Learning the Code

This is the wording on an actual notice at work, it has been issued by the Richmond RCMP.
'If you suspect someone is acting suspicious....' I rest my case m'lud. Just write it like you say it lads.

Back in the black hole period when I was trying to pass my driving test here, my friend Sleepy said,
'It's not about the driving mate, it's about learning the code,' and she was right. But there are many more codes to learn.

Today, Lori and I were putting together a bid for a grant. I'm pretty good at the education buzzwords from the UK, and some of them were useful here too.
When we got to the actual number crunching, there was an entire section for putting a dollar value on 'payment in kind'. Yep, I know, my eyebrows shot up too. But it's not being used to mean 'payment in goods or services as opposed to money' it is being used to mean...well, cost of things like .... office space, supervision. Odd, but, no, but nothing, just odd.

When I meet people and find out what they do for a living, sometimes I don't understand what they do, sometimes I wonder how that can be an actual job.
Say I met someone who said their job was to research bee diseases, well I might think hmm...that's rather specific.
Well, it seems that we need to get researchers onto that right away, there is a mystery disease that is wiping out hives, and fewer hives means a shortage of bees to pollinate much of what we eat. Kinda scary really.

I am currently reading Alistair Reynold's latest book, 'Century Rain'. Alistair Reynolds, I think I mentioned some time ago, is the cousin of someone Sleepy and I used to work with and I didn't find this out until the colleague saw me reading one of his cousin's books.
I love trying to get my head round the ideas in sci-fi, being in a completely imaginary world.
In 'Century Rain', Reynolds talks about 'Shannon Entropy' which can tell you how complex languages are. So, many human languages - Reynolds gives the example of English or Russian - have a Shannon Entropy in the order of eight or nine, Dolphin communication, three or four.
I searched to see if this was a real statistical theory, and it does seem to be, although far more complex than that. Reynolds has introduced a very difficult theory and made it accessible, I for one found the idea fascinating.

One thing that frequently bugs me in my TV watching is how the programme starts. Possibly the most irritating beginning is for 'Ghost Whisperer', we don't need an entire synopsis of the back story to be able to watch an episode.
One of my favourite openers is for 'How I met your mother', because it is quick and to the point. Very nice.

Code. Everything we do or say is encoded. I know what you're thinking, am I going to go off on one about Roland Barthes. Nope. Not today, maybe some other time.