Yes, this is a Japanese zen garden. But does anyone else think it looks like a zen golf course?
Category Archives: current affairs
What we Value — Branding
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.
Zen Mischievous Moments #132
From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007
Calendar chaos
[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.
One is left with just one question: Why?
Doctoring the Toilet
Spotted this notice in the toilet at my doctor’s surgery the other day. How to murder the language! Well it amused me!
Excessive DUST?!
Absolutely brilliant — so much so it is stretching my credulity neurons.
As @j-sin syas: I’ve lived in the UK long enough to know that this is the only country where “leaves on the track” stop our trains but this seemed a new level of sillyness. Was the dust “high in fat or low in fat” I wonder?
Terrorism
I have never yet blogged about terrorism. And I am not going to start now. To do so would be to give the perpetrators one of the things they desire: attention. The best solution is to get on with life and leave the law to deal with criminals.
Naked Cyclists
Nice little piece today on BBC News about naked and near-naked cyclists protesting in London and elsewhere about traffic and climate change. Lovely quote at the end:
Bikes and naked bodies harm nobody. Car fumes … are driving us all to climate chaos.
But I’m miffed that I missed it. I would have been there.
Mass Circumcision to Fight AIDS
Here we go! I did warn you.
There was a BBC News item yesterday under the above title tells of a mass programme to circumcise males in Africa because doing so reduces AIDS rates (in males!) by 60%.
Effectively they start by “offering” the procedure to all boys born in hospital. But how long will it before adult & adolescent males are being “offered” the operation; just as men in India were bribed into vasectomies some years back. I put “offering” in quotes because I have no doubt that the offer will be heavy handed and not exactly optional.
I find this type of attitude obscene in today’s world (no, any world). Mutilation of someone, for any reason, when they themselves cannot opt out is to me a violation of human rights and an abuse. The medical profession really should know better. There would be outrage if the equivalent operation was “offered” to females — indeed there is outrage, because it is done to females (tho’ not as an anti-AIDS measure).
Oh yes, and what about the women? Circumcising men does nothing to reduce the chances of a female catching AIDS from an infected male.
Come on guys. Let’s have some medical responsibility — in the round! A little holistic thinking. Let’s find proper ways to tackle AIDS and not resort to barbaric, medieval, mutilation. And let’s stop name-calling against those who don’t agree with you, too.
Charlotte Church Savaged to Death
Charlotte Church* savaged to death in the Beckhams’ back garden
(*that’s the lamb Gordon Ramsay named after the Welsh singer and was rearing for his TV show)
The above is a headline from today’s Daily Mail. You can find the full story here.
Someone please tell me it’s actually April 1st! Or are these people total tossers?
Blogging Code of Conduct
Another piece I picked up from this week’s New Scientist is the suggestion that weblogs should effectively be forced to adhere to a code of conduct or be “black marked”. Here are a few apposite quotes from the full article, Bloggers lash out at ‘code of conduct’:
Perhaps inevitably, some bloggers have criticised a proposed “code of conduct” designed to curb the harshest online criticism.
A pair of internet luminaries suggested the code after a prominent blogger complained of threatening messages posted on her own blog and other sites.
Publisher Tim O’Reilly […] and Jimmy Wales […] proposed the Blogging Code of Conduct after Kathy Sierra [received] threatening messages [on her weblog].
[…]
A first draft was released this week […] has riled some bloggers, who accuse its authors of acting like media overlords and disregarding free speech.
[…]
The proposed code calls for bloggers to ban anonymous comments and delete messages if they are abusive, threatening, libellous, false, and if they violate promises of confidentiality or an individual’s privacy. “We take responsibility for our own words and for comments we allow on our blog,” the draft code states. […] The code also calls for ignoring “trolls” […]
[…] bloggers who adopt […] the code would adorn their websites […] a sheriff’s badge […] those who chose not to […] mark their websites with an icon of a stick of dynamite […]
[…]
“I like civility but prefer the ‘anything goes’ badge […] Censorship is a slippery slope […]”
Some other bloggers also complain that even a crude bar on anonymity could help control comments in countries with governments that are intolerant of free speech.
David Sifry, founder of Technorati [says] “One of the core principles that the Internet is built on is the principle of free speech […] If you really are a jerk, I don’t have to read what you say.”
“I’m not sure a code of conduct is the answer […] It makes about as much sense as me wearing a badge to have a conversation […]” [adds Mike Tippett].
Here’s a link to the draft “code of conduct”. Having read the “code of conduct” it isn’t as draconian as the news articles I’ve seen imply. But I’m still not hugely in favour. No, correction, I am still against.
I have a fundamental belief in free speech and civil liberty for everyone, however uncomfortable it may be. And any such code of conduct strikes me as censorship by the back door. As previous readers of this weblog will know I have a deep rooted moral objection to anyone making impositions on what someone may read, write, say or think. Either we have freedom of speech or we have censorship. And in my book there is already too much censorship (mostly covert) in the world. I may not like or agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it. If I disagree with you I can either engage you in debate or I can ignore your views.
Equally no-one – at least no-one of right thinking – would want to abuse or upset someone else. But sadly there are too many out there who aren’t right thinking. By focusing on them we give them the attention they mostly crave. As with “trolls” the best thing is to be grown up and ignore them. Let’s lead by example and not by diktat.
And this weblog? Well it would instantly be “dynamited” because of the occasional references to sex and equally occasional use of words like “fuck” and “bollocks”. Now just how pathetic is that!?