developed a style of my own that I could be proud to use on application forms and cover letters. (I'm no calligrapher by any stretch of the imagination, I just wanted to make my writing look a bit more presentable.) Despite writing like this for a while now, I only just realised that my adopted style had any similarity to my dad's. I'm sure a psychoanalysing graphologist would have a field day with this.

Update: This is my handwriting.

I've posted some photos old and new into a Flickr account to get things started. Some were already posted and blogged, others -- like two close-ups of a (dazed but healthy) blue tit that flew into our window today -- are stuff nobody's seen before. I'll probably end up posting more photos to Flickr than I mention here, so if you're inclined to keep up with my decidedly amateurish photography, there are RSS/Atom feeds to subscribe to that'll notify you when I upload new images.

My Flickr account.

After futzing around one time too many with the embodiment of cackness that is my dad's Samsung Digimax 350SE, and it being the season for spending money and all that, I've decided to treat myself to a new digital camera -- preferably one that doesn't take 30 seconds to start up and run out of batteries after 20 minutes.

I'm thinking Canon Powershot A620.

In fact I'm thinking I'll order one right now.

Please take a moment to send your most congratulatory vibes, by whatever tangible or metaphysical medium you see fit, to my friends Carl and Susie Ebrey. After several days of anxiety, they are today the proud father and mother of their first daughter Bethan Ruth, and it's my sincere belief that they're going to make truly exceptional parents.

The massive oil fire still burning in Hertfordshire has blackened the sky for miles, and provided opportunities for some spectacular photography.

• From a plane departing Stansted.
• Filters? Who needs 'em?
• Looks like the world is ending.
• This one is very clever.
• The smoke dwarfs everything else for miles around.
• Typical British understatement.
• This one is my favourite, though -- very artistic. Someone said it looked like a movie poster, and it took me a while to figure out why that comment made something in my brain ping like crazy. But I figured out why, and you know what? It really does.
• Tagged with 'buncefield' on Flickr: many more photos.

So the season of goodwill is upon us again, and that can mean only one thing: everyone's desks and mantelpieces are full of crappy little pieces of card with hackneyed imagery and lame visual jokes on the front. In January they will be ceremonially swept into the bin and end up decomposing in some landfill somewhere, except for the ones with bits of foil and tinsel and inexpensive electronic components that play music, which won't even degrade and will just sit in the ground for decades as a polluting memorial to an event which happens every single year.

Yeah. Greetings cards? Not really a fan.

It used to make sense. You would send a card through the post to your geographically distant friends and family members as a thoughtful gesture that even though you might not see them this season, they were still in your thoughts. And they could put the card on their mantelpiece as a reminder of you too. It was an elegant arrangement that bridged loved ones that were separated by distance, and only a cynic would have had a problem with it.

Here's the thing, though. We don't live in 1850 any more. We have cars, we have phones, we have the internet. We're not out of contact with people. Not ever. It's trivially easy to have a conversation with your aunt in London or your ex-housemate in San Jose. And yet christmas card sending habits have gone the other way -- people routinely send cards to their coworkers, people they see every day¹. Is the art of conversation so far dead that people have to rely on the contents of an envelope to express a heartwarming sentiment to somebody? What happened to telling people you care? With actual words?

Going to the shops and spending 90p on a message that somebody else has crafted is not a substitute for simply telling somebody 'have a good christmas' and meaning it. That way at least the message comes from you and not some army of focus-group-obsessed Hallmark sentiment engineers.

I don't want to offend anyone, because I think most people just don't give much thought to these issues, they just send cards because it's tradition and everybody does it. So I'm not criticising anyone for doing the 'done thing', just trying to point the problems with it and hopefully get people to consider their reasons for participating in a tradition that is both ubiquitous and unnecessary.

I'm not sending any cards this year. Instead of contributing to the bottom line of a big company², I've sent a cheque to the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust. Please consider doing the same for a charity you support. And in any event, whether you agree with me or not, please don't send me a card. I have phone and IM and email, and conversations are much nicer than cardboard, and will never end up in the bin.

¹ My current workplace is an exception to this, where we've had a whip-round instead of sending cards to one another. Yes, I have allies in my campaign.

² Think it's much different when you buy charity-branded cards? Nope.