Statistics: Hype'n'fantastic

Statistics are everywhere, everyone is doing them, and there are a whole bunch of tools to help you produce them and then present them as pretty little charts. They give a report a certain standing, and they are eminently quotable at meetings, and they are evidence of the work that has been put in, quite the stamp of research. However, do the mean anything?

Sadly, statistics have three essential problems:

- They represent only the data that has been included in the research or calculations
- People tend to believe them over the reality
- The calculations themselves ignore certain kinds of data

Since statistics are most often applied to supersystems, when you gather the data, some of it will not fit, if not today, then when someone tries to repeat the test. If you are not aware of this and try to tighten down the tolerances of the calculations to give more exact, repeatable data then what you get is a set of answers which varies from week to week, from test to test. This might be a brilliant way of generating more reports, but it can actually make understanding the results much more difficult. If you get a better trained statistician to try and help you refine the process, they will not understand the significance of the data they are seeing. Statistics are nothing more than a guide, and the best way to prepare results using them is to remember that you should be generating insights not definite answers.

Because statistics seem so authoritative, they are seductive in their believability. If you want to use results presented in this way for anything beyond an opinion, you have to learn more about the situation and the conditions under which they were taken. Generally you will find a ton of special circumstances that invalidate the statistics for other situations.

The main thing I want to focus on here is ignored data, the greatest problem for people who apply statistics, and I see uncountable numbers of scientific papers where I have major questions that are left unanswered because the researcher seems unaware that there was a problem.

If you look at data relating to people during their lifetimes, you have a great advantage - no one existed before they were born, they continue to exist throughout their lives, and never return after they die - yet. Statistics works well with such life-cycle data. However, imagine for a moment that you could die when you were forty and get reborn when you were fifty? If this were possible, it would completely invalidate life-cycle statistics, because you could not predict when, where and for how long people would be dead, and so the number of 'living' people you use to calculate the mean, for example, would be false. Luckily, people do not tend to die and get reborn, but a similar kind of thing does occur in other data. I have read of a report where it was observed that dandelions remove heavy metals from the soils, but failed to analyse what happened to heavy metal in the dandelions that died or the weight of dandelion mown or eaten and so removed from the parks in questions - and completely invalidated the monitoring of heavy metal in those soils.

Statistics can also be applied to continuous systems, such as flow in a pipe or the grading of translated texts. Again, a good use - as long as the pipe does not leak between testing points or you do not have new translators beginning work and others leaving. I have seen both of these problems ignored in scientific papers written in the relevant fields of engineering and linguistics. There are uses elsewhere: I remember my father describing how, as a Royal Engineer building roads during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, they would count the locals they employed in the morning and then at the end of the day - assuming that if the latter count was larger there were some Mau Mau infiltrators in the group. However, it could not possibly measure any Mau Mau replacing workers, or any change in sympathies during the working day, and as such it was a dangerously unsafe methodology.

The kind of data the straight application of statistics ignores are, therefore, those little datalets that enter and leave the system unobserved. Rarely do I see checks for this kind of problem since too often their is overconfidence in the use of statistics, too much effort in their application and a consequent lack in the assessment of likely data leaks.

So, next time an authoritative reports thumps onto your desk or into your inbox, spend some time thinking about what might have happened to the tested quantities between observations.

Supersystems: So what about me?

How you use the concept of a supersystem to help you learn is dependent on you, because not everyone's brain works in quite the same way, you might be a Data Acquisitioner or a Conceptual Integrator. Actually, I just made up those two names, what I really mean is: do you, that's you personally, learn best by memorising lists of facts, by experimenting, or by soaking up events and allowing understanding to happen somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind? This is something you need to work out for yourself, and it is important. I am hopeless at learning lists, and even if I do then what I learn is not of particular importance unless I have some exam to take, I experiment with data by playing around with concepts in my mind, and if the data is numerical I might enter it into some kind of spreadsheet and play with it on there to see if I can see any patterns in the data.

If you learn by memorising, or perhaps you believe that this is the only way to learn even if you are not successful at it, then there is one thing you must understand - facts/knowledge/data is essentially random. You can learn as many as you like and it will never be enough, rather like preparing yourself for some quiz where you know that there is a good chance that you will not know the answers to certain questions. I remember back in the 1970s there were a number of different kinds of gameshows on TV in Britain, and then one year they decided to organise a competition between the winners of several of these gameshows. The winner of this super-competition was the winner of a gameshow involving working out solutions, and the one who came last was the winner of a gameshow that was a pure memory quiz.

Facts by themselves are essentially dead things; they lead nowhere. If I asked you what was the capital of China, you would probably say "Peking" or "Beijing". Great! But where does that lead us to? Is this anything that I could not have got out of an encyclopedia or other fact-based book or knowledge source? I have a very small car, a Citroen C1, and yet when the lights go green, most times I am across the junction first, and without spinning the wheels or revving the engine hard. The facts like 'press the gas pedal to go' and 'go when the light changes to green' are all available to everyone, even to that guy in his powerful car who kept creeping forward, impatient for the lights to change and who is now having to accelerate hard to get past me. Facts are easy to teach because they are like bean cans, always there on the supermarket shelf. Teaching how to use facts is much harder, because use seems different every time, and future use is something you do not know now. Teaching, therefore, works best for what is known, and wrks worst for what is not known.

When I leave the lights ahead of the pack and my wife is in the car withn me I make a joke and pretend to say 'bye' to the other drivers, making her smile in this way is just one of the many benefits of learning about what is not known. Knowing what many other people do not know can be very satisfying, and if you create it yourself then it costs nothing more than some time and does not take up room in your car or at home, and the only dusting it requires is simply to remember it from time to time. To make my C1 so fast I gathered all the facts I could think of and which seemed relevant, and then arranged them in some order. I tested that order and then adjusted the original order, added some more facts that I had accumulated, and tested this second concept. The key was to understand that getting across the line quicker was not just about getting my car to go quicker - that would mean investing in another car or in making this car quicker, something I was unwiling to do as it would consume my time and other resources. No, my car did not need to go quicker, I had to waste less time moving from one event to the next. Make sure car was already in the right gear, right foot already pressing slightly on the gas pedal, left foot already with the cluitch pedal partly raised, one hand on the handbrake waiting to release it, other hand on the steering wheel, eyes watching traffic, pedestrians and lights, and brain with the course already plotted. When the lights begin to turn green, assuming it is safe to proceed, I lift the clutch, press the gas, and release the handbrake together. That's all it takes, it works, and you can practice it every day and still have a good car to sell when the time comes to replace it.

Interestingly enough, I have now converted my concept into new knowledge that you and anyone else with a car can use. Concepts created in real time convert to knowledge, and they seem to fill all the available space. What other knowledge do you need to know? At this point you need to stop and realise that cars-at-a-junction are a supersystem, and this is one model we can apply to that supersystem. As such, we know it is only going to work some of the time. What happens when the person in the car beside you has also read this text, but has a much faster accelerating car and quicker reflexes than you? What if you are not at the front of the queue? Well, this junction is just one of many, and today is just one of many, perhaps instead of listening to music you could start watching how other drivers typically respond to different situations. I have a whole stack of knowledge models I have developed to deal best with many different situations, because I have devoted much of my time in cars to observing how other drivers react, and how I react.

Time and devotion are essential to creating new concepts, as is the belief that you cann develop them. Society tries to pressure us into the belief that the answer lies in learning more facts, in copying what others have done, but perhaps the best answer lies within ourselves. Once you have gained knowledge in one area, you can apply it to another. Having developed the 'be faster at the junction' model I began to apply it elsewhere in my life. After leaving university I spent seven weeks working nights in a meat factory to earn some money for a vacation. Most of the time I worked the grills, char-grilling burgers for microwave meals, working alongside two women who had been using the grills for years. In such a short period I had no real chance of honing my reflexes to match theirs, and I know that they chose to use the better pair of grills. Once I learnt the basic techniques I spent every night trying to minimise wasted time, optimising burger layouts on my grill - learning the hot and cool spots, and all the rest. I never was able to match them for speed, but I was 90% there, far better than anyone else. Was it worth it? Of course, the grills are the only warm places at a meat factory, everywhere else is cold so that the meat does not start to go off.

I stated earlier that facts are random, which is not quite true. If you were to go to a zoo and saw a zebra you are likely to think 'black and white stripey animal, like a horse, from Africa', an amalgam of facts based on observation and prior learning. Have you ever looked closely at a zebra's eyelashes? Are they like a horse's? What about zebra feeding patterns? Observation is limited to survival traits, interest and comparison to previous knowledge, which takes some of the randomness out of the knowledge we acquire, but in terms of the universe it is still fairly random. Take cats, for example, many people do, they have been living close to us for thousands of years and yet people still believe that they are independent creatures despite the evidence to the contrary. Cats go off when they want to, but so do children if they can get away withn it. Oh, they don't tell you when they will be back, isn't that a typical problem with children? They don't take orders? Well, who do you know who does if they can get away with it? They go live next door? Hmm, if you were my friend and your neighbours cooked better lunch I might spend more time their too. Cats are like God - you have to notice them first, and being small and easily abused by big humans, it is up to us to prove we respect them first. Cats are very communal, and generally have lots of friends they like to hang out with, including us. When the day comes that all our friends are comfortable sitting on our laps, maybe cats will trust us a little further.

Knowledge being essentially random means that they are only some facts and they are not necessarily the ones that will be most useful to us, and some facts may not be as true as we imagine. Since in any one subject we do not have all the facts (knowledgelets), what if we were to place all our subject knowledges on top of each other in some kind of trememdous sandwich? This is what encyclopedias do, in a way, you may well find 'cat' on one page and 'Catherine the Great' on the opposite page. What would happen if, instead of reading the entry about cats as a complete unit, we read the first line of the 'cat' entry' and then the first line of the 'Catherine' entry, the second line of the 'cat' entry' and so on? This might sound silly, but if knowledge is essentially random, and most people gather information in similar ('normal') ways, then by applying a non-normal acquisition method we might discover something new.

Two of the biggest blocks to non-normal acquistion are 'what would the neighbours say' and the 'three wise men'. Discovering new things automatically is doing what the neighbours would not do, unless your neighbours are already busy doing things differently. There are elements in any society which attempts to block change, so you might have to practice being an innovator in private or in forums where your neighbours do not go. The three-wise-men block is the conviction that someone greater than you has already plotted the best path, has already maximised quality, method or whatever. However, the point of supersystems is that there is no Holy Grail, no ultimate method, not wise person who has a handle on the best method. What the wise person knows is what works best for them, not for you. Grammar Hammers are a good example of people relying on the three wise men, 'someone' in the past has created a system of language that is 'right'. This makes innovation in written language very difficult, because you know they are going to start telling you your grammar is wrong, you have used the wrong words etc.

So, find that quiet place away from the people who you feel are blocking you, and practice there.

Even then, you are unlikely to make a world-shattering discovery in the first forty minutes of trying. I like to use the time in my car or on a bus, when I know I am stuck there for the duration and there is nothing else I can do. I have pretend arguments with people, where I have to take each side in turn and often either demolish my own arguments or learn something new from the second person's viewpoint.

A bus or a train has many opportunities for thinking. Often when it is dark and cold, and I am sitting shivering on a poorly heated bus in the wintertime, I shut my eyes and try to imagine where we are every second of the way. This quickly shows you how little you remember about your surroundings, even though they seem familiar when your eyes are open. Not all memory is accessible, the brain does not deem access to the 'familiarity' memories as being particularly high, and it takes practice to lever that particular door of your mind further open. Hypnosis is another way into this particular memory store, and it is known that this particular type of memory is particularly open to suggestion, perhaps because the brain has to continually edit it as trees grow, buildings get built, we redecorate our rooms or just plain get older. Whatever it's advantages or disadvantages, using the imagination in this way pays off -it gets easier to build and modify whole new concepts in your head.

To conclude, knowledge is essentially dead, random and partial, and what is important is to examine this knowledge from different perspectives. It is this practice of looking that educates our minds into being more innovative, but to do so means fending off the social pressure to conform in all aspects of our lives.

Supersystems: when your logic is not enough

if you check out the meaning of 'supersystem' you are likely to come up with the definition that it is a system made up of other systems, but this is a back-to-front view. All systems are part of our universe, everything eventually connects with everything else: you sneeze today and it moves the air in front of you and, like the ripples on a pond when you drop a stone in, the effects of your sneeze will reach the limits of the universe, imperceptibly, some time in an unimaginably distant future.

A supersystem is one small corner of the universe that is big enough for us to comprehend that it is a system, but too complex for us to understand its workings. Our brains are a good example of a supersystem, we apply a range of simplifications to try and understand some of its workings, such as 'vision', 'hearing' or 'memory', which makes them sound as if they are separate systems (subsystems) in our brain, while in fact they are interlinked and share many operations. If your memory and vision were separate functions, for example, no one would ever shut their eyes to help them remember something almost forgotten or to hear a recorded message clearer. Vision consumes huge amounts of your brain's resources, and by shutting your eyes or staring into space you free up lots of resources for thinking, and vice versa - if you drive you probably can remember a number of times when thinking about problems has resulted in a delayed reaction to events on the road.

All systems are supersystems in practice, but some are easier to think of as simple systems than others. If you balance a book on the edge of the desk, small road-traffic or wind vibrations on your building are not going to affect it noticeably - you pushing it or putting some other object on top of it are about the only things that will decide whether it remains on your desk or falls to the floor. You already know a lot about balance from a lifetime of experiencing the effects of it, and although it is only a simplification, this assuming that things with small effects can be safely ignored is one of them most important precepts underlying that mathematical subject of calculus.

Better still, our brains our able to analyse supersystems so complex that, if asked to describe them, we would be unable to do so. You can watch the branches of a tree blowing in a wind and understand exactly what you are seeing and what will happen if the wind becomes stronger or weaker, or if someone throws a ball towards you then you have a good chance of catching it even though its flight is effected by gravity, trajectory, spin and wind. We can do this not by learning traditional mathematics, but by accessing a system that is much older, one that is built into our brains.

We do not have direct conscious access to this part of our brain, as it mainly deals with things like coordination, but we can train it and we can access it indirectly in many ways. In our conscious thoughts we generally try to classify everything, so we might say that we are bad at maths and good at languages, and use this to condition our career choices - becoming a translator rather than a mathematician. We use this idea to create our education systems and then, lo and behold, translators all tend to be alike, mathematicians all tend to be alike, and translators and mathematicians tend to be different. However, this situation only happens because we all get used to allowing our initial classifications define our social systems, and as a result we come to believe that the skills required to be a mathematician or translator are different. This, though, is only a social belief, albeit an extremely strong one.

Advanced linguistics (the science of languages) is much like advanced mathematics - mathematics is only another human language that attempts to describe numbers of things, while linguistics is yet another application of mathematics. The more we push forward our understanding of linguistics or mathematics, the more the methods and results we learn in these fields come to resemble the systems already built into our heads, moreover, they come to resemble the same systems.

Thousands of years ago we understood little about the environment that surrounded us, other than as a set of in-built and trained responses to the way we lived in that environment. Sometime in our early experiments to test how the universe worked we decided that we were separate from the universe, and that by gathering more and more knowledge of the outside world we would come to understand it. This has conditioned the way we perceive the world, that mathematics and linguistics are separate fields that perhaps overlap at the edges. Today we are beginning to understand that everything we know are nothing more than variations of the same things - linguistics and mathematics are but two names for the same thing. The only difference between them is that they are two different ways of looking at the same thing, like taking a pumpkin and carving 'mathematics' and 'linguistics' on different sides - while the pumpkin may appear different when viewed from different directions, it is still the same pumpkin.

Linguistics is really the way the brain processes a particular group of information, in this case a vast databank of sounds. The brain is not like a dictionary of words, we only think of it that way because our education presents them that way as a convenient method of dealing with making readable symbols of our language. We are at our most inventive linguistically when we are about the age of eight or nine, when our brains are good enough to conceptualise but not yet old enough to have succumbed fully to common social beliefs about language (such as that of 'vocabulary' and 'grammar'). If you can still find someone intelligent who has not had the 'benefits' of education, their concepts of language are likely to be very different to yours, even though their language use is as rich as yours. Most of our vocabulary is learnt by observation of other people's usage, and we can readily create new words and fit them understandably into the 'pelonia' (I just made that word up, as a replacement for 'language').

So how can we use this to help us think? Ah, well that is the subject of a later blog, I have covered quite enough for one day! Suffice to say that supersystems are those too complex for us to analyse rationally, although our brain can usually figure them out subconsciously. All supersystems are basically the same, as all are by-products of the way our brain understands the world.

Czestochowa: For your salvation

If you were wondering where the centre of religious life was in Poland, and I am only talking about the Roman Catholics here, then should go to Czestochowa. One of the most interesting times to go is the 15th of August for the Ascension of Mary holiday, when people arrive from all over the country on foot as part of large pilgrimages. Well, everyone needs a 'local' place to make pilgrimages to, they are such a great way to escape from the reality of daily life and to spend time with other people with similar aims.

My only visit to Czestochowa was in 1995, and when I arrived on my own I only had a basic guidebook knowledge of what I was supposed to find there. Those were days before the internet took off, when one had to scour the shelves of the local library and then probably illegally, certainly irresponsibly, take a book with you on your trip. I sometimes wonder how many travel books made frequent trips to the places they described - some of them may well have been more seasoned travellers than I was. The city was a bit of a disappointment, a rather drab looking monastery on toop of a worn grassy hillock set amongst a sad district in that Socialist way. Once inside I found myself among a group of believers at the beginning of a mass - for a moment I nearly turned round and left by the nearest exit, but then I decided that nobody would notice me, a foriegner, among this group of strangers. There was not much fuss, and from my position at the back of the church I could hardly see the star of the show, the Black Madonna, although what I could see of this early painting left me puzzled as to why they had dressed it up in jewels. I believe that God cares for me as an individual, and that he is always there, whether he wants it or not, but I am aware that I am surrounded by people who are happier believing that their god is elsewhere, safely concealed from observing their actual life by a thick barrier of priests and idols. Maybe that helps explain why I have low levels of jakraj?

On the walls of the monastery church, which since my Polish was almost non-existent I had plenty of time to examine, were covered in crutches and all manner of silver and gold medallions, many given to the church by grateful former sufferers of a wide range of diseases. Perhaps their god cured them, perhaps my God did, or maybe the actual time spent focussing on hope of a cure did the work all by itself. After leaving the monastery, I was mooching around on the hillock, wondering how I could fill in the next four hours or so when my train was due to leave. At this point I met a couple who were sitting on a bench nearby, they were Polish, but living in Sweden. We went back to the apartment they were staying at, loaned to them from some of their friends, and spent the evening eating blueberries from a huge bowl and chatting.

Faith, then, is a remarkable thing, and not something we are going to understand in the near future as it remains as undefineable as it was to primitive man. Having something to believe in can make the most remarkable of changes to your life, although you having one belief is no justification for insisting that anyone else in the world has to have the same one. I recently read of some research where they showed a picture of Mary to a number of Roman Catholics and athiests, and then applied electric shocks to them. The Roman Catholics felt less pain after being shown the image of Mary, and that is the power of faith, and useful for more than warding off stray electric shocks. There are other alternative faiths, even for Poles, even for Roman Catholic Poles.

I have on the table here a booklet in English and German advertising a honey from the deep and ancient forests of Bialowieza... I know of dozens and dozens of small farms and individuals producing honey in my region, some of them also producing mead, but since it still lacks much in the way of support don't expect to see much in the way of Polish honey in your local store. The Polish word for honey is miod, and the English name for the honey-based fermented drink is mead, just another example of how words have always drifted from nation to nation.

Back to the booklet, it has four pages describing the honey product and its benefits, then one page as a welcome letter, followed by a dozen pages of excerpts from letters sent the honey producer. Personally, I would have preferred the welcome letter on the first page, more information about the product with perhaps some history and something about the bees, hives and the plants the bees use, and then far fewer grateful letters. Well, that is what I would have preferred had not the translation been so bad that it is often hilarious, like "I have two children who frequently catch diseases." leaving you wondering how many they have who don't catch diseases, or "I have a pleasure to inform you that since my children started eating your Honey, I do not need to visit doctors any more." - I wonder who would be cured if I started eating the honey?

The truth is that with such miraculous products as this honey, sorry Honey, on the market, who needs religion? Given a choice between sitting in a cold church every Sunday where no one will talk to you and sitting around a warm table eating Honey with your family and friends, I know where my preference lies. Seriously, if faith in Czestochowa is matched by faith in Honey, what value does religion have, except to those who are allergic to honey or who simply do not enjoy its taste? With all the manpower that religion can wield, why can they still not surpass a few hives of bees? Ah, you may say, but religion also includes some valuable afterlife options, and you would be right to an extent, except that the Roman Catholic church in Poland focusses its parisioners energy on the miraculous in the present and prayers for the already dead, and puts as many barriers as it can to prevent parisioners understanding enough of their religion to make any intelligent decision that will improve their chances in the afterlife. You are, it seems, better off putting your faith and your money in the Honey to solve your problems in your current life, and simple faith in your god for your afterlife, religion having nothing better to offer either way.

Football: Basic Instinct

I really feel sorry for people who follow football, but then, I was never much of a spectator, probably why I do not do much in the way of commenting on current affairs. Much better is to be involved, in actually creating new solutions rather than sitting on the sidelines being Me Clever.

However, wouldn't life be boring if 'never' was a real word.

As a result, even I can spend some wordage on commenting on football, especially when it comes to the current situation with Polish football. Football here has long been more of a mafia scene than the mafia, as dumb ass people slip money here, there and everywhere so that one particular group of players 'win' some championship or other. Who cares, if it is not one fairly then the 'win' has no value, and if it continues the supporters should simply walk away - don't worry if you are a supporter, there are plenty of other things to do with your life than watch Polish football, and as long as you do and sit around letting people abuse the game, you get the kind of situation you deserve. And we can all do something, even if it is only walking away. Once people in Poland put their televisions in their windows and went out for a walk to demonstrate their belief that at least one can publicly demonstrate one's disapproval of the current situation.

However, I never found anyone who would do anything about the corruption in football, and now that Poland is set to co-host the 2012 championship it is a bit late to demand any action. Recently the Polish government has dismissed the board of the Polish national governing board, an action that goes against the constitution and the basic precepts of law. But no, people think it is OK, but how can you prevent one criminal action by using another? It is just for this reason that Poland remains in the mess it is in - the sitting on backsides when something could be done, and only shifting off them with the realisation that international embarrassment might outweigh any benefits of non-action.

As an interesting aside, the other co-host for 2012 is Ukraine, and Lublin lies on a direct line between Warsaw and Ukraine. A new road is needed between Lublin and Warsaw and on towards Ukraine, so where are the plans? Um, eh, in the current situation... blah blah blah." The reality is that Lublin sits on its collective ass (a kind of donkey), and I just wonder at what point soemone else will notice that opportunity came and passed us by.

Driving to Kill

Driving in the former Soviet bloc countries is incredibly dangerous, the roads, drivers, police and regulations form a cocktail best observed from a helicopter, tall building or mountain - just no where anyone could possibly drive or kill you by driving into it.

Roads. Safety and flow regulation systems are inconsistent, while approaching an unfamiliar junction you must do more than observe the cars, people and stray animals, you have to work out which flow control is in use there. At one junction in Lublin, the traffic lights are positioned not beside the stop line but on the other side of the junction, and as the side roads are staggered it is not clear where you should stop - and as a consequence drivers frequently overrun the actual stop line into the traffic coming from the right. It has been like that for years, no one in the local government sees it as a problem because it is an unfashionable part of the city. I need not mention the state of the direction signing as I don't think there is a nation on earth where the local planners employ people unfamiliar with their city to test for potentially confusions - and every city is, as a consequence, a nightmare to navigate. Locals genrally know where they are going, signage is always for the unfamiliar and always created by the familiar.

Regulations: Back when I was a lad, most cars had such poor brakes and handling that the only safe road was a very straight one with no other traffic. In those days, in the UK, they still had what was called a 'suicide lane', which was a third lane in the middle of the road that traffic going either way could use to overtake. With a name like that, you can imagine why by the 1970s they had all gone, along with all those people who helped give it its name, except for some places where use of the lane depended on time of day. Here, for most out of town main roads, there are two normal lanes, but on either edge of the road there is a half width lane. If you sit in this half-width lane to let a van overtake, the van still has to cross the centre lane, and while they are going past, someone might be trying to overtake him... If there is someone walking, riding a bike or similar in your half lane, someone overtaking the other way expects you to brake hard and somehow avoid the hazard in the your half lane. Dangerous? Incredibly so.

Police: If you find any, make a note in your diary. In a land where they can make instant fines on the road, the police force should be the richest government organisation. I mean, I could pull over a dozen vehicles on my trip home and bill at least half. I think I should see if they will subcontract traffic policing to me, all I would have to do is fit a few video cameras to my car and cruise the city all day. Keeping 10% of the take I would have a fleet of vehicles and no need to work myself in a couple of years. The saddest thing is that if you have a bump you have to call the police - and not move the vehicles until the police have checked the situation. Yep, seeing bent but drievable vehicles sitting in the middle lane or on a junction waiting for the police is common, and with poor driving on a poorly designed road systems the police spend more time picking up the pieces than preventing problems by forcing drivers to not drive poorly.


Drivers. With poor road safety regulations, ill-thought out traffic flow, and almost non-existent policing, I can see why many drivers become the selfish pigs they are. Driver training is second rate as few trainers have any idea of what constitutes risk even though many surely believe they know everything they need to know. The trainer giving my wife refresher course wanted her to make a clearly illegal left turn across the traffic to enter our estate; he was lucky I was not in the car because, while I do not believe in violence, I would have dragged him from the car and beaten him to a pulp as who knows when that bad habit is going to kill a former student in the future?

Finally, which group is the most dangerous on the road? The young? No, not enough of them. The old? Again not yet enough of them on the road. No, men between the age of 45 and 60, and women 25 to 45. These bad driving men have never had such powerful cars before due to the limited availability in the part, while the bad driving women have been brought up to the belief that there are men's things and women's things, and therefore think you can change lane like you were walking down a street, or sit a couple of metres behind the car in front.

Come to Poland, there is a lot to see and you will not regret it, but just take care if you hire a car.

The Grammar Hammer

One of my pet hates is that almost any language discussion seems to reach a point where someone says 'They don't seem to teach grammar these days'. My response often goes something along the lines of 'what, as compared to three centuries ago?' If you actually read old books, such as those written fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago, then you will discover the same whine, the same complaints. So:

Shut the Eff up! You have about as much understanding of grammar as a dead ant.

Boy, how long have I wanted to say that.

Not that it will make the slightest difference.

But it felt good!

One of muy favourite pieces of bigotry is the insistence that Latin grammar is the ultimate controlling grammar of English, well, with a good measure of Greek. Latin is a pure grammar, did you know that? Yes, that English in your head, no matter how well honed, no matter who utters or writes it, is mere second rate bumbling unless one applies Latin grammar to it. Our education system in terms of language is based on this principle, hence the never-ending whine about the state of teaching language. Luckily, there are vast numbers of teachers who realise that English is a language in its own right with its particular grammar, one in many basic ways deeply different to Latin: You cannot split an infinitive in Latin, and articles mean almost nothing. However, this only serves to widen that gap between happy English users and the Latinite Grammar Hammers.

One of the most hallowed Latinite principles is that a noun is a noun is a noun. A noun can never be an adjective, verb, or adverb, and so on. Once a noun, always a noun. Once an adjective, always an adjective, once a, I think you get the picture. Fair enough, 'table' must always be a noun, 'chair' must always be a noun, so why don't I chair a meeting on this and table a motion that English grammar be thus - except that I cannot since I have just used 'chair' and 'table' as verbs. Similarly, if I teach maths in a traditional way, I cannot say 'two twos are four' as numbers are adjectives and can never be plural.

Switching words between grammatical forms is a very powerful feature of English, as is the ability to split infinitives and subtly edit meaning by varying the articles, and yet these areas of thw language are among the most often ignored or attacked by the hammers. English, like most languages, was not officially taught until at least a thousand years later than Latin, and the teaching of other languages was done by comparison to what had been observed and taught about Latin. As a first methodology for teaching, it was a good an idea as any - if you were a teacher in a classroom its better to teach what you know rather than have to research the whole subject. As a result of tradition, many of those early make-shift teaching methodologies hung on, they still control people's thinking on the language even today.

I think this is another area in which a reappraisal is long overdue in the public areana, it is time people writing or speaking the langauge they were brought up with were made to feel guilty because their image of the language fails to match another's.

Changing jobs, and the Polish university system

From Today I will be using a shorter, rougher format with less proofing of what I write - which might sound strange coming from someone whose current gainful employment is editing other people's texts. However, I once served an apprenticeship as a mechanic, and the state of my car was no measure of my skill with a spanner it was rather a case I had a better lifeplan than spending 24/7 doing exactly the same thing. looking back i have never spent a great deal of time doing any one thing in particular, being married to Ania for eleven years breaks all records for my interest span. In fact, the difference between my relationship with Ania and with other people is that eventually I want to push the borders of understanding well beyond the comfort zone of the kind of people I work with, and most are not that happy to move out of their niches, in their lifeplans work is generally something you do to earn money to pay for whatever they get up to, including bringing up their families. I am not an ogre, and I find it better for everyone if I move on.

Ania, though, was already ready for change, her feet were itching for change, and continuous change is what she has got. So much change, in fact, that she is now noticeably different from the people she works with, most of whom have been ground down by a university system that has yet to move out of the dark ages in terms of management. If anyone reading this has experience with Western universities and what goes on in them, be aware that no matter how hard life seems there, it is only a pale shadow of the problems faced by Polish universities and, I suspect, those of other former Soviet bloc countries. There are two main ways to survive teaching in Polish universities - by outright greed or by shutting down your will to innovate. Knowledge is spoonfed, books can generally be accessed by request in libraries (often with a 24 hour wait), and at the end of every semester the students have to chase their lecturers down to get a signature in their 'indeks' to prove at the end of the course that they attended the lectures. Exams? If you fail in June, you get to retake the ones you failed in September, and if you fail that you get a retake a week later, and a week later if you fail that. The exams themselves are generally oral no matter what the subject is, and passing an envelope of money to the examiner at some point prior to the exam, or by attending a paid 'exam booster course', and your chances of passing are higher.

Corruption rules, and it stinks, too.

Ania, though, does not overcharge for her services, but does introduce well thought out innovation into her teaching and course design. As a consequence she is overworked and will soon have to make a decision on how she plans to spend the rest of her working life.

075: Your Local Friendly Alien

Your Local Friendly Alien, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I think I might be a Cylon

This is my final photo for FGR, I have popped out of my box for the last time - with the help of a few things I found around our apartment. The days when I thought science fiction was the future are long past, humanity in the present is a far more fascinating problem - so many people with so many problems.

So, thank you to all those of you who have followed my progress, it has been a lot of fun.;)

074: A Calmer Sultry Night

A Calmer Sultry Night, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We found a manual to help us with our time in bed, but we haven't got a torch so its hard to know if we are looking at a big end or a tired rocker. It is kind of cosy, though, and we might need a soapy bath afterwards, so things are looking up!

I took one look at today's group and it seemed full of the usual 'beautiful people' shots, you know the type of image taken by someone youthful who mistakes the youthfulness they capture on camera as being their art, and who are rewarded by a large number of views by people who really want to look at unclad youth. Some of the best, most innovative work I see are by the people who's bodies are roundy or aged and who, partly as a consequence, have to work on their art to achieve a modicum of success.

No 'here's my bust, please ogle it and comment on how you wish I had undone my bra' shots here. Instead i dug back into my past when I trained as a car mechanic and spent a lot of time on my back under it. Beds are also something I used to hide under to have a sulk when I was a kid. Here then, Ania and I are together, working on our marital bed, equal, and spending time together out of view of the people we spend our days working or socialising with. We are doing our own thing because we believe it is important, not because we think it will make us more popular.

073: Cracks in the Paving...

Cracks in the Paving..., originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Nightmare

Many children learn to fear the cracks in the paving, and the dark horrors that live down there. Of course, no one takes it seriously, but what if you could slip down...

Today I kept it simple, or did I? Today is my late shift day, which means that I get home tired and have little time or inspiration for my images - a good time, then, to work on my craft. A lot of craft is honing the reflexes - being able to make repeatable movements such as being able to form all the letters clearly when you write. I experimented here with the colour tools to see how much information there really was buried in the original similar shades of grey of the paving, and trying to produce convincing shadows.

The reference to a childhood dear made this image quite different to the gothic-adult horror images produced by many other fuggers, and yet it is the remnant of the childhood fears that often form the basis for our fears in later life. Life in Poland often leaves me feeling insubstantial, unable to dent other peoples behaviours they learnt in childhood and to which they desperately hold onto even though it is slowly destroying them.