B U R N

Yesterday’s Guardian featured a pretty interesting article on olympians whose sex has been called into question. In fact, this is not a new problem at all:

You could tell because they would always go into the toilet to get changed. We’d go and stand on the seat of the next-door cubicle or look under the door to see if we could catch them.” Tyler held the world record for the high jump, but when officials wrote to her telling her that Ratjen had broken it, she wrote back. “I said: ‘She’s not a woman, she’s a man,’” she says. “They did some research and found ‘her’ serving as a waiter called Hermann, so I got my world record back again.” Dora, who had been born Hermann Ratjen, had in fact been a member of the Hitler Youth and said that the Nazis had forced him to enter as a woman.

Read the full article: The gender trap.

A great author, Haruki Murakami, writes an entire book about a fascinating albeit slightly geeky topic, ultra distance running - it is bound to be good.

Usually when I approach the end of a marathon, all I want to do is get it over with and finish the race as soon as possible. That’s all I can think of. But as I drew near the end of this ultramarathon, I wasn’t really thinking about this. The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence. It’s very philosophical - not that at this point I’m thinking how philosophical it is. I just vaguely experience this idea, not with words, but as a physical sensation.

Excerpt taken from here.

PS. It reminds me of the time I encountered a serial runner on a Dutch beach. Slightly proud of my training for the marathon, as one is during the honeymoon days, I told him, lungs in my mouth, I was preparing for a 42km run. As he gradually, i.e. as gradual as it gets over the course of 30 seconds, outpaced me, he managed to tell me that he was out on his 40km “Sunday jog” in preparation for a 200km race:

Me: How do you feel after a race like that?
Dutch runner: Dead.
Me: How do you prepare for it?
Dutch runner: You run. A lot.

And there he was, a mythical creature, gone with the wind…

Oxford is like a shelter for all the misfits of the world.

-Vikrom Mathur

PS. Mind you, this quote comes from a man whom I recently caught frozen in a ponderous position in the middle of a public path. He could not remember for how long he had been standing there, just that he ‘had a brilliant thought.’

The amount of clutter generated around me is inversely correlated with the number of days left to the thesis deadline.

It is often assumed that flying is far superior to any other means of transportation in terms of getting conveniently from A to B. I sometimes wonder, though, if railway, coach and shipping companies have actually started believing in this nonsense and just stopped bothering when it comes to developing and refining their product/service portfolio.

As a potential customer of any ground services that will take me from London to mainland Europe, I find myself sizzling with anger every time I try to book a ticket. Most of the time I just give up because I end up spending too much time navigating the jungle of websites that must be traversed in order to travel across borders. A few examples will illustrate what I am talking about:

London - Berlin: While the Eurostar seems to be the only company that has learned anything from the smooth interaction design of most airlines’ online sales points, the Deutsche Bahn website - which I have to visit, too - keeps presenting me with an internal server error.

London - Rotterdam: Same story. Getting to Brussels is easy peasy, but if you want to avoid paying a exorbitant amount of money for the Thalys, you will soon find yourself nicknamed “Dances with train service providers.” In addition, “Around the World in 80 Days” reads like the CV of the Danish Minister for the Environment compared to the one time I attempted to go there by train/ferry.

The world is full of good travel portals, e.g. Momondo, Late Rooms, and Last Minute, so why is there no central resource for booking European travel by train, coach, ferry or any combination of the three?

While all the giants are sleeping in a newly/soon-to-be/trying-to-avoid-to-be privatised sort of way, I sincerely hope that my colleague, Alistair Hann, will be successful in developing his prize-winning idea further.

This brings me on to another rant: one of the reasons why I am so excited about CSR and similar issues is that it is really about innovating and thinking through alternative scenarios for the future, not ‘giving up’ or ‘returning’ to some form of imaginary state of things that used to be. Problems have always been the best providers of the stuff that gives rise to profound strategic renewal.

Due to an unforeseen train of events including someone losing their car keys in the Scottish Highlands and a fast courier, I am ‘forced’ to make my way down to London this evening for the First Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall.

There are worse ways to start the weekend, especially since the concept of free time has been somewhat diluted recently.

[Update] Off to a thunderous start indeed; we sat right next to the 9997-pipe organ, which is the size of a small country. You can see the concert on the BBC iPlayer.

So we bought a car. Not just any car, but an Austin Rover Mini City E from 1985. There is more to tell.

When doing qualitative research, it is quite well-known that the researcher becomes embedded in the world he/she seeks to describe, whereby the border between ‘research life’ and ‘private life’ is rendered problematic. In trying to get to grips with what ethics is about, I have felt this confluence acting out in many, many ways.

It is, however, nice to know that I have yet to go completely native, as witnessed in my devilish laughter this morning. Someone sent out an email to one of the ‘ethical’ mailing lists I subscribe to, looking for a couple of new housemates:

Re: Two Housemates Wanted: Green/Creative share in Cornerville*

How do you like the idea of waking up on a Sunday morning to the aromas of freshly-brewed fair-trade coffee and fried eggs crawling their way up the stairs from the kitchen, the faint sound of self-penned songs dedicated to the perils of modern living coming from downstairs, cherishing the luxurious knowledge that once you’ve struggled out of your semi-slumber you’re just a 14 minute tube ride to London’s thrumming heart?

You would be sharing with a mixture of musical, artistic and green-minded folk (aged 25-29) who offer various communal schemes - collective organic cookery, evenings out – for those who want to join in, within a cosy, laid back, TV free space.

The house itself is a lovely, spacious Victorian behemoth of a thing with a large living room, large kitchen and a back garden patio-ish thing with a regular squirrel. (and bikes, a compost heap, and struggling vegetables).

Yes, I am an evil, reactionary, sad git.

*I made up the name. Out of common decency, of course.

I have spent yet another weekend tied to the computer, working on the Unmentionable. So, instead of posting something about my vegetable plot or means of transportation, here is another brilliant quote by Karl Weick:

Investigators who study organizations often separate environments from organizations and argue that things happen between these distinct entities. This way of carving up the problem of organizational analysis effectively rules out certain kinds of questions. Talk about bounded environments and organizations, for example, compels the investigator to ask questions such as “How does an organization discover the underlying structure in the environment?” Having separated the “two” entities and given them independent existence, investigators have to make elaborate speculations concerning the ways in which one entity becomes disclosed to and known by the other. But the firm partitioning of the world into the environment and the organization excludes the possibility that people invent rather than discover part of what they think they see (Weick 1979: 166).

I use this quote, and the line of reasoning more generally, to say something about how companies should not think of standards merely as descriptive devices or neutral instruments in interacting with the ‘world’ and defining their spheres of accountability.

[Click above for more pictures]

I got my Pista a little over a week ago and I have been riding it ever since. These are my experiences so far:

It is a beautiful, retro-looking bike and people ask all sorts of questions about where I got it and why on earth it has no gears.

Not being able to coast is much more difficult than first anticipated, which means I still find myself cautious - bordering panicking - when going fast downhill or having to negotiate bumps in the road. Not being able to keep your feet in a level position can be a little nerve wrecking. On the other hand, once you get used to pedaling non-stop, you do notice an emerging symbiotic relationship between the bike, the road and your body. It requires a lot of energy, though, in the beginning I felt exhausted after spinning around for a mere 20 minutes.

The second major difference, having ridden only crap bikes for the past five years, mind you everything gets stolen around here, the drive-train efficiency is absolutely shocking. In addition to this, the stiff frame and the race geometry make for a virtual speed-machine, and a silent one at that. I am used to bikes making a lot of noise, clonk! clonk!, but this is like a stealth fighter in comparison. Nevertheless, this is also a cause of some anxiety since you only realise how fast you are actually going once you start overtaking cars, even before rush hour kicks in.

In conclusion, it has been a bit of a mixed experience to date, but I am sure that another couple of months in the saddle will make my initial fears go away. There is a much more appreciative essay on riding fixies here.