Calipers in thought before communion

In the view of my cane

It’s a funny world of knowledge gained in the past that you probably never thought might come in useful. At other times, rather than use that knowledge lost in the deep recesses of your memory, you find someone who is an expert of sorts to help for a fee or a price, whichever way you look at it.

As I sat in church yesterday, I thought about my walking canes and I have quite a few, they have been subjected to lots of wear and tear, some in need of repair that I have had thoughts of fixing myself, but never got to it.

When it comes to the ferrules, the rubber thing that you fix to the end of the cane, over time, that does wear away. You would think you just walk into a cobbler’s shop and find an array of ferrules to attach to your cane. Wrong!

No standard to the rule

Beyond the unsightliness of some ferrules as big as doorstops, some just would not fit, suggesting there is no particular world standard for the diameter of walking canes. At least, that is my experience. I like snug and slim ferrules that do not bulge out at the end of my walking cane and those I would hardly find at the local cobbler’s which probably caters to a clientele that needs functional walking canes without any aesthetic beauty to their appearance.

I guess I am of the persuasion that appearances always matter, regardless of the handicap you retain for whatever circumstances you might be in.

So, whilst I was supposed to be meditating on the Eucharist I was about to receive, I began to think of how best to measure the diameter of my canes in order with that knowledge to get the specifically useful kind of cane ferrule I needed. Obviously, I could have measured the circumference of a cross-section of a cane and divided by Pi, easy arithmetic, but I wanted a bit more precision.

Calipers of a different sort

Out of the recesses of my knowledge acquired from secondary school came, what’s the instrument for measuring diameters amongst other things? Calipers, in fact, vernier calipers and so, my mind was set on acquiring vernier calipers and once I had a view of the diameters of my many canes, I would order the cane ferrules.

One other reason for cane ferrules beyond the response shock of them hitting the ground is you avoid the wear of the core material of the walking cane, the ones I use are of wooden material, however, one has an inner metal core that was exposed once the cane ferrule was completely worn. The cane needs additional work beyond the replacement of the cane ferrule though.

Shopping for a vernier caliper is an ordeal in itself, the cheap ones with digital readouts looked like a bargain until you read the one-star reviews, inaccurate, flimsy, poor quality, and useless, were the verdicts. Basically, give them a miss.

Exactness and precision, old-school

Heck, I have an engineering background, so I should be able to read scales and the precision elements to them why not get a more durable one than the plastic ones that require a battery with all the other issues the poor reviews highlighted?

So, I am getting a traditional hand-operated, stainless steel vernier caliper. I quick review of how to get your readings to two decimal points and you are assured that no knowledge is entirely lost if you let your imagination explore the possibilities around you.

After a moment of seeming daydreaming in church, it was my turn to stand in line for communion.

Thought Picnic: MLK suffers another misquote

A pastime of quotes

When I was an adolescent I collected quotes, I had an old diary which was just well suited to recording quotes from many sources including newspapers. We had at least six daily newspapers and I voraciously devoured the content from the news to reviews of issues and opinion pieces.

It was a time that you could trust Nigerian newspapers to pay attention to quality of news, quality of copy, objective analysis and most of all proofreading, I suppose the phrase will be they were committed professions of the art of communication and journalism.

Now, I have always risked a level of facetiousness that has had some label me as pedantic, I will beg to differ; there is no pedantry in the verification and confirmation process, having an engineering education just compels you as a matter of course to be procedural and to avoid approximation when precision, exactness and accuracy is required.

Quotes awry

Once again on my Facebook news feed provided another gem for a blog which is topical as it is essential in the way we communicate on the social networking space.

A quote was posted thus: “If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

I had no reason to doubt this was spoken from the lips of Martin Luther King, Jr. but considering recent events about wrongly attributed quotes [1], I felt anything attributed should and must be scrutinised and verified, more so, I expect everyone to be alert to that fact and go the extra mile to ensure they are not caught in another urban legend of misinformation.

Trust, but verify

So, I searched for the quote on Google and it revealed a number of interesting points that I tried to highlight in the Facebook post I made to the author of that Facebook status. My Facebook entry appears within brackets the rest of the text serves as a running commentary.

[I think is essential following the quote attributed to MLK following Osama bin Laden's death to ensure that he is quoted correctly, completely and in context.]

I suppose I have already introduced the context of this blog, but this is how I tried to address the issue.

[The exact excerpt of what you have posted is - "If the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate life of bitterness, and his chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos."]

I have emboldened the differences between the quote on Facebook and the original quote itself; whilst the context seems to have been maintained, it has been generalised and it has shifted from a struggle for justice to just the struggle.

Retracing the context

[The quote was specific about the Negro, hence the one you published being paraphrased should have said so.]

It is probably pedantic to dwell on the person of the Negro but I have opportunity in this blog to flesh out the issue and contend that there was more to this quote than had been offered and then for the changes made to the quote which itself had been used by others it has lost its literality, however, on reflection it had not become a paraphrase but at the same time it was incorrect because the specific context had changed.

[It was part of a longer speech delivered on the 3rd of April 1957, titled, Justice without Violence http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/liberation_curriculum/pdfs/justicewithoutviolence.pdf ]

Martin Luther King, Jr. had just returned from the Independence Day celebrations in Ghana and he gave an address to the Institute of Adult Education at Brandeis University for the Helmsley Lecture series and this quote appears towards the bottom of the second paragraph on the third page.

Giving the quote a body

[And when the Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project uses it, it publishes a much longer contextual quote of which you have published just a quarter.]

[The second in the list at this site http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/quotes_contents ]

The authoritative archives [3] of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s works are kept at Stanford University and that is where one should go for anything attributed to the great man.

When using this quote it is placed in the context of the paragraph in which it was made.

“Now the question that we face this evening is this: In the light of the fact that the oppressed people of the world are rising up against that oppression; in the light of the fact that the American Negro is rising up against his oppression, the question is this: How will the struggle for justice be waged? And I think that is one of the most important questions confronting our generation. As we move to make justice a reality on the international scale, as we move to make justice a reality in this nation, how will the struggle be waged? It seems to me that there are two possible answers to this question. One is to use the all [too] prevalent method of physical violence. And it is true that man throughout history has sought to achieve justice through violence. And we all know the danger of this method. It seems to create many more social problems than it solves. And it seems to me that in the struggle for justice that this method is ultimately futile. If the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate life of bitterness, and his chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. And there is still a voice crying into the vista of time saying to every potential Peter put up your sword. And history is replete with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command.”

Nuances of speech to text

I will not begin an exegesis the grammatical correctness of any of the text but it goes without saying and it the speech the use of “and” is conjunctive throughout the paragraph linking clauses and thoughts even though they inappropriately appear to commence sentences.

The “Now” at the beginning of the paragraph infers that the speaker was about to make some statements based on the groundwork laid earlier in his speech and the crux of the whole paragraph is balanced on one basic question. How will the struggle for justice be waged?

What he says from then on should be the fundamental guiding principle for non-violent struggle and it shows why the excerpted quote does no justice in correctness, completeness and context to what Martin Luther King, Jr. said on that day.

[Thank you :D ]

I think I have made my point, always seek the authoritative source of quotes you intent to share and I will also add if Bible verses are being shared the specific translation used should be shown.

Sources

[1] Anatomy of a Fake Quotation - Megan McArdle - National - The Atlantic

[2] Paraphrase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] King Institute Home @ The Stanford University

Thought Picnic: Losing the battle for the concise

Few views in many words

I would be the first to admit that I could be given to a bout of verbosity in my writings and communications.

However, I do strive hard to cut down my expressions to the bare essentials, in the process; I might use long words, complicated expressions and constructions that might have multiple meanings to convey my views.

I would very much like to eliminate ambiguity though something about English that allows you to offer unspoken assertions with nuanced intentions – rather be poetic than directly nasty which in common parlance is considered politely rude.

In all, it is still necessary to keep to the age-old dictum that I hope guides some of my writings – like a good skirt – it should be long enough to cover the detail and short enough to keep the interest.

An excess of letters and words

Yesterday, the Enough is Enough movement wrote an open letter to the governor of Lagos State and like many opinions expressed in the Sahara Reporters marketplace of vile sensationalism and perverse opinions it failed the good skirt test.

It was too long that every detail was covered but not short enough to keep my interest – for a busy man like the governor of Lagos State who might well have been interested in what they had to say, it would have been easy for him to plead the lack of time to read the tome and he probably would not have delegated the task of searching out the salient points to some underling.

The same can be said of the letter written to repudiate the activities of Charley Boy, it just went on and on, by the end, I wondered what got me into reading the stuff. [I read both letters on Facebook]

Precise, concise, short and simple

Living in the Netherlands, in official letters you notice they quickly want to get to the point in the first few paragraphs before it rambles on.

I like telling stories, but in letters we all need to acquire the fine art of the concise, the finesse of the precise and for urban acceptance sake, the punchy – short and simple can really get far – I do wonder if it is a lesson we Nigerians will ever learn.

Twitter and my other social networks

Online on long

For someone who first went online some 15 years ago with a CompuServe [1] account and having been online literally non-stop since June 2000, I am not particularly enamoured by the many social networking fads and there are quite a few.

I started blogging over 5 and half years ago and did because I felt I ruminated a lot about events and issues around me but never really have a forum in which to express myself or air my views.

Probably, I should have been political, but after a brutal encounter with student union politics where the authorities interfered with anyone who dared have independent thoughts, I felt the game was just too dirty for my sensibilities – however, when I did politics, people knew I was in politics that was 25 years ago.

Links to strange places

There are so many social networks they are as comforting as a scratch to a rash, but one does really wonder what real purpose they serve, but each to their own.

The only mainstream social networking site I am registered to is LinkedIn [2], this is a professional setting for networking with people you have associated with in your career.

As I entered details of my work life, I began to make connections with people I had worked with over the years, we commended and recommended each other based on memories of our experiences and before you know it, you have a self-referencing career profile.

Someone comes across your LinkedIn profile and finds that you are connected to other well known persons, that can be taken at face value or more inquiries can be made – before you know it, you are connected if not working through the connections made within the LinkedIn network.

Though, I have not yet secured an opportunity yet with LinkedIn, I know as a self-employed consultant that in the last 10 years, all projects I have been on have come about through undocumented networks, LinkedIn in my view can take that further sometime in the future, I think.

A commitment to Blogs flagging

Blogs can be difficult to write and it could take time to incubate and then appear as an opinion, I have held issues for months at times before I felt the time was ripe to write with inspired fervour.

Somehow, my blogs are not short, they are fully referenced, attributed and painstakingly researched, well, I try, it might not be as thorough as one would like it but my write-ups are not academic treatises.

The advent of Twitter [3] has somehow changed my blogging perspective, as system whereby you condense a topic, a reference and your opinion into 140 characters must test anyone’s abilities in concision, precision, brevity and context, you bet, mine have been tested.

I have been quite a purist about Short Message Service (SMS) messages, I hate abbreviations and what is known as SMS English, I once received such a message from my kid sister, I politely told her I could not understand what she had written – it took my mother transcribing it to traditional English for the penny to drop.

The Twitter spirit is fabulous

Anyway, I do like Twitter, it makes you think about how to put it all together in one Tweet making allowances for a reply or a ReTweet. This means you Tweet must be at least 2 characters plus your Tweeter identity short of 140 characters. Sometimes, you have to rephrase a Tweet and still maintain the original context, but I wonder what this would make of communication.

Would we all become masters of the soundbite, earnest purveyors of the dramatic put-down or scribblers of putative one-liners?

I am not sure that Twitter would radically affect the seeming verbosity of my blogs but this outlet is very useful; in 140 characters, I could be serious, silly, salacious, sceptical, sanguine, sarcastic, probably scandalous but never seditious.

A toolbox of Twitter spanners

Beyond that, Twitter came in useful when I found myself the only passenger on a boat, I sent a Tweet announcing where I was and one announcing my arrival on terra firma – it offers public insurance with private assurance.

There are so many Twitter tools out there but I have selected three for their ease of use, basic functionality and follower management capabilities.

I use the PowerTwitter Add-on to Firefox [4], it automatically expands the shortened URL to the source and shows pictures and video links if the short URL points to those elements. I can immediately see who I am following and who is following me.

My Swiss-Army Twitter knife

Twhirl [5] is easy and portable, the reply, ReTweet, favourite and direct message icons are available when the mouse is moved over the image of the Tweeter. I use the http://is.gd URL shortener because it gives the shortest URL and only this weekend the sequentially generated part moved up from 4 characters to 5 characters.

Then suddenly I got all this following from lewd profiles, those I did block but I also ended up blocking some profiles I should have just stopped following – I found out how to better work the system over time.

Just like my blogs the general theme of my Tweets is also about things too concerning to ignore, so really, I am not interesting in some other get-rich- quick Internet money making idea – if the ideas were so good, the purveyors of such Twitter Spam would be serial entrepreneurs making money not part of the nuisance of online noise.

Between friends, acquaintances and hobos

Just like I learnt with ICQ over 10 years ago, in the first day, I was connected to 50 people who did not say more than “Hello”, I was so clueless about who they were, what their interests were and they had not bothered to fill in their profiles. I cleaned out everything and ended up with just 5 connections. The same logic has applied to all my other networks, I engage with people who engage me because there is no point taking traffic you cannot use. It is already a jungle out there.

So, this is where Tweepular [6] came in useful, it shows mutual follows, unrequited follows and followers – in fact, it is a crude tool I use every other day based on the last time a Tweet was published and the content of that last Tweet to decide whether to follow or not – so that the point in time when I check Tweepular my decision is a hammer and that momentary Tweet is a nail.

The developers of Tweepular are such fun loving crazy people, as it generates your data the progress bar has the Twitter bird moonwalking – makes me smile everytime.

What I would like

I would like to see a proper reference to Tweets I have replied to so the thread is consistent and if necessary one should be able to easy expose a thread to public viewing.

I have published my Tweets on my blog, on the left there is a full-colour Flash based record of recent Tweets and to the bottom right of my blog, you can find a list of my last 50 Tweets.

Tweepular intends to create a feature to show Recent Unfollowers, but really, are we that bothered? In the end, the ideal TwitterVerse is to be followed by just the same people you want to follow, we would never get that ideal but people are getting on my list the more their one-liners have content, context, sense and probably some humour too.

I am not on FaceBook, I am just not persuaded of its usefulness at all and Flickr handles my photographs efficiently, in fact, I have had a few published in forums, guides and journals.

Sources

[1] CompuServe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] LinkedIn Home

[3] Twitter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Power Twitter : Add-ons for Firefox

[5] twhirl | the social software client

[6] Tweepular Login

The Red Cross marks the missile target - Updated

Surgical precision targetting

The madness portrayed as strategy by the axis of Israel and American continues adrift as the number of causalities progressively advances to unimaginable figures.

Two events especially make this whole situation dangerously precarious and unsustainable.

As I watched the news yesterday, we were shown patients bandaged up in hospital, having been wounded by some attack whilst they went about their duties.

These patients were ambulance men who at the time of attack were moving other wounded persons to hospital.

Many Israeli propagandists with a spokesperson tag for the army or some other function of government have stressed to distraction that they have been making their strikes as surgical as possible.

It makes one wonder how the crosses on two ambulances ended up becoming the bulls-eye for Israeli missiles. Two separate vehicles, with the internationally recognised Red Cross targeted and destroyed - with precision.

Courtesy of WhatReallyHappened.com

UN endangered in every place

Then, the UN Secretary General in the person of Kofi Annan lamented the killing of 4 UN observers, who can blame him? Hardly 3 years ago, he lost one of the best diplomatic brains in Iraq in the person of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, as the UN looked for ways to help the Iraqi War move towards probable solutions of democracy and peace.

If the belligerent parties cannot provide adequate protection for UN officials or observers, then they should not resort to the UN to help legitimise their activities.

In the advent of these killings, I would surmise Israel has already lost the battle for the hearts of many in the international community and it is unlike that they would do any better with the battle of the minds.

People of all nations including Nigerians killed

Once again the bomb was a direct hit on the shelter of the observers - surgical - which was clearly marked, in all 12 UN employees have been killed or injured, with a closer to home tragedy of a Nigerian civilian employee of UNIFIL being killed in Tyre along with his wife.

Obviously, Mr Annan is close to being vilified for jumping to conclusions at obvious and blatant unwarranted attacks on places and vehicles that should in any civilised endeavour be protected from the ravages of war.

They can investigate all they can, but the lives have already been lost and the trigger-happy sharp shooters in F16 planes are probably planning another precision and surgical strike on another clearly marked out structure - churches, mosques and hospitals better beware.

The stupor of delusion

Beyond this point one really has to try and phantom the logic of continuing these exchanges and onslaughts be Israel and the militants labelled as terrorists. Like Robert Fisk suggests, it is a complete delusion to expect that the stated goal of weakening Hezbollah and humiliating Iran whilst taming Syria is achievable by any means and definitely not by parading the best weaponry on the market.

To quote the man more clearly - "The problem, surely, is that the United States sees this bloodbath as an 'opportunity' rather than a tragedy".

The world cannot abide a situation like this any longer.

References

Robert Fisk: Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross on the roof of each ambulance

Annan accuses Israel over attack on UN post

Israeli bomb kills UN observers