Lorne Mitchell's Thursday Thoughts
Random Thoughts on Thursdays about Quirky & Interesting Things (Now in HexaStanzas)
Although I use an Apple iPhone and heard today that Apple overtook Nokia (in revenues) on mobile phone sales, you have to hand it to Nokia that they still think big. Just watch this:
and then see the background story:
Just hand it to Nokia – Apple might have the “i” – but Nokia’s Dot takes the day for me!
Vote for them on the Webby awards here.
A keen fan of the Royal Society of Art’s Animate series, I saw this yesterday and thought it would make a great Thursday Thought:
A great analysis of the problem – but I wonder what readers think the solutions might be? Please add your comments below!
My 13 year old son Oscar just sent me this brilliant piece of Mathematics. It seems as though Maths classes are teaching less abstract Maths than in my day… Even my wife laughed!
Oh, and an hour later, my 15 year-old son, Rory sent me this:
I was doodling the other day and came up with this ABC of Fibre-to-the-Alphabet:
Fibre to the Antenna
Fibre to the Business, Basement
Fibre to the Cabinet / Community / Church / Carpark / Community Hub
Fibre to the Device (what happened to LightPeak?)
Fibre to the Ethernet Port, Exchange
Fibre to the Farm, Fridge, Flat
Fibre to the Garage, Golfcourse
Fibre to the Home, Hospital
Fibre to the Island
Fibre to the Jacuzi
Fibre to the King's Head
Fibre to the Library, Laundrette
Fibre to the Mast
Fibre to the Notspot, Next Billion
Fibre to the Organ
Fibre to the Pub, Post Office
Fibre to the Queen's Head
Fibre to the Radio Mast, Radio Tower, Rock
Fibre to the School, Surgery, Steeple, Spire, Sheep
Fibre to the Third Place
Fibre to the University
Fibre to the Village Hall, Village Pump
Fibre to the Wellington Boot
Fibre to the X (as in FTTX) - X as in "Anything"
Fibre to the Yellow Brick Road
Fibre to the Zebra Crossing
Please add your thoughts on other destinations below!
With the debate about what “best” looks like as in “The UK will have the best broadband in Europe by 2015”, I looked up some famous quotations on “best”:
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.”– Helen Keller
“Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.”– Dale Carnegie
“The government is best which governs least.”– Thomas Jefferson
“It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”– Sir Winston Churchill
“One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem to be busily employed on things that are already done.”– John Kenneth Galbraith
“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”– Buddha
“Sometimes the best gain is to lose.”– George Herbert
With thanks to: http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com/small-business-resources/quotations-containing-the-word-best.htmlFor those of you who know me, I have spent so long in the Telecoms Industry, that I simply love to wind up the appalling degradation of customer service over the past 15 years. What a fantastic prank our colleagues in Belguim pulled-off here to reverse the situation! Enjoy!
I was talking to a friend the other day about Lean and Six Sigma and all that – and I felt I did not know the word “lean” – so I looked it up on synonym.com and this is what I found for the adjective:
thin (vs. fat), lean
anorexic, anorecticbony, cadaverous, emaciated, gaunt, haggard, pinched, skeletal, wasteddeep-eyed, hollow-eyed, sunken-eyedgangling, gangly, lankylank, spindlyrawbonedreedy, reedliketwiggy, twiglikescarecrowishscraggy, boney, scrawny, skinny, underweight, weedyshriveled, shrivelled, shrunken, withered, wizen, wizenedslender, slight, slim, svelteslender-waisted, slim-waisted, wasp-waistedspare, trimspindle-legged, spindle-shankedstringy, wirywisplike, wispy
lean (vs. rich)
lean, skimpy
insufficient (vs. sufficient), deficient
We have all had it. That frustrating blankness that hits you when you want to write something. Those who know me, know that I have been trying to write a book on bees since 1986. I am not sure if this is worthy of an entry in the Guinness Book of Records – but this work of art has been a long time in the womb!
Coincidentally today, I had an extraordinarily energetic meeting brainstorming out a new marketing strategy for a company. We really got “in the flow”. At the end of the meeting I had to take 5 minutes out just to re-tune to normality. One of the people at the meeting started talking about left-brained and right-brained thinking – and pointed me to the work and theories of Gabriele Rico. Gabrielle has written a book that has sold over 500,000 copies called “Writing the Natural Way”.
On investigating the theories, I was struck by how similar they are to many of the methods I use in my work. I use Spider Diagrams or Mind Maps a lot to brainstorm-out ideas – and then clump or cluster them into patterns or blocks of ideas – before finally looking for a natural sequence or flow that works well for the problem set in question. I really liked Gabriele’s names for the two sides of the brain – “Sign Mind” and “Design Mind“. Sign mind (left hemisphere) thinks linearly, parts-specifically, logically, one step at a time, while the Design mind (right hemisphere) thinks in whole patterns, drawing on images, emotional webs, sensory patterns, as in a memory that suddenly flashes into consciousness as a complex whole. So similar to the attributes missing in the Organisational Caetextia article I wrote with Mark Richards last year.
So it got me thinking – why don’t I actually use this very effective technique to help me write the book? And it made me realise that my my work and other activities at home are so time-consuming that the real issue wasn’t so much writers block, but time deficiency! Although I have already created the chapters, the themes, the plot, I just need to sit down and write. But I am not a natural writer. I prefer telling stories aloud. I prefer drawing pictures. Anything but writing. Gabrielle’s theory says I should be using my right brain (or Design Mind) first – and then start writing…
Actually, this problem is really why I started to blog. Because I thought: if I write regularly in small chunks about things that interest me, then I hope to overcome this writer’s block that I have. I set up another blog – http:/beelore.com – a few years ago. And it really does seem to work – this blogging thing. Little and often is better than being blocked and producing nothing at all.
Which means that I don’t currently plan to finish the book – because by the time I have done everything else, I actually don’t want to find the time to write the book.
I would rather work, play and blog; and go with the flow. For the moment – anyway. Than write a massive book. On bees. That probably few will read. And certainly not over 500,000! The rough numbers that read Gabriele’s book!
In fact I called beelore a “blook” – sort of cross of a book and a blog. So maybe I havn’t got writer’s block…..I have simply replaced it with a new age, Web 2.0 writer’s blook!
I came across this short excerpt from the great film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” – in which Dr Quantum visits Flatland. Makes you think!
And if you enjoyed that, you might enjoy this – which will begin to stretch your brain quite a bit:
And if you are still with me, come with me to the tenth dimension!
And if you are still with it, then you must be thinking: “Aren’t there really 11 dimensions?” – well here we are for a final brain stretcher:
And if you have gotten this far, I’ll next meet you in anti-time with Rob Bryanton!
I live in the country. I live in the so-called Final Third. Ofcom call it a “Market 1” area – because BT is the only fixed-line service provider providing the physical lines that broadband and telephony run across.
This week, three different views hit me that have changed my whole view on how we roll out broadband to the final third. I expect many of my readers will have switched off by now – but bear with me – because I think it might interest you.
The first view was from Adrian Wooster’s blog – where he has produced a really interesting picture of what the spread of the UK’s broadband looks like by postcode – one image of which I have copied below:
Click on the image on Adrian’s blog site to see each scenario – it loops back at the end to highlight the gulf between where we’re starting from to where we need to get to. Each spot of light represents a postcode.
At the moment the image only covers England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own statistical output area systems which individually need resolving to postcode level.
The interesting thing is that most of the “final third” remains in the dark – even at 95% coverage!
That got me thinking. What will be available from WiFi/Mobile/Radio technologies by 2015? Regular readers will know that I am interested in LightPeak – but there have been two other announcements this week that are very interesting and makes you think differently about broadband for the final third in 2015.
The first was from Alcatel Lucent – who have just announced the launch of the lightRadio cube which can be installed wherever there is electricity.
So this little device will dramatically reduce the costs of deploying mobile phone base stations – whilst allowing extended coverage of 3g networks to areas that are currently far too expensive to cover.
The second was from an In-Stat Report – stating that a new Wi-Fi technology standard called 802.11ac has been developed to provide Gigabit speeds across WiFi networks. The report predicts 1bn devices shipped with this technology by 2015 – which will allow streaming of high quality video to the TV set – or downloads of BlueRay DVDs in 6 seconds.I expect that many, if not most, will be mobile devices of some sort.
Add these two developments together and you get a very interesting set of technologies that may be able to provide 1Gbps speeds (depending on availability of backhaul) to most households in the country that are not provided with a direct link – i.e those who are in the dark areas on the map. That is 500 times faster than our current unambitious target for 2Mbps….and will require the cooperation of mobile operators and fixed-line operators who can provide much faster backahual speeds.
Exciting stuff – but I wonder if today’s #digitalbritain thinking is really embracing such ideas as these to create a truly competitive infrastructure for those in the power of the Dark Lord? As these new technologies are enabled, the bottleneck may well move to the backhaul. Which is why the current ideas around Fibre to the Community or “Digital Village Pumps” will become even more important. Then again, I would prefer to redefine FTTH as Fibre to the Hamlet – like the one I live in – or Fibre to the Clachan – as they say in more Celtic countries!