A couple of weeks ago, I went to a work-related conference in Bern, Switzerland, and was fortunate enough to have a couple of days’ walking in the mountains at Saas Fee beforehand. (Thank you, Peter!)
I had skiied there before, but never visited at this time of year. It really is a very pretty spot.
Better views than the average working week, I think.
“I expect our sales”, says the marketing manager confidently, “to have an inflection point in Q1 next year”.
This is a pet peeve of mine. I’ve often heard sales and marketing types, and even economists and scientists who should know better, use ‘inflection point’ simply to mean ‘a sudden change in the direction I’d prefer’. Perhaps they think an inflection point is the sharp bend in a hockey-stick-type curve, or the lowest point on a line that is about to turn upwards.
In fact, an inflection (or occasionally ‘inflexion’) point on a graph is technically where the second derivative is zero and changes sign: i.e. where the gradient changes from decreasing (or increasing) to increasing (or decreasing). Another way to think of it is that, viewed from the side, the line changes from concave to convex, or vice versa.
So, typically, an inflection point looks like this:
But, when touting your sales figures, remember that this is also an inflection point:
And so is this:
Doing a quick search, I came across an article from Thoughtworks all about inflection points and how they are important to your business. Sadly, they get it completely wrong.
As a technology leader, a portion of your analysis should revolve around determining inflection points, the critical phases of transitions along a technology’s journey from an abstract idea to maturity.
Inflection points are the points at which a product becomes a trend (something that will be used by a critical mass and therefore likely to drive value) instead of a fad (something that will fizzle out).
And here’s their illustration:
But you, gentle reader, know better. That’s not an inflection point! This is an inflection point:
And if your strategy was to catch technologies there, I think you’d write a rather different article.
Here’s a pretty map of Chicago, produced by Erin Davis:
(Click for a larger image)
The colours come from the street suffixes: Green for ‘roads’, yellow for ‘streets’, etc. It’s an interesting commentary on naming trends and the historical development of the city.
Erin’s done many more, too, which you can find on her site here, and more recently including more global cities, here.
There clearly haven’t been many new ‘streets’ in London for some time…
The spellchecker on my iPhone 6 doesn’t know the word ‘perchance’! I desired to use it in a perfectly ordinary sentence today, and found I had to spell it out, confirming my intent with the leftmost of the available buttons.
Maybe ’tis only acceptable when followed by “to dream”? Or embedded in a flow of iambic pentameter?
In either case, you will agree this is a serious flaw, which is, no doubt, addressed in the latest version of the operating system.
Sadly, my iPhone is deemed too archaic to be able to run that version! Or perhaps it’s the owner…
In the beginning, Twitter only allowed messages to be 140 characters long. This was because SMS text messages were a common way of posting, and sometimes receiving, tweets, and they were limited to 160 characters; allow 20 characters for a username, and 140 is all you have left: about 20 words.
Two years ago, Twitter expanded the maximum length from 140 to 280 characters, though they said soon afterwards that this hadn’t actually made much difference to the average tweet length. It did, however, reduce the number of abbreviations – remember b4 this, when everything was gr8? Thank heavens we don’t have so much of that now, though I suspect an improvement in phone keyboards also played a significant role in the change.
Last night, I was contemplating the new trend for people to write long spiels using Twitter ‘threads’; typically one sentence per tweet. Sometimes you see them with ‘1/17’, ‘2/17’ etc after each post. It works, but it really seems as if Twitter is being stretched beyond its design!
I suppose the alternative would be to use Facebook, but who wants to do that?
So I was feeling a bit nostalgic for blogs and RSS feeds. Just imagine how good social media would be if:
Doesn’t that sound good? Well, that’s what we had in 2005. 🙂
Don’t get me wrong, I do use Twitter, and I’ve had an account for over 11 years now, but I’ve had a blog, and read other blogs, for much longer, and if I ever had to make a choice between losing Twitter or losing my RSS feeds, I’d soon be waving bye-bye to the little blue bird.
But then I realised this was crazy thinking. Imagine if you had to show you could write a whole sentence before you could be elected President? Or even a paragraph just to announce a major change in policy? I guess nothing would ever be accomplished…
Malham, in Yorkshire, is a splendid place, which I’d never visited until we stayed there last night. It’s a pretty and charming little village, with a bubbling stream running through it, and one or two very nice pubs.
But, take a short walk through the green, rolling countryside in one direction, and you come to Malham Cove, a very impressive limestone cliff.
A path with some good stairs takes you to the top of the cliff, where the limestone has eroded into other unexpected features.
An occasional delicate flower nestles in the indentations, protected from the sometimes dramatic weather.
If, on the other hand, you head out of the village in the opposite direction, a path through some fields eventually enters a little wooded valley, which takes you first to Janet’s Foss:
And then, a little higher up, to Gordale Scar.
And between all these dramatic sites…?
Sheep grazing in bucolic peace beside gently winding streams.
I love this cartoon! It’s a great illustration of why Quentin’s Second Law can prove so challenging.
When I take my foot off the accelerator in my electric car, the ‘regenerative braking’ process charges up the battery. Similarly if I’m going downhill. This is reasonably well-known now.
Well, I was talking to a friend today about his planned purchase of some high-tech hearing aids. They sound splendid, though they should do for the price. It would be cheaper to put two MacBook Pros in your ears… though perhaps a bit less comfortable.
Anyway, I was asking him about their battery life, and, pondering this topic later, I was thinking that you ought to be able to do something similarly clever there: if they use power to amplify things which are too quiet, could they also recharge their batteries by deadening things that are too loud? If you were out for a long day and they started to run down, you could simply head for a loud rock concert, or perhaps seek out a high-crime area and stand near some police sirens. Even if the recharging didn’t work very well, you wouldn’t be able to hear anything afterwards anyway, so you wouldn’t care.
Brilliant, eh? I’m off to the patent office…
I once went to a talk by Ben Goldacre, in which he said he was going to get a T-shirt printed. This was because he seemed to be giving the same response to lots of questions recently, and it would be easier if people could just read the answer as they walked up to him. The text would say, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”
It was a throwaway comment, but I often think of it, most recently as the British mobile phone networks start rolling out 5G and (because they spent so much on licensing the spectrum) are being very energetic about telling us how wonderful it is.
Yes, 5G can be faster. Potentially much faster. That’s the main marketing push, of course: you can play games more interactively and watch higher-quality videos more quickly. Marketing people like simple numbers. Which is fine, but it’s just an incremental change to 4G, and many people, including me, find it hard to get very excited about that.
I’m far from being an expert on mobile networks, but I have some friends who are, and I’m slowly learning that there are lots of other aspects to consider. Here are a few lesser-known facts about 5G:
So, yes, 5G is generally a good thing, or will be in a couple of years. And it has key advantages other than just streaming Netflix in higher resolution.
But perhaps the best news, if your family and friends start asking you about it, is that Ben did actually go ahead and create those T-shirts.
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or what’s a hedgetrimmer extension handle for?
Today, for the first time ever, I’ve been wearing contact lenses. As a new user, I have to say, they’re a jolly impressive technology!
These are multifocal ones, which I hope may save me from the routine of putting on my reading glasses, taking them off, dropping them, picking them up, losing them, finding them, cleaning them etc, which I currently do several times an hour. We’ll see how well they work overall, but you know what was the very first benefit I noticed in the optician’s office? I could read my Apple Watch!
Such a cruel mistress is Fate, that the very moment that I was able to purchase this miracle of technology and strap it to my wrist was the same moment my eyesight deteriorated to the point where only things further away than the end of my arm could be viewed unaided. Since then, yes, I’ve been able to read big digits and press pause buttons, but most of the more detailed displays on the watch have had me reaching for my glasses, which does somewhat tarnish the high-tech coolness of it all. Sigh. Old computer-graphics geeks don’t die, they just lose their resolution.
Another problem I’d like to solve is that of seeing both my SatNav and the road. I don’t need glasses for driving. I do need them to read the dashboard. When I put them on, I can’t see the road. Ça, c’est un problême.
So is needing a spare hand for specs when I’m taking photos. I can use my camera’s viewfinder, which has a diopter correction, or the rear screen, which doesn’t. I often want to switch between these to get the best shot, but by the time I’m ready, the eagle has flown.
In a way, it would be easier if I needed to wear glasses all the time, rather then half the time. But my distance vision isn’t at all bad, and I tried varifocal glasses and they didn’t agree with me. So I hope these prove to be a success. My total contact-lens-wearing experience currently runs to about 6 hours, so it’s too early to say.
But they have at least allowed me to write this post without difficulty, and, perhaps more importantly, they have solved that problem whose critical importance for humans was first identified by Arthur Dent on a spaceship in the late seventies, and encountered by me in central Cambridge in 2015: “How am I going to operate my digital watch now?”
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