Tag Archives: statistics

2,571?

7 Replies

 

The title is the number of subscribers WP tells me I have. I once went through the list and deleted a lot, but these days I don’t have the time. Quite clearly it is a fiction and at least 2,550 of them aren’t pulling their weight. Such is life on WP. Most of them, I seem to remember from checking last time, only visit once.

Julia, on the other hand, just went to the shops and it took her ages because she kept bumping into people she knows. We’ve only been here a year, how does this happen? She’s a lot more sociable than I am, and a a lot more friendly, but it still seems like a lot of new friends.  I could go to the shops in Sherwood, where I lived for nearly 40 years , and maybe nod to a couple of people. At least you know every one of those people actually exists.

Then, when I’d finished digesting this, I went to find Laurie Graves on Facebook. She’s retiring from WP. You can get friends on Facebook. I did once, when I first signed up for it, but then I realised how pointless it was. Viewed as statistics they are meaningless and viewed as actual friends they are pointless. If I ever met most of them we wouldn’t be friends in real life. At least, with the conversations we have on WP I can be fairly sure that everyone I think of as a friend on WP would be reasonably pleasant.

A decorative touch

One entry I found, whilst trying how to become a friend of Laurie, has been suggested as a “friend” by Facebook. It’s one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen, and probably a pointer to the direction society is taking as we all sit by our keyboards. I actually know him in real life and we have probably been put together via the Numismatic Society. I have changed his name, just to be on the safe side.

“Albert Bates” the entry says “has 2 friends.”

Pictures are from December 2019 when we spent Christmas in Suffolk. Except the heart-shaped one. That’s going to be used in the next newsletter of the Nene Valley Railway, in which she pretends to be Winnie the Pooh. It’s hard finding a fresh approach each month.

 

 

 

Poetry and Robins

11 Replies

 

Robin - singing

Robin – singing

a robin
sings to its mate
when was the last time
I sang
for you?

That is my latest publication. It was a surprise, because I hadn’t ben told it was accepted. Fortunately I always check before sending things again, as editors don’t like simultaneous submissions. It’s in a German publication called Chrysanthemum. After waiting a while, I went to check on the website, assuming I’d been rejected but wanting to double check, and found the magazine had already been published and I am on pages 226 and 227.. It was a pleasant surprise. They also translated it into German. I knew this was going to happen, but hadn’t anticipated the different look (using capital letters) or the different dynamic that would come from what seemed to be a reordering of words.

Here’s the German translation.

ein Rotkehlchen
singt für seine Gefährtin
wann habe ich
das letzte Mal
für dich gesungen?

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

I just fed it into an internet translator and it put it into English in almost exactly my words. This was a surprise, and a superb effort by the human translator. I have to admit I was expecting it to come back seriously scrambled due to the changes in word order I could see and because of previous experience with internet translations.

I also had a haibun published.

Lesson not learned
Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once
a Roman town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then
rose again. So many empires, so many layers of dust telling one and the same story

dreams of
a second chance
— one more grey dawn

I’m not quite sure what happened in the edit as the title and last line have been altered in the published version. Altered but possibly not improved. What do you think? The original version is shown below.

Lessons we have not learned

Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once a Romans town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then rose again. So many layers, so many stories they could tell. So many men forget all empires turn to dust.

dreams of
a second chance
—one more grey dawn

Robin at Rufford Abbey

That means that in the first four months of the year I have made 30 submissions and 22 have resulted in acceptance. However, before congratulating myself, I have to remember that the 30 submissions contained 151 poems. Normally a submission contains three haibun or tanka prose and the submissions of shorter poems at often 10-15 poems. So when I say I made 30 submissions and had 22 acceptances this 77% success record could also be calculated as also only 15%. It all depends on how you look at it.

Robin

 

 

 

 

Murder – A Depressing Subject

18 Replies

I’m feeling very right wing today.

The murder rate in London is, I’m told, higher than the murder rate in New York. Of course, that’s just according to some papers; other papers actually looked at the figures.

It seems that the two cities are very close in total murders, with New York actually two ahead. However, it also seems that this is just based on the first few months of this year. This is not, as anyone with half a brain will tell you, statistically significant. So, if you can’t draw any useful conclusions from the figures what can you do?

Well, I suspect you can draw some useful conclusions about journalists and their approach to statistics when pursuing a story.

You can probably also draw some conclusions about a rise in the London murder rate and the necessity to do something about it.

There are plenty of statistics out there if you want them. I could discuss them at length, but if I did I might send people to sleep.

However, you might like to think about a few facts.

 

London is quite a safe city.

New York, after much work from the police, is also quite a safe city.

Teenagers are not the only victims, so talk of better youth facilities, whilst well-meant, won’t solve the problem.There are no easy answers.

Everybody has a choice – they are not forced to pick up a gun or knife before they leave the house.

Punishment doesn’t reduce crime, though hanging clearly prevents re-offending. Assuming you hang the right people.

You can’t believe everything you read in the papers.

You definitely can’t believe anything in this blog, which is just the view of one grumpy old man with firm ideas about personal responsibility and the decline of modern society.

Every murder is a tragedy for someone and, if that person was going to grow up to cure cancer or stop Global Warming, it’s a tragedy for us all. Any man’s death diminishes me, as Donne says.

And finally, a quote from the Office of National Statistics. “Over one-third of adult male victims…were killed by a friend or acquaintance”.

I don’t know about you, but my definition of “friend” tends to exclude the likelihood of murder.