The power of incremental progress (and a gadget)

I've never been a great fan of jogging, but where am at right now it's the most effective way to get some daily CV and rebalance the system. I can swim for an hour or play tennis for an hour, no problem. When I started running just after Christmas I had to take a breather after 800 metres.

I've gradually increased the distance non-stop and the pace but the big break-through has been getting the RunKeeper app on my iPhone. Now that I can see exactly how far I've run every day, and how fast, I just have to make sure it's a little more each time. Today it was just over 3 km and soon it will be 5.00 km.

So many thanks Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper.

Blowing away the cobwebs today

I went on the following run - map courtesy of RunKeeper on my iPhone. Great app, guys!

Tweets as a way to drive blog / website traffic

Maybe it's the people I'm following on Twitter, but it seems to me that a lot of tweets are essentially functioning as a signpost to blogs or websites.

Sometimes the click-through is worth the time, but nine times out of ten I scan tweetlinks and ignore them. IMO part of the value of Tweets is saying something worthwhile in 140 characters or less.

Twitter search, not Google

Today I needed to find out some information about Location-Based Services and rather than Google the term I searched it on Twitter. Within seconds I had found something highly relevant and authoritative here, thanks to Twitter.

Twitter 95, Blogger 0

It's a couple of months since I've been moved to blog anything here. Yet in not much more than a week I've tweeted over 90 times.

Two key differences.
1 - Brevity - no need to craft a well-turned piece for Twitter, there are only 140 characters
2 - Interaction

John McCain and the art of losing well

So Barack Obama ended up winning around twice as many electoral college votes as John McCain (365 vs. 173). The actual votes cast show a closer race than that (52.8% 45.9%) but it was still very clearly Obama's election. The worse the economic crisis became, the more Obama looked like the man who would be better able to steer a course through it (please God!)

If it's any consolation to McCain, there top job looks like the most poisoned chalice around. As The Onion ironically reported under the headline Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job - In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.

Even dealing with the current crises (plural) will put years on Obama fast. Just imagine if it were McCain with a 72-year-old body already damaged by torture and bouts of illness.

All in all, John McCain probably got the best result for him, for the United States and the world. His loss was clear but not crushing and certainly not humiliating. And whatever he goes on to do, he will be remembered for one of the most gracious, courageous and magnanimous concession speeches on record.

John McCain will win

At the time of writing everything is set for Barack Obama to achieve an historic victory in the US Presidential elections on November 4th 2008. The polls are showing him with a six-point lead at a time when the panicky economic situation seemed to cry out for his reassuring coolness and detachment. McCain is an experienced, older man, but economics are not his strong suit. And his party was on watch when the credit party ended and the economy turned hyperbearish.

There are signs of a rift in the McCain camp. His VP selection Sarah Palin and her fervent supporters are eager to attack Obama with whatever weapons come to hand (some of them literally), while McCain himself is standing up to defend Obama and asking highly partisan crowds to tone down the attacks.

But there are at least three factors set to upset the predicted Obama victory. One is that although there are waverers among both affliliated Republicans and affiliated Democrats, there are more Democrat waverers leaning towards McCain than there are Republican waverers leaning towards Obama. Another is that McCain's support is stronger among older voters while Obama's support is stronger among younger voters; older folk are more reliable at turning out to vote than youngsters. And the third is the so-called Bradley factor - up until the last moment, liberal and moderate white voters go with their conscience, but in the privacy of the booth, they go with their gut and vote for the white guy.

Teaching Creationism and Darwinian Evolution

Once again, thanks to Sarah Palin, there's been a lot of debate about whether schools should teach Creationism / Intelligent Design alongside Darwinian Evolution.

I'm all for teaching both alongside each other, but not in the science lesson - nor in religion. Evolution is a scientific theory based on tangible evidence, with some scope for testing the hypotheses, and belongs in science teaching. Creationism / Intelligent Design are based on scriptures and belong in religion.

Both are dependent on belief systems, and what kids (and adults) need to learn is the ability to examine belief systems and ask smart questions about them. So maybe they should come together in PSHE of philosophy.

FWIW when until the age of 7-8, my youngest never asked the typical kiddie question "why?" - he asked the far tougher "how do you know?"

Does the future need us?

A few years back, Bill Joy wrote a disturbing and interesting piece for Wired Magazine, called "Does the future need us?". And more recently the Luminous Landscape forum had a worried thread about humanity being reduced to just another machine.

As far as I'm concerned, if mankind comes up with a machine that's kinder, more compassionate, more empathic and more loving than humans, great. What's not to like?

As for taking photographs, composing music, playing chess, playing tennis, speaking foreign languages or any of the other things in which I take an interest, I know with 99.999999999% certainty that at age 53, I will never do any of them well enough to rank in the top 1000 in my country, let alone in the world. There are more than 6.8 BILLION humans out there, and the number is growing and my chances of getting near the top of any field of activity are shrinking.

So for me, whether the entities that do those activities better than me are humans or machines makes not a lot of difference. What matters for me is the experience of doing those things, and interacting with others as I do them.

As for the products of machines compared with the products of humans, similar considerations apply. What counts for me is whether a photograph, or a piece of music or a piece of writing connects with me. If a machine has produced it, then that's amazing.

The strange attraction of Early Music

I've become very partial to what's known as "Early Music", which means stuff written up to around 1760 - Bach and before. I guess it helps that my piano teacher Sophie Yates is a specialist in that era and her husband - a former rock musician - is a lute player.

Some of that early music sounds strangely modern - not in an MTV, Indie way - and some of it evokes Elizabethan drama, Spanish grandees and the like.

Anyway, at last Friday's piano lesson I was just relishing getting my ten thumbs round a particularly pleasing couple of bars and I wondered out loud what it was about music from 350 years ago that was getting to me. And Sophie said it's just music from another place, except that it's also from another place in time. Which seemed to hit the nail on the head for me.