Geohash on a slow Sunday

The latest thing in this household is a new activity, geohashing.* Basically, geohashing is being told where to go in the belief of patient fun and maybe meeting someone, all at random.

It works like this:

(1) Get ready to go -- sandwiches, friends, camera (especially);
(2) Find your part of the world (graticule) on the site's interactive map;
(3) Enter today's date and find out where to go. The randomness comes from an algorithm hashing the Dow Jones Industrial Average is published with the date to create coordinates for every graticule in the world;
(4) Try to get to the geohash point for 1600 hours. GPS and rulers help. Then, either (i) rejoice in your success, (ii) rejoice in your failure. In both cases, have fun and take some interesting pictures of wherever you have ended up.

If you want, you can post a report of your expedition when you get home.

We met no one new, indeed no one at all. But for a random set of coordinates, we stopped at quite an acceptable point of a sandy beach and chuckled to ourselves.

I really do have lots of things to occupy myself with: books, spinning, gardening, blogging. But today's expedition is just what a slow Sunday should be.

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*Geohashing originates from the wkcd web comic. 503 is rather poignant to the geohasher per se, and 162 suitably cross-matches with my slow mood.

Slow stories

Having a blog ID of The Slow Smoulder, I was rather gratified yesterday at an event which talked about Slow-ness.

Indeed, the speakers on Slow Technology gave us a menu of the sections of their talk, which included Slow Technology, the first main course, being "infused over a low fire". Big satisfied smile :D

In fact, one of these speakers had taken the idea of sitting around a fire and designed a heated coffee table, the focus of a social setting in the modern age -- yeahh!

But it was really Glorianna Davenport's description of slow stories in the spectrum of stories in general that really interested me. Slow stories allow time for reflection; they don't follow a plot -- they represent an attitude, emerge out of a need to tell the story and respond to reactions.

She didn't talk about blogs, but it is what The Slow Smoulder is about. Another :D

Another aspect of a slow story is how it can represent real time, either really as real time or as a careful compression of the story. Glorianna reminded us of writings that represent real time in the reading (Shelley, ). She described the worth of having unedited real time footage: sunsets, children learning, creature's activities in a mud flat. But she also described her research with video and sound stories, both in terms of recording the events that happen and in terms of compressing time but keeping information. Food for thought on how the making of history works.

Also, my thinking about news, or fast stories, was ratified: news is a progression of ideas that should generate interest and feedback so that the overall story can continue. Food for thought on how newspapers rarely keep accessible old material on a breaking news item, as mentioned here (thanks to ms_wellwords). This also applies to me as a scientist: updating data while keeping that for old timepoints is essential.

Finally, take a look at myconfectionary.com, a result of Glorianna's work: multimedia slow stories!

Talk until you are tired

"Talk until you are tired" is the translation of the words printed on a kanga I was buying in Dar es Salaam in 1989: Mtasema mtachoka. With many of the kangas in East Africa having a jina, they were clearly important for communication. I didn't want to be in ignorance; I asked the shop assistant.

She paused and laughed, clearly having difficulty. She explained: "It means that you keep talking about things that matter to you, whether it is a certain problem or just things. It is very important to talk as much as you can. You have to keep talking until you cannot talk anymore because you need to sleep."

Talking until you are tired is a way of life. It is the only way to sort things out. I spent 3 years in Africa, where women talk all the time as they walk, wash clothes in the river, wait by the bus stop. Men sit in groups in the evenings and talk. Great efforts are made to talk to the right people: in a country without a fit-for-purpose telephone system, people made long journeys, over the hill on foot, by bus or by train, and I am sure they still do.

Now, I'm blogging until I am tired. There is much to talk about. I'm writing from a UK perspective and I'm hoping, not least because the seed of this blog's attitude originates in Africa, that the blog will generate a collection of world views simply because there are issues that affect us all.