Category: Musings

Alan Peters

What is it about wood?

The smell of wood shavings!

When I was a very young boy at Grammar School (aka High School) in Wembley, North West London, one of the subjects taught was wood-working.  I loved the feel of wood, still do, and the smell of a wood shaving fresh off the wood plane is still remembered.  But, for whatever reason, wood and I never got on.

Later on, my first yacht was a pretty little East Coast gaff cutter, built in 1898, with a hull of pitch pine laid on grown oak frames.  Her original name was Mimms but this had been changed to Esterel by the time she was purchased by me. Despite needing a lot of remedial work, the over-riding memory was how the hull ‘spoke’ when she was being sailed.

It’s almost as though wood doesn’t die when the tree is felled, it just passes into another phase depending on the use made of it.

So where’s this all leading?

Alan Peters who died October 11th, 2009

In the issue of The Economist dated November 7th, 2009, there was an obituary about Alan Peters, furniture maker, who died on October 11th, 2009, aged 76.  Like all obits. that appear in The Economist this was well published but something about this particular obituary really stuck in my mind.  I tore out the page so it could be re-read over the coming weeks.

It’s still on my desk even 6 months later and it prompted me to write about Alan Peters on Learning from Dogs.

Here’s an extract of the obituary of Alan Peters as published in the The Times.

In contrast to many of today’s school-leavers, who look for instant success and celebrity, the furniture designer Alan Peters served seven years’ apprenticeship in the workshop of Edward Barnsley, which then operated without power tools. When interviewed last year Peters was still proud that he swept the workshop floor quicker and better than anyone else. His eagerness to share his passion and knowledge of furniture design and furniture making was a theme of his life.

And here’s another reflection from David Savage who studied under Alan Peters:

Damn, Damn, Damn, I am getting fed up writing obituries on dead furniture makers. Why can’t they just go on for ever.

I knew Alan quite well. He was a role model and a mentor when I really needed one. This would be way back in the late 1970s when there were very few people making modern furniture in a barn in Devon which is what I wanted to do. Even fewer making a living doing it. I had all the questions and Alan as far as I could see had all the answers. I spent a short time working with him. I was first in the workshop in the morning and last out in the evening. I’m sure he got fed up with my questions but he patiently answered. He gave and gave and gave. When I was set up he helped me get into the Devon Guild of Craftsmen and much later he would come to my workshop in Bideford to give Saturday seminars showing slides of his work and trips to Japan and Korea. He was an inspiration I know not just to me but to a generation of makers. I miss him.

Question: How many furniture makers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Ten, one to change the bulb and nine to discuss at length how Alan would do it.

By Paul Handover

Celebrity Eclipse

Can this form of holidaying still remain popular?

The Celebrity Eclipse has recently left her construction dockyard at Papenburg, Germany bound for her home base.  This enormous  new ship attracted some news simply because the exercise of getting her from the dockyard to the open sea required some ‘shoe-horning’!  This YouTube video shows why (amateur filming but a great soundtrack!):

The Celebrity Solstice leaving the dockyard at Papenburg
The Celebrity Solstice leaving the dockyard (backwards!) at Papenburg

All would wish any ship that sets out to sea safe travel.  But one wonders whether this huge ship, that must require such huge sums of money just to stay afloat, and that must have been conceived and ordered when times were much rosier, will ever be a commercial success?

By Paul Handover

The manageability of innovation

Innovation is manageable

“Innovation” means different things to different people but, generally, it involves the application of novel ideas, products or processes for some purpose. But even if we can agree on “what” it is, do we understand “how” innovation happens?

Managing 'bright' ideas

There is a significant change taking place in the way that the process of innovation is understood. We can put this in the context of developments in the manageability of other areas of business activity in recent times. Read more of this Post

Lies, damn lies and statistics

How safe is flying?

Safe?

Wikipedia have an interesting, and well referenced, entry on Air Safety.  Within that entry is a table showing comparing deaths by air to other forms of travel.

The table in Wikipedia is much easier to read, it’s here, but the data is shown below for those that do not want to click through.

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There are three main statistics which may be used to compare the safety of various forms of travel:

Deaths per billion journeys
Bus 4.3
Rail 20
Van 20
Car 40
Foot 40
Water 90
Air 117
Bicycle 170
Motorcycle 1640
Deaths per billion hours
Bus 11.1
Rail 30
Air 30.8
Water 50
Van 60
Car 130
Foot 220
Bicycle 550
Motorcycle 4840
Deaths per billion kilometres
Air 0.05
Bus 0.4
Rail 0.6
Van 1.2
Water 2.6
Car 3.1
Bicycle 44.6
Foot 54.2
Motorcycle 108.9

It is worth noting that the air industry’s insurers base their calculations on the number of deaths per journey statistic while the industry itself generally uses the number of deaths per kilometre statistic in press releases.

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Interesting to see how air travel varies in terms of comparative safety depending on how it is measured.  But also interesting to see that however it is measured, riding a motorbike doesn’t come out so well.

Finally, that word’ billion’ is too easy to throw away, as it were.  A billion hours ago was over a 114,000 years ago – when mankind was living in the Stone Age.  A billion kilometres would represent 114,285 trips between London and Los Angeles.

If you are interested!

By Paul Handover

Stop Flaunting Sexuality Please

Oh, this is really clever! Not!

I was stunned the other day to read this:

In the latest development in his campaign to show how dramatically the Tories have changed, David Cameron has published the party’s first-ever official list of openly gay MPs.

The Conservatives say they have 20 openly gay candidates standing in the Election. Of those, 11 told party chiefs they were ‘happy’ to be named in the first authorised list of gay Conservative candidates.

David Cameron

Homosexuality is no longer – thankfully – a crime.  It has always existed and no doubt always will. It is therefore – logically – a normal feature of human society. Isn’t it time to accept it as such and stop flaunting it constantly in the media? Can we not keep private those parts of our lives which are private? Do heterosexuals go around flaunting their heterosexuality?

Why on earth does a potential government-forming party feel obliged to publish lists of people’s sexuality? Why do I suddenly feel as if I am bizarre in thinking that one’s sexuality should be something private? Personally I haven’t got the faintest interest in other people’s sexual inclinations. Like religion, it should be personal and not eternally flaunted in the media.

And it is all illogical. Either homosexuality is normal or it isn’t. If it is (as it is), then why the constant need to bang on about it, as for example in the Tory party? What on earth has it got to do with running the country? Are the Tories supposed to be better-qualified to run the country the more homosexuals they have? Is there a point at which having TOO MANY becomes a negative point? Would they then start to proclaim how many heterosexuals they had? On a personal level, I keep my sexuality to myself. It is nothing to do with you and certainly not with running the country.

It is analagous to sex in the media. It is overdone. The endless superficial titillation and flaunting of sexuality is demeaning of the Human Spirit. Sex is – or should be – a private matter. It’s better that way. It is more mature that way, but the media – and now the political parties – sink to the lowest denominator instead of focusing on what really matters.

Please, please give us some politicians with common-sense.

By Chris Snuggs

In praise of Yves Smith

Helping thousands better understand this crisis

Yves’ Blog Naked Capitalism has been mentioned many times on Learning from Dogs.  Indeed, she was one of the Blog authors highlighted recently in this Post.

Yves Smith

I fail to understand how she finds the hours in the day to write in such detail – but those of us interested in getting under the skin of our present economic situation are all the better for it.  Here’s a great example that was published on the 23rd February.  I quote the opening paragraphs and then link to the rest of her post. From here on is her piece:

———————–

Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ highly respected chief economics editor, weighs in with a pretty pessimistic piece tonight. This makes for a companion to Peter Boone and Simon Johnson’s Doomsday cycle post from yesterday.

Let us cut to the chase of Wolf’s argument:

Now, after the implosion, we witness the extraordinary rescue efforts. So what happens next? We can identify two alternatives: success and failure.

By “success”, I mean reignition of the credit engine in high-income deficit countries. So private sector spending surges anew, fiscal deficits shrink and the economy appears to being going back to normal, at last. By “failure” I mean that the deleveraging continues, private spending fails to pick up with any real vigour and fiscal deficits remain far bigger, for far longer, than almost anybody now dares to imagine. This would be post-bubble Japan on a far wider scale.

Yves here. Notice he associates success and failure with polar options. But how can you “reignite the credit engine” when the financial system is undercapitalized even before allowing for the need to take further writedowns? The IMF has found the converse in its study of 124 banking crises, that purging bad debt is a painful but necessary precursor to growth. So I fail to understand how Wolf envisages that “skip Go, collect $200″ of releveraging quickly comes about. And in fact, it turns out that Wolf’s “success” is a straw man:

[to read the rest click here, Ed]

By Paul Handover

The Greenwich Meridian

Don’t know what time it is?  Hardly surprising in Spring and Autumn.

Today is exactly one month before the United Kingdom ‘moves’ its clocks forward and enters British Summer Time; 1am (UTC) on Sunday 28th March 2010.  Is that date the same across the world?  One would think so because it makes life, especially international air transport, so much easier.

But no!  In fact the way that time zones are applied and changed for Daylight Saving is a complete hotch-potch.

In the United States of America, daylight saving starts at 2am on March 14th, 2010.  And just three years ago that start time would have been the first Sunday in April.  Changes were made in the US Energy Policy Act of 2005.

From this geographic site comes the following:

Other parts of the world observe Daylight Saving Time as well. While European nations have been taking advantage of the time change for decades, in 1996 the European Union (EU) standardized an EU-wide “summertime period.” The EU version of Daylight Saving Time runs from the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October. During the summer, Russia’s clocks are two hours ahead of standard time. During the winter, all 11 of the Russian time zones are an hour ahead of standard time. During the summer months, Russian clocks are advanced another hour ahead. With their high latitude, the two hours of Daylight Saving Time really helps to save daylight. In the southern hemisphere where summer comes in December, Daylight Saving Time is observed from October to March. Equatorial and tropical countries (lower latitudes) don’t observe Daylight Saving Time since the daylight hours are similar during every season, so there’s no advantage to moving clocks forward during the summer.

Of course, someone had to create a web-site to track all these various time zones and changes.  Here it is.

Last year, the BBC News website published an interesting article about the Greenwich Meridian aka The Prime Meridian.  The setting of the Prime Meridian was done just over 125 years ago, in October 1884.  When one thinks of the importance in having a standard meridian, both for time keeping and navigation, I would have guessed that it went back much further in time.

The other aspect that was news to me was that the conference had been convened at the request of the American President Chester Arthur.

From that BBC article:

Until the 19th Century, many countries and even individual towns kept their own local time based on the sun’s passage across the sky and there were no international rules governing when the day would start or finish.

Maps with multiple meridians were confusing

However, with the rapid expansion of the railways and communications networks during the 1850s and 1860s, setting a standard global time soon became essential.

“The world was in a very big mix-up,” explains Dr Avraham Ariel, author of Plotting the Globe. “People had lots of prime meridians. Earlier in Europe there were 20 prime meridians. The Russians had two or three, the Spanish had their own and so on.”

Thus that famous line in the grounds of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London is not as old as many might have thought.

Prime Meridian, Greenwich

By Paul Handover

Not your average airport!

The world’s 18 strangest airports

The American magazine Popular Mechanics had an interesting piece on some of the more bizarre airports around the world.  As the article says,

Engineers tasked with building an airport are faced with countless challenges: The ideal location needs ample space, endless flat ground, favorable winds and great visibility. But spots in the real world are rarely ideal, and engineers are forced to work with what they have, making sure that the end product is the safest possible structure for pilots. A survey of airports around the world turns up a mixed bag, ranging from dangerous and rugged landing strips to mega-size facilities that operate like small cities.

Apart from the general interest in these airports, there is also a personal resonance as three of them are in my aviation log-book: Barra; Gibralter; Courchevel.  Indeed my experiences of flying into Barra were the subject of a Post on this Blog a few months ago.

Courchevel in the French Alps is, for all pilots, one of the most amazing, butt-clenching arrivals one could ever imagine.

As Wikipedia puts it:

Courchevel’s airport also has a certain degree of infamy in the aviation industry as home to one of the shortest runways in the world, with a length of 525 metres and a gradient of 18.5% in order to help slow landing aircraft. The airport has a dangerous approach through deep valleys which can only be performed by specially certified pilots. On landing there is no go-around procedure, as most of the worlds airports have – there is merely a very steep hill which has seen a few accidents since the airport first opened.

Quite so!

Here’s an interesting video from YouTube

and a few personal memories:

Start of the approach into Courchevel
'short final' Courchevel
Author & aircraft on the apron - Courchevel

By Paul Handover

Old age!

A piece of Internet fiction still carries an important message

One of the features of the Internet is that stories can circulate widely across the globe.  This poem is one such example.  The ‘story’ behind the poem would appear to be fiction but so what!  It serves as a good reminder of something that affects us all (except those tragically cut off before they grow old!).

But before getting the poem, the reason that it was decided to publish the Post is that old age, whatever that really means, is a much bigger issue for societies than many care to acknowledge.  Because, I guess, the ‘many’ tend not to be old, or let us say, the right side of 60.

And look how even the terminology is so biased towards youth.  Why should it be the ‘right’ side of 60?  What is ‘wrong’ with being older than 60, or 70 or whatever age?

Of course, in so many ways nature’s purpose is for us to breed the next generation to continue our gene pool and once we have achieved that then our ‘natural’ use is limited.  But that is to ignore the value of wisdom, the huge advantage the next generation has in being able to tap into the experience and knowledge of the ‘ancients’.

Here’s an interesting piece from Aging and the Elderly by Hampton Roy MD and Charles Russell PhD

Wisdom has been attributed to older people in nearly all world societies from ancient times, but modern research on the psychology of aging has paid little attention to this quality of the late years

………………..
A number of researchers, however, have assessed the psychology of aging quite differently. Instead of measuring decline, their aim has been to measure the unique and special characteristics of mind possessed by older people.

………………….

These researchers might typically define wisdom as Kenyon did when he described it as “the ability to exercise good judgement about important but uncertain matters of life” -where “uncertain matters” refers to problems that may not have come up before, or to which there are competing or conflicting solutions, and so forth. These researchers describe the old as having “self-creating” powers because they seem to be more independent in their decisions, and less subject to external influences like the fads and trends that sweep over the young.
They propose also that the old are better able to live with contradictions in life and that they quickly see the essentials of situations because of their greater experience. Wisdom, they observe, includes the intent to do good, which in turn depends on holding favorable attitudes toward other people.

Then again, popular culture defines the ancient American Indian warrior as many things but old and decrepit doesn’t figure in that list!

Sioux warrior

So here’s that poem – may you live to a great age!

Read the rest of this Post