Copestake dot Org

Just a quick hello to remind myself that this site does still exist and I should visit it more often…

Well it’s January and it’s brass monkeys outside. I have made (and broke) all the usual new years resolution cliches and now the rest of the year expands before me. I have already booked my summer holiday.

I have installed the WordPress app on my iPhone so in theory I can blog from anywhere now. You would think this would lead to more and more frequent blog entries however if anyone knows me you’ll realise that this simply is wrong.

Our clocks “fall” back tonight. Can’t work out if this is a good thing or a bad thing and should be abolished. Heard talk of changing it to 2 hours which seems even worse. In my mind why not keep the time as a constant and change start/finish times as appropriate. If schools want to start at 10am then they can. If businesses want to change their working hours they can. In this age of 24 hour life it seems odd to enforce the change of a constant when it doesn’t suit everyone (highlands of Scotland for example)

In fact why not go one further and have a global time which is the same worldwide. Does everyone have to start work at 9am? What difference does it make if you call it 9pm if the sun is up and you’ve just had your breakfast. Seems a lot easier to me if my 2pm meeting is at 2pm and I don’t have to work out which timezone people are calling in from and adjust accordingly.

Just got my hands on an iPhone 4s. A nice piece of kit if a little over priced (duh apple!). Just getting used to the smaller screen (compared to 4.3″ on my old HTC HD2 running android.) Resolution is very nice and I can see the benefits. Siri is a bit of a gimmick in my mind. I’ve used it (her?) once to check it works and that’s about it. I truly can’t see a use case in my day to day usage. If I’m driving I don’t want to be messing with my phone anyway.

Keyboard is very usable, similar to the HD2, I’m surprised how accurate it is given the smaller real estate but I guess that’s more to do with clever software than anything else (damn you autocorrect!)

I bought the phone sim free so I am not “stuck with it” for any contract length. I’m expecting to upgrade next year for the new iPhone 5. That being said this one is pretty good.

Bloody freezing this morning. I need to buy a new winter coat. Only just Autumn though. Summer is my favourite week of the year.

Very clear morning. Good opportunity for photography although had no time as usual. Dark nights coming, which means I might try and get back into astrophotography.

Have a 4 day weekend (yay) so that gives me a little time to play. Although I wanted to rebuild my NAS. HDD are expensive if you are buying 4.

–end stream of conciousness–

I’m at the south coast today for a meeting at work. For some reason I never sleep well in hotels so at 7am I went for a walk along the beach. I was amazed to discover hundreds of people up and about doing various pre-work things. There were a group of women exercising at a self styled boot camp, joggers, dog walkers, cyclists (and lots of good cycle paths away from roads).

There was a sign on the lawns that didn’t say “no ball games” it said “please be careful, if your ball goes onto the road it may cause an accident” – how polite.

There was a specially designated bin for BBQ’s and a sign that said “be careful, may be hot”

The whole feeling was one of a pleasant atmosphere and generally all round warm fuzzyness.

I leave to return to staffordshire this evening, its something of a contrast.

Had an interesting weekend. I had the opportunity to watch Ray Kurzweil in Transcendent Man talking about his predictions for the future of mankind. I’ve read a few of Kurzweil’s books, most notably The Singularity Is Near and whilst I may not agree 100% with his predictions and time scales, I agree with the majority of what he’s saying.

I also watched episode one of Brian Cox’s Wonders Of The Universe which was about time. Not the usual time of the human scale, hours, days, years, and not even the deep time of geology where eons pass by and rock flows like water. He was talking about cosmological time, our sun orbits in our galaxy every 250 million years, the universe is 14 billion years old (with only another 15 billion years to go).

It was the strange combination of the two programs that got me to thinking. We only have 15 billion years left to experience the universe (discounting multiverse theories). We are already about halfway through.

I want Kurzweil to be right so I can spend the next billion years learning all I can about the universe and 10 billion years after that working out what to do about the last 5 billion years left!

I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit and it gives me something to aim for. I would give it a 50/50 chance of me reaching the singularity (assuming we recognise it) and a 1 in 100 chance of surviving past it. Something like a 1 in 1000 chance of seeing the end of the stelliferous era, which is pretty good odds really.

My kids I would give a 99% chance of reaching the singularity, and a 50/50 chance of living past it. If the can get past the next 100 years I would say they can choose to see the end or not as they please.

It makes me realise how insignificant my current day to day problems are, and perhaps it should give me better perspective on my life and how important my family is.