I haven’t really updated this recently. Not an awful lot has happened, yet a lot has. In short, I’m no nearer to achieving my goals. What’s worse is that I’m being stifled from trying to.
But some good things have happened: I’ve been in contact with my sister and one of my stepbrothers; my business is creeping slowly forward (very slowly…); and um… well they say things come in threes, so I’ll report back later with the other one!
Got two interviews this week. They tell me that’s really good, and they say I’m pessimistic when I don’t agree. I don’t count my chickens before they hatch; I approach each role with trepidation and respect. It seems interviewers appreciate that… but nothing more. Let’s see anyway.
Plenty of fish in the sea, the slippery buggers!
...with no replies just yet.
One of my heroes is Georg Cantor. The branch of mathematics that he (pretty much) invented himself goes some way to proving the point I was making yesterday.
If I were to ask you to count to infinity, what number would you start on? And what would be your next number?
Cantor thought about it. If you count the Natural numbers (that is 1, 2, 3, …) then you will eventually count to infinity. But if you count all the integers, including minus numbers as well, (0, 1, -1, 2, -2, …) then you will count infinitely many numbers again: but surely you will have counted more numbers this way.
If you keep changing the way you count, you can begin to see that you count a different infinity each time. In theory, there are an infinite number of infinities. That sounds odd, doesn’t it?!
...with no replies just yet.
There is a genre of jokes about engineers, physicists and mathematicians. They play on the viewpoint of each of these when tasked with certain problems. A particular one I’ve remembered (though many versions exist) is one where the three are asked to fence some sheep with as little fencing as possible.
The engineer carefully manoeuvers the sheep into a neat circle and attempts to build a fence round them. It works. But the physicist notices that he can make the circle smaller. So he builds a fence of infinite radius then draws it in and makes it as small as possible with the sheep inside. Satisfied he challenges the mathematician to do better.
The mathematician sighs and puts a fence round himself and declares "I am outside". He wins.
That’s what mathematicians learn. We have conventions that we make without really realising. Why is the centre of the circle thought to be on the inside? Why is there no square root of a minus number? Why is there only one infinity? If you can’t answer those questions then keep an open mind, and you’re half way to being a mathematician.
Of course, you’re also half way to madness.
...with one reply so far.
Are we on the brink of something amazing? Can we expect to have ultra-fast charging and discharging batteries? — ones that don’t heat up? — ones that don’t weigh a lot and take up a lot of space? I hope so. Imagine how much more efficient and lightweight our little pieces of technology would become…
...with no replies just yet.
Following a week of criticism, a Scottish MP has called for Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, to be stripped of his knighthood.
The last paragraph of a BBC News article reads:
Sir Fred was given his knighthood for services to banking in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in June 2004.
What would you do?
...with no replies just yet.
“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.
“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”
Stephen McNamara, spokesman for Ryanair, via Travolution
You might be wondering what provoked such an astonishing attack on the general public and drew members of staff from Ryanair into a heated argument abusing its customers. Not exactly “textbook stuff” is it?
It started on Jason Roe’s website, where he highlighted a harmless but amusing little bug on the Ryanair website. Simply by navigating their site in a perfectly normal way (no real tricks used here) the website appears to set the cost of the ticket to £0. Of course, when you try to proceed to acquire these tickets for free, the website will stop you. That’s sensible. But still, it’s a misleading bug and for a company to seemingly offer a ticket for free and take it away again isn’t good. At the very least, you would expect any self-respecting company to try to fix it, or at the very least warn customers that repeating such a sequence will result in an invalid session.
But no. As you will see in the comments on Jason Roe’s site, some people purporting to be from Ryanair starting throwing personal insults towards Roe. Later analysis of the IP addresses confirmed they are actually Ryanair customers, further supported by this spokesman.
So. Hmmm. Make up your own mind!
...with no replies just yet.
I was wondering about global warming the other day. I have my own (fairly) uneducated opinions on what would happen should the Earth warm up significantly.
The icecaps will melt, there will be more water in the water cycle. That suggests the sea levels would rise, as many people have stated. They have also suggested there will be long droughts, more deserts. But I wonder whether that will happen. In a warmer atmosphere, with a larger surface area of water, I would guess that more water will be taken into the atmosphere. There would perhaps be more unpredictable weather, with long rain storms. Perhaps this would result in the Earth “repairing itself” by creating ideal conditions for new rainforests to grow.
All said and done though, I do feel we should still invest in renewable energies and reducing our consumption of raw materials: it is good practice not to waste the resources available to us. Even if we weren’t constantly faced by the bleak predictions of ecology experts, we would in most likelihood be told that we need to reduce consumption in order to maintain stock.
...with no replies just yet.
I went back to Kent briefly this week for an interview. It went “ok”: I regret not adding things I should have done, but it’s all in hindsight. I had a small amount of time left over while in Sittingbourne to myself so I had a bit of a look around.
One question I asked with alarm in my mind is: “what the hell have they done to the place?”, to which the answer is “just about nothing”, which is about the worst thing they could have done. Few shops have changed hands and those that have been replaced were pretty much exactly the same but with a different name.
I wondered back into Milton Regis, saw my old house and had a brief look around the south of the village. The iron works is still there, though the garage has been replaced by a new housing area. The plants and trees in my old gardens were much taller now, but other than that, it’s all the same.
It’s funny really. You’d expect to be sad if things changed and you weren’t able to recognise the place, but Sittingbourne is completely different. When it seems like nothing has happened since you left, it’s as if they haven’t learned anything at all. It’s still crap, but there is still that strange attraction…
...with no replies just yet.
