I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
I was interested to see a recent article in Businessweek showing the world’s top 100 brands. No I’m not going to list all 100, you can find the full article here, but the top five are:
A number of things surprised me about this. First of all that GE (General Electric) were in the top five. Secondly the significant difference in brand value between the first four and Nokia in too surprised at most of the entries. Perhaps not surprisingly I had at least heard of all the top 100 brands. I was surprised that Ford and Kodak had both fallen over 10 places in the last year. The top UK brand is HSBC in 23rd place, and the full list contains only 6 UK owned brands. Of course just over half the brands are US owned, followed by 10 which are German owned.
Steve Mirsky has written an interesting column in the”Antigravity” series in September issue of Scientific American. It talks about a book with the title What is Your Dangerous Idea? edited by John Brockman in which scientists and intellectuals pose what they consider to be dangerous (mostly intellectual) ideas.
Some of the ideas quoted in the article include:
The planet is fine. The people are f*^#ed … the planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas. Test the hypothesis first posited as a child that a red towel tied around the neck will indeed confer the ability to fly.
Mirsky ends with
Bertrand Russell’s truly treacherous notion: “I wish to propose … a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it true.” The danger of ignoring this doctrine can almost certainly be found in the politics or world events stories on the front page of today’s New York Times. On whatever day you read this.
You can find the full article here.
So what is your dangerous idea? Add a comment to tell us! If nothing else it’s a fun game!
Oh, what, mine? Well let’s start with: Ban the motor car and the aeroplane!
Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on Clive James interviewing himself at the Edinburgh International Books Festival. The article includes:
Did we know, he asked, that by decree, no rank below Major could wear make-up in the Romanian army during the war – a gem first divulged to him, incidentally, by Anthony Powell.
[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.
Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.
Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …
Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.
Giraffe’s necks and Golden Gate Bridge [It seems] an appropriate moment to introduce readers to the unusual unit converter discovered … at http://www.weirdconverter.com/. This enables you to convert from one unusual unit to another. Sadly, in the “weight” section “male polar bear” is listed, but there is no baby elephant, only a fully grown one. Even so, you may be interested to know that one African elephant equals 12.24790343434 polar bears. There is also a “length/height” section which reveals, for instance, that one Golden Gate Bridge equals 720 giraffe’s necks.
[New Scientist; 28/07/2007]
Eccentric looks at life through the thoughts of a retired working thinker
A number of things surprised me about this. First of all that GE (General Electric) were in the top five. Secondly the significant difference in brand value between the first four and Nokia in too surprised at most of the entries. Perhaps not surprisingly I had at least heard of all the top 100 brands. I was surprised that Ford and Kodak had both fallen over 10 places in the last year. The top UK brand is HSBC in 23rd place, and the full list contains only 6 UK owned brands. Of course just over half the brands are US owned, followed by 10 which are German owned.