Any Colour You Like

Unfortunately you don’t get a mortar board at Bristol, but it was great to finally get to prance around in the Bristol colours.

Outside Wills Memorial Building

Well, it has been a while. I used to have the excuse for not writing here when I was busy organising kitesurfing trips last autumn, doing my project work this spring and studying for exams this summer. It has now finally sunk in that all that is over and I am now happily homeless and unemployed and a the proud owner of a shiny 2.1 in Masters Engineering Design

Luckily I haven’t had a chance to get bored yet what with moving all my stuff out of my house, going to various end of uni parties and watching England play abysmal football.

This last week I have been up in Scotland visiting my grandparents, and amongst the numerous scones and tea there has been time for lots of mountain climbing,

nature watching,

barbecuing,

and I am now busy fixing things around the house. Tomorrow I am back to London to be house husband for a bit and then on the 12th it is graduation. I feel so duped that we don’t even get a mortarboard because Bristol is ‘reformist’. I haven’t worked hard for five years for them to skimp at the end! Still, before then there are lots of jobs that need applying to pronto…

I have such epic back and neck ache from leaning over a desk and writing with pencil and paper. I know computers are bad on your eyes and there are plenty of ways of getting RSI from them but I had no idea the old fashioned way of working was so painful. At least with computers your head is up and your back is straight.

Physical pain coulpled with mental strain and the fact I have postponed all exercise except for 1 hr per week mean revision is really taking it out of me. I don’t know if I can handle another 20 and a half days of this!

As a great day off from revision I went to see the Royal Philharmonic playing film music at the Royal Albert hall on Friday. It all started off a bit tentatively when the trumpet soloist royally messed up the Rohan theme from LoTR about 3mins in. But after that is was spectacularly good =)

We got all of the expected classics, the modern favourites such as Pirates of the Caribbean and a smattering of random Western themes from a conductor/composer in jeans with rolled up bottoms. I had never been before, what a spectacular building.

It is pretty dire when I have so little clue what an entire module is about that I have to resort to wikipedia to get an overview. It turns out, 20 lectures in, that my course on non linear behaviour of materials is actually an obscure treatment of solid mechanics. It would have been nice if he had bothered to tell us.

It is still terrifying though. Our lecturer is so much of a mathematician and so little of an engineer that even with liberal applications of wikipedia knowledge I am still struggling to link his maths back to anything tangible. Two weeks to go till exam and I will either get it by then and get 60% or not get it and get 0%. Not 30%, not 15% but zero. And the only book he sites is some dodgy russian maths book that doesn’t exist in the library.

I just can’t wait to finish. I can’t wait to go kitesurfing. And I won’t even complain that we don’t get motar-boards at graduation in Bristol if I make it through…

Two days from now I will get to switch from learning Spanish in order to blag 20 easy credit points to learning Spanish to say useful thing like ‘dos cevezas gracias’ in fabulous sunny countries. I had forgotten the school day tribulation of conjugating verbs and force learning conceited, supposedly professional sounding sentences for letter writing such as:

‘le agradecería que tuviese la amabilidad de informarme de…’

– litteraly ‘I would be ingratiated if you would show me the magnanimity to inform me about’. Apparently they genuinely do spurt such tripe in the average letter to their local job agency and newspaper. And haven’t they heard of email, where a simple ‘cheers for your help’ would do fine?

This is the School of Divinity adjacent to the Bodleian Library. Does anyone recognise what it is from the HP movies?

It was great to see a load of my family congregate in Oxford yesterday. We really do live far closer to each other than we remember and should definitely put more effort into visits. We had a very interesting ‘exclusive’ guided tour of the Bod and got to wander through all of the tunnels and see the huge underground darkly lit and pretty eerie archives with their miles of shelving. Being the engineer that I am, I was far less impressed by the fact that they had a complete collection since the 1700s of every edition of the Belfast Telegraph (amongst many other very random newspapers), and far more impressed by the victorian network of iron shelving supported by a corrugated ceiling of I-beams.

There are constant (and somewhat annaoying) debates about whether climate change is really happening. The best way to tell in my opinion that I read recently involves long periods of ‘record collecting’ and the harmonic series. What is he on about you may wonder?

Take an example. Annual rainfall in the UK. Data collection began in 1748 and clearly that year will have experienced record levels of rainfall by default. If rainfall is a random event unaltered by humans then the next year there is a 50 – 50 chance of there being a new record. Year three will have a 1 in 3 chance and so on. It turns out that the expected number of record years follows the harmonic series i.e. 1+(1/2)+(1/3)+(1/4)+(1/5)…+(1/n) up to the number of years we have been keeping track. This clearly grows very slowly and in the 256ish years since 1748 we would expect 6.12 record years. This was fine up untill 2004 but has started going significantly awry…

I found the following post on an internal GE message board and found it interesting:

What is the right formula for self-confidence?

In order to succeed in life you must have self-confidence. Self-confidence is the amount of ones belief in ones ability. That’s great, but how does this work? Do I need to believe in myself more or do I need to acquire more skill or both.

Let’s consider believing in myself. How far can that take me? Can it compensate for a lack of skill? The answer is yes. We have all witnessed people in sports, business, etc., achieve beyond their capabilities. We call them over achievers. However, are they able to sustain a high level of performance? The answer is most cannot. They have had their 15 minutes of fame.

Let’s consider ones ability. How far can this take me? Can it compensate for a lack of belief in ones self? The answer is yes. We have all witnessed people in sports, business, etc., who trained and worked hard to achieve success. We call this the American Way. Can people continue to succeed on hard work alone?

There is one common denominator that is implied in the formula for self-confidence. It is success. You have heard it said, “Success breeds success.” However, success is not possible without self-confidence. That brings us back to the original question, how does this work.

The definition suggests the amount of ones belief is the key. If so, how do I assure that I have the right amount of belief. If I have less ability, do I need more belief and vice versa. I think we all struggle, some more than others, believing in our abilities. That is probably a good thing because if we did not, self-confidence would be replaced with arrogance.

It’s a really great concept. A group of enthusiastic people take over an abandoned building, bring along a random missmatch of furniture, candles and cutlery and set up shop. Or should I say kitchen. They then distribute invitations to partake of fine cuisine via blogs and texts. Just before they open you get a message telling you when the restaurant will be and for how long. You then go along and enjoy a three course meal and leave a donation afterwards.

The food was good if somewhat weird, but definately ambitious. Pigs head stew and ‘wet’ paella…