Not So Breaking News

A new idea for some blog posts to single out some examples of 'Breaking News' services that bring us 'news' which is barely worth calling news, let alone breaking news. First offender is from the Breaking News twitter account which today gave us this:

Report: Apple is evaluating plans to offer iPhones with screens up to 6 inches - @WSJ http://t.co/reVDoFcVMg

— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) September 5, 2013

So Apple is 'evaluating' plans to offer iPhones with screens up to 6 inches. When you click through to the Wall Street Journal story, it reveals the source of this 'breaking news' as people familiar with the matter.

I have no doubt that that might be true, but only in as much that Apple is probably also 'evaluating' iPhones that are thinner, fatter, lighter, and heavier. For all we know, Apple might be 'evaluating' iPhones that come with a free pony as well.

In any case, it is vague speculation from an unnamed source about a possible plan that, even if it happens, would almost certainly not take place until a year from now. Whatever this story is, it hardly seems to constitute 'breaking news'.

Remembering my father

As of today, I have passed a sad, and unwanted, milestone. At the age of 41 years, 9 months, and 26 days, I have become older than my father was when he died.

I was eleven when he passed away, just a month shy of my twelfth birthday. However, I was probably only ten when he was first diagnosed with cancer, a brain tumour. In many ways, I think we lost the person we knew and loved several months before he actually died. Brain tumours can cause so many different symptoms depending on their location. Increased headaches. Confusion. Memory loss. These were all symptoms which affected him in the early stages...but even then he was still our dad. He could still function on his own, he still knew who we were, and he could still hold conversations with us. This would all change.

In the summer before he passed away, it was decided that it would be better for me to spend some time away from everything. My two elder brothers — three and six years older than me — were better equipped to deal with what was happening, and remained at home. I spent that summer break from school — what seemed like an eternity when you are eleven — staying with two of my aunts. It was during this time that I was told that my father was not going to make it. I can't remember whether I had already reached this conclusion for myself. Probably not.

Returning home I was shocked to see how much his condition had deteriorated. He could no longer speak, but what hit me the hardest was that he no longer seemed to recognize anyone. I don't think there is anything that could have ever prepared me for that day. To an eleven year old boy, it made no sense at all. He was my dad but he no longer knew me. As summer drew to a close, so did my dad's fight against the cancer. Despite the immediate sadness at losing him, I think we were all glad that he was no longer suffering.

On the one hand, I am grateful that my memories of my father are all good ones. It's possible that I could be looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I don't think so. I can't recall him ever being angry with us, or disappointing us in any way. What more could you ask for? But at the same time these memories are the memories of a child. I'm jealous of my brothers. Not just because they have more years of memories, but because those memories were from a time when they were able to not just talk with him, but converse and more fully interact with him.

As today's date has approached, I have been surprised by how many feelings it has stirred up from the deep. It has made me reevaluate many aspects of my life. I have only just become a father — of a wonderful 5 month old boy — yet my dad had already helped raise three kids by the time he was my age. It has made me think about the preciousness of life and about how we only have so much time on this planet to do the things we want to do.

I'm sad when I think that my dad never got to see how we all turned out — I like to think that he'd be happy with what we have all made of our lives. I'm sad that he never got to see his four grandchildren, and that they will only have passed on memories by which to know him. I'm sad that I never got to discuss 'grown up' things with him, such as talking about politics or even football (he was a huge Arsenal fan). But mostly I'm sad because I miss him.

Love you dad.

My father and me, 1972

Fruit of the Month Foolery inspired by the USDA

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), August is Get Acquainted with Kiwifruit Month. This amuses me for the implication that the USDA doesn't necessarily want you to eat any Kiwifruit...just become 'acquainted' with them.

This makes me wonder what other fruit-related months the USDA will endorse in future:

• September: Become Vaguely Familiar with Mango Month
• October: Stroke a Strawberry Month
• November: Make Eye Contact with an Elderberry Month

Fly me to the moon...or maybe just take a train to Birmingham instead

The UK government has been planning a new high-speed rail network known as HS2, the first phase of which will connect London to Birmingham (the UK's second city).

I was shocked to discover that the planned timetable for this initial phase spans nine years (2017–2026). The surprise is because the distance for the London to Birmingham route is only 119 miles. Less surprising — but sadly more predictable — is the recent news that the planned costs for the first part of this project are now projected to be 30% above the initial budget (up to £21.4 billion, ~$32.1 US billion).

This seems a lot of money to connect two cities that are not so far apart. I'm sure that this budget has to cover lots of other things besides the actual construction (e.g. purchasing land). But even setting the cost aside, will it really take almost a decade to construct the line? This is the best-case scenario of course, and pessimists among us no doubt imagine that there will almost certainly be delays (assuming the project is not derailed — metaphorically, not literally — by opposition campaigns).

We are not talking about building a railway line across mountainous terrain or having to circumvent huge lakes. However, any route built in the UK does have to face the twin forces of nature that are leaves on the line and the wrong type of snow.

How did things get so bad? After all, we are the country that introduced the first public passenger railway (1825), the world's first intercity railway (1830), and we also have the world's oldest continuously working public railway (since 1758). We used to be good at building railways!

So just to summarize the costs, timetable, and distance of this rail route:

• $32.1 billion
• 9 years
• 119 miles

If we convert this into a cost-per-year-per-mile, we get a figure of $29,971,989. How does this compare to some other public transportation projects? Well, the new Eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will hopefully open this year. It is running over time and budget, and still keeps running into problems. How does this project compare to the UK's HS2 line?

• $6.3 billion
• 11 years
• 2.2 miles

Cost-per-year-per-mile: $260,330,579 (almost an order of magnitude worse than HS2).

One final comparison. Between 1969 and 1972, the Apollo program put 12 men on the moon. This is, as you might imagine, much harder to work out the total cost of this massive project. There are some estimates that try to allow for inflation, and these put the final bill of the Apollo program between $153 and $422 billion. Let's go with the upper limit of this estimate. That gives us:

• $422 billion
• 13 years
• 239,000 miles

Cost-per-year-per-mile: $135,822 (a bargain!).

Of course these very fickle calculations make no effort to factor in how many people make use of these routes. The Apollo missions only took a grand total of 24 people to the moon (and of course not all of them got there), whereas the Bay Bridge carries 280,000 vehicles a day. However, I still can't get past the fact — and again this assumes that the project won't overrun at all — that the 1st phase of HS2 will see an average of just over 1 mile of the route completed per month of the nine year construction phase. British Rail — the former nationalized rail company that ran the UK's railways — once had a series of TV adverts that ended with the proclamation "We're getting there". A modern day update to this slogan might be "We're getting there...slowly".

Frustrating web design #1: AT&T

Earlier today I was trying to see whether the pre-paid phone plan that my inlaws are using during their visit here would allow them to send texts to the UK. A quick trip to a page on AT&T's website almost, but not quite, revealed the necessary information. 

The box highlighed in red says Text to Mexico, Canada & 100 countries. In order to find out what those other 100 countries are, I tried mousing over the question mark symbol. This short video shows what happened next:

That's lovely AT&T, make me have to copy a URL by hand and type it in. Because the web is much more efficient that way. 

Heinz tomato ketchup...not as nature intended?

I just noticed that on the back of our bottle of organic Heinz tomato ketchup is a slogan that reads:

Just as nature intended...

This raises two issues:

1. Do Heinz really think that nature "intended" for tomatoes to be smushed together with vinegar, sugar, and various flavorings?
2. Does this imply that Heinz's regular — i.e. non-organic — ketchup is not as nature intended? Perhaps the best selling ketchup variety in the world was an unintentional accident, and is secretly loathed by Mother Nature as the black sheep of the processed-tomato-products family?