Tuesday 18 June 2013
Sunshine on a rainy day
I love the rain. I was just in the park and a beautiful monsoon reduced everybody to sodden wrecks. It happened so quickly there was nothing you could do. I have never seen so many beaming smiles in the rain - it was as if everyone had given up hope and then realised, oh it doesnt really matter. As my relief grin was subsiding, the sun came out. It could never have looked that good without the rain.
Three legs good, G8 bad
3 legs good, G8 bad
My table was wobbly at breakfast today. As I went to stuff napkins under one of the feet, I thought of a solution to this common cafe problem. You might have wobbly tables at home, but because they dont move as often, once youve fixed the problem you can leave. Cafe tables get moved more regularly for cleaning and different sized parties etc. Small imperfections in floors and tables mean that its hard to line up the four points of contact on a table with the floor and you'll often end up with a wobble. If cafe tables were designed to stand with only three points of contact, even on the most uneven floors they wouldnt wobble at all.
Why aren't cafe tables normally made with three points of contact? Perhaps its because cafe-table-makers are quite removed from where their tables end up... They don't come into contact with wobbly cafe tables enough for it to even be thought of as a problem. Even stranger is that they could save 25% on the cost of legs, so its in their interest to make three-legged tables.
Its not hard to understand how being detached from the environment your making solutions for means that you might miss problems that need solving - you may even miss solutions that are in your own interest to carry out. It seems odd then that the G8 is meeting to solve, amongst other things, poverty in Africa without any representation from African states.
Obviously, its tasteless to declare yourself a representative of the poor when you stink of cash, but youre also risking missing some pretty simple solutions, and with the G8 these are solutions that could help billions of people. Or we could just spend another century stuffing napkins under the unnecessary forth table leg of food supply management.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/bono-africans-stealing-voice-poor
My table was wobbly at breakfast today. As I went to stuff napkins under one of the feet, I thought of a solution to this common cafe problem. You might have wobbly tables at home, but because they dont move as often, once youve fixed the problem you can leave. Cafe tables get moved more regularly for cleaning and different sized parties etc. Small imperfections in floors and tables mean that its hard to line up the four points of contact on a table with the floor and you'll often end up with a wobble. If cafe tables were designed to stand with only three points of contact, even on the most uneven floors they wouldnt wobble at all.
Why aren't cafe tables normally made with three points of contact? Perhaps its because cafe-table-makers are quite removed from where their tables end up... They don't come into contact with wobbly cafe tables enough for it to even be thought of as a problem. Even stranger is that they could save 25% on the cost of legs, so its in their interest to make three-legged tables.
Its not hard to understand how being detached from the environment your making solutions for means that you might miss problems that need solving - you may even miss solutions that are in your own interest to carry out. It seems odd then that the G8 is meeting to solve, amongst other things, poverty in Africa without any representation from African states.
Obviously, its tasteless to declare yourself a representative of the poor when you stink of cash, but youre also risking missing some pretty simple solutions, and with the G8 these are solutions that could help billions of people. Or we could just spend another century stuffing napkins under the unnecessary forth table leg of food supply management.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/bono-africans-stealing-voice-poor
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