BarkerOnLine Life is an experiment

Yesterday was the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere and one of the coldest so far this year in mid-New Hampshire. With the wind and its direction coming from the northwest, the temperature felt even colder. It was a time of remembrance of the homeless people who have died in years past.

I live in a village on the outer edge of a small city in New England. Usually it's easier for me to drive into the city on the nearby Interstate/motorway. As a ‘holier than thou’ Toyota Prius driver, recently I've been setting my cruise control to 55 mph (88 kph) on the highway. I remembered from the 1973 oil crisis that the most fuel efficient speed for a vehicle is supposed to be 55 mph.

David Cameron, the newish head of the Conservative Party in the UK, has a new slogan for the forthcoming local elections: "Vote blue, Go green". This is a bit more catchy than "Vote blue, Go right." The colour of the UK Labour Party is red, and the colour of the third party, the Liberal Democrats, is orange-yellow. Plotted against the visible colour spectrum (ROYGBiv), from left to right, those colours would nominally seem to fit.¹

Last year, while browsing in the The Quaker Bookshop at Friends House on Euston Road in London, I happened across a copy of The Invention of Clouds : How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the

On my Google 'Home Page' there's a list of various 'How Tos'. The other evening, I thought that I'd start to focus on 'How to get Organised', but there were so many that I had to start to organise the lists.

Key to modern theories of classification is the notion of 'family resemblances'. A thing or relationship is a member of a class by degrees; membership in a class is on a continuum. The key question is "What is the threshold value at which an attribute of a thing or relationship becomes a member of a class?"

Many have long enjoyed those imaginative images of M. C. Escher, such as "Sky and Water I" and "Reptiles". I accept that birds do not morph into fish in "Sky and Water I", but tessellated shapes do 'turn into' reptiles in "Reptiles".

Just as precision is not the same as accuracy, classification is not the same as findability. For years, I believed that classifying something into a category would enable me to find once again in the future. Certainly, that was the primary motivation of my early involvement with classification schemes and systems. Often, that's the case, but it's not necessarily true.

Last Saturday, I had to get up earlyish to move my car and avoid getting a parking ticket. As usual when I'm nervous, I awoke earlier than I needed to. So it was that I happened to hear a repeat of a programme that I'd heard on BBC Radio 4 sometime last year, "The Soundhunter". After listening to it in bed, I looked it up on DigiGuide [or myTVinfo in the United States], which describes the programme as

ENTERTAINMENT: The Soundhunter
Channel: BBC Radio Four 904
Date: Saturday 18th February 2006
Time: 05·45 to 06·00 (Already shown)
Duration: 15 minutes.
Isobel Clouter scours the planet in search of disappearing sounds. 2: 'The Nightingale Floor'. In Japan, some temple floors make birdlike tweeting noises at even the lightest of footsteps. (Repeat)