Sunday 25 October 2009

Religion

It strikes me that Christianity is very much a religion for farmers, shepherds and fishermen. The lord is my shepherd, fishers of men. Celebrating the harvest home, and the joy of rebirth at Easter as the cold earth reawakens.


But we have been hunter gatherers for far longer than we have been farmers. I wonder what they believed, did they believe in gods, did they have creation myths.


Farmers have to work hard, plough the hard land, make sure that there is seed set aside for the next year. It is a life that favours hard work and prudence.


On the other hand hunter gatherers don't really work hard, it is quite a light life, with times of plenty, and times of scarcity, but one where you need to go with the flow of what nature provides. It is a life that rewards flexibility and an understanding of your environment. Perhaps their understanding of their environment was so close and implicit, that it was like guiding a sailboat before the wind. They did not mediate or complicate their understanding of their environment, they just observed it endlessly, and relied on it for their needs. Who needs a metaphor when you are living in the real thing.

Friday 23 October 2009

One Straw Revolution -by Masanobu Fukuoka

Zen and the art of organic rice farming


The One-Straw Revolution is not really written as an book, but as a collection of short discursions. These cover the author's life, his farming methods, his conversations with the students that visited his farm, and his philosophy on the impossibility of understanding nature. For me the book got a bit repetitive by the end, but it was never less than readable and thought provoking. With hindsight I would have simply launched straight into reading the book, and left the rather wordy introductions by other authors till later.


If you are interested in the Japanese approach to life, then you might find "Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use" by Toshio Odate, of interest too.


I suspect that often we are striving to find a technical solution to the wrong questions, when books like this can make us wonder if maybe we should be asking a better question. File next to Thoreau's Walden.




http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3E5TLC4J10OBL/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


Sunday 4 October 2009

The end of days

Friday was my last day in my old job, on Monday I start my new job, a promotion to a different part of the organisation.

It is so weird rushing to try and tidy up all the loose ends, write up handover notes, file everything useful electronically, get anything contentious agreed, get anything difficult done, let everyone know, say bye and thanks to everyone, and then it is done.

It was a rush right up to the end, I paid out over £6m on my last day, and writing handover notes till I was the last person in the office, and headed home at 6.

After being so much of my life, the page has been turned, and on Monday I have to start getting to know about something completely different, getting out to know a new bunch of of people, figuring out how to do a whole load of new things.

You should always quit when you are ahead, so I suppose I left at a good time, I was enjoying my work, I really liked the people, and found them great to work with. I suppose I was spinning my wheels a bit, I was wanting more to get my teeth into, not more work, but more challenge.

Saturday 3 October 2009

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The latest Girl ... book caught my eye, but being boringly conventional I decided to start with the first in the sequence, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even if the cover is not quite so eye catching.


For - it is a good read, I read it inside a week, which is unheard of for me. It is engaging, thought provoking and is about somewhere sufficiently different (Sweden) to be interesting.


During most of the book nothing much happens, for the remainder the action comes thick and implausibly fast.


Against - despite the title, the girl hacker is probably in less than a quarter of the book. There is an abiding cosy middle classness things, the trains run on time, and young people are polite. Everyone rapidly becomes implausibly rich because being poor is unspeakably dull.


The bulk of the book is about the journalist author's alter ego, a brilliant journalist, who solves crimes, saves lives, wins awards, beds numerous women, and is just generally wonderful.


My geek comments would be that no top hacker would use a bog standard Apple McIntosh computer, they might use a hackintosh, they might use a Linux distro of their own devising, or Windows running on a Mac, or most likely a PC laptop. The trojan programme that plays an integral part in the later plot is just balderdash, as it presumes that you would not notice that you were working off a remote server instead of your own hard-drive. I would have thought that whenever your wifi signal dropped it would be a bit of a give away. And a trojan version of Internet Explorer!


All criticism aside, it is a well written book, it is engaging and likable and although far from perfect it well deserves its success. I'll be buying the subsequent volumes.