U.S. presidential election (30): has Trump finally gone too far?
August 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Donald Trump has just had what pundits are calling the worst campaign week of any presidential candidate in living memory. It may be that we look back on this week as the turning point in Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march on the White House and the time when he lost the race to the relief of the world (with perhaps the exception of Russia). But he has bad weeks before. He seems to be the teflon candidate and his core support is solid.
An article in today’s “Observer” newspaper summarises the week and its current consequences:
“In a few short days, Trump managed to insult the parents of a fallen war hero, claim that Russia would not invade Ukraine (it has already done so), say his daughter should “find another company” if she were sexually harassed, joke about receiving a Purple Heart, initially refuse to endorse Paul Ryan, the highest ranking elected Republican, and even order a crying baby out of a rally.
The string of unforced errors certainly seemed to affect independent and moderate Republican voters. An NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll put Hillary Clinton at 47% and Trump at just 38%; tellingly, she had moved one point ahead among men, who usually lean away from the Democrats. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey even put Clinton four points ahead in Georgia, where a Democrat hasn’t won a presidential race since her husband, Bill, did in 1992.”
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A review of the new super-villain movie “Suicide Squad”
August 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
It’s the summer and my workload is starting to ease, so this week I managed three visits to the cinema to see some very different films. This latest was the over-the-top but fun “Suicide Squad” which I’ve reviewed here.
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A review of the new action film “Jason Bourne”
August 6th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
My two visits to the cinema this week have been to see “Finding Dory” and “Jason Bourne”. These are two films that could hardly be more different but that’s the magic of the movies.
So how does the fifth film in the Bourne franchise compare to the others? See my review here. And, if you want to track back to the previous four movies, you can check out my reviews here.
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A review of the new animated movie “Finding Dory”
August 5th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
What’s a 68 year old doing at an animated feature film? Giving a dear five year old friend an afternoon of fun, that’s what. You can read my review here.
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Are you hooked to your digital devices? Do you fancy a ‘digital detox’?
August 4th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Fifteen million UK internet users have undertaken a ‘digital detox’ in a bid to strike a healthier balance between technology and life beyond the screen, according to major new Ofcom research. The study of 2,025 adults and 500 teenagers reveals how our reliance on the internet is affecting people’s personal and working lives, leading many to seek time away from the web to spend time with friends and family.
Ofcom’s “Communications Market Report 2016” finds that one in three adult internet users (34%), equivalent to 15 million people in the UK, has sought a period of time offline, with one in ten (11%) doing so in the last week alone. Of these digital down-timers, 25% spent up to a day internet-free; 20% took up to a week off; and 5% went web-free for up to a whole month.1
The most common reasons for taking a ‘tech timeout’ were to spend more time doing other things (cited by 44%) and more time talking to friends and family (38%).
Many people found their time offline to be a positive experience: a third (33%) said they felt more productive, 27% found it liberating, while a quarter (25%) enjoyed life more. However, 16% experienced a ‘fear of missing out’ (‘FOMO’) while on the web wagon, 15% felt lost and 14% ‘cut-off’.
Millions of holiday-goers are purposely abandoning technology. Thirty percent of UK adults have done some form of digital detox holiday. Sixteen per cent of UK adults have purposely visited a destination with no internet access, while 9% have intentionally travelled to a place with neither internet nor mobile phone coverage.
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What is the name of your organisation’s Intranet?
August 3rd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Many organisations have an Intranet and give some thought as to what to call it. I do some work with South East Water and learned recently that they call their Intranet Gurgle.
I though that this was a clever name. It is a play on the name of the web search engine Google; it is a reference to the basic business of this water company; and it elicits a smile when it is mentioned.
What’s the name of your organisation’s Intranet?
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Would you jump 25,000 feet without a parachute?
August 1st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
American Luke Aikins did – as you can see here:
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Don’t forget Hong Kong – the only place in China with anything like genuine elections
July 31st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
“On 4th September, sandwiched between the Brexit vote and the US elections, Hong Kongers have the opportunity to vote in the four yearly LegCo [Legislative Council] elections.
Hong Kong’s democratic processes are a hangover from its colonial days – the first election took place in 1995 two years before handover. UK graciously offering HK a tantalising taste of democracy, after having denied it to for the preceding 150 years.
HK’s legislature currently has 70 members, half of them are elected from five geographic constituencies, and most of the rest either by business sectors (like industry) or professional bodies (like accountants), so-called “functional” constituencies.
A myriad of different political parties are fielding candidates – with seemingly more parties than there are constituencies seats. The parties loosely fall into the pro-Beijing “Establishment” camp which controls LegCo and the pan-democrat “Opposition” camp.”
This is the opening of an interesting blog posting by a friend of mine who is currently working in Hong Kong. You can read the full posting here.
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A review of “Seven Brief Lessons On Physics”
July 30th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
When I studied physics at school half a century ago, the universe was explained by the steady state theory but now the Big Bang theory is very much the consensus, while I was taught that there was nothing smaller than electrons, protons and neutrons but now we have discovered quarks, gluons, neutrinos and more.
It’s hard to understand modern physics: both relativity theory and quantum mechanics are immensely complex and nobody has yet resolved the contradictions between the two.
But, if you only read one book on this subject area, it should be “Seven Brief Lessons On Physics”. It is very short (80 pages) and written in a simple and appealing style. You can read my review here.
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Word of the day: indexical
July 29th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’ve been reading a short, but fascinating, book titled “Seven Brief Lessons On Physics”. In the process, I came across a word which was new to me: indexical.
I have learned that, in linguistics and in philosophy of language, an indexical behaviour or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of affairs. For example, ‘I’ refers to whoever is speaking; ‘now’ refers to the time at which that word is uttered; and ‘here’ refers to the place of utterance.
However, in modern science, a term like ‘now’ is highly problematic. Carlo Rovelli, the author of “Seven Brief Lessons On Physics”, writes: “Physicists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion and that the universal ‘flow’ of time is a generalisation that doesn’t work”.
He adds: “Time sits at the centre of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics”.
Something for you to think about this weekend – if you have the time …
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