Working Title

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

This popular endlessly circular argument seems more answerable than question of what I'm going to do with the rest of my life?

I've asked the this question and various forms of it.

What do you want to do with the rest of your life?
What are you passionate about?
What do you like doing?
What do you want from life?

The quick answer to all the above is frighteningly “I DON'T KNOW”. The really frightening thing is the long answer is also “I DON'T KNOW”.

What am I passionate about? Currently I'm an engineer and I don't like my current job....in fact I've never liked the 10+ years of working as an engineer. I am actually passionate about engineering. I see beauty on in engineering design, solutions, calculation and reasoning. I marvel at finished products and the processes involved in getting them from concept to the customer. I'm here in the canteen writing on my laptop. In front of me is a stainless steal salt shaker. This is ordinary common item but think of it's history, it's life and how it got to be in front of me. The metal had to be formed and that preformed metal was rolled from a ingot which came through several steps from mainly iron ore, which was probably transport many miles from the mine where it was dug up, before that it lay there until it was discovered as a economical source of raw material and the whole political and social issues that had to be address (or put to side) to get that mine operational. Can you imagine all the machinery and people involved in getting that ore from discovery to the salt shaker in front of me. An that's just the iron, what about all the other components that make stainless steal and then there is the plastic base and the salt inside the shaker. Why stop there. Where did this ore for the metal come from, oil for the plastic and the salt it's self. I don't know about you but I can imagine all those steps and I suppose it was one of the reason I studied engineering.

Still I can't translate any of the above in what I want to do with the rest of my life. What I don't like about my job is the job itself. I don't feel excited about it. The last thing most engineers do is engineering. Most of my work is managing data, people and politics. But aren't all jobs the same? I'm also bored, always bored at work. But it is really a 9 to 5 job so I get home to my wife and daughter early every night. If I change career it's going to take me a few years to recover the initial pay cut ignoring the initial outlay to do this in training or an extra degree. This can go on and on, a circular argument in which each revelation cancels the previous one out.

But a few nights ago I was wondering about that chicken and egg. An came to the conclusion that there is no one answer. There is several answers depending on your beliefs.

Say you believe in evolution. Then you accept the idea that you are a combination of the DNA of your mother and father and a little bit of genetic mutation. It's this mutation that in the long run drives evolution. Mutation will can give you something different that your parents don't have. If it's beneficial, like giving a slightly larger brain which better enables you to survive, thus increasing the chances of this mutation been passed onto your off spring so they can benefit from it. This is how we can down from trees millennia ago. These is no grand jump from prehistoric man to humans but millions of tiny combinations of mutations. Palaeontologist had to draw a line at a said point and say from that point forward the human species exists. At some point in the future the DNA of human offspring will have evolved into another spices. Again this won't be sudden but a gradual process and again some point in time will have to be picked to say from this point forward this new spices exists.

Applying this logical arguments to the chicken ad egg question and at some point in the past we have to say the chicken evolved from it ancestors. The ancestors weren't chicken but the chicken was a combination of both it's parents DNA and some mutation. This all was in the egg that produced the chicken, therefore the egg came first.

Change your beliefs to say creationism and you accept that the world is several thousands years old and the literal word of the bible is true. In the book of Genesis on the Fifth day God creates birds and sea creatures; they are commanded to be fruitful and multiply. God could have created an egg first but there would have been no chicken to keep it warm and hatch it. So therefore the chicken came first.

How does this help me. I think I've being looking for an answer, a silver bullet, my unification theory. But I now suspect there is many answers all depending on your beliefs and maybe that it where I should start.

Jerry

It's been a while sine I've posted anything on my blog. In fact this will be my fourth posting. I'm now 34. 34 and ½ to be Moler about it (I am a child of the 80's). My daughter is now 1 year old and besides that my life hasn't moved on. Well hasn't move on by my own design, I'm just getting swept along by events, other peoples events. In fact this has been the situation most of my life.

I'm not say life has been handed to me on a silver platter, but lets face it I'm male, white, well educated, native english speaker, in good health and I grew up on a farm but I'm not working class. These make the path through life a bit easier for me. But until now I just being wandering all over the place with no real idea what I want to do or where I want to go. The ebb and flow of daily life has overall guide me, but with shear luck I am where I am.

I have a decently job as an engineer, which I hate. I get a good wage, but not fantastic. I'm smarter than the average bear, but lack of motivation is my let down. I have a beautiful wife who I love and she loves me and a beautiful daughter......no buts here, that arrangement I'm very happy with...but my wife is the motivation powerhouse, I'm really just guided by that. Moving to London, six month travelling the world, getting married, have a baby are all originally her ideas.

Don't get me wrong, I am not lazy per say, but until now if I don't get directions or a plan I stall. I do my bosses bidding. I have plenty of ideas but only give them when asked. I'm very capable but only do when told.

I want a better job, one I actually like. I want a hobby, not just feel tired at in the evening and just watch TV. I want to change the world....well some part of it for better.

So this blog marks the turn around. My line in the sand. It time I'd really plan what I want to do with my life, time to prepare.

Jerry

It’s now been a few weeks since I wrote my first blog and let’s say the response wasn’t the most rousing. Well actually there hasn’t been any. There is some traffic through my blog and certain additions have been added to my tags, illiterate (ouch) and squid molester (don’t quite fully understand this one, but not good.) Reading over my first entry again I can see why. It’s long, not gripping and I lose the point about 5 sentences in. But I stand by my overall gist. Web 1.0 was viewed by all in the early days as the great leveller. All the people in the world, talking to each other, doing business with each other and so on. But it didn’t go that way, big business now dominated the web and the majority of traffic goes through a relative small number of sites. The arrival of blogging in Web 2.0 has been hailed as the great leveller, this time of the media and information, making journalist of us all. But I fear not. Blogging by its very nature suits professional journalist and big media. Yes there will be changes and some big names in media will be gone because of the internet by the end of the decade. But companies will adapt, embrace blogging, create the better blogs with their resources, gain the majority of traffic and control of news and our view of the world will again come from the professional few. This isn’t a worst situation to be in, it’s just the same one we’re in now.  The overall lesson I gathered from this is I need to formulate my ideas better and write a better blog……I wonder will I achieve this or by the end of the decade I will still be an illiterate squid molester.

This is my first blog so HEY FOLKS,

Blogs seem to be the "in thing" at the moment. Every paper I read, internet news site I visit and every news programme (radio and TV) I hear say

..how great blogging is..

..a wonderful medium for anyone, anywhere with anything to say..

..another source of information..

and so on.

There are also negatives.

..it only propagates rumours..

..not everyone has something interesting to say..

..there is too much information to wade through..

..it's not a legitimate source of information.

(Strangely I never hear anything regarding blogs from my everyday friends. They’re a cross section of 25 to 35 year olds ranging from engineers, solicitors, bankers, teachers, IT, recruiters, accountants, and project managers…..not what you would describe as internet illiterates….note there are no media professional list in my everyday friends….read on)

All the above point of view listed regarding blogging, in my opinion, are true. The negatives I'm not too worried about. The internet from the start was a great source of information but where 99% was useless or irrelevant to my daily life. But I get through it. Modern search engines like Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo make sense of it and therefore the internet useful. Not everyone has something interesting to say, but that always been the same before the internet existed. Newspapers roughly publish the same volume information every day, but rarely has a newspaper gripped me from page to page. As for legitimacy and rumours, well the old media isn’t the gold standard in these either. Read the stories behind similar headline news in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail and you’ll get 5 different stories of varying goodness to badness, opinions and suggestions. As for the Red Top can you possible believe half the news they come out with? But I’ve (and I think the public at large) learned to filter this. The FT is pro-liberalised economy, the Guardian make more sense when read through the eyes of a teacher/social services and the Mail through that of an ultra conservative.

No I’m actually worried about the positive point of view on the internet and blogging in particular. Ask yourself who is more likely to write a blog? Who would actually like to writing a blog? Who can make boring everyday stories interesting? Reporters, journalist, novelist etc.

Now I’m not having dig at people who have committed their life to the pen. They are the corner stone of free speech, and free speech is the corner stone of democracy. But they are not everybody. Prior to the internet, news (nationally and internationally) could only be gotten via TV, radio and newspaper. Opinion and points of view were delivered to us by a few people. Even government can only be seen through a layer of reporters. The internet has given arise to another channel, where everybody could contribute to the debate. But as the internet grew and data it contained became vast, people congregated at a few websites (relative to the number in existence) to get the information they require. These sites like Yahoo, AOL, BBC etc. compile their news by reporters. Even were the opinion of the public is given, it’s edited by editors (who are reporters).

So what’s so bad about getting all your news from people who do it professionally? They can be an impartial point of view sense the story usually doesn’t involve them. They are professionals and have means and ways of getting to the heart of the story. They routinely report (evening news), from a permanent source (TV) and a familiar format so saving us time in locating news stories.

But here lies the rub? Watch Euronews (if you can get it on cable or satellite) or read the short columns in the financial section of a broad sheet newspaper. This is raw news reporting, literally just the fact mam. Boring Boring Boring. A bit of opinion, an introduction to where it’s coming from, predicting were the story is going, a panel of “experts”, sound bites, reports from the people most effected etc. These techniques are employed to make the news more interesting and therefore more watch able or readable. But these said techniques used by a third party (a reporter) can lead to over hyping of news.

SARS, Birdflu, MMR, Mad Cow Disease, Foot and Mouth, the Dot.com boom are only some examples of where reporting moved from informative to being hysterical. The people the newspaper and TV station deployed to cover the story are not experts on these topics but end up shaping our opinion and view of them. Over critical and over bias reporting can affect judgment in trials such as OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson. One has to wonder if it wasn’t for the 24/7 media coverage would they both have gotten off? And of course the most current over hyped story is Global Warming. Storms destroying News Orleans, water shortages in South East England are all being directly linked to it by the press, but where scientists are says it’s an indirect side effect (New Orleans) and anyone in the water industry will tell you that the issue of water shortage in London are more to do with bad management over 20 years than lack of rain. I’m taking global warming seriously, but I learned little from the media. In my opinion they spend way too much time with what wrong with the world now and decision that need to be made for the future. There is little understanding of how and why we got here. Coal is a dirty fuel that produced too much CO2 is only part truths and does it little justification. We first have to look back of how we arrived here to understand where we’re going to go in the future.

Its here I believe where blogging can help. The side stories, the opinion of the masses, industry insiders and so can air their view and show us another side of the story. But I fear in time this too this will be a dominated by main stream professional media. Already many newspaper and TV reporters have personal blogs to continue their coverage of what ever story they are doing or just air other views. I have read many and they tend to be good, but I don’t think my knowledge of the subjects being covered were extended more as it is effectively the source and same opinion. This coupled with main stream media advertising their reports blog only enforces the fact we’ll get our news from the same source as we did 20 years ago. The internet has arrived but what has changes? More news? Yes. Can access it when we want? Yes. More diverse reporting? Time will tell.