Imagine if you will, a world where the length of our lives was predetermined by our number of breaths. That is imagine a world where every human being breathes 1 billion times, with the 1 billionth breath being their last.
If you maintained a constant rate of breathing that consisted of you taking 1 second to breathe in, 1 seconds to hold, 1 second to breathe out, that would amount to 3 seconds per breath. At that rate you would live for 3 billion seconds - or 95 years, and 1 and a half months give or take.
This of course relies on the unlikely scenario where your breathing remained constant your entire life. That's not likely to happen regardless of any degree of self control as we are not always conscious of our breathing - we're not always conscious either for that matter. When we are in an agitated state, moving about a lot, doing exercise or playing sport, or even just sleeping our breathing changes pace.
Imagine a world where we knew that we would at most live to exactly 1 billion breaths. This isn't conducive to a fixed time period. The more active we became the shorter our lives would become. If this were a reality for humans, our behaviour could dramatically change. For one neonatal style classes teaching people how to breathe would probably be taught in our schools. Having children and raising them would be one of the biggest blows to your breath allowance. Having sex would also have a big impact on how long we live - would that stop us doing it so much?
Would people shift geographically? Would you move to a climate that made it easier to breathe or one that was conducive with a relaxed state. Or would you just say fuck it all and live your life like nothing was any different and know that your days are numbered and there's nothing you can do about it?
11
Your mobile phone number is 11 digits long. All I need is those 11 digits to be able to speak to you, hear your voice, see you, and for you to see me. Not to mention a whole host of other forms of communication that our smart phones now open up to us.
I think about the people in my life and how much we stay in touch. I think about the impact they have had on my life and I often wonder and sometimes wish that I had met them sooner than I did. It's incredible to think that 10 years ago my life could have been so different if I had been in touch with the people I am today. All it would have taken was a phone number, their number, obviously since I knew my own, what I needed was theirs.
11 digits separated us, well if you're in the UK it would be 9 actually since all UK mobile numbers begin 07, so all that would have been needed was the other 9 digits. I think it's human nature to look back on your childhood, or your teenage years or your young adult life and think if only I knew then what I know now - that sentiment is usually connected with some deep understanding of the world we have gained or some invaluable experience or sometimes just a warning not to do something. We often think of those messages we would give our past selves as something magnanimous, the thought may not ever cross our minds that something as incredibly simple as a string of digits could completely change the course of our lives [unless you're a lottery dreamer].
I look at my phone and the numbers of the people I speak to most and it makes me smile when I think that whoever I meet in the future, wherever they are now, if they read this, their 11 digits are all that separate us. Posting mine would be the easiest way to remove that separation. I am not going to do that though because for every person that could come into my life and make it better there are hundreds that could make it worse. This isn't really aimed at anyone in particular or an effort to reach out to people it's more of a contemplation of the reality that those lyrics - "somewhere just beyond my reach there's someone reaching back for me" - once meant a lot more than they do today, our reach is far wider than ever before and that gap between yours and mine, or whoever you are reaching out for is a lot narrower than we realise.
There is however a question which allows us to dance with destiny, that is, how different would our relationships with those people be if we had not met at the exact time and place and under the circumstances that we did? Would we ever have even engaged with them?
If you really want to wank your mind then think if you ever had a text from a number you didn't recognise had a brief conversation establishing they had the wrong number and parted ways. What is the likelihood that you would text the wrong number? For one don't most people have contacts saved in their mobiles, even our old 'brick' phones had that capacity. If a future version of yourself had ever travelled through time the one number you're probably most likely to remember is your own and if you take into account the paradoxes and causality complications that arise from meeting a past version of yourself, communicating by text would probably be the safest way. I'm sure at some point you've lived somewhere and moved, whether it was into University halls of residence or whatever, had a phone number that years later you rang out of curiosity to see who had moved into your room - I know dozens of students from my halls of residence that did this, most simply hanging up when someone answered, some actually having conversations with the people who took their room after them.
The temptation to know that your past self was indeed alive would likely compel most people to try it. I will admit I would try it, I still remember my first mobile number.
Yahoo Answers and Death by Design
I've been a member of Yahoo Answers since 6th of June 2006 - I know, ominous date - I've seen the site be quite busy at times with the rate of questions being asked too much to keep up with. My regular haunt was the Programming and Design section where I was often a top contributor and still hold my place in the top 10 contributors for that section.
In the last year or so Yahoo has slowly changed the design of it's site, and in the last few months it has begun migrating each of the regional variations to the new design. The old one was green and instantly recognisable, to the point where many of you who were no doubt sent there at some point by Google can probably recall. The new design however in my opinion is horrible, and it would seem I am not alone in that opinion, to the point where the backlash from users has been quite vocal. A backlash which Yahoo has decided to ignore.
Many sites redesign themselves periodically and while sites like facebook often have outspoken critics who reject their new designs, the masses eventually "like it or lump it" - however in most of those scenarios I would argue the redesign is most rejected due to the fact it's a change, not because it's inherently bad. Yahoo answers I believe falls into the latter category.
Earlier today I had a look at the activity on Yahoo answers and found that in a 2 hour period there had been 18 questions asked in the programming and design section. Looking at the All Categories page there had been around 140 questions asked in 5 minutes across all categories on the site.
There are 23 categories devoted to Yahoo Products. There are a further 1,522 categories totalling 1,545 categories in English alone - I might have missed some, and many of them were empty when I was looking through the site.
These figures are all taken from Yahoo Answers, set to show all English questions. Looking at those figures as a whole if that rate is maintained then there's approx 1,700 questions being asked per hour in English across all categories on the site that's just over 1 question per hour per category. Restricting the view to questions from the UK only there had only been 200 questions in the preceding hour - that's 16 questions ever 5 minutes in comparison to the 140 asked across all English sites [11.4%]
As for the engagement of people answering the questions, across all English questions within the last 3 weeks there have been approximately 600 questions that have received 20 or more answers. That's approximately 30 questions per day that manage to get more than 20 responses. The same search restricted to UK only returned 100 questions in the last 3 weeks that gained 20 or more responses, approximately 5 questions per day.
For a site that had 200 million active users worldwide, with 25 million unique visitors in the US per month alone, racking up 62 million visits to the site, that's incredibly low levels of engagement, far below the 1% rule which I have mentioned on this blog before.
It beggars the question, has Yahoo killed Yahoo Answers?
Addendum:
Upon request for date and time clarifications I have gathered new data. At 15:00 on the 23rd of January, there had been:
13 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [All English]
2 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [UK only]
120 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [All English]
This extrapolates to 1,440 questions being asked per hour across all English sites.
18 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [UK only]
This would extrapolate to 216 questions per hour for the UK only however the time period and number of questions was low enough to count, there have been 137 questions in the UK in the preceding hour - approx 64% of the extrapolated figure so if that applied to the global rate too then that 1,440 would be reduced to 922
Update:
It will come as little surprise to anyone but Yahoo Answers formally shutdown on May 14th 2021 after a period of sustained decline. The writing was on the wall it seems now looking back at this post.
It Gets Better
Life has its ups and downs, and sometimes it can seem like you're being dealt more downs than up. It can seem like there's nothing on the horizon or like your life is never going to change. For some of us that's a hard thing to consider and it scares us. People do incredible things when they are scared both good and bad.
I am a survivor. There aren't many who know my whole story and I don't think there are many who ever will. What I went through, and what I did, are not things I feel comfortable sharing with the world so you'll forgive me for not going into detail here. What I do want to share with the world is hope.
At my lowest, I did not believe it was possible to meet anyone in this world who had compassion. I did not believe my future could bring anything that would make me happy. I was fixated on everything that was bad and everything that had gone wrong in my life and I had been trapped in a vortex of negativity surrounded by dark clouds.
No-one knew and I never told anyone how I felt. I survived, but for a time that's all my life was, survival, I lived for the sake of living with nothing spurring me on. I ate and I slept, day after day. My monotony was eventually broken, little by little things changed. Small glimmers of hope shone through. Fast forward through the years up to today and I look back on all I have been through and the one thing I take away from it all is this, the future is never as dark as we fear it will be.
I know where I am today, I know where I was that day and I know that I couldn't imagine being here at the time. I am glad I survived because my life did change. I had more and more ups and less downs to contend with. I have had moments since, when I have felt like there is nothing on my horizon - but to borrow from something my teenage self once wrote - "A world exists beyond the horizon, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" - just because it may seem like there's nothing coming, doesn't mean that's the way it is.
You just have to make it through. It gets better, it really does, you've just got to hold on and believe and it will come to you. I felt alone, I felt afraid, I felt like no-one cared - but I was wrong. There were people around me who cared about me, I was just too blind to see it. When I think about the people in my life now, I am eternally grateful, and to all of them I care deeply for them. I know a few of them are having a hard time at the moment and that things may seem dark or bleak, but I believe in them, I believe they are worth so much more than they feel right now. Even the most beautiful, precious and magnificent diamonds in this world were all found in the midst of coal, surrounded by darkness and buried deep under mountains of Earth. Where you are does not define who you are and how you are treated does not define how you deserve to be treated.
I am a survivor. There aren't many who know my whole story and I don't think there are many who ever will. What I went through, and what I did, are not things I feel comfortable sharing with the world so you'll forgive me for not going into detail here. What I do want to share with the world is hope.
At my lowest, I did not believe it was possible to meet anyone in this world who had compassion. I did not believe my future could bring anything that would make me happy. I was fixated on everything that was bad and everything that had gone wrong in my life and I had been trapped in a vortex of negativity surrounded by dark clouds.
No-one knew and I never told anyone how I felt. I survived, but for a time that's all my life was, survival, I lived for the sake of living with nothing spurring me on. I ate and I slept, day after day. My monotony was eventually broken, little by little things changed. Small glimmers of hope shone through. Fast forward through the years up to today and I look back on all I have been through and the one thing I take away from it all is this, the future is never as dark as we fear it will be.
I know where I am today, I know where I was that day and I know that I couldn't imagine being here at the time. I am glad I survived because my life did change. I had more and more ups and less downs to contend with. I have had moments since, when I have felt like there is nothing on my horizon - but to borrow from something my teenage self once wrote - "A world exists beyond the horizon, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" - just because it may seem like there's nothing coming, doesn't mean that's the way it is.
You just have to make it through. It gets better, it really does, you've just got to hold on and believe and it will come to you. I felt alone, I felt afraid, I felt like no-one cared - but I was wrong. There were people around me who cared about me, I was just too blind to see it. When I think about the people in my life now, I am eternally grateful, and to all of them I care deeply for them. I know a few of them are having a hard time at the moment and that things may seem dark or bleak, but I believe in them, I believe they are worth so much more than they feel right now. Even the most beautiful, precious and magnificent diamonds in this world were all found in the midst of coal, surrounded by darkness and buried deep under mountains of Earth. Where you are does not define who you are and how you are treated does not define how you deserve to be treated.
Smart
Smart used to be a superlative, a definitive term for something that was deemed to be clever or marked as an improvement over the subject's contemporaries. The term however has evolved into a pejorative term thanks to the wonderful world of marketing. The most prominent example of its use would probably be the term "smart phone." Originally a smart phone was a new generation of mobile phones that offered something clever, and a substantial improvement over other phones on the market. That's not what it has come to mean though. Today it is a pejorative term, it marks a distinction between phones that are deemed functional and those that are deemed inadequate.
The use of the word smart however has invaded the consumer conscious, to the point where our products for the most part are having chips stuck in them and an Operating System slapped on them to make them a "smart" device. The original distinction between what would be referred to briefly as dumb phones and what were considered smart phones was that the latter incorporated most of the functions we associated with personal computers. et strangely we have never used the term 'Smart PC' save for the literal brand by Samsung, which was again just a PC with one of the same Operating Systems slapped onto them as smart phones used. The brand didn't last long however and now almost 2 years on it has more or less been abandoned, namely because a PC is already capable of PC functions so labelling one 'Smart' when it provides nothing different, improving, or clever was a dead horse to begin with.
We are however reaching a point with mobile phones, and some would argue that we have been there for a while, where our smart phones aren't smart. Not in the original sense of the word. We have a market saturated with devices that are essentially clones of one another. Now you can argue the merits of mobile platforms all you want but one thing is clear, Android, Apple, et al under the hood are all made from the same physical hardware components. The device configurations offer a limited scope for diversity and marginal gains at best in terms of technical capability. Our mobile phone market is divided by software not hardware. As such there is no distinction anymore between the capability of these devices - the term smart, has become irrelevant, to the point where we assume any new phone coming to the market will be a smart phone we don't even bother using the term anymore and ask the real question of what specification it has and what operating system it will run.
So where does that leave smart? Well it leaves the term as one that has been disposed by the mobile phone industry, and left it to be pecked at by the vultures of the remaining manufacturers in consumer electronics to use on their new devices as it was originally intended - to mark a distinction between smart and dumb technology. Take smart watches as an example. The term here is used to distinguish devices that now incorporate much of the same functions as our mobile phones and our PCs, although nowhere near as capable and nowhere near as popular as they are still in the early adoption stage although 2014 is being eagerly anticipated by those manufacturers as the year when they became 'a thing' whether that happens remains to be seen - I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't but at the same time I don't see any real reason why it should either.
The point was that smart was once a term we used to define a step forward or a step up in our level of technology, and, while smart watches and TVs etc are making improvements over their contemporaries by incorporating much of the same hardware; our level of technological advancement is stagnating. Everything is being brought 'up to a level' where everything is expected to be a connected device, everything is expected to have an interface that can show you as much information as it can, even our processors and memory chips are decreasing in physical size and form factor to be able to fit into anything we want to stick them inside - despite all this there is nothing that is really 'new' about anything these devices can do. All we are doing is making their existing functions more conducive and compatible with the tech we use the most.
The use of the word smart however has invaded the consumer conscious, to the point where our products for the most part are having chips stuck in them and an Operating System slapped on them to make them a "smart" device. The original distinction between what would be referred to briefly as dumb phones and what were considered smart phones was that the latter incorporated most of the functions we associated with personal computers. et strangely we have never used the term 'Smart PC' save for the literal brand by Samsung, which was again just a PC with one of the same Operating Systems slapped onto them as smart phones used. The brand didn't last long however and now almost 2 years on it has more or less been abandoned, namely because a PC is already capable of PC functions so labelling one 'Smart' when it provides nothing different, improving, or clever was a dead horse to begin with.
We are however reaching a point with mobile phones, and some would argue that we have been there for a while, where our smart phones aren't smart. Not in the original sense of the word. We have a market saturated with devices that are essentially clones of one another. Now you can argue the merits of mobile platforms all you want but one thing is clear, Android, Apple, et al under the hood are all made from the same physical hardware components. The device configurations offer a limited scope for diversity and marginal gains at best in terms of technical capability. Our mobile phone market is divided by software not hardware. As such there is no distinction anymore between the capability of these devices - the term smart, has become irrelevant, to the point where we assume any new phone coming to the market will be a smart phone we don't even bother using the term anymore and ask the real question of what specification it has and what operating system it will run.
So where does that leave smart? Well it leaves the term as one that has been disposed by the mobile phone industry, and left it to be pecked at by the vultures of the remaining manufacturers in consumer electronics to use on their new devices as it was originally intended - to mark a distinction between smart and dumb technology. Take smart watches as an example. The term here is used to distinguish devices that now incorporate much of the same functions as our mobile phones and our PCs, although nowhere near as capable and nowhere near as popular as they are still in the early adoption stage although 2014 is being eagerly anticipated by those manufacturers as the year when they became 'a thing' whether that happens remains to be seen - I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't but at the same time I don't see any real reason why it should either.
The point was that smart was once a term we used to define a step forward or a step up in our level of technology, and, while smart watches and TVs etc are making improvements over their contemporaries by incorporating much of the same hardware; our level of technological advancement is stagnating. Everything is being brought 'up to a level' where everything is expected to be a connected device, everything is expected to have an interface that can show you as much information as it can, even our processors and memory chips are decreasing in physical size and form factor to be able to fit into anything we want to stick them inside - despite all this there is nothing that is really 'new' about anything these devices can do. All we are doing is making their existing functions more conducive and compatible with the tech we use the most.
This is me
You and I have never met, and all that you have, to judge who I am is this blog. The truth is I am a writer, and one thing holds true for most writers - what they write versus what the live are rarely the same thing. So in that vein this post is about me. I've tried to "write" an 'About Me' post several times, but I realise now that was the wrong thing to do. So instead of writing a post about me, this post is me.
I write of philosophy, of psychology, of behaviour, of religion, of spirituality, of my interpretation of the world, but what you read are the thoughts in my head, they are not what I say in life. The truth is I'm incredibly shy when you first meet me - even then it takes me time to open up. I have tried to rush that with people before and open up sooner than I felt comfortable doing and it didn't work out well for me. I guess the reality is that most people don't want to know your life story, that most people have one thing they want whether that be physical, emotional, or maybe just a mentality, ultimately they have one thing more than anything they are looking for and if they don't see it they walk on by.
I'm incredibly cynical at times when I write, that much is true of my real life. I often focus on the negatives and I often find it hard to 'look on the bright side' but as much as that side of me often shows, all this is based on my experience. My life hasn't been a bed of roses, and I'm not saying that as a sob story. There are few people I have confided everything to, and I regard them as my closest friends. I try to treat others with respect, and I try not to judge but I am only human. I make mistakes just like everybody else. Despite all I have been through I still have faith in people, because those that have been there for me through everything have shown me that there are people out there who are just like you. People who are kind, compassionate, caring, and try to be fair - who also have their moments when they dwell too long on the negative.
I am happy. I am happy with who I am. I have made peace with my past, something which took me a long time to do but I accept that I can't change it. I would never want to go through it again, but I wouldn't change anything, because without everything I have been through, I wouldn't be the person I am today and I wouldn't have met the people I care so much about.
I don't want to change who I am, but finding someone who feels the same, at times feels like an impossible feat. I don't know if I ever will. One thing is for sure though, if the Universe does work in the way that we receive what we project, that we can only attract what we put out there, then the chance of me finding you, Mr Right, are slim. I still have hope, but it feels like if I forever focus on the things I want and forget to live then I will waste my life. So I think it's time I stopped looking. If you are out there, you're going to have to find me, because I can't find something I'm not looking for. That sounds arrogant, and I hold my hands up, yes it is, and I make no excuses.
There is a famous quote, often attributed to Marilyn Monroe, I don't know if she actually said it but it is something I have come to live by:
“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
So I'm not going to change. This is me.
I write of philosophy, of psychology, of behaviour, of religion, of spirituality, of my interpretation of the world, but what you read are the thoughts in my head, they are not what I say in life. The truth is I'm incredibly shy when you first meet me - even then it takes me time to open up. I have tried to rush that with people before and open up sooner than I felt comfortable doing and it didn't work out well for me. I guess the reality is that most people don't want to know your life story, that most people have one thing they want whether that be physical, emotional, or maybe just a mentality, ultimately they have one thing more than anything they are looking for and if they don't see it they walk on by.
I'm incredibly cynical at times when I write, that much is true of my real life. I often focus on the negatives and I often find it hard to 'look on the bright side' but as much as that side of me often shows, all this is based on my experience. My life hasn't been a bed of roses, and I'm not saying that as a sob story. There are few people I have confided everything to, and I regard them as my closest friends. I try to treat others with respect, and I try not to judge but I am only human. I make mistakes just like everybody else. Despite all I have been through I still have faith in people, because those that have been there for me through everything have shown me that there are people out there who are just like you. People who are kind, compassionate, caring, and try to be fair - who also have their moments when they dwell too long on the negative.
I am happy. I am happy with who I am. I have made peace with my past, something which took me a long time to do but I accept that I can't change it. I would never want to go through it again, but I wouldn't change anything, because without everything I have been through, I wouldn't be the person I am today and I wouldn't have met the people I care so much about.
I don't want to change who I am, but finding someone who feels the same, at times feels like an impossible feat. I don't know if I ever will. One thing is for sure though, if the Universe does work in the way that we receive what we project, that we can only attract what we put out there, then the chance of me finding you, Mr Right, are slim. I still have hope, but it feels like if I forever focus on the things I want and forget to live then I will waste my life. So I think it's time I stopped looking. If you are out there, you're going to have to find me, because I can't find something I'm not looking for. That sounds arrogant, and I hold my hands up, yes it is, and I make no excuses.
There is a famous quote, often attributed to Marilyn Monroe, I don't know if she actually said it but it is something I have come to live by:
“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
So I'm not going to change. This is me.
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