I love to see what Google has to say on certain topics, so today I asked ‘Is the glass half full or empty?’ and I found this website, Businessballs.com, that dedicated a whole page to this concept. Here are a few thoughts on the topic:
- The computer programmer says the glass is full-empty
- The actor says, “Whatever the director wants it to be – or not to be…”
- The Buddhist says don’t worry, remember the glass is already broken.
- The realist says the glass contains half the required amount of liquid for it to overflow.
- The inventor says: I can invent a new glass that will put an end to this ridiculous misperception.
- The millennial says: I cannot make an informed decision about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty before I have checked all the reviews on Yelp and Trip Advisor.
- The entrepreneur sees the glass as undervalued by half its potential.
- The computer specialist says that next year the glass capacity will double, be half the price, but cost you 50% more for me to give you the answer.
- The call-centre operator asks if you’d mind holding while she finds out for you. (Your call is important to them…)
So tell me, what’s your glass like?
This is what happens when I mix my day job with my night job
– A video answering the question, “What is risk?”
Some of you already know that I’m an engineer, but you mightn’t realise that my current job is as a risk manager. Last week I thought it would be fun to fuse my engineering work with my cartooning to see what would happen. And this is my modest result. Let’s call it a fun 101 introduction into the concept of risk.
So humour me a bit here and click the image below to watch on youTube and then …
…Let me know what you think?
I’ve been inspired by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s recent discovery of 7 new earth-sized planets within the habitable zone around one star. And what names did they give these beautiful babies of the Milky Way? An uninspiring: b, c, d, e, f, g, h – not even capitals!
But wait, it gets better. The star these planets are revolving around is named TRAPPIST-1 (short for Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope); but that name was created for commoners such as myself. It’s astronomical catalogue name is 2MASS J23062928-0502285. No wonder they ran out of imagination by the time they reached the planets.
I’m sure you could do better. What would you call them?
…with a fake orange
Don’t you find it amazing how only last month, the phrase fake news was but non-existent, but now it’s everywhere you go. We’re probably living and breathing the beginnings of a future etymological study over 500 years from now; where etymologists will dive into our popular culture and history to understand what was going on at the time that resulted in the phrase fake news.
And as I stand here today before you in pixel format, I prophesize we’ll see a logarithmic escalation in the use of the term fake news, as captured within tool such as Google Ngrams. If you aren’t aware of this neat little program, it’s an online search engine that charts frequencies of a word or string of words (such as a phrase) as documented within printed sources between 1500 and 2008. Below is the ngram I created for the use of the phrase real news versus fake news.
Now, let’s sit back and watch fake news rise above and beyond the real news.
PS. If you want to find out a bit more of the serious side to this Google tool, watch the TED talk What we learnt form 5 million books.
Those of you who know me, realise I enjoy science. So it’s hardly surprising that I create an odd cartoon or to on the subject matter. In this instance, I Googled ‘gravity’ to find out more to share with you all. Wiki provided the following definition,
‘Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that a particle attracts every other particle in the universe using a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.’
Quite a mouthful. No wonder the expression ‘What goes up, must come down’ was coined.
What’s your favourite expression or idiom?
In 1963 JF Kennedy gave one of his finest speeches, Ich bin ein Berliner (You can watch it on YouTube here). He stood in front of 400,000+ West Berliners and the world as both a president of the US and a citizen of the free world. By declaring he was a Berliner, he showed that he was the same and that together they were all united by a common belief in freedom.
In 2017 freedom remains, but I guess it comes with an asterisk and fine print listing exclusions to the rule.
Are there any famous speeches that inspire you?
Inspired by the line from the Blues Brothers, when the woman was asked what kind of music was played at the venue in question. ‘Sure, we have all kinds here – country and western.’
Do you have a favourite line from Blues Brothers, or perhaps another movie?
Who knows, it might somehow make its way into the next cartoon
I was inspired to create this cartoon when I read a Forbes article written on the 2016 Grant Thornton UK LLP London study into senior roles held by women in the workforce. The study reported that almost four in ten businesses in G7 countries have no women in senior management positions and those companies that do have women in senior roles, average out to 22 percent.
We have a long way still to go.