President Chris opened the meeting.
Birthdays and Anniversaries: Happy Birthday Andrew Knowles, Dave McDonald, Michael Batchelor, Shiv Thamalla, and (note to Buddy) Fiona Sullivan.
Anniversaries: Wayne Shadbolt – wedding anniversary tomorrow.
Guests: Zip
Michele Beaton introduced Bryan Winters as speaker.
Bryan has spent 32 years working in IT in places including Africa and Singapore. A man of many talents.
Bryan’s talk was about numbers in general and the decimal system in particular. The talk was delivered by running a recording of a TedX talk given by Bryan.
Getting the recording to run required a co-operative effort of major proportions due to the absence of sound – various members displayed talents to contribute to the process and we were all able to both see and hear at the appropriate time.
The TedX talk can be viewed at:
And in support of the humble foot you can view Chris Jagger:
Some additional information from questions:
The USA is the final bastion of feet and inches, except for the space industry which has gone metric;
Even Airbus had to desert metric to comply with aircraft industry requirements effectively set by Boeing;
In NZ surfboards are still measured in feet and inches.
- Dean Thompson noted that while lockdown persists speakers will be by Zoom which will require a re-jigging of the schedule. Can any club members who are willing to speak please talk to Dean.
The Raffle wasn’t raffled.
Sergeant Steve Dorrington
Started by noting that Bryan’s talk referred to the use of metrics in Star Wars – Steve reminded us that Star Wars is not real…
Playing Bottles is much harder if you use Roman numerals….
Colloquial English has not yet embraced metric terms – we still talk about miles and feet.
Steve has tried to keep himself busy in lockdown, but instead he has seen proof of Newton’s First Law – A body at rest is reluctant to change its motion.
The passing of Charlie Watts was noted.
And for those of us who struggle with the appropriate time to have our first drink of the day, somewhere in the world the sun is over the yardarm.
Parting Thought came from Ian Burns: From Oscar Wilde – Just be yourself, everyone else is taken.
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Accordion to a recent survey, 7 out of 10 people don't notice when a word in a sentence is replaced by a musical instrument
