Tim O’Hare
observations, thoughts and useful stuff…Archive for Reflections
The use of common sense
I was just writing a post about the importance of sleep on another website when I came up with a phrase that I was quite proud of, so I thought I would share it here too:
“The use of common sense would make a lot of sense if only the use of it was more common“
Profound eh?
Humans as ultra-mobile worms
Any alert readers of this site (ha, as if there are any readers…) might have noticed that I am gradually working my way thorugh some recent back issues of New Scientist highlighting a few interesting articles along the way. Something that intrigued me from New Scientist Issue 2697 (28 February 2009) was the response to a letter from a parent asking a question on behalf of their daughter (age not given). The daughter wanted to know why humans have evolved to have two systems to excrete waste products (“poo” and “wee”). I’ve never thought about this before, but the responses indicated that in fact we only have one real excretion system, “wee”, as this takes waste products from inside our bodies and ejects them to the outside. It turns out (and this is the good part) that really our bodies can be thought of as having an elongated annular shape, by which I mean that we are a chunk of connected organic matter that surrounds a long tube. We feed by drawing material in through our mouth, squashing it about a bit, squirting acid on it, sucking the good bits into our interior and leaving what is left to drop out of the end of the tube. This is certainly a very different view of things, but clearly it is not wrong. Now I keep thinking of humans as being quite like some ultra-mobile and (presumably) ultra-intelligent worms, roaming through space enveloping food, and leaving a trail of waste behind us… What a great question.
It won’t be pretty as the climate changes
Earlier this week I helped to assess some presentations given by final year Ocean Science degree students. The presentations were the endpoint of a year-long integrating case study module in which small groups of students work together to tackle a realistic consultancy-type project relating to their degree area. Several of this year’s topics related to future changes that are likely to occur in coastal regions as a result of climate change and, in particular, sea level rise (for example, there was one project on the threat to the main south-west railway line at Dawlish and another on the need to protect or re-route the coastal road at Slapton [both locations in Devon, UK]). Anyway, I don’t want to go into details about these projects but there was one thought that struck me very firmly as I reviewed the material in front of me, namely that because significant sea-level rise is going to occur and because there will be significant impacts on infrastructure such as railway lines, roads and housing, developed coastal areas ARE going to change and it’s not going to be pretty.
There was one picture of Dawlish showing the railway line, which runs along a seawall, with nice “safe” houses perched up on the hills behind the low-lying coastal strip. It is inevitable that at some point in the not too distant future the seawall will crumble, the railway line will be lost and the low-lying area will be inundated, but the houses further back an up will be okay. The thought that struck me though was that no-one will come along and landscape the eroding and flooding coastal strip; no-one will tidy up the damage, remove the old buildings, the concrete blocks and the twisted metal etc. So once we start to lose coastal infrastructure of this type (and lose it we will) there will be a region that, for want of a better description, will look like some kind of war-zone and this, in turn, will lead to abandonment of the surrounding safer/higher areas because who will want to live next to a wasteland?
But this is only looking at a local scale… Also this week I read an interesting article in New Scientist Issue 2697 (28 February 2009) on how human civilisation will have to adapt and change to live in a warmer world. While large parts of the globe may become unable to sustain existing populations, other parts (e.g. northern latitudes) may become more suitable for human habitation either as a result of changes in temperature, rainfall, soil condition etc. I’ve been comfortable with the idea that the world will change as climate changes, but it had never struck me before that along with the serious environmental consequences, it won’t be pretty.
VAT’s a mystery
If I buy a cappuccino from the canteen at work it costs me £1.09. If a student buys a cappuccino from the same canteen is costs them 95p. I believe that the difference (14p) arises because students do not have to pay Value-Added-Tax (VAT) on their food and drink purchases whereas staff do. I can understand this but what I would like to know is does it make a difference i) who drinks the cappuccino? or ii) who’s money is used to buy the cappuccino? or iii) who hands over the money that is used to buy the cappuccino? What would happen in each of the following situations:
- I buy a cappuccino for a student to drink
- A student buys a cappuccino for me to drink
- I use a student’s money to buy a student a cappuccino to drink
- I give my money to a student to buy a cappuccino for me to drink
- I give my money to a student to buy a cappuccino for them to drink
- A student gives me the money for me to buy myself a cappuccino to drink
It seems to me that in cases 1, 3 and 4 the cost of the cappuccino is £1.09 and in cases 2, 5 a 6 the cost is 95p but in cases 2, 4 and 6 I get to do the drinking and in cases 1, 3 and 5 the student does the drinking. Case 4 is the best one for me, so if any of my students are reading this and want to come to some kind of arrangement, feel free to get in touch (there’s the seed of a money-making idea in here somewhere).
Eight is not the magic number
I spend quite a lot of my time in meetings of various committees, sometimes acting as Chair. So, it is perhaps not surprising that I was interested to read a recent New Scientist article (“The curse of the committee”, Issue 2690, 10 January 2009) describing some recent work by a couple of Austrian physicists which set out to create a mathematical model of the interactions that occur in committees and organisations of various sizes. This work revisits ground covered in the 1950s by C Northcote Parkinson (who is one of those “famous” people belonging to my “I know the name but I don’t know why” category). Parkinson is best known for the so-called “Parkinson’s Law” which basically states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion (a principle that certainly seems to have a lot of truth in it). Anyway, the new research explored how the size of a committee or administrative structure influences its effectiveness.
Based on knowledge of organisations throughout history, Parkinson argued that there was an upper limit on membership size beyond which an organisation becomes ineffective and will split into smaller units. The new research supports Parkinson’s hunch but more intriguingly, it was found that when the number of decision-makers involved in a group decision-making activity is eight there is a very high probability of deadlock occuring with the group splitting into two equal but opposing factions. So, the number eight is simply a bad number for committee membership etc. Thinking about this a little, it seems to me that this is an obvious result – look at the symbol for number eight: 8. It’s made up of two small loops (two groups) that touch each other but don’t overlap; two opposing factions that are unable to reach a consensus, like this:
Snow? What snow?
So is the city of Plymouth sitting inside a sealed bubble, cut-off from the rest of the world, or what? Once again I have woken up to reports of huge (for the southern part of the UK) snowfalls, with the area just north and east of Plymouth being particularly badly hit. Last night, hundreds of motorists were trapped on Haldon Hill just west of Exeter and other routes across and into the south-west are also closed. Walking into work I have seen parked cars with a few centimetres of snow perched incongruously on the roof and I can go online (here for example) and see photographic proof that there really is snow and disruption out there.
But what of Plymouth? Can I see a single flake of snow in the sky? Can I see a single flake of snow on the ground? The short answer is “no”. Whilst the rest of the country has being struggling away with people grumbling about our inability to cope with the extreme weather, Plymouth has just carried on with no snow, no days off school for children, no snowmen, no snowball fights. It’s actually hard to believe the news reports and hard not to feel that we’re living in a bubble here.
