Four hours to record a ten minute presentation, I know how sisyphus felt.
Cartoon courtesy of Gaping Void

I’ve neglected this blog over the last few weeks, partly due to travel (A Round the World ticket, followed by a side trip to the US) and partly due to the intensity of some of the work. Last week for example saw me in Atlanta looking at human interactions in irregular warfare for the US Navy. That was followed by two days in New York working with one of the founders of Starlight Runner and their editorial lead on synergies between the transmedia approach they created and SenseMaker® . Watch out for some exciting new projects that will come from that, and you never know it may be Hollywood here we come at some stage! From my point of view, one of the exciting realisations is that when humans start to interact with the large scale micro-narrative databases we create that we get whole new forms of media.

More on that in future blogs, for the moment I want your sympathy

I was brought back to earth with a bump this morning. I needed to record a ten minute presentation on robustness and resilience, linking abductive/nil hypothesis research to power laws and uncertainty. I can do that in front of an audience at the drop of a hat, but it generally takes twenty minutes and recordings made at seminars were not acceptable. So I sat down after an early morning call at 0800 and started to record using the audio facility on Keynote. I finally finished just after midday and the result is loading into dropbox as I write. I expected to run it though two or three times to get the pacing right so that plus some note taking took an hour. I then recorded it and was only 5 seconds over. However attempting to create a quicktime video crashed the mac (too many other windows open) and I hadn’t saved the file so I started again, then the sequence of disasters happened, roughly as follows:

• Cat leaps onto computer and halts recording at eight minutes
• I fail to delete the above failure so next attempt ruined
• Phone rings seven minutes in
• A Colleague pings me on Skype which I should not have left open
• Postman knocks on window to avoid walking round house with a minute to go
• Wife and son have argument in kitchen next to study
• Car leaves drive just as I am one minute in to the next attempt and we have a gravel drive outside window of study
• Cat gets up from side of computer and pulls out mike lead
• Phone rings again (normally we go whole days without people ringing) at nine minutes
• Perfect recording, but then discover that in dealing with cat I had turned off the mike so that is lost
• Car returns, that gravel again
• Loud discussion that might be an argument between wife and daughter in kitchen
• Argument between me and entire family about noise
• Courier knocks on window to avoid walking around house
• Network member phones on my mobile
• Use “null” when I meant “nil” so start again
• Cat sinks claws into bare leg attempting to leap onto lap, decide scream inappropriate to recording
• Ambulance screams past house sirens active (normally a once in a quarter event and no, I didn’t call it to deal with cat inflicted wound)

Then finally, its complete

An all too brief conversation with Tom Stewart this morning (he was the opening keynote at KM World here in Washington) produced a gem of an idea, namely what poems are appropriate to give an insight into the different cynefin domains. I have long used Robert Frost’s Mending Wall to illustrate complexity. Its evocative use of the old proverb Good fences make good neighbours and the two lines My apple trees will never get across; And eat the cones under his pines show the idea of boundaries and diversity well. Tome came up with Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens for Chaos, the need to take action to allow patterns to emerge. All other ideas and suggestions welcome.

I have around 7 blogs to backfill for last week the minute I get a chance to complete them; two on the Phoenix event and the rest of my brief holiday in Arizona and New Mexico. They will be done, but not just yet.

Entering the smog of Los Angeles

I had been planning to post my frustrations at yesterdays travel schedule and may still do so tomorrow. Suffice it to say that we had to put down in Chicago before making Dallas three hours late; would someone please tell the airlines that an aircraft is a Faraday Cage. Two hours to get through immigration (15 minutes for US Citizens I timed it), three hours queuing to get allocated to same flight next day then a shuttle bus to a Dallas Centre hotel at 0100, exactly 24 hours after I got up. However I got pinged by Dylan Evans first thing with a story that is so absurd that it sounds like a sketch for Monty Python except that it is serious.

I met Dylan through an online discussion about crowd sourcing and distributed connection and hope to meet up later this year. Dylan is a lecturer in behavioral science in the School of Medicine at the University of Cork. He, like many a biologist I know, argued that humans are not as unique as we think. In an ongoing debate with a colleague he referenced a fully peer reviewed article (not some sordid internet search) that showed that fruit bats indulged in fellatio apparently to prolong to stimulate sexual intercourse. Now there is a wider debate here as to the uniqueness of human beings that has been taxing me of late but I’ll come back to that in the future.

Now the absurdity starts, following a complaint (what social and intellectual inadequate would complain about such an example) which was not upheld by an investigatory committee, Prof. Michael Murphy President of UCC placed Dylan under a two year “close supervision” order. Personally I would have fired anyone who brought such a frivolous complaint and the same would apply to a student. This is not a rural primary school, but an institution that purports to be a centre for higher education. You can read the story here, please sign the petition here and whatever you do don’t talk about fruit bats if you take the ferry to Cork this year, you may end up in some mediaeval correction unit.

And a late addition – a poem from the blogosphere

Another silly survey to test your stress levels and coping mechanisms, from the BBC of all people not the Sun. It turns out my stress levels are medium and I tend to blame circumstances when things go wrong and I have a healthy habit of not blaming myself. I love these things, spend five minutes on line and your area assessed and categorised. For an encore I will read my horoscope, I’m pretty sure that will be as accurate and equally useful.

The New Statesman has been running a weekly competition for intelligent quips of various types for as long as I have been reading it, which is over 40 years now. Number 4077 asked readers to come up with factoids which means believable comments that become true through repetition. popular examples include the number of words that Eskimo’s have for snow and the frog boiling story. Some of these (the latter in particular) are too good not to be true but never mind! They are a subset of the general category of urban myths. There were some delightful ones in this weeks edition (which is on George Orwell by the way so well worth a quick visit to the newsagents) which I share here (and in the title of this post):

• There is a Starbucks in the Vatican but none in Italy
• More people were killed in making Saving Private Ryan than died in the Normandy landings
• If a penguin stays dry for three days, it turns red
• Muesli is more carcinogenic than Coco Pops
• The memory of an average pocket calculator equals that of 100 million earthworms

So I come back from the US and I hit my normal problem at this time of the year with the first flowering of rapeseed. The fields around us are becoming a patchwork of yellow and blue, the former from rape the latter from linseed. I have a long standing allergy to rapeseed flowers and I am sneezing in consequence. However it seems the local population (i) assumes that Mexico and Washington are adjacent and (ii) that the odd sneeze is a sign of immanent pandemic. This illustration (hat tip to the NHS Blog Doctor for it) is excellent. This cartoon is also brilliant and my thanks to a tweet from Richard Sambrook for it. Reading the Daily Telegraph would have me thrown out of the family for political deviance so I am reliant on others to reference interesting material from that source.

If you don’t like ants, do not follow this link. On the other hand, you would be missing some fascinating pictures and great bye line comments.

I don’t know about you but I think this is probably a step too far (Brain researchers open door to editing memory). Aside from the dangers of loosing material around the edges there are wider ethical issues. Are you still responsible for actions of which you have no memory? What are the implications for emotional resilience if I can just edit out the bad stuff? A few minutes thought on the implications for criminal activity and a myriad of fairly nasty implications come to mind (maybe I’d like to forget some of those for that matter). What about guilt? Now I don’t want to dwell on that but a brain swept of guilt does not a good person make. It all takes cosmetic surgery to new depths. Nip and Tuck adds chemical lobotomies?