The DNA Delusion

Last Christmas a friend of mine bought me Richard Dawkins' book "The Greatest Show on Earth". I was staggered to find out how narrow minded this man is. I have not read his book "The God Delusion" nor will I waste my money on it. He articulates a well-reasoned treatise on how a living form could arise from the primordial soup and then with a sudden leap of faith says that consciousness is simply the result of the complexity of the molecules - I have to say that this viewpoint reflects an act of faith rather than reason. Descartes pursues the argument the other way around, saying that the rules of the universe are simple and elegant, therefore there must be a God. I have to say both viewpoints are interesting but not totally convincing.

How many zeroes at the end of 100!

I thought this was a fun question from one of the (Junior) Maths Challenge papers. It's a good way to reflect on prime factorisation.

QueasyJet Queueing

This weekend I got a message from an old friend of mine Robert Paine (better known in our maths class as Pean). He attached the following probability problem to his email knowing that I enjoy doing the occasional maths problem in my extensive free time.

There is a queue of passengers waiting to board a QueasyJet plane each with an allocated seat. The first person boards the plane and sits in a random seat which is not their allocated one. The next person gets on, and if their allocated seat is free they sit in it, otherwise they choose a seat at random from those remaining. Each person then follows that same rule: if their allocated seat is available they sit in it, otherwise they sit in a random free seat. What are the chances that the last passenger sits in their allocated seat?

It's the sort of thing that would turn up on a Maths Challenge paper but probably not a GCSE or A Level these days. It did prove a welcome distraction from the essay I have to write!

Viral Marketing?

I got an email this morning from Katherine Poll of Digeus Software the exact text of which is below. Now as my early blogs will attest, I do have an interest in the way internet will work for business and marketing in particular. This is a cool approach which I have not seen before. Digeus are offering what should be a useful software item for screen capture and asking in return to have their product mentioned on my blog. Now is it the fact that it is on my blog that interests them? Well of course the answer is in the postscript. You must not change the text Screen Capture Software which under the covers links this phrase with the company Digeus Software. So what you ask? Well I just typed "Screen Capture Software" into google and I got heaps of results as one might expect. I browsed through the first 6 pages and could not find a link for Digeus Software. If my suspicions are correct then if Digeus are successful in getting this link into a large number of blogs, Google's search algorithm will obligingly push them up the list. Viral marketing? Let's hope not!

"May I ask you to place the link below to our Screen Capture Software anywhere on your blog? If you agree, please send me the link where you placed the link and I will present you with a license for free.

Here is the link:
Screen Capture Software
You may place this link alone without description or on existing post or create new post with a short description (language and text is up to you)
Feel free to get information about product here: http://www.digeus.com/products/snapit/snapit_screen_capture_3_5.html
P.S. Don't change text in the link. It should be "Screen Capture Software".
Sincerely,
Katherine Poll"

Education, Education, Education!

It seemed more than appropriate that, as I began my third University level course of education, I should be sitting in front of my laptop waiting for an on-line tutorial to begin. The tutorial, part of a PGCE teacher training course, was about "Professional Studies". This part of the course looks at the history of education, and amongst other things the role and evolution of the National Curriculum. Dennis Almeida of Exeter University showed the YouTube video "Shift Happens" to set the scene for our discussions; it is an interesting collation of various statistics which reflect our fast changing and technological world, and should certainly inform our approach to education.
Having reflected on this I have settled on three threads of thinking; invariants, vocational training, multi-culturalism.
For me, mathematics and basic science, and literacy and good literature will always be the core of education. Understanding the ways to reason rigorously and natural language skills are the gateways to new learning. Good literature is the route to understanding the human condition beyond the world or worlds that we can experience directly [I like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and even Jane Austen who has to be admired for having written the same book so many times!] These things are the invariants for me.
The second thread is vocational training. This one is always difficult. For one, it is very expensive to set up good vocational training facilities (compared to the chalk and blackboard needed to teach mathematics), and secondly everything in this arena is going out of date so quickly. When I left school they were still training printers to typeset with lead typeblocks. Later, I witnessed armies of Cobol programmers being trained. As the video so clearly noted, many of the jobs of the future do not exist today. So what is the solution? I think the main job to be done is to try to reveal a seam of passion within the individual, and to then encourage that individual to nurture and exploit that passion. This may seem vague, but its vagueness is what will allow it to adapt to the inevitable change.
For me the multi-cultural UK is missing out on a trick if it does not embrace and exploit its multi-cultural nature. If I were able to change the curriculum in some way it would be to include more of the history of civilisations, how humanity arose from Africa, the early civilisations in Mesopotania, the Arabs, Indians and Chinese and so forth. I have been delighted to see that the increasing number of programmes on science and mathematics give due credit to the various cultures responsible for the development of these subjects. I would also like to see some different languages taught in schools not just the French and German, how about Polish, Arabic, or Punjabi?
As a final observation, we need to be able to teach our children the benefits of perseverence. From my experience it takes about 10 years to become good at anything; a sport, musical instrument, foreign language, technology or whatever. I have been most fortunate to witness the perseverence of my own children in the fields of mathematics, languages, music and drama. I hope in my future role as a teacher I will be able to help others too.

Climate Change - Now It's Official

The last of the most hardened sceptics were finally convinced of the reality of climate change as most of the UK enjoyed good weather over the Whitsun bank holiday. Michael Fish, well-known weather reporter commented "Our forecasting software at the met office has bad weather set as a constant for bank holidays. We can normally only rely on Bank Holiday Tuesday for fine sunny weather. Our scientists are having to rethink our system from first principles". Bernie Madeoff, speaking from an unnamed location in South America said "I'm putting my money, or rather the money of my former clients, back into the market. Riding on the tidal wave of climate change, I'd recommend investments in British Wine and in the luxury seaside resort of Margate". A pity that Alan Sugar's potential apprentices did not pick up on this.

A Day of Internet Therapy

I spent a very therapeutic day yesterday trawling through Linkedin looking for old friends. It really does seem to be the case that we are each only five people away from knowing everyone in the world (like 90% of statistics, that was made up). The approach that I took was to scan the contact lists of all my contacts and look for names that I remembered; it certainly seems to have born fruit.

It was particularly pleasing to find John Giannandrea once again. Dubbed "John, Jean and Andrea" by still ST-resident wit, and excellent engineer Julian Wilson, the name was particularly appropriate as John did have the productivity of at least three good engineers. It was John who asked me to pay for a connection to the internet and thus gave INMOS (and subsequently ST) its first internet connection; it didn't take long to see how this world-wide email connection was going to change the way we did business. Sadly, through this connection I learned of the recent death of Jeff Mock who worked on the Pixar Renderman Engine when Pixar were using transputers and came to INMOS for a 6 month sabbatical. He provided us with the C run-time library to support multi-threading in our C development system. He was a great guy personally and participated in many of our lively technical debates. We were also priviledged to see some of the early images, such as the baby, that appear in their later blockbusters like toy story.

Of course the internet and email was one part of the story, and this arrived before web browsers arrived on the scene. It was some years later in 1994 that Mario Guanziroli gave me a demo of Mozilla in Cagliari; being slow on the uptake, it took some time (and explanation) for me to appreciate the significance of the "document" that we appeared to be browsing being distributed across various researchers' desktop machines.

As an unexpected side-effect of this trawl I have been delighted to have received so many good wishes from friends and past colleagues. I must apologise for the short notice I gave for my leaving drinks at the Cambridge Arms; it did of course result in a saving worthy of a Corporate Finance VP. I hope to be able to make amends over time.

Crimes of Passion

The Royal West of England Academy should be congratulated for the recent "Crimes of Passion" exhibition showing the work of various Bristol graffitti artists. It was a really vibrant and exciting event which I happened across by chance. I uploaded some pictures to my facebook site I am not sure if there are copyright issues, but I guess if you leave your art on walls in the street you have to suffer the consequences. The wackiest item on display was Andy Council's dinosaur; he should produce a 3D graphic image for the web so that more people can enjoy and explore it. Dora's ladies were particularly poignant and atmospheric. The best graffitti slogan was "When a bike is stolen another fairy dies" which works for me.

Under Construction

Having almost completed my sabbatical year I decided that I should take finding a job more seriously. I have applied to Christ Church Canterbury University to do their on-line iTeach Maths course which would lead to a PGCE in 18 months. There is also a £16,000 bursary to encourage people to become teachers of maths, physics or chemistry. I have seen their on-line teaching and resource package and have to say that it is much more impressive than I expected. I also visited The Marlowe Academy in Ramsgate which I was also very impressed with; I'm back there next Wednesday to spend a day experiencing the maths classes, the youngsters and the place at large.

Do you love Banksy or hate him?

Pity that so many of the critics are dismissing Banksy's work as trivial, particularly when may dubious offerings are receiving such high acclaim. For me Banksy is establishing a new genre - much like Lautrec who has been credited with being the first to get posters into the artbooks - and of course the controversy over whether it is right to splash such images over other peoples' property adds some further spice. People either love him or hate him, I am definitely in the former category, the fact that much of his work still remains is testament to atleast some appreciation and approval.
http://www.topix.net/forum/source/finding-dulcinea/T2E48J7FAVO11O5NB#lastPost
reports on the alleged unmasking of Banksy; I hope it is a false alarm, as the anonimity is of course part of the charm and "process" once valued by the critical art community

Where will the opportunities come from?

I've just spent what seems like a lifetime on www.linkedin.com putting a personal profile together and sending invitations to all the people that I know; it was a bit like writing Christmas cards, you start out with good intentions to write a short personalised note to each of your friends and then give up use the default message and hit "Invite". You can also get a rather attractive graphic to add to your website which you will see on the right hand side of the blog. It certainly generates rather a lot of email traffic which is rather comforting if nothing else. I've also posted the CV to various job sites: www.monster.co.uk, www.jobsearch.co.uk, www.jobsite.co.uk and www.jobs.ac.uk these all offer to mail you lots of jobs daily. Time to sleep.

Starting Something New

After 21 years with STMicroelectronics and previously INMOS we parted company by mutual consent on 31st July - with two weeks official holiday left to enjoy! I had certainly lost the plot and did not have the ear of the new management team. I hope they can turn things round. There is so much under-used talent at the company, and I think it fair to say that I was not alone in my disenchantment.

So what next? Fortunately I had frequently read Andrew Taylor's column in the Sunday Times detailing his experiences and reflections on life after redundancy for a 53 year old. He managed to reinvent himself as an author and journalist using his quest for a future as the springboard. Whilst finding a job in your fifties may be daunting - and unfortunately, in my case, necessary - it is also a good opportunity to revitalise your life. I had often thought of jacking in my job but never really took it seriously because I had too many financial commitments. Finally the time was right and I took the leap.

Я изучаю русский язык

As you may or may not have determined from the title of this piece, I have started to learn Russian. Why? Well, primarily it is because I encouraged my son Alistair to take up Russian at school (he is 25% Polish, but the school does not teach Polish) and I thought I may be able to help him at some stage. The reverse is of course much more likely. First hurdle is the Cyrillic Alphabet named after St. Cyril a 9th century monk. It certainly helps to have had exposure to the Greek alphabet either through studying the sciences or island hopping.

I'd recommend the following book for beginners:-
Teach Yourself. Beginners Russian. 2 CDs.
Rachel Farmer does her best to play down the horrors of Russian Grammar and offers some very useful simplifications.

Here is the link for details of the evening classes in Bristol

The text used on this course has 2 CDs included and can be found below. Daphne goes into more depth than Rachel and has an unhidden affection for Russian grammar.



The class teacher is Galya Ransome, who just happens to be the wife of Alistair's Russian teacher at school. The classes are conducted with a healthy level of participation which more than compensates for the unreasonable feats of memory which seem to be expected.

до свидания! (Dasvidanya)

She loves me, she loves me not...

Well isn't technology just wonderful. Just a few more strokes of the keyboard, sign up for another google service, post more of you cyber-experiences and yes, you're back to the top of the Google listings when you type in your own name. It makes it all worthwhile doesn't it? So it seems like Google is a bit like one of those Tamagochi electronic pets. If you keep feeding your blog, and tidying up any mess that it might leave behind, Google will love you back too.

Now I've got web based activity tracking!

Two days ago I took a look at Google's site and saw that they had a web based activity tracker. Also it was for free. So I took a look. You have to apply to use it, so I did, and low and behold today I got an email asking me to create a Google account and providing the instructions to create a Google Analytics account. So I did all that stuff, and much like the Amazon scheme for creating ads of various varieties was given a small block of javascript to copy and paste into the bottom of the home page of the web site; or to the template of the blog. It also lets you track multiple web sites, so I pasted the code into each of my various blogs. Now it is up to all you avid readers out there to keep reading my postings so that I can get some pretty analytics chart showing me how often my blog has been visited from the different parts of the globe. Perhaps right now I should offer a special prize for the one millionth hit on any of my blogs?

The Elusive Google Listing

Soon after my return to blogging, I thought that I would try to find my blog using Google. So in went my name "Tony Debling", click search, and wow, I could not believe it Tony's Blog made the top of the hit list. In some ways I was surprised, in other ways, I thought it is not so surprising; I haven't encountered anyone else with my name, so Google won't have many references. Well, yesterday, this initial delight had turned to disappointment. Having explained this easy method for finding my blog to some friends - somewhat less of a mouthful than my blog address is www.tonydebling.blogspot.com - I was horrified to find that when I demonstrated this on the members' PC at the tennis club the cupboard was bear! No reference to my blog! Had I done something to upset them? I was consoled by a friend, Matt Clark, who suggested that it was probably because I hadn't updated the site for a while. So that's what has prompted me to make this post, a vain hope that fame can be restored, if just for one day!

The Cloudspotter's Guide - do not miss

I've just started to read the Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Seemed a bit off the wall, but I was intrigued by a book review in the Economist. I've read about the various types of Cumulus clouds; these are the nice fluffy fair weather clouds. I've read about the Cumulonimbus, the marvellous anvil shaped storm cloud which can stretch from 2000 feet up to 50000 feet. Gavin gives an exciting explanation of what is going on from a meteorological viewpoint and soothes the flagging intellect with some rather fine anecdotes and cultural cameos. The best example so far is that of Lt. Col. William Rankin who fell 45,000 feet through a rather lively Cumulonimbus - experiencing outrageously low temperatures, pummelled by hailstones, repeatedly lifted by convection currents, a forty minute roller-coaster ride - and still lived to tell the tale. Already I find that skies are better able to grab my attention. Works of art that are easy to take for granted and hardly notice at all.

Can you really make money out of blogs?

Well I am starting my trawl for how people make money out of their blogs. My first port of call was the Adsense option on blogger.com, the second port of call was of course Amazon, where I signed up as an Associate. Took a look around the associate information. The main idea was to write the occasional book review and to leave a link to the book in the blog. You get 15% of the list value credited to your account if someone follows the link and buys the book. There's also something called a "self-optimising link". This is a kind of banner ad which adapts itself to the content of your web site. So as a starters I copied the html provided by Amazon into the bottom of the blog template, just above the footer, ... et voila, nice little Amazon ads appear at the bottom of my blog page. Nice, but retirement plans still on hold.

You really will get comments on your blogs; not always welcome however ...

Having returned to the blogosphere, I was delighted to discover that my experimental blogs had attracted some comments. To my initial blog I got a comment from Jean-Claude Morand who first demonstrated the technology to me. He has since set up a company to evangelise these new technologies http://www.cyberstrat.net/blog.htm ; si vous pouvez parler francais, je vous recommande a suivre cet hyperlink!
I also discovered some less welcome comments on my "In search of an RSS reader" posting. No, I don't want to contact "abunnyinpink", no I don't want to want to "get my desired college degree in less than 2 weeks", and nor do I want to "follow the day to day life of a park ranger". But hey this is the internet after all. In any case I left them there for posterity.

Has it really been more than one year?

After a fit of enthusiasm about blogging and RSS and all that stuff things went quiet for over a year. It has recently come back on the radar. Probably because, as everyone else is, I am finding that there is so much stuff filling my email, and so much information that we need to filter to find what we are interested in, that I am thinking again how best to address the problem. This is an issue both in a personal context, and a work context, but mainly the latter.
A friend of mine Roger Shepherd has started blogging. I think he would like to make a modest fortune from the activity. May be not as much as contemporaries who got in at the start of Microsoft and are now sailing yachts 24X7, but perhaps enough to fund the family ski trip. Take a look at his articles, they're pretty good.
Blogger Shepherd - http://bloggershepherd.blogspot.com
I explained to him that getting up the search rankings would involve a very similar you scratch my back philosophy as in the academic world with referring to each others publications.
Now I also think that a blog needs to have some kind of theme, or at least in the early stages focus on themes for a little while. Having decide that meta-blogging, or blogging about blogging is a bit off of the mainstream, I think that from a few experiences that I have had recently, I will start a blog focussing on "ebay rants". The general theme is that there is so much fraud and bad stuff that goes on through ebay and it is all kept very quiet to allow ebay to make lots of money whilst accept no responsibility.