I’ve always loved the simple elegance of a pendulum clock mechanism.  But, clocks commonly hide in huge cases, which hide the mechanism away.  So, in our newly decorated drawing room we thought we’d have a clock out in the open air.  I dare say that dust will cause issues, that we’ll need more oil and cleaning than we might, and that it won’t keep such good time.  But, as a piece of classical kinetic aesthetics it’s hard to beat.

We got this from Klockit.

I bought this on impulse on the way to Canada – it was 4 for 3, and I had the three books I wanted, so added this one … look, such poor form, I am already making the excuses in my head (and indeed in the post).  As you can guess, not my favourite book of all time.  It’s interesting and instructive if you believe that outliers (people with astonishing achievements) are a direct function of innate ability and pretty much nothing else.  But, the surprises I had heard before.  I knew that the athletics jocks were the kids born at the start of the rating year.  I knew that there is seriously hard work is a key factor is the success of most really successful people.  And, I knew that accidents of birth date, culture and the like can have a gigantic impact.  If you haven’t read about this stuff then it might be an interesting read, and probably somewhat surprising.  That I have heard it before doesn’t make it bad, so why have I got a downer on this book (and I have got a serious downer on it)?

The problem for me is that it has a horrible survivor bias in it.  A survivor bias is the tendancy to disregard cases that don’t survive from reviews.  In this case, Gladwell reviews interesting cases of outliers, but, by definition, they exclude the people who weren’t outliers.  And, lest it pass people by, there are a LOT of people who aren’t outliers.  So, he points out is that there is little about outliers to suggest that it is the innately gifted which make up such a group.  He says that it is enough to be clever enough (or a good enough sportsman or whatever).  And so it is.  But, it also matters that you work very hard, and get all the lucky breaks.  And, there are legions of people who fail on one or more criteria – and that doesn’t make them bad people, just not outliers.  You can see this in spades in the music industry, where you have to be able to sing well, dance well, look good, and even then it’s a lottery.  This isn’t unfair, it’s just the maths that comes with a model that promotes the promenance of a few people hugely, and you start with a huge pool.

So, I suspect that the aim of the book was to show, as the Observer puts it “Makes geniuses look a bit less special, and the rest of us a bit more so”.  The truth is sadly very different, and much tougher on the soul.  It is that you not only have to be innately good (though maybe not brilliant), but also work very hard and get very very lucky.  Are you feeling more special?

I was somewhat ambitious on the book front when we were in Canada, taking five with me, and then succumbing in the airport and buying another three that took my fancy.  That was never going to work, but in the event we played Canasta most evenings, so I got through only the new Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy book called ‘And another thing’ by Eoin Colfer, and the first half of ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by Lawrence Durrell, that I’ve wanted to read for ages.

The Hitch-hikers book was always going to be interesting, since Eoin Colfer is carrying on Douglas Adams defining work with its unique style, and where the books were a development of what started as a radio play, and in many respects work better in that format.  And, for the most part he does that well, it was an enjoyable read that had an Adams feel, and didn’t feel like it let down the standard.  About the only point that started to niggle were what felt like a materially larger number of ‘guide asides’ – entertaining, but occasionally in such frequency that they distracted.  It was good to see him adding new features and angles to the Adams universe, as well as leveraging much that Adams created.  All in all, if you liked Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy then this is well worth a read, though it’s probably not in my top ten books this year.

The Alexandria Quartet, however, is already in my top three for the year, and I haven’t finished it yet.  It is actually four novels that deal with the same people from different angles – I am half way through the third (Mountolive) having read Justine and Balthazar.  This is definately not a light fluffy read that can be picked up and put down, since there is so much depth, and the description is so rich that it works your mind more than most books that romp through events.  The characters are developed better than any other book I can recall, with ones understanding building up in layers, often with the characters own understanding of themselves.  And, though Alexandria of the 1930’s is far far from my personal experience, I almost feel like was there personally.  It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading it, but I’m very glad I have.

Binary clocks are so last millennium.  You know the ones I mean – each of the normal decimal digits are represented in binary.  If you don’t know what I mean, I suggest you stop here and move along to something else .This is a bit of a bodge, since a real binary clock would use pure binary for each section … and you can get these as well :-

But, just too easy.  Everyone knows binary, it doesn’t really qualify as a properly geeky skill, or push any boundaries in number representation.  I was thinking about how one might use a numbering scheme where the base used increments each digit.  So, the first digit is binary, the second in base three, the third in base 4 and so on.  It might sound like a ludicrously hard thing to understand, but in working it out, it turns out it is quite possible easier than binary, since 2×3x4 just happens to equal 24, and adding another digit (in base 5) gets you to 120 which is handily exactly twice the number of minutes in an hour.  So, showing the hours down the left, and the three digits next, you get :-

0	0	0	0
1	0	0	1
2	0	1	0
3	0	1	1
4	0	2	0
5	0	2	1
6	1	0	0
7	1	0	1
8	1	1	0
9	1	1	1
10	1	2	0
11	1	2	1
12	2	0	0
13	2	0	1
14	2	1	0
15	2	1	1
16	2	2	0
17	2	2	1
18	3	0	0
19	3	0	1
20	3	1	0
21	3	1	1
22	3	2	0
23	3	2	1

This is pretty easy to use – the first digit shows which 6 hour block of the day you are in, the next which two hour block etc.  And, it has the beauty that the granularity gets finer as you head to the right.  In use, an idea would be to use different colours for each digit value – nothing for 0, red for 1, green for 2, etc.  Then you have three lights for hours and four for minutes (down to 30 second intervals).  And, I think it could truly be called cool in a world where the old geeky standard is mainstream.

I was planning an art-deco bookcase for the back room (see here), but reality has rather intruded.  We did a massive cleanse (for us at least), and threw out or gave away over 500.  But, when we did the maths that still left far more than would go into one walls-worth of bookcases, even if they went to the roof.  Building two was going to be wildly expensive and time consuming, so we decided to go back to a simple model, though still roof-high and with doors on to keep the dust out (photo below shows both bookcases side by side, though they are on opposite walls) :-

After quite a bit of research, the best option appeared to be the venerable Billy bookcase from Ikea – with vertical extensions it goes over 9 feet up.  But, the old design lives on – I plan to bring it out at some other time.