Tag Archives: slowness

An expanding universe

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I attended a workshop last month at which one of the speakers showed us this graphic.  It illustrates that the volume of information available to us has been approximately doubling every year.  In 2005, the digital universe was 130 Exabytes (billions of gigabytes) and by 2020 it is expected to have grown to about 40,000 Exabytes.  The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy or disorder of the physical universe is always increasing; so, is this also true for the digital universe?  Claude Shannon proposed that information is negentropy, which implies that an increasing growth in information represents a decrease in entropy and this seems to contradict the second law [see my post ‘Entropy on the brain‘ on November 29th, 2017].  Perhaps the issue is the definition of information – the word comes from the Latin: informare, which means to inform or to give someone knowledge.  I suspect that much of what we view on our digital screens does not inform and is data rather than information.  Our digital screens are akin to telescopes used to view the physical universe – they let us see what’s out there, but we have to do some processing of the data in order to convert it into knowledge.  It’s that last bit that can be stressful if we don’t have some control mechanisms available to limit the amount of disorder that we ask our brains to cope with – we are back to Gadget Stress [see my post on April 9th, 2014] and Digital Detox [see my post on August 10th, 2016].

Source: Atsufumi Hirohata, Department of Electronics, University of York www-users.york.ac.uk/~ah566/lectures/adv01_introduction.pps

Image: http://japan.digitaldj.network.com/articles/9538.html

 

Season’s greeting

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zurich christmas tree

Christmas tree in Weinplatz, Zurich

Best wishes during the holiday season to all my readers.  I’m in digital detox over the Christmas and New Year holidays.  So no post today.  If you’re having withdrawal symptoms or want to know more about digital detox then read ‘Digital detox with a deep vacation‘ posted on August 10th, 2016. Otherwise ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ [see my post on December 23rd, 2015].

Pebbles – where are yours?

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The picture shows a little collection of pebbles and a shell that sits on the desk in my office.  There are similar collections in various locations at home and some of my coats have a pebble permanently in one pocket – there’s even a shell on the dashboard of our car.  They have all been picked up during walks on beaches [see my post entitled ‘Take a walk on the wild side‘ on 26th August 2015] and serve as reminders of the ‘slowness’ enjoyed on vacation [see my post ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ on December 23rd, 2015].  Barbara Hepworth owned a similar collection of stones that you can see in the Hepworth Wakefield.  On the subject of this habit she wrote in 1961: ‘Many people select a stone or a pebble to carry for the day.  The weight and form and texture felt in our hands relates us to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force.  The beautifully shaped stone, washed up by the sea, is a symbol of continuity, a silent image of our desire for survival, peace and security.’  I could not express it better so I didn’t try.

The quote is from a contribution to the film Barbara Hepworth directed by John Read, BBC TV, 1961 and can be found in Barbara Hepworth: Writings and Conversations, edited by Sophie Bowness, London: Tate Publishing, 2015.

Anything other than lager, stout or porter!

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While we were sitting in the Red Deer in Sheffield enjoying a couple of pints of Iron & Steel Bitter from the Chantry Brewery in Rotherham, my long-time Swiss collaborator, and sometime correspondent on this blog, asked me: what’s the difference between an ale and a beer?  And, I had to admit that I couldn’t provide a definitive answer to satisfy his curiosity.  So, I am going to have another go, now.  Beer is an alcoholic drink made from a cereal grain and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ale is any beer other than lager, stout, or porter!

However, ‘real ale is a beer brewed from traditional ingredients (malted barley, hops water and yeast), matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide‘ according to CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale.  So the Iron & Steel Bitter that we enjoyed at the Red Deer was a real ale.

My digital detox during July [see my post entitled ‘In digital detox‘ on July 19th, 2017] included  sampling bottled ales from local West Country breweries and the photograph shows my favorites ranked from left to right.  Many were enjoyed while overseeing the BBQ in the picture below; however, the time in the Red Deer involved some rather more productive brain-storming for the MOTIVATE project [see my post entitled ‘Getting smarter‘ on June 21st, 2017].

Details of beers in photograph: Pirates Gold from Wooden Hand Brewery; Jail Ale from Dartmoor Brewery; Original Beer from Butcombe Breweries; Rebel Red from Rebel Brewing and Summer Lightening Hop Back Brewery