Observations from a Hill

When I went to work for BT [British Telecom] in 2004, I was exposed for the first time in my life firstly to being employed by a corporate structure, as opposed to more human scale business or academia, and secondly to what would become the bane of my life for sixteen years: performance management. Although not a new branding of the concept, even then, its origins stretch back nearly a century-and-a-half to the concepts of work management dreamt up by one Frederick Winslow Taylor in the U.S. His approach was to essentially break down working practice - mostly in heavy industry - into discrete, time-managed units which could in theory be quantified in scientific terms, circumventing entrenched guild and unionised working practices where roles, conditions and time management devolved to the workers themselves under the traditions of their trades and crafts and the relations between the various skill groupings. In essence, his approach was to solidify the aspirations of profit motive of e...

I'm going to stick roughly to the theme of the last couple of posts here tonight, in that I was reading Carlo Rovelli's seminal 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics' this lunchtime, over a couple of pints of local beer and a poke of chips, at the Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris]; specifically his second lesson, 'Quanta', which aims to enlighten the casual reader to the niceties of Quantum Theory/Mechanics in layman's language. As always, like all good teachers, he lays out the complex in terms that most of us can at least grasp, leaving the technical and mathematical underpinning to one side in order to give a clearer overview of frankly, apparently, mind-boggling concepts. On the question of the un-resolvability of the exact existence of electrons [Heisenberg's theory], or their position in space when their interactions reveal them to us, he has this to say: '... an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is ...

I mentioned last night that digitised data is twice abstracted via both hardware and software, but I didn't expand on what I meant by that, so I thought I'd drop a brief note to go some way in explaining what I meant by it. Getting back to the written/printed page as the most successful archival method of human produced stuff yet invented: a page of text in whatever natural language is the perfect wysiwyg - 'what you see you get' - interface. It is a direct, orthographic, symbolic rendering of human language, unmediated by the medium that transmits it. It's longevity, and hence its long term viability and reliability as a data retrieval system, is only governed by the quality of the means of production [paper, ink, binding, etc.] and the stability of the long term storage conditions of the artefacts. No other significant factor comes into play, and as the layer of abstraction of the data is the direct analogue of its source, ie. natural language, and as written lang...

Talking yesterday in the pub with Joe about that development in data storage media currently being mooted, which utilises a 3D borosilicate glass [ Pyrex to you and me] structure and lasers to store data at a pretty prodigious density for a claimed 10,000 years. The development by Microsoft is pretty impressive in and of itself, technically, and the predicted lifespan of the storage medium is a thousand times that of today's solid state hard drives, but herein lies the rub. As I've written here before, we struggle now to retrieve data from digital media created less than fifty years ago; not because the media themselves have necessarily physically deteriorated beyond reading, but simply because the file storage formats, not only physically themselves but their data structures also are now obsolete; the disk drives largely all gone to landfill, and the file and disk formats they employed arcane to all but a few archivists, museums and data specialists. For most us at least,...

  Pictured, some of Jane's charity-shop acquisitions from today: three old singles, and all in pretty decent nick, considering their considerable age. On top is a record that is dear to my heart: it charted in the summer of 1970 and I first heard it on the radio when I was holidaying in Ross-On-Wye with my mate Jeff and his parents: we were fifteen at the time and still forging our identities, both personally and musically. I remember this track coming out of the tiny little transistor radio [Google it if the reference is too obscure for your age group] and thinking 'my God, this is utterly brilliant'; so unlike anything that Fleetwood Mac had released thus far, and I'd been a fan for some time at that point. What I didn't realise in my naivety - and to be fair not many spotted it coming - was that this was probably the final signal of Peter Green's mental deterioration that led soon after to him leaving the band and living for many years as a virtual hermit, we...

Pictured - I guess weirdly, if I'm honest - are my boots. On the left my current daily wear, and to their right, my originals. The astute observer will note that, apart from age and wear, they are identical. The original pair I bought ten, maybe fifteen years - more likely the latter, I really can't remember - ago. The new ones are just broken in and in constant use. They are German-made, and go by the brand name Waldläufer, or ranger; literally, a forest walker in English. To say they are superb is a bloody understatement: they are comfortable from the first wearing - when I said that the new ones were broken in, I really should have said christened by the outdoors - they are lighter than any boot this durable has a right to be, and wear like carpet slippers. Both pairs were bought from Dick's Discount Shoes on Anglesey; the originals costing around eighty quid, discounted from well over a hundred, but still not cheap.  Their replacements last year were a hundred and thirt...