GARDENING
One of the larger groups, exceedingly well run by Margaret Massey, which, unusually, keeps going through the summer with visits to members gardens. For the rest of the year it meets monthly in the lecture room at Singleton Botanical Gardens and listens to a particularly good set of outside experts.
As I discover whenever the group visits our garden I am not the only one who is there for the tea, coffee, cakes and conversation! Nevertheless there are more than a few flower-mad enthusiasts in the group, including my wife Joan who will not stop, buying and cadging, until she has one of everything - a life's work if ever there was one. As for me, groundsman and building labourer, more recently specialising in disguising concrete blocks with natural stone, forever altering the levels in our garden, and now even being usurped from vegetable growing by a practitioner more knowledgeable in the green arts.
ART APPRECIATION (Modern European Art from 1350)
Another large group run by Mo Ellard and Margaret Winter, to which my wife Joan belongs. Dr. Barry Plummer, Chairman of the Friends of the Glynn Vivian, is giving a series of lectures illustrated by slides, which this coming year will consider 18th Century artists.
WALKING
This large group with morning Rambles led fortnightly by David Michael and Ambles led by Eileen Jones will suit those no longer game for the much longer walks of the Gower Society or The Ramblers Society. A pleasant healthy way to prepare for a Pub Lunch.
READING AGAIN
We have just had our first group meeting of the year at which Hilary Jones presented her choice of 'After You'd Gone' by Maggie Farrell. I suspect it will prove one of the more memorable choices of the year, beautifully written and with a well drawn small family of characters, religious bigotry, and a love affair curtailed by tragedy. Rather unusually, nothing seemed forced to suit the needs of the writer, all the events and characters rang true throughout. The narrative was particularly poignant for those in the group who had lost loved ones.
Luckily so far loss has not been my lot, nevertheless I couldn't but reflect that the very day that Joan gave birth to our last child she was warned by an experienced nursing friend not to expect to see me again. Thanks to Mr R D Weeks, the neurosurgeon at Cardiff Royal Infirmary, I survived that same day's foreshortened operation with literally hours to live. He later became better known as the surgeon who operated on Mervyn Davies, that great Swansea, Wales and Lions Number 8, in his hour of need.
With all that said it should have been a pleasant read - and it was .... but, I found the cinematic chopping and changing of time-scale and viewpoint challenging to say the least. A short chapter could often deal with three seemingly unrelated episodes decades apart. It is a book with two ends and a middle and it was only during the presentation that I realised I had misread the ending - the beauty of group discussion is that you see things you would never have noticed alone.
As an engineer, responsible for the designing and maintenance of complex digital control systems, I was a great believer in KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). In my view the only route to reliable engineering solutions. Simple solutions are usually the most difficult of all to find (though they seem obvious in hindsight) - but they are usually elegant. So why do modern novelists seem to go out of their way to make things more complicated and confused than they are? The writers of classics never did.
As the token male in the reading group (that's one of the penalties - or are they joys - of the U3A and reduced life expectancy) I should have explained in the group discussion that books like Maggie O'Farrell's, After You'd Gone, with its realistic thought provoking views of the human condition, pass gender boundaries, even though the characters in view are mainly female.
Someone, who knew we men were argumentative self centered beings, suggested that the male characters in the book were less realistic on the premise that a loving, long-suffering husband was 'too good to be true'. I swallowed my response , 'aren't we all'. But went on to muse that it's grannies that 'ruin' boys - my mother told me.
ENGINEERING AND COMPUTERS
If you want some examples of simplicity in engineering innovation then for a homely example think James Dyson and his vacuum cleaner. He started with the idea to move a simple technique from industry to the humble vacuum cleaner, to swirl the air sucked in and let the resulting centrifugal force separate out the dirt, dust and fluff. Add a touch of the Pompidou Centre design principle of making a feature of the workings and you have his iconic design. Want a real world example of a cyclone, or 'twister' as the yanks call it, then recall that a tornado sucks roofs off houses, no wonder the early examples his vacuum cleaner were reputed to damage fragile carpets.
Or Alec Issigonis's whose idea for the Mini was to use front wheel drive and turn the motor sideways, thus at a single stroke improving traction, reducing the length of the bonnet and increasing the useful interior by allowing a flat floor. That powerful simple idea forced an elegant compact solution to the problems it posed for transmission design. It was highly successful and now virtually all family cars follow the same principles.
Or if you must have visual elegance think engineer Michel Virlogeux and architect Norman Foster and their Millau Bridge. Just a century on from Brunel's equally impressive Clifton Suspension bridge.
But the best example of all is how the now microscopic transistor replaced the ever increasing complexity of the electronic valve. The transistor is like a toasted cheese sandwich in which the filling has opposite electrical conducting characteristics to the crusts. That simple idea was followed by several decades of exponential growth in which the transistor got ever smaller, and because of this, ever faster in operation and ever cheaper to manufacture.
In 1961 I was one of those who designed conventional electronic (valve replacement) circuits with the very first silicon transistors which cost £5 each. Today there are tens of thousands in PC processors chips which sell for £50, far less given the value of today's money. In a computer processor and its memory millions of transistors are used simply as a two state (0/1) switches. But when engineered (interfaced) to real life hardware and powered by increasingly sophisticated software logic they enabled the digital revolution we see today.
Digital simply implies things which are built from binary computers. A digital camera is nothing but a computer and memory with a lens and an electronic retina. The real power is in the systems engineering and especially the software, that's what turns a computer into a PC, camera, mobile phone, or TV. It almost defies comprehension that its vast memories and powerful processors contain nothing but billions and billions of ones and zeros.
The digital computer is incredibly fast and all but totally reliable at elementary integer arithmetic, elementary binary logic, memorise and recall . It performs according to a software program which are instructions to itself conveyed in a sequence of binary patterns. Some instructions can change this fixed sequence by jumping to a new section of program and this is what allows the software to have architectural structure.
Binary numbers are sequences of just two possible digits, one or zero. Binary counting goes, 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, which is simply a different way of representing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 . Each left shift in binary implies the number is doubled whereas the decimal system we are used to moves left in multiples of ten. Thus decimal shifts left in units, tens, hundreds thousands whereas Binary shifts one, two, four, eight, sixteen etc. Nothing could be more basic.
Binary logic has just two opposite states (one and zero) which can be thought of as, true and false, on and off, yes and no. It's important to understand that we are talking of binary logic not binary arithmetic, these ones and zeros represent logical states not binary numbers.
The simplest form of digital logic is the AND gate, which electronically is a circuit comprising little more than a single transistor. It has two inputs and a single output, each can have only the 'one' state or the 'zero' state. The logic of an AND gate is that if both inputs are set to 1 (1 & 1, or more elegantly represented by 11) then the output will also be 1. However if the two inputs are set to any of the other three logic patterns 00, 01, 10 then the output will be zero.
A simple example is to show the AND gate modelling the operation of a light circuit in the home. Assume the first input is set to the state of the Main Switch in the house where (Closed=1, Open=0) and the second input is likewise set to the state of the Room Switch. So if the Main Switch is Closed AND the Room Switch is Closed then the Output of the AND gate goes to 1 indicating that the Light is On. Turn either switch to Open (0) or both switches to Open (the three other possible combinations) and the light will go Off.
But I digress. I didn't know how far when I started writing about engineering but you will see that the theme of simplicity and elegance is close to my heart and I would hope to explain. I believe I can show it is close to the nature of some of our groups than you might realise. Would you care to speculate which?
FINANCIAL CRASH
16 September 2008. That is the date of the latest update, the day after the financial markets crashed. Why did they crash? Because the whole banking system had got so complex and so successful that for years no banker bothered to understand the risks they were taking. As the old saying goes 'they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing' - and I am speaking after decades in which the best young brains have been enticed to work in the financial markets, for only they could be taught to deal quickly with such complex trading. No-one apparently questioned the long term sustainability (reliability) of their practices.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Saturday, 6 September 2008
INTRODUCTION - START HERE
Hello I'm Brian the Swansea U3A Groups Coordinator as well as the 'Oldie Backpacker'. I belong to the Swansea U3A (University of the Third Age, an inappropriate title which leaves many of us cold). You may be pleased to learn there are plenty of opportunities here for, discussion and socialising, thought and laughter, starting new interests or continuing others, making new friends, but no formal tuition and no exams! Perhaps the innuendo in the blog's title gives a better feel from one who 'intends to grow old disgracefully'. I have just been cajoled (arm twisted, in the nicest possible way, by Chairman Bob) onto the committee and now find myself in employment again.
Our U3A meets collectively on Wednesday afternoons at Swansea University for a wide ranging series of lectures, but also at regular intervals in special interest, self financing, groups. There are currently around thirty of such groups with memberships between five and fifty people, some meeting weekly others monthly, in members' homes, community halls and hotels as appropriate. One of my roles is to help new groups get started, another, which I shall enjoy, is to maintain contact by visiting group sessions. I intend to publicise these activities via this blog.
If you want to find out more than I can possibly tell you ATTEND the
U3A GROUPS OPEN DAY at the DOLPHIN HOTEL Swansea on 8 OCTOBER between 10.30am and 3.30pm
where each group will set up stall to recruit new members.
If anyone already has ideas for a new group would they please inform me on Swansea 424702 before the Groups' Day, because that would be an ideal event at which to gauge interest.
NODDY GUIDE TO USING INTERNET and BLOGS
Chairman Bob has persuaded me to give up the ego trip and use the About Me section on the page which always appears first to provide some simple instructions. Here I have the space to expand a little and to layout my thoughts easily. So here goes. Please skip to the paragraph heading GROUPS if you don't need elementary guidance.
Internet
You wouldn't have got this far without typing in the Internet address and actioning
http://muses-of-an-ageing-groupie.blogspot.com
The first thing to do is to click 'Favorites' (on the second line at the very top), then 'save this page'. In future all you have to do is to click on Favorites with the up/down arrows scroll down the list to highlight the site of today's choice and click. Thus avoiding any address typing to access your favourite sites. Use Favorites for all your favourite web sites.
Blogs
A Blog is simply a series of letters published on the Internet to which only those, like you, who know the site address can access. Pat Herbert should think of this blog as Letters from Mr Bloggie, with apologies to Alistaire Cooke. A Blog has its own web site this one is held on Google's computers. I can edit it as I am doing right now at any time. You, the reader can leave comments - please do so and leave your name, but please only to contribute to further discussion about groups. Be warned, I can cut you all off, or limit it to a select list of authorised well behaved contributors if needed.
The first page after entry is always the start of the last letter written. On the left just below a picture of me is a short set of instructions. There are several ways to move about ('navigate' in the jargon), PCs are like that there are always a hundred and one ways of doing the same thing. To get here you probably jumped on the link INTRODUCTION _ START HERE. If so there's a gold star in the post!
To read down the letter ('scroll') a line at a time use the Down Arrow cursor control on your keyboard. To move back then use UP. To move by much larger steps then use 'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keys in the same way.
More sophisticated ways of navigating a blog are to click on the 'links'. Firstly find your way about with the mouse and look for links, they are the points on the screen where the cursor changes from an arrow head to a hand. If the cursor shows as a hand and you click you will jump on the link. In a blog most of the links are simply to another part of the same document. There are two main areas of interest. the ARCHIVE at the top left of the screen which gives a list of the letter headings grouped by the month of original issue. Using these you can jump to the head of the requisite letter ('posting' in the jargon). At the end of each posting there are links on keywords. If for instance you are looking at a posting with a keyword 'read' it will include a paragraph about a reading group, if you click on the keyword 'read you get all those postings in the whole blog with the keyword 'read'.
Very importantly at the end of each posting there is a link which jumps you to another page where you can see any comments already entered and leave a comment of your own. Since for the moment I have allowed entry by anonymous subscribers do include your NAME and GROUP as part of your message. Since this is a private blog it cannot be found by search on the Internet not even by Google, therefore it's a reasonable presumption that only U3A members or their close friends will access this blog.
If you want to know more about me then click under About Me. If you want to start a blog of your own then sign up via Google for a Google Blog. It is free but you will have to open a Google Account - the same as you would do to use gmail. It provides you with a cut down set of the facilities you would find in Word. I found it a wonderful way of keeping people at home in the picture during our lengthy travels, internet cafes are never far away, as well as providing me with a diary to aid memories. You will find links to my two travel blogs under 'more about me' - sorry about the spelling in these earlier blogs, but then spell checkers in Mandarin or Spanish are not very useful!!!
Jump about by links and remember that you can always go back a step, or forward a step, by using the green highlighted arrows at the left hand end of the Internet line, three lines down on my screen.
GROUPS
I start this blog with a brief introduction to the four Swansea U3A groups I already know about from personal experience.
BOOK GROUP 1
On first joining the U3A I decided to join what was then the only Reading Group. It has been run for several years by Mo Ellard. My motivation was simply that I had not read for pleasure since my early twenties and knew I was missing out on an ideal activity for the retired. At work I read only, slowly and very carefully, or by extra high speed scanning looking for needles in haystacks, and in consequence found it difficult to memorise or maintain concentration on a complex story line. Five years on I have speeded up a bit and am beginning to enjoy reading again, but still find it hard to memorise plots.
Five years later there are three reading groups in this U3A and I am told they are all different. How they differ I intend to find out. Each summer we make an annual choice of the reading program for the next year by a semi democratic method. This year's authors are Maggie O'Farrell Blake Morrison, Ann Patchet, Sam Selvon, Donna Tarrt, Ernest Hemingway, Sarah Waters, Edith Wharton, C J Sansom and Susan Fletcher. All but three are new to me and that's after reading a novel a month for five years.
We meet monthly at the Hall attached to St. Paul's Church Sketty. At our last meeting before the summer break Mo announced that she and I had just been elected to the committee, boasting that our group was now particularly well represented.
DIGITAL MEDIA (Having Fun with Digital Photography)
Mo's boast was squashed when I went to one of their meetings only to find almost all that Group belonged to the committee. Chairman Bob, thinking I was already trying out my role of Group Coordinator, immediately plied me with coffee and scones covered in lashings of butter and strawberry jam. I will be expecting similar over the top welcomes wherever I appear!
In fact I was only trying the group out with the thought of joining and in particular of getting my wife involved in the tedious task of making sense of our lifetime backlog of film and slide photographs. I intend to return to meet group leader Anthony Hughes, guru in the dark arts of falsifying photographs to disprove the idea that 'the camera never lies'. He will be back in October to dispense me advice on more basic 'photoshopping' aimed at making the best of reality in my archive of travel photographs.
It helps if you can bring a laptop PC. They meet at the Vivian Hall Annexe at Blackpill.
ARMCHAIR TRAVEL
This group now run by Brian Davies coincides with my continuing interest in exploration of the less developed world of Asia and South America, although I am currently grounded for health reasons. It meets once a month at which there is a slide/power point/verbal presentation, usually by one of the group members. I shall be talking in the Spring about a trip to Guatemala, though wife Joan is going to muscle in on this one.
They also eat in exotic sounding restaurants. So the preliminary meeting is at China-China for lunch on Friday 3 October.
They meet at the Sketty Park Evangelical Church Hall, where there is a built in digital projector.
GEOLOGY
Not strictly a Swansea U3A activity but one carried out by the U3A Network in South Wales. The group organised by Nigel McGraw uses a variety of excellent guides, often from the universities, museums, or national parks of South Wales. There are visits to sites of geological interest across South Wales about once a month, except for the coldest weather. By happy coincidence geological interest appears to coincide with wonderful scenery, be the interest be in the stones in St David's Cathedral or a castle, to the cliffs of Gower. Glamorgan. Monmouth or Pembroke. There is lots of gazing and theorising, and, plenty of walking but scrambling is optional. They are all day visits with lunch in a pub, if there is a convenient location, or else by picnic.
Our U3A meets collectively on Wednesday afternoons at Swansea University for a wide ranging series of lectures, but also at regular intervals in special interest, self financing, groups. There are currently around thirty of such groups with memberships between five and fifty people, some meeting weekly others monthly, in members' homes, community halls and hotels as appropriate. One of my roles is to help new groups get started, another, which I shall enjoy, is to maintain contact by visiting group sessions. I intend to publicise these activities via this blog.
If you want to find out more than I can possibly tell you ATTEND the
U3A GROUPS OPEN DAY at the DOLPHIN HOTEL Swansea on 8 OCTOBER between 10.30am and 3.30pm
where each group will set up stall to recruit new members.
If anyone already has ideas for a new group would they please inform me on Swansea 424702 before the Groups' Day, because that would be an ideal event at which to gauge interest.
NODDY GUIDE TO USING INTERNET and BLOGS
Chairman Bob has persuaded me to give up the ego trip and use the About Me section on the page which always appears first to provide some simple instructions. Here I have the space to expand a little and to layout my thoughts easily. So here goes. Please skip to the paragraph heading GROUPS if you don't need elementary guidance.
Internet
You wouldn't have got this far without typing in the Internet address and actioning
http://muses-of-an-ageing-groupie.blogspot.com
The first thing to do is to click 'Favorites' (on the second line at the very top), then 'save this page'. In future all you have to do is to click on Favorites with the up/down arrows scroll down the list to highlight the site of today's choice and click. Thus avoiding any address typing to access your favourite sites. Use Favorites for all your favourite web sites.
Blogs
A Blog is simply a series of letters published on the Internet to which only those, like you, who know the site address can access. Pat Herbert should think of this blog as Letters from Mr Bloggie, with apologies to Alistaire Cooke. A Blog has its own web site this one is held on Google's computers. I can edit it as I am doing right now at any time. You, the reader can leave comments - please do so and leave your name, but please only to contribute to further discussion about groups. Be warned, I can cut you all off, or limit it to a select list of authorised well behaved contributors if needed.
The first page after entry is always the start of the last letter written. On the left just below a picture of me is a short set of instructions. There are several ways to move about ('navigate' in the jargon), PCs are like that there are always a hundred and one ways of doing the same thing. To get here you probably jumped on the link INTRODUCTION _ START HERE. If so there's a gold star in the post!
To read down the letter ('scroll') a line at a time use the Down Arrow cursor control on your keyboard. To move back then use UP. To move by much larger steps then use 'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keys in the same way.
More sophisticated ways of navigating a blog are to click on the 'links'. Firstly find your way about with the mouse and look for links, they are the points on the screen where the cursor changes from an arrow head to a hand. If the cursor shows as a hand and you click you will jump on the link. In a blog most of the links are simply to another part of the same document. There are two main areas of interest. the ARCHIVE at the top left of the screen which gives a list of the letter headings grouped by the month of original issue. Using these you can jump to the head of the requisite letter ('posting' in the jargon). At the end of each posting there are links on keywords. If for instance you are looking at a posting with a keyword 'read' it will include a paragraph about a reading group, if you click on the keyword 'read you get all those postings in the whole blog with the keyword 'read'.
Very importantly at the end of each posting there is a link which jumps you to another page where you can see any comments already entered and leave a comment of your own. Since for the moment I have allowed entry by anonymous subscribers do include your NAME and GROUP as part of your message. Since this is a private blog it cannot be found by search on the Internet not even by Google, therefore it's a reasonable presumption that only U3A members or their close friends will access this blog.
If you want to know more about me then click under About Me. If you want to start a blog of your own then sign up via Google for a Google Blog. It is free but you will have to open a Google Account - the same as you would do to use gmail. It provides you with a cut down set of the facilities you would find in Word. I found it a wonderful way of keeping people at home in the picture during our lengthy travels, internet cafes are never far away, as well as providing me with a diary to aid memories. You will find links to my two travel blogs under 'more about me' - sorry about the spelling in these earlier blogs, but then spell checkers in Mandarin or Spanish are not very useful!!!
Jump about by links and remember that you can always go back a step, or forward a step, by using the green highlighted arrows at the left hand end of the Internet line, three lines down on my screen.
GROUPS
I start this blog with a brief introduction to the four Swansea U3A groups I already know about from personal experience.
BOOK GROUP 1
On first joining the U3A I decided to join what was then the only Reading Group. It has been run for several years by Mo Ellard. My motivation was simply that I had not read for pleasure since my early twenties and knew I was missing out on an ideal activity for the retired. At work I read only, slowly and very carefully, or by extra high speed scanning looking for needles in haystacks, and in consequence found it difficult to memorise or maintain concentration on a complex story line. Five years on I have speeded up a bit and am beginning to enjoy reading again, but still find it hard to memorise plots.
Five years later there are three reading groups in this U3A and I am told they are all different. How they differ I intend to find out. Each summer we make an annual choice of the reading program for the next year by a semi democratic method. This year's authors are Maggie O'Farrell Blake Morrison, Ann Patchet, Sam Selvon, Donna Tarrt, Ernest Hemingway, Sarah Waters, Edith Wharton, C J Sansom and Susan Fletcher. All but three are new to me and that's after reading a novel a month for five years.
We meet monthly at the Hall attached to St. Paul's Church Sketty. At our last meeting before the summer break Mo announced that she and I had just been elected to the committee, boasting that our group was now particularly well represented.
DIGITAL MEDIA (Having Fun with Digital Photography)
Mo's boast was squashed when I went to one of their meetings only to find almost all that Group belonged to the committee. Chairman Bob, thinking I was already trying out my role of Group Coordinator, immediately plied me with coffee and scones covered in lashings of butter and strawberry jam. I will be expecting similar over the top welcomes wherever I appear!
In fact I was only trying the group out with the thought of joining and in particular of getting my wife involved in the tedious task of making sense of our lifetime backlog of film and slide photographs. I intend to return to meet group leader Anthony Hughes, guru in the dark arts of falsifying photographs to disprove the idea that 'the camera never lies'. He will be back in October to dispense me advice on more basic 'photoshopping' aimed at making the best of reality in my archive of travel photographs.
It helps if you can bring a laptop PC. They meet at the Vivian Hall Annexe at Blackpill.
ARMCHAIR TRAVEL
This group now run by Brian Davies coincides with my continuing interest in exploration of the less developed world of Asia and South America, although I am currently grounded for health reasons. It meets once a month at which there is a slide/power point/verbal presentation, usually by one of the group members. I shall be talking in the Spring about a trip to Guatemala, though wife Joan is going to muscle in on this one.
They also eat in exotic sounding restaurants. So the preliminary meeting is at China-China for lunch on Friday 3 October.
They meet at the Sketty Park Evangelical Church Hall, where there is a built in digital projector.
GEOLOGY
Not strictly a Swansea U3A activity but one carried out by the U3A Network in South Wales. The group organised by Nigel McGraw uses a variety of excellent guides, often from the universities, museums, or national parks of South Wales. There are visits to sites of geological interest across South Wales about once a month, except for the coldest weather. By happy coincidence geological interest appears to coincide with wonderful scenery, be the interest be in the stones in St David's Cathedral or a castle, to the cliffs of Gower. Glamorgan. Monmouth or Pembroke. There is lots of gazing and theorising, and, plenty of walking but scrambling is optional. They are all day visits with lunch in a pub, if there is a convenient location, or else by picnic.
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