John S Denker is both a scientist and pilot. Now, I have no doubt that there are many scientists who are pilots, and that many of them combine these interests in a variety of ways. So in what way is he “remarkable”?
Experts as communicators
Sometimes experts dedicate considerable effort to communicate their understanding for the benefit of people who are much less knowledgeable. It is probably important that this happens, because it is the main means by which substantial topics are understood in any depth by other people. Without the experts’ thorough knowledge of a specific subject area, very little understanding is likely to be transferred. Continue reading “Remarkable people: John S Denker”→
There is a very interesting Post on the Blog TechCrunch. Let me quote a little from that Post:
Last week two bloggers, Steven Frischling and Chris Elliot, were visited by TSA agents and threatened with jail time if they did not reveal their source of the TSA Travel Directive that they each published shortly after the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas day. Frischling caved immediately and handed over his computer. Elliot did not. Since then the Department of Homeland Security has dropped the subpoenas, but there is a bigger issue here. The protection of sources is a cornerstone of our freedom of speech.As bloggers, we have a duty of confidentiality to our sources. And that means keeping information confidential even if threatened with the tyranny of government. And even if the legislatures and courts haven’t decided that as bloggers we have real rights protecting us from that tyranny.
I’ll never be surprised by a tyrannical government. In a sense, it’s their job. It’s our job as bloggers to stand up to that tyranny, even if our liberty has been threatened. Journalists have gone to jail rather than disclose their sources. If bloggers want the same level of respect, and protection from government by the courts, they need to stand up for what’s right.
For many years it’s been traditional for me and the family to take a walk on New Year’s Day. But this time, without me, my wife and family back in the UK decided to go to Stonehenge for a walk, on a cold crisp day.
Why ‘back in the UK’? Because I was in Sharjah, one of the seven emirates in the UAE.
When here I always stay in one of the original hotels of the country, built on the edge of the corniche. As the day was warm and bright I decided to vary my walk.
Instead of going some 5kms round the lagoon, I made my way towards the area where the shops are mostly run by Indian people. For many years their influence has been very strong, indeed the rupee was used as currency until not long ago.
Arab dhow
It didn’t take long to leave the main area that is regularly seen and head down towards the old port where the Dhows are moored. There is an ancient feel to this area, and the water front is full of activity.
There was one man who had been unloading coal from his boat onto the quay side. You could hardly see his features until he smiled. All along there were people onboard their various craft, none of which really looked seaworthy, but which obviously make a regular and long journey to India.
The pathway was broken, and the occasional cat appeared from a rubbish bin. I made my way past the open market where animals are sold. Nothing is hidden here ! It was prayer time, and from many different minarets came the sound of the chanting. There was a lot of dirt and rubbish, uneven walk areas, and tatty shops. All with quite an East African feel. I passed a selection of tents where many plants and flowers were for sale; no garden centre as we have come to expect in England.
I finally worked my way down to the fish market, and was amazed at the white covering to the broken pathway, which turned out to be made up entirely of fish scales.
The next part of the walk was back towards the lagoon where directly in front of me was the Burj Dubai, which has taken
The Burj Dubai
just over 5 years to build, and measures 2684 feet. It is due to open this week, and if you want some office space, the cost is $4000 per square foot. The contrast from such back street filth to the glitter of the world’s tallest building separated by only a few miles brought home the stark contrast of what for most people is reality, and the unreal.
Sadly the amount of rubbish in all its forms is a huge problem, but I did smile when I saw one fisherman improvising, for instead of a float on the end of his line he was using the upturned remains of an old plastic bottle, but it did work!
Nobody bothered me, and I was quite happy taking in the sights and smells, and lost in my own thoughts, amazed that if you smiled and caught somebody’s gaze they would likely wish you Happy New Year.
that Christmas for young children is a wondrous place.
Here we are on the verge of the first full week of the New Year and soon busy lives will engage with all that 2010 is bringing. So I wanted to share with you something truly magical that happened early on Christmas morning in the Derham house.
Our little four year old woke us at 4 o’clock Christmas morning crying.
“Father Christmas hasn’t come”, he struggled to tell us through his tears.
British governmental ‘skills’ now being applied to British universities
THE GOLDEN GOOSE … Greed and the City killed off the financial golden goose – at terrible cost to ordinary people and the economy as a whole. With the problem compounded by government folly, Britain now faces years of debt and austerity to pay for it all. For the moment, the City is reeling, but at least we still have our Higher Education system, don’t we?
Well, errrrmmmm …… yes, we still have it for the moment.
Oxford University
We do – or perhaps did – have a great reputation for having world class universities. Rich foreign parents – including, of course, a good many whose source of income is highly dubious – naturally seek a good education for their children, which Britain in the past was able to provide and their country presumably couldn’t. For decades, a British degree was seen as a precious cachet of excellence in the international paper-chase.
The best place to live? It’s all down to your neighbors!
No offense to anyone else, but I live in the perfect neighborhood.
My neighborhood is not big; it consists of only one street, a circle; where you enter the street is the same place you exit. There are only about 30 homes on my street. None of them are very fancy or very big. Most of the houses are older. Some need repair. One or two are empty now. No, it isn’t the size of the neighborhood or the grandeur of the houses.
I live close to the University where I work. I could walk to work if I needed to. But I haven’t needed to, except for the one time, when the Presidential debate was held on campus and security closed it down to all but pedestrian traffic. Although it is certainly convenient, proximity to work is not the reason my neighborhood is perfect.
My girls are unlikely to agree just yet with my assessment of our neighborhood. But they are still young, and there are no kids their age on our street. One neighbor does have grandchildren their age who visit sometimes, but that doesn’t really count, they tell me. Off and on, they complain and say they want to move. My 15-year-old wants to live in a city, the bigger the better, the more people the better; my 13-year-old wants to live on a horse farm, the bigger the better, the more horses the better.
But I tell them that some day, when they are married and have children and are busy with life, they will look back on this time in our neighborhood, and will understand what I meant when I told them how very lucky we are to live here.
Because we have neighbors; real neighbors!
They welcome new families with home-baked bread; take in your mail when you are away; call to check on you when you are sick; give you a ride to get your car out of the shop; lend you their extra tall ladder. All without hesitation and without expecting anything in return. And they let me do what I can for them. There’s genuine warmth and support between neighbors on my street. It’s like an extended family.
Maybe even a little better! Why? Because they do all of this without pushing, without invading your privacy, without crossing into your personal space. They are supportive without being nosy. How totally wonderful: to have support when you need it but, as important, perhaps more important, you also have your privacy. I can’t imagine a better combination. I can’t imagine feeling safer. I can’t imagine a more wonderful neighborhood. I can’t imagine a better home. My neighbors are the best.
A few years ago I saw an advert for a small piano sized electric organ in our local shop window.
Great I thought, that will be a good way to introduce some music into the home, and see if I can add pedals to the idea of playing the piano.
It didn’t take long to track down the owner, but unfortunately the organ was in a back room, down two sets of stairs, round a corner, in a house which was isolated and difficult to find. Whereas I should have gone along with a team of
Typical electric organ
people, there were only three of us to move the instrument, but we eventually managed to move the thing out of the house, and into a trailer which we used to transport it to our house.
My wife thought I was mad, but I really liked it because it only had the sound of an organ, not a choice of sounds. It even had stops, not buttons to choose the different pipes you wanted to use.
Actually we were undertaking a great deal of building work at the time thus when our local church’s organ came to the end of it’s life, it seemed a good idea to offer them the chance to have this piece. It was ten times better than the original and sounded wonderful: job done!
However, last year some kind soul left money to the church and it was decided that the churcch could afford a new organ.
It duly arrived and our old one was moved to an alcove at the back of the church: I was asked to remove it.
Where was I going to put it? By chance we had acquired an almost new one ourselves and nobody seemed to want this old but wonderful piece.
We tried Ebay – no luck. Adverts – again no interest. The pressure started to grow.
People were asking me to move that old organ of mine. Letters started to arrive. Could I please take it away – I became the bad guy.
Eventually, I made contact with a man in London who would be happy to take it away for free, but he wanted to hear it play. Whoops! It was already loaded on my trailer!
But I managed to position trailer and load near an electric socket and in broad daylight, with the aid of the mobile phone, I stood and played a range of music! Our customer was happy.
He agreed to come at about eight o’clock one Saturday morning, but actually arrived two hours ahead of time at six in the morning!
A church in Ghana
The man brought his wife, dressed in her national dress, explaining that they wanted the organ for a church in their village back in Ghana. They had never ventured outside London, so this visit to the country was a major event. They joined us for breakfast and we showed our children a map depicting where the organ would eventually go.
The man was built like an ox and he and his wife together were quite happy to lift the instrument and put it in the back of their vehicle.
Thanks to Naked Capitalism, we posted an item on the 19th December about an unknown wild-life ranger working in the wildlife refuge area of Lanseria, South Africa. Here was one of the pictures included in that Post:
The Post finished with an appeal to anyone that knew the name of this Ranger. Many of you did and responded; thank you!
The heads of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may each receive pay packages of up to $6m (£3.7m) for 2009, depending on company performance.
Now I’m not an American nor do I really understand the issues BUT when taxpayers put in $111,000,000,000 of THEIR money into these organisations (that’s $365 for every man, woman and child on the US Census!) and so many of those same US taxpayers are up the proverbial financial creek without a paddle, there has to be a better way of rewarding top bosses (of US publicly owned corporations) than the option of $6,000,000 each!
But the regulator which decided the pay levels said the awards were 40% lower than before the government bailout.
The sums involved reflected the need to attract and retain talent, it argued.
Frankly, I just don’t believe that there aren’t many other incredibly capable business leaders who would do these jobs for a fraction of six million dollars. (The present incumbents are Michael Williams at Fannie Mae and Charles E. Haldeman Jr. at Freddie Mac who will receive a base of $900,000 in 2010 with the opportunity to earn $5.1 more if “certain targets are met“.)
Read the article here – I’m going to lay down in a dark, quiet room for a while!
Tim Clodfelter of the local Winston-Salem Journal wrote a very interesting piece on the future of brick-and-mortar
Tim Clodfelter
video stores and video rental places such as NetFlix and Red Hat.
I happened to be quoted in the article as an economist (the comment about “reducing the average cost every time we watch a purchased video” was supposed to be a joke!), but actually met up with Tim in my role as mom and pseudo-agent! Let me explain.
My 15-year-old daughter was standing in a very long line of young ladies waiting to audition for the Coen Brother’s remake of True Grit. Tim was there to get the story on the open casting. I asked him over hoping he would talk to my daughter. He and I got to talking instead; he found out that I was an economics teacher, and pulled out his notes on the Video Store story. He ended up talking to me and several other parents in line, all of whom had a different approach to viewing movies. The resulting article follows with permission to publish on Learning from Dogs.
Learning from Dogs 