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Pass it on..

My Christmas read this year was Richard Dawkins latest, “The God Delusion“, so it seemed appropriate that I received a blog meme from Mikel last week.

Dawkins introduced the term meme to describe a element of cultural information transferred between communities, the social networking version of a gene, I guess, in the blogosphere the term is used to describe a question or debating topic which is propagated across different blogs.

An interesting web 2.0 effect or just a modern form of the scary chain letter – I’m not sure, anyway this one seems mostly harmless so here are five things you don’t know about me.. btw it would be really interesting to work out where this started and when ? Would this not be an interesting spatial-temporal distribution problem.. I can see the time series in ArcGIS 9.2 or Google Earth any day now…

1) If not for a Field Trip in South Wales, taken at the end of my O-Levels, Geography would have passed me by, despite the fact it was about the only subject I was good at – My head was turned by jumping in and out of rivers with a bunch of girls to make stream discharge measurements ( Steady now !!) and analysing landslips using a model developed in BASIC on a Apple IIe !

Looking back why would I have taken technical drawing ?

2) I share a birthday with a great hero of mine, the great British inventor Barnes Wallis who most famously developed the bouncing bomb, Wellington Bomber and the R100 airship. A man of great principles, but an individual never completely at home with the establishment. The bouncing bomb was tested a few hundred metres from when I live in Teddington

3) I grew up in Chelsea, the famous West London “Village”, just off the Kings Road actually, missing both the cultural explosion of Punk (too young) and Sloane Rangers (too poor). Still at least I can say I still support the local team I grew up with.

4) At university for six months I dressed only in a surplus flying suit and red converse all stars, fortunately no photographs of this exist.

5) I nearly appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme to do a segment with Edward Stourton and the editor of a certain walking magazine to debate the merits of satellite navigation compared to “good old” OS maps. At 8.20 I was there sitting across from John Humphrys in the studio, ready to evangelise on the benefits of GPS, problem was the other guy got lost trying to find the studio!

So to continue this meme experiment I hand the tag onto The Very Spatial guys (Sue, Jesse and Frank – a combined answer ?), Jeff, Mr Bridges, Geoff and Dominic

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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