Change Your Ways - It's Good For You

(The picture was taken while driving around Wellington in New Zealand and is an example of local art that proves your mobile home doesn't have to be a Fiat.)

I am playing with blogging, which has been another source of using up my available time. What I found this morning is an indication that I have made the equivalent of an oil strike. It is all very well finding oil - it promises riches untold, but like all those films that about the oil industry that were so popular in the 1940s and 50s, there are disadvantages. Almost all of the tough he-man heroes in those films got drenched in the stuff as it erupted from their inadequately protected wells, spurting miles of steel pipe linings up into the air and falling like lethal spaghetti from the sky. ("Why didn't they anticipate this happening if they were expecting to find oil?" I used to think, - and "If they weren't expecting it, why were they drilling at all?") I used to wonder how their mothers washed their clothes. Detergents were new at the time and I knew enough to realise that Sunlight Soap wasn't going to help much if that had been real oil. So overnight I had 6 emails on the subject, all of them with lists of web and blog sites for me to visit. I have visited them dutifully, and after a while, dully, as the sheer volume of more and more references grew with every page.

I am now thinking in slightly more definite terms of having a Family and Friends Blog acting as a kind of communications centre, "surrounded" by a set of satellite blogs, each operated by one of the members of the group of Family and Friends (I don't know why I don't give up and just call them Frineds, which my computer seems quite strongly to prefer.) The contributors would write whatever they wanted to write in their own blogs and notify the commcen blog each time they make a post that they want to be available to other Friends and Family Blog members. Membership, and notification of new posts to MY Blog/commcen would be entirely voluntary, but monitored by me, as coordinator of MY blog/commcen. Each satellite blog would be its own commcen and have its own satellites, and access across a growing web of inter-related blogs would be made possible by the links between them. I could see this becoming a World Wide BlogWeb driven only by personal preferences, and I was amazed to see exactly that kind of organisation being described in one of Steve's references last night. A World-wide Blog, fully-developed, will "correct" what it will certainly regard as that deficiency by instituting an effective and yet-to-be-designed world-wide blog indexing system. No prizes for guessing who is most likely to provide that function.

I won't trouble you with the matter any further for a while until I know better what I am talking about. But what is happening now is the formation of the first core blog using a German software design that allows subscribers to have more than one blog - much more. This one provides for 100 blogs. I expect to need one as the Family and Friends commcen, and a few more for my own personal interests. Windsurfing is the obvious first, but my digital photographs could be the main content of another - my autobiography if ever I write it could take a third blog - and so on through my songs and doggerel. Since I have paid for 100 blogs I can make some of them available to anyone described as Family or Friend without cost to them. And if a Family member or Friend feels like it they can store their own family or other information in that (or those) blog(s).

And there is nothing to stop them from having a totally separate blog or blog system, or of starting one that contains only limited links back to mine. My responsibilities, financial and administrative, would end with those blogs allocated from my initial purchase. I would act as moderator to any blog allocated as one of my satellites in the same way that an internet forum’s moderators govern the conduct of individual streams within their forum. I could, for example zap any of my direct satellite blogs entirely, and without its operator’s permission if I did not like what they were doing. But essentially, once started, any such system could grow to an unlimited size - and I could neither prevent it nor would I want to have anything further to do with it.

So – friends and family – would you like to have this particular free blog for your own use? There are plenty of other free blogs available, and there is nothing to stop you from having this one plus any number of others, nor do I want you to feel under any pressure to take part in blogging under my auspices or at all. Blogging will be of no interest to some of you – others may be interested but not want to take part in a family blog, some may be interested in reading blogs but prefer the idea of voyeurism entirely outside the family and friends scene. It’s a free world – well this bit of it is free. I won’t bother you again with the subject, but if you want to know more, you know how to get hold of me. The current blog address is http://www.blog.co.uk/index.php/mikerankin, where you will see one post describing part of my intentions for it - and a copy of this information.

I'm exploring. This looks promising and I like the designs on offer. I'll play with it to get a better feel for its appearance and the features it offers. One blog is not going to be enough, especially if I invite my family to join me in it.

My interests - writing of course, or I wouldn't be here - digital photography - reading, especially science fiction and anything of the calibre of Patrick O'Brian's naval historical novels, the gruesome pathologists' stories of Reichs and Cornwell. I fancy the idea of being a popular science writer but have yet to prove myself capable of it.

I know my grammar and spelling well enough and have done a considerable amount of writing of manuals in the past, starting with an excellent training in the RAF, including a year's Staff College course, and have had articles published in special interest groups. I'm working on a book for windsurfers at present. Its theme is the presentation of the science behind the sport in a form simple enough to demolish arguments that the subject is too complex for windsurfers.

This attitude is partly the fault of scientists who notoriously fail to appreciate the difficulties that most of us have in using mathematics as a tool for understanding physics. And having been a professional pilot for most of my working life, I was surprised to find that the much simplified aerodynamics knowledge that pilots need to acquire is barely known at all in windsurfing.

The amount of science we need for engaging with the wind and water on our sailboards is no more complex than the fact that if you press down on one end of a seesaw, the other end goes up - yes really! Most of it we all learn as we grow up, and we simply need to have it put in context to be able to start making profitable use of our knowledge.

But even those who realise - usually as a sudden revelation - that they do understand the clumsily taught mechanics find themselves frustrated by lack of information about either the forces that are acting on their equipment, or that are available to them to control the manoeuvring of that equipment. It is a surreal situation. Nothing at all is taught about hydrodynamic forces, and the teaching on aerodynamics is crude and incomplete. Some of the forces that continuously affect the performance of a sailboard have never been mentioned in my hearing in the twenty years since I took my first lesson. And there is to my knowledge still no source of this type of information available to windsurfers. I aim to fill that gap by one means or another.

It may be that publishing this news in its own blog may be the best way to present it. Most windsurfers are happy to use windsurfing forums to discuss the sport and I noted recently that there are plenty of questions on the subject but still almost no informed anwers forthcoming. I see no reason why they should not be both able and willing to use a well-designed blog as a reference tool.

The technical matters are only part of the problem. The whole syllabus of windsurfer training needs to be be discussed and the levels of difficulty evened out. While the relatively simple science of fluid dynamics is badly neglected because the designers of the syllabus do not know the subject well enough to recognise the problems it causes, they insist on a knowledge of meteorology that is both disproportionate and beyond the capability of all but the best of their instructors.

I see the blog, with its ability to cause and record discussion on a specific subject as offering the potential to be very useful to those who really want to know about the subjects it discusses. Let's see how it goes. I'll post my first article shortly, describing how pilots (and later, windsurfers) have been using a defective explanation for the generation of lift for almost a century. The article also provides details of the replacement explanation, showing what happens when an attempt is made to explore a dynamic situation such as sailing or flying wihtout references to the forces driving it.