F is for....

F is for... JFK International Airport... John Fitzgerald Kennedy....F. Scott Fitzgerald... the element Fluorine.... and the letter F itself.

G is for Geekcode

Robert Hayden's valuable Geekcode is here, waiting for you.

E is for edit later

Because I can, I will edit this later. It seems like cheating but it is simply modern life. For example my 7 year old daughter talks of "saving" stuff whether in a computer or a non-computer context. As in 'I'll save this now and retrieve it later'. It doesn't matter what it is, it can be "saved" for later editing. She also memorises long URLs that matter to her, but that's another story.

D is for Digital

Digital, as opposed to analog. Discontinuous, versus continuous. Digital, as in a series of 1s and 0s, either on or off, black or white. It's not how we usually think about life, with our shades of grey, but by streaming these 1s and 0s we can build immensely detailed information streams - and information is what we and the world are all made of...

Of course an analog waveform can describe the same information. It's a little like quantum physics vs classical: you can view the same information in different ways. So why not stay with analog? The primary advantage to digital information storage and transfer is ease of manipulation. It can also be more readily checked for accuracy. A simple count and compare of the 1s and 0s against a known value can be performed at intervals, ensuring a degree of veracity that is hard to reproduce - certainly on the same scale - using analog data. In fact, digital data is simply easier to work with. Error correction, loss reduction - you name it, digital's got the advantage. Digital streams can also be converted to analog and vice versa, so the appropriate mix can be found to do the task at hand.

There's discussion here on digital data, here on analog vs digital music, and here is a crash course on digital from PBS for further reading.

C is for Comparative Religions

It's nice to compare and contrast. It's popular amongst university lecturers to request papers that compare and contrast (just so that you get the idea that comparison differs from contrasting, if nothing else) and it's very popular amongst those of religious faith. Sometimes it's simply an enquiring mind at work, othertimes it's someone seeking to 'prove' something. Well nothing outside of mathematics can be proven at this point, so it's just interesting, isn't it?

Check these sites out: Comparativereligion.com, a really good, detailed site; Islam 101, for a fascinating perspective; and Virtualreligion.net, another deep pool of reading.

From my own perspective, stumbling over the Greek myths and legends as a kid loose in a library was a great way to get perspective on the world. I wandered from Babylon to the Bible, looking for clues as to the reality of much of this fascinating, otherworldly mythology. The stories get spoken, written and re-written, and then translated. They get coloured by priests and prophets, flavoured by the times and put to use to 'prove' a new case. Knowing that this is the process, that 'the word of God' is often a multi-generational rethink of much older stories gives me perspective. It doesn't undermine the quest for understanding, rather it fosters it.

C is for Cycling

OK, OK, I know. It's really BI-cycling. The pros to this activity include physical fitness, or at least fitness sufficient to ride a bike. How far you go depends on you. Tour de France fitness requires pro-level bike handling skill (like jumping your bike over a gutter at 50kmh, or simply riding in the middle of a 200-rider strong peletonwithout freaking) plus fitness specificity. To get that requires about 10-15 years of consistent high-level effort and commitment, great pain management, enormous motivation and a love of pasta. Plus about 700km a week, week in, week out.

To ride around and enjoy yourself is a lot easier.

B is for business

Shameless plug I know but I blog on business management resources here and critique business and sustainablity a bit more here. Why? Because we seem to have fallen for capitalism, let's make it honest. There's no point in pricing goods in a "free" market if the price is distorted by hidden subsidies. Yes, some products should be available at minimal cost to everyone - hey, that's hardly capitalism, is it? - but if we are pretending it's a free market we should recognise the lie. Protect the innocent - the poor, the incapacitated - but let the rich pay a fair price and let them know where their money goes, so they can opt out or make a racket about abuse. I'm talking at everything from energy to food.

Car makers are probably the worst - subsidised either directly (and massively!) to keep them employing loads of people, or indirectly via cheap fuel, free roads, no contribution to the health system and a no-cost emissions "get out of jail" card. Yes, it's in the community's interest to build roads and hospitals anyway, but let's price these assets properly instead of hiding it and put the cost where it belongs - against the cars that expect to use these roads and the hospitals that put accident victims back together again.

Think about it - how many industries get a free ride like this? Why is it so?