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Random thoughts on Tourism; Patriotism; Music; Sport; Motoring; Computing and the Internet; Science and Technology; Language; Fame; Politics; Death.

Some of these thoughts probably started in Buzz's head. You know bow it is when you're very close to someone, and talk about everything... it's hard to remember who thought what originally - and often the same thing occurs to both independently.

Please Do Not

Feed the animals; Throw coins in the fountain; Collect rocks; Leave the trails.

Most tourists seem blind to these requests. In particular, I think that the Right To Throw Coins In The

Water and the Right To Feed The Animals must be little-known amendments to the American

Constitution.

Why is it? Most folks can read the language in which the signs are 'written (although signs in US national parks could do with more European languages to ensure everyone stays on the trails).

I believe it's the one-more-won't-hurt attitude, the idea that individual action can't make a difference. It's the enemy of both democracy and conservation.

I don't want to apply stereotypes, but a lot of tourist behaviour does seem to apply to many people of the same nationality.

Germans seem loud and brash. It's a stereotype in England that Germans rise at the crack of dawn to reserve deckchairs around the hotel pool by placing their towels on them. I haven't seen that, but I have heard of a number of places where many Germans hang around the hotel - despite being in Majorca, LA or even the Grand Canyon.

Japanese, as well as the well-worn photography stereotype, seem to travel in large groups such as bus tours and experience the environment only superficially. The large group thing is understandable when abroad if you consider the language gap (although I don't know why, say, English for Japanese is harder than English for French). At the Grand Canyon, apparently, there are many busses of Japanese at the viewpoints, standing and looking where the guide instructs, but very few take even a short walk into the canyon.

I find the English tourist harder to define - being one myself - but one thing I've noticed is the lack of adventure. In Paris, surrounded by restaurants, I overheard one say to a bus driver "I always hate asking this, but can you tell me where the nearest McDonalds is?"

Stand In Front of That And Smile

Why do people do that? Does it not count that you've been somewhere if you haven't been photographed standing in front of it? What do these people's photo albums look like? I cynically wondered if there might be a business opportunity offering blue-screen substitution of different scenic backgrounds in front of the same grinning faces, but I saw on TV that someone's already done it. I also heard that, a few yards from the Golden Gate Bridge is a booth where you can have your photograph taken in front of a huge Golden Gate Bridge background card. I suppose it's for when the fog's .... "Here's the photo I would've taken if the weather'd been better".

I could understand it if they were doing something appropriate to the scene - hiking the canyon, climbing the mountain

Hash photography of vast scenes is another one that gets me. I'm not really a photo-snob, but honestly, a fixed-exposure camera with automatic flash is never going to get a good picture of the city lights at night, the Canyon at sunset, or whatever. My favourites are the combinations, where you have to stand in front of the Golden Gate Bridge for a flash photo. OK, I can see that for some people it's their first time with a camera, but that still leaves a hell of a lot who do it all the time. I would kill to see these people's photo albums. "Yep, that's me in San Francisco. You can't tell in the black background, but that's the Golden Gate Bridge behind me ... or was it Sydney Opera House?". The other thing I would love to know is what these people think of me, with my camera on a tripod making a thirty second exposure?

Video photography... people obviously haven't fully mastered still photography, but those with camcorders seem worse. The number of people who video static scenes is beyond belief. The subjects don't seem much better either - most stop moving and talking when the camcorder points their way.

The most incredible bit of home movie making I've ever seen was at the white cliffs of Dover a few months ago. A carload of Japanese folk pulled up at a viewpoint and piled out of the car, one of them armed with a still camera, another with a camcorder. The senior members of the family posed grimly in front of the scenery for the still shots whilst the video cameraman zoomed and panned over the scene. Then, they remained absolutely rigid, wearing exactly the same facial expression, while they were videod for thirty seconds or so. As soon as the cameras were turned away from them, they broke formation and were as happy and animated as anyone could be.

Seriously, Why Is That?

Except for the dumbos taking their 2000th doomed flash photograph, I'm not making fun of anyone here. I'm sure there are deep cultural reasons for wanting a photograph of one's companions in with landmarks in the background (if anyone knows, I'd love to find out). I'm even more sure about the grim faces episode. In the early days of photography exposure times were very long - twenty minutes, half an hour. Trying to keep a natural smile for that long didn't work. Also, this was the Victorian era, not just anyone could get a photo-portrait done, so you wanted to look dignified. Perhaps this is why old folk still behave this way - or perhaps it's about the perception of seniors in some societies. With video, it seems clear that the subjects are as bad at being "filmed" as the cameramen are at filming. A relatively new media, people who are used to facing still cameras freeze; those who've faced cine cameras keep quiet

I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's comments on this stuff.

Speech, "Hansard" 4 June 1940

-- Speech, "Hansard" 18 June 1940

ToWin

Why do we use the same word to describe the acts of becoming Wimbledon champion and having our numbers matched in a lottery? Are there any languages with different words for winning through skill and through luck?

Tennis In The Olympics?

Please, no. Tennis is a professional sport. The Olympics is for amateurs. Tennis without professionals is a joke. The Olympics with professionals is a disgrace.

Sport In The Olympics?

Please, no. The Olympics is about athletic discipline. Further, higher, faster. No skill or tactics or teamwork, but individual strength, speed and technique. It sounds boring. It is boring - but keep it pure.

What is a Sport Anyway?

It's clear I don't think athletics count. What else? Well, the more complex the equipment used, the less I consider it pure sport. The more that equipment alone can make the difference between winning and losing, the less it's sport. Often a skillful opponent can compensate for an equipment disadvantage (as endlessly discussed in the perennial "which is the best dogfighter" threads in rec.aviation.military)

Horse racing ... now, I may be over-simplifying, but isn't the horse doing most of the work? It seems to me that not many people would notice if the horses didn't turn up one day, as long as someone rolled a dice to say who'd won. Isn't a sport that exists only for gambling a bit strange?

Motor racing - pretty complicated equipment. Driving a Mclaren Mercedes can (could) definitely make up for a lot of driver skill. I've never been in favour of pit stops either, It detracts from the individual competition to have a whole team of mechanics able to influence events. The notion of having a two-way voice and data link between car and pits is incredible (but has been fact for several years). Not a sport.

Scoring

It's fascinating the different scoring schemes different sports have. Some make more sense that others.

Fixed-duration / drawable games like soccer seem a bit strange to me. It's OK for a Sunday afternoon friendly, but the possibility of having no winner seems to blight the game - extra time and penalty shootouts are just ugly botches.

Racket sports all play to the death. In squash and badminton there's an elegant scoring hierarchy (point, game, match), although the way you can only win a point on serve (else you just lose serve) is a bit odd. I also like the way there's an anti-luck buffer built-in, requiring a certain point differential even after the target number of points has been reached.

My favourite scoring system is tennis. Played to the death, hierarchical scoring, anti-luck buffers, excellent tie-breaks, and every rally wins a point. I think it's a great shame that the modern professional game is dominated by power strokes.

[

It's amazing to see how many of the world's most popular sports were invented in Britain: Tennis, golf, soccer, billiards, squash, badminton... It can't just be the length of time we've had to do things, or the other European nations would've contributed something too.

Another wierd thing is that two of the most popular sports in the USA - basketball and baseball - derive from English sports played only by young schoolgirls - netball and rounders.

The Local Team

It's obvious why sports teams have geographical associations: village; town; county; country. The home team is an important feature in sports culture. At some point, (I suspect when money started to become important) teams started to recruit outside the local area. It seems a bit strange to have, say, Liverpool Football Club when most of the players had never been to Liverpool before they joined the club - some of them never having been to England.

Now I've heard something even more bizarre. In the USA, teams move location if they can't get what they want from the area. The Seattle Mariners were threatening to go if they didn't get a new stadium; some football team recently moved state. I think they keep their nickname but prepend a different city name.

What's the point? Once your players aren't local, why bother having the location in the name? If you have so little loyalty to your area that you leave town in a sulk if you don't get what you want, do you even deserve to use the name? Surely supporters of "the local team" can't he duped that easily...

Active Suspension

I can't wait until active suspension becomes commonplace, mostly so I can whizz along over road humps and mini roundabouts without even feeling it.

That shouldn't be allowed, should it? If the traffic departments want us to suffer a bump as we travel the roads, surely we are legally obliged to suffer a bump?

I wonder if legislation will insist that active suspension must incorporate the facility to simulate a bump when instructed to do so by some external signal. Then we could have smart, virtual sleeping policemen which didn't affect, say, bicycles, buses and cars doing under 20mph, but which gave a big jolt to speeders. Also, the severity of the bump would be the same for all drivers, so a Jaguar driver wouldn't suffer any less than a Mini driver.

I'm a bit of a hoarder. If during my surfing travels I find something cool, I grab it and keep a copy on my hard disc.

Or at least, I used to. Now I just (try to) remember where I found it, so I can get it when I want it. I think this is a very significant and exciting development. It means that:

There's so much useful info out there I can't keep it all on my disc .The speed of communications is such that I can load significant data in insignificant time. The data's stable enough that I trust it - or an even better version of it - to be there next time I look for it .I'm growing up a bit

These last two points are a bit tenuous. In particular, I try to avoid pointing to URLs of the form "http://blah.edu/~student/play/...". Of course, another compelling reason for shedding my bushy tail and cute little paws is that my hard disc's filling up too, but it's been 90% full for about eight years now ... it's just that now it's a 90% full 9Gb disc instead of a 90% full 40Mb one.:-)

The next stage in my personal development concerns the efficient organisation of a 6Mb bookmark file.

The World Wide Web is Dead

When I were a lad, there was no World Wide Web. We had to make do with e-mail and Usenet, but we loved it. The WWW is much more fun as it has pretty pictures, and you can point and click your way around the world.

But there's a big difference. WWW is dead. You connect not with people, but with their remains. It's completely passive.

Of course, this is a good thing in some ways. Folk can provide general information about stuff without having to make personal replies. If you want, you can usually email them ... if their address still works.

The Bath Water Problem

I know that water goes down the plughole clockwise in the Northern hemisphere. I've heard that it's anti-clockwise in the Southern hemisphere (although someone told me it had been proved that it was all down to plumbing, I choose not to believe it).

What happens to it when you're bang on the equator? Why has it never occurred to anyone to try it?

Leaky Acronyms

Wear your ignorance on your sleeve, I say: "PIN number"; "AC current"; "SCSI interface". Sheesh.

What's In A Name?

Is it my imagination, or do people who share a given name also share personality traits? I don't think it applies across cultures, but it seems to, for example, throughout England.

I can think of an explanation. Certain groups of people are influenced by certain famous folk, as well as by one another; Certain types of folk will, in a given era, like a particular name; They'll then proceed to raise their children in a similar way. Consequently all Sharons are alike.

There's another facet to fashionable names ... I grew up without meeting another Rod. Evidently, about eight years ago the name became popular and now it seems all I hear in supermarkets is "Rod ... Rod... Rod . It must be weird to have a common name.

Le Quattro Stagioni

Oh yes, it makes much more sense for "Autumn" to be called "Fall"... what doesn't make sense is to leave the names of the other three seasons alone.

Why don't Americans have Freeze, Grow, Burn and Fall?

How did Colonel Sanders get into chicken? Most ex-military types I know of go into government or work for defence contractors. Will we have "General Schwarzkopf Nebraska Glazed Ham" or "General Sir Peter de la Biliere Devon Scones"?

Marriage

Why can't film stars stay married? I suppose it must be the tremendous pressure under which they work. Shyeah, right, like the worry of what to buy with the next $10,000,000 pay cheque.

I reckon it's the availability of replacement partners, together with the social acceptance of multiple marriages in those circles. Far be it from me to suggest that they're a bunch of spoiled brats who can't handle not getting their own way 100% of the time.

I saw a telling headline in a US newspaper on the occasion of the wedding of Michael Jackson (not the structured programming guy; the other one) to Lisa Marie Presley, describing it as Jackson's "first marriage". Once upon a time, that would have sounded as ludicrous as a reading an obituary about a person's "first death".

I hate politics. I hate party politics. I hate political parties. And I hate politicians. I suspect that if I knew anything about it, I'd hate it even more.

My Favourite Foot-In-Mouth Political Analogy

I believe it was a party political broadcast by the Liberal Party for the 1993 General Election. The speaker quoth:

The Conservatives are the music of Dire Straits;

Labour are the music of Simple Minds;

We are the New Kids On The Block!

In other words, the other two parties are like two fantastically successful and enduring rock bands, while we are like a flash-in-the-pan bunch of talentless sad-acts chosen only for looks and appealing only briefly to a small section of the populace.

I don't recall where the Liberals came in the polls ......

Apparently, in Southern California (particularly LA) that the homeless and jobless, the panhandlers, are either black or white. You don't see a single hispanic beggar.

Meanwhile, low-skill jobs (McDonalds, hotel cleaning) were done almost exclusively by hispanics.

What stops blacks and whites from getting the jobs the hispanics do? Do they not want the jobs, or can they not get them? I can imagine that some jobs would be difficult for a non-Spanish speaker to do, as there would be a real communication problem - many of the hispanics we encountered spoke very little English.

McJobs

I think it was the British media (at least, I mentioned it to a couple of Americans and they stared blankly at me) who coined the term McJob to describe unskilled, low-paid labour, such as might be found in a fast food restaurant.

In a McDonalds recently I picked up a leaflet about franchising opportunities, and I realised the McJob label can apply not just to the serving staff but to the managers.

It is McManagement - almost everything is decided by McDonalds, from staff uniforms, training, pay to decor and equipment, and of course products and pricing. They'll even help decide a site. There's little risk because there's a known market for the identical stuff at the identical price, all you have to do is find a spot a little way down the road from the next branch, round up some staff, teach them to speak a little English (optional), and you're away. So what does a McManager do?

Terrorism's OK

Compare and contrast

1 Clinton invites Gerry Adams to the Whitehouse and allows IRA fund-raising in the USA. Clinton condemns the Oklahoma bombing. 2.The Serbs want NATO bombings to stop and Clinton says not until they withdraw their artillery. 3.Genry Adams wants to start peace talks while the IRA still have their weapons and Clinton invites him to the Whitehouse.

A British newspaper cartoonist wondered whether the Oklahoma bomber would also be invited to the

Whitehouse for lunch. I wonder how the American people - even in Boston - would react if the British

allowed open fundraising for terrorists to maim and kill innocent women and children on the streets of

American towns. At a guess, I'd say we wouldn't be top of the Christmas card list. What do you think?

In the unlikely event I've said anything worth any money, all the above is Copyright (c) 1997 Rod Young.

 

Get your own ideas.

 

 

What if Data were MS Windows compliant? STAR TREK 9 - More than just Market Share
WORF: Captain, there are three Romulan warships uncloaking dead ahead.
PICARD: On screen.
[The main viewing screen changes to a pattern of horizontal lines, each only a single pixel wide.]
PICARD: Data, what's wrong here?
DATA: Captain, the main viewscreen does not have sufficient video memory to display an image of this size. May I suggest that you select a lower resolution?
PICARD: Make it so.
[The screen blanks, and then an image appears, with big, blocky square pixels. Three objects appear in the center, which could be Romulan warbirds, but which actually look more like the aliens in Space Invaders.]
PICARD: Data, open a hailing channel to the Romulans.
DATA: Aye, sir.
[Data picks up an hourglass from the floor beside him, turns it over, and places it on the console in front of him. He punches some buttons on the console and sits motionless for several seconds. A flash of light blossoms from one of the Romulan ships on the viewscreen.]
WORF: Incoming plasma torpedo, Captain!
PICARD: Shields up!
DATA: I'm sorry, Captain, but I am still attempting to complete your last instruction. I must ask you to wait until I have finished before you issue your next command.
PICARD: What on earth do you mean? Data, this is important! I want those shields up right now.
DATA: I'm sorry, Captain, but I am still attempting to complete your last instruction. I must ask you to wait until I have finished before you issue your next command.
LAFORGE: Allow me, captain. [to Data] Control-alt-delete, Data.
[Data removes the hourglass from the console, and returns it to the floor.]
DATA: The Romulans are not responding to my hails. Press my nose to cancel and return to Windows. Pull my left ear to close this communications channel which is not responding. You will lose any information sent by the Romulans.
[LaForge pulls Data's left ear.]
PICARD: Shields...
[There is a tremendous explosion. The bridge shakes violently, and all the crew members are thrown to the floor. A shower of sparks erupts from Wesley Crusher's station at the helm, throwing Wesley back away from the console.]
PICARD: Up, Data!
DATA: Aye, sir.
RIKER: All decks, damage report!
WORF: Captain, Ensign Crusher is injured. He appears to be unconscious.
[Data picks up the hourglass again, places it on his console, and punches some more buttons. He waits a few seconds, then puts the hourglass back on the floor.]
DATA: Shields are now up, captain.
PICARD: And not a moment too soon. Worf, lock all phasers on the lead Romulan ship.
WORF: Aye, sir. [He punches buttons on the weapons console.]
PICARD: Mr. Data, take the helm, and prepare for evasive action.
DATA: I am sorry, sir, but I do not have the proper device driver installed for that console.
PICARD: Well, damn it, install the right one.
DATA: Please insert Setup Implant #1 in my right nostril.
PICARD: Number One, where do we keep Data's setup implants?
RIKER: I left them with Geordi.
LAFORGE: [in a surprised voice] What!!? I thought you still had them!
PICARD: Data, don't you have device drivers stored in your internal memory?
DATA: Not found, sir. Please insert Setup Implant #1 in my right nostril.
PICARD: Data, I don't have Setup Implant #1.
DATA: Not ready reading right nostril. Abort, Retry, Fail?
PICARD: Abort!
DATA: Not ready reading right nostril. Abort, Retry, Fail?
PICARD: Well, fail, then!
DATA: Current nose is no longer valid.
[Data walks over to the helm, and presses several buttons. The ship lurches, the images of the Romulan warships suddenly shift to one side of the viewscreen, and a high-pitched whining noise is heard coming from somewhere else in the ship.]
LAFORGE: [alarmed] Data, what the hell are you doing?
PICARD: Number One, do we have a customer service number for Data?
RIKER: Yes sir, but last time I tried to call them, I got put on hold for two hours before I was able to talk to anyone. And that person wasn't knowledgeable about androids of Data's model. She specialized in industrial control robots.
[Suddenly, the lights all go out, the viewscreen goes blank, and all the usual noise of fans, motors, and so on whines to a halt. After a few seconds, the red emergency lights come on. Data is standing by the console, absolutely motionless.]
PICARD: What's going on?
LAFORGE: [checking the helm console] Lieutenant Data has caused a General Protection Violation in the warp engine core.
PICARD: These androids look really sharp, but you can't really do anything with them.
[The shimmer of the transporter effect appears, and six Romulans in full battle dress materialize on the bridge. A seventh figure, a Ferengi, appears moments later.]
FERENGI: [with a mercenary grin] Can I interest you in a Macintosh, Captain?

Rod Young

BILL GATES, BARN DOORS, AND THE BRAVE NEW WORLD.

Although I was not in attendance, I know that someone at the Philadelphia
Centennial Exposition of 1876 lamented that everything of value in the world
had already been invented and such future celebrations of man's technological
genius would be unnecessary. Such optimism seemed logical at the time. After
all, in a year when Alexander Graham Bell had perfected the telephone (with
the aid of one T. Edison) and Nicholas Otto had developed his four-cycle
gasoline engine and Adolphus Busch had introduced a new, pasteurized beer
named Budweiser and H.J. Heinz had offered bottled ketchup, what else did the
world need?

Plenty, as it turned out, including the vehicles of Messrs. Daimler and Benz
that arrived a decade later, triggering the automotive revolution. Their
nascent motorcars, which preceded Henry Ford's earth-shaking Model T by less
than two decades, transformed 20th-century civilization on a magnitude
equaled only by the cathode-ray tube, the microchip, and nuclear fission.
Those creations, inconceivable at Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, have brought
us to the edge of a brave new world wherein mega-nerd billionaire Bill Gates
predicts we will be transformed into masses of slack-jawed ciphers
perpetually glued to computer screens, communicating via the Net in
semicoherent crypto-sentences.

To Gates and his geeky visionaries, the car seems obsolete. After all, why
drive when all human needs can be satisfied by the stab of the keyboard and
any urge for the sensation of speed can be realized within the inner worlds
of CD-Rom and virtual reality? This presumes a transformation to total
inertness on the part of the most educated of our population. Even now,
Net-surfing is being viewed as an addiction, like puffing five packs of
Marlboro a day or blowing the milk money on a case of Busch's best. But
the question nags: Is this a temporary craze -- the CB radio of the 1990s --
or are we headed into some nightmare of no-life isolation wherein the
automobile will become passe?

Perhaps, but so-called futurism -- the high-tech voodoo of divining what is
to come -- is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of low science. Its overall accuracy
record makes the Farmer's Almanac seem as infallible as a papal bull.
Therefore, I question whether Mr. Gates and his big-byte buddies have a
handle on what lies ahead, any more than did the prognosticators in
Philadelphia, not to mention their successors a century later.

Consider what was supposed to be the automotive reality of today, based on
the best thinking of 1976. At that point, we were headed into a mud bog of
low performance and lower expectations. The OPEC gang (remember them?) had a
vice-grip on the world's petroleum supply, and no one could imagine how
anything but wheezy, front-drive lumpen-hatchbacks could be in the future.
Electrics, Wankels, turbines, steam, hydrogen, etc. -- every kind of
powerplant except the dreaded petrol-powered internal-combustion engine -- would
power our pokey, fuel-sipping, ultra-green, ultra-aerodynamic pod cars.
Nothing else was possible.

Nothing else, of course, besides minivans, MPVs, and pickup trucks, all of
which quickly overwhelmed the market -- all powered by the despised IC
engine, all featuring multicam, multivalve, computer-controlled induction
systems, and all offering nearly one horsepower per cubic inch with amazingly
low levels of fuel consumption. The sports car was also dead, so they
claimed, just as the wondrous Nissan 300ZX, Porsche Turbo, Dodge Viper,
Corvette ZR-1, and Ferrari F40 elevated road-car performance into the
stratosphere.

But the 1976 soothsayers weren't finished. Recovering from their disastrous
divining, which had missed every significant shift in the market, they became
mesmerized by high tech, predicting that the New Age automobiles would be
loaded with such goodies as digital instruments, turbochargers, four-wheel
steering and radar-controlled crash-avoidance systems. These slippery little
supercars would travel on fly-by-wire, computer-brained highways, and traffic
jams and urban gridlock would be but distant memories.

And what arrived instead? How about throwback 480-cubic-inch V-10 pickups,
£40,000 sport-utes with the aerodynamics of barn doors, and retro-rods and
sports cars like the Plymouth Prowler and the Porsche Boxster that are about
as avant-garde as Andrews Sisters' CDs. And what of the super-roads, digital
everything, and such technological overkill as four-wheel steering? Gone,
probably forever, while the nation downsizes as funds, both private and
public, to finance such excesses dry up.

We are in a curious period of indecision. We look to the new century and see
a world run by scary geeks like Gates, essentially inert quasi-robots who
would snatch us into a third-wave world where the only reality comes via a
computer screen. On the other hand, we remain restless, essentially
aggressive creatures. High-risk sports such as auto racing, rock-climbing,
sky-diving, radical skiing, rodeo, ultralight flying, aerobatics, and
bungee-jumping are booming as we seek ways to vent our innate predilection
for physical challenges in a world increasingly sanitized by nannyism and
fear-mongering.

To me, this is the essential reason we have forsaken the pod cars for the
barn doors. Somehow a pickup truck or an SUV represents, however
subliminally, a fundamental grounding in reality. Deep in our subconscious
rings the siren song of open roads and untamed trails -- "Somewhere west of
Laramie," as the immortal Jordan Playboy ad line put it. Trucks and
blockhouse sport-utes offer something more than workaday function. The reason
may be too repressed, too shadowy, too subtle, for any socialist to dredge
out of the national psyche.

This is hardly to imply that computers have been a bad thing. Far from it.
They have contributed mightily to our quality of life -- and particularly to
the viability of the modern automobile. It is not the machine but the couch
potatoes -- correction, mouse potatoes -- who have corrupted and abstracted
our sense of reality and who scare the hell out of me.

How long will they remain on the scene, playing their video games rather than
engaging in the real thing -- even as real spectators? Will they prevail when
the next energy crisis kills real cars, trucks, and motorsports? Are we all
doomed to a world of virtual reality? I haven't the vaguest idea. I was wrong
in 1976 (and would have been in 1876 as well). Let's just hope Billy Gates
isn't right either.

--Rod Young

Member of The HTML Writers Guild.  

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Authored by: Rod Young Last updated: May 1998.