You can clean the floor if you are good!

The other day (a bit over a week ago now, I have been too busy to blog) I was sitting down at the table in the conservatory with my two year old son Theo. It was his dinner time and he was eating nicely but he managed to drop something.

Now when he was nine months old I taught Theo about tidying up and he is quite good at it. He enjoys the praise he gets when he tidies or cleans up. His first time tidying up was with me in the bath when I got him playing the game of helping me put the bath toys back in their containers. This was in out old house in Cambridge and the containers were wire corner cage things that are stuck to the wall by suckers. Because there are a limited number of corners above the bath this meant that some of the containers were out of his reach even when he was standing up in the bath, so for those ones he handed me the toys to put away. The rest of the toys he could put in the lower container.

Theo has a routine where he has dinner, then has a bath, then goes to bed and is read a story. I added the sub stage where he would put away his bath toys before he came out of the bath.

Not long after I started him on playing this game whenever I was bathing him Theo had a bath with Coralie (his mummy). Now Theo was, as I said, nine months old at this point so he wasn't really talking yet. When Theo started feeling tired and wanted to go to bed he couldn't ask, not being able to talk, but he decided to start putting away his toys. The problem was that there were not many out so that the bottom cage, that he could reach, was full, so he gave the toy he had to his mother to put in the top cage. She did not know about the new game and thanked him for the toy and then gave it back to him. He looked a little annoyed at her not doing it right and thrust it back at her. She did the same thing again. After two or three more passes he went over to the cage while she had the toy and pointed at it. She finally twigged and put it away, where upon he held up his arms to be picked out of the bath.

I mention all this to give the understanding that he has bought into the concept of tidying things up. So you can imagine that when he dropped something on the floor he wanted to sort it out. Now it had created a splash so it would not be a quick wipe so I had to tell him he needed to finish dinner first. Being an inventive two year old it was entirely possible he could decide, either at the time or in the future that throwing things on the floor would get him a later bed time, so I did not want to set a precedent that would encourage the idea. This left me in the position, if I wanted to break the routine to let him clean up (a good thing for him to enjoy) I needed to set the context properly. I found myself saying:

"You can clean up after dinner if you are really good"

It was about then that it struck me what I had just said. I suddenly thought to myself how lucky I am and how it really doesn't get much better than having to be in the position of saying something like that to your son. At that point I realised that I would have to put this in one of my blogs lest I ever need to look back on it and smile happily.



It was about then that it struck me what I had just said. I suddenly thought to myself how lucky I am and how it really doesn't get much better than having to be in the position of saying something like that to your son.">Rufus Evison

This amused me

I saw a cartoon that amused me and thought I would share it. I came across it on Matt's blog, which I highly recommend. I have great respect for Matt, so it seems ironic that my first blog to mention him should be the frivolous one.

Sorry matt.
Rufus

P.S. Can anyone mail me with a suggestion for which bit of LGM physics I should cover next?

Ostrich doesn't have quite enough points...

WWW.XKCD.COM

Carbon Footprint

I have been asked to look at the term Carbon Footprint and how it appears to search. It seems that most of what you see when you search for carbon footprint are sites whcih talk about carbon footprint calculators. There is also some descussion of the definition of carbon footprints and how they should be viewed in terms of claims by businesses. Does a carbon footprint include the carbon footprint of your suppliers footprints when they were creating the items you use to creat your products for instance. If not the footprint for your product is misleading, if so then the carbon footprints are going to be double counted.

I will probably have to update this to get it to register on search engines itself, but I will see if it manages on its own for the moment. In the meantime a question to ponder: what is the carbon footprint of a blog article?

Rufus Evison

Testing a you tube object

This is Bill Hicks talking about how he feels Marketers are evil. It isn't as funny as you might hope, but it illustrates the placing of a youtube object within a blog post which will be usefull to me now and again, so I feel it is worthwhile. Those of you interested in retail media may be equally interested in why I chose this particular object.

Physics Explained : LGM Theory and Electricity

When you run a current through a wire you are effectively giving a push to the little green man at the back of the queue of little green men that run through the wire. He Shouts and then starts to run through the wire. The next LGM will run to avoid him and so forth.

Clearly the reason that a wire gets hot when you run a current through it is that the little green men are doing exercise and so getting hot. If you have a thinner wire they will be more likely to run into each other and fights may develop. Also if it gets very thin the crowding will make it much more work. As well as producing more heat this clearly makes it more difficult to get th LGMs down the wire. This is what we refer to as resistance. This leads us to an equation:

V=IR

V is the voltage (the term for the force you need to get the LGMs going down the wire).
I is for the current or flow of man down the wire. It should be remembered that even though they refer to thuis as I it is the flow of the men, not the men themselves that is meant here.
R is the resistenece they put up to going down the wire at all.

So as you would expect the more resistance the more you need to push them to make them go. The greater the flow of men you are trying to get the more you need to push them too.

If you do not have a circuit the man at the front of the queue will have nowhere to go and so will not be able to move. This means the man behind him is stuck too and so on. In effect this means that is you have a break in the circuit you have a logjam and no one can move.

As the men move they sing, but you will only hear this if you are another LGM. This helps account for a whole lot of intereference effects that I may detail in a later post. Another bit I shall discuss is the blocks of flats people call capacitors and how coming out of a narrow wire can lead to enthusiasm and hence to over crowding and pushback providing oscilations. More details as and when...

It all makes sense really.

Rufus Evison

Privacy and capriciousness

I wrote the following post a few minutes ago, but have since found out that in fact an email was sent to Bain and Company. The reason I was mentioned is that they are the company I am going to be talking to in a conference call later today. My colleague Oliver Harrison had asked me yesterday if I would take part in the call but did not say which company would be on the call. I am letting this post stand so that we can see if the people I am talking to later have triggered on this post. If nothing else it should be amusing.

Original post follows:
-------------------------------------------------------

I just noticed some web-evidence (webidence?)that someone from Bain and Company had received an email about me and had followed it up by having a quick look. The evidence is not conclusive but is highly suggestive. It is certain that someone from within that company has been looking at me online, and the way in which they have done this suggests they were prompted by an email. As I have mentioned elsewhere the information available on the web is really quite startling. I find myself tempted to contact Bain and Company and offer more information. I imagine this would have a couple of effects if I got the information to the right person:

1) It would make them feel that big brother was watching them and so understand the privacy concerns some people feel about the Internet.
2) It would make them feel that I was good at what I do, at least in the context of web monitoring.

Neither of these seem bad things. A third effect that it would have is that it would amuse me. Taken together these are almost enough to make it worth the bother of trying to find the right person, or at least broadcasting the information throughout their company so that it is heard. Almost enough but not quite.

Instead of making that effort I have decided to leave this to chance. If they are the sort of company they present themselves as being then at least one person from Bain and Company will have a Google alert set up on the company name. They will then see this posting and will either comment or not. If they are not as switched on as they seem they will never know that I noticed them passing.

Rufus Evison