h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The BBC Radio 4 8am news bulletin is sure to become a classic.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/

(listen to the end of the bulletin)

Charlotte Green! Sexiest voice on the radio.

That link doesn't work. James Naughtie's not nearly so sexy.

Hang on. I'll dig it out...

Here!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/morning_news

(if you're listening today, anyway. Afterwards...it's bound to become a meme.)

Or at least it will when it's updated with today's. Still yesterday's at time of posting.

It's up now. Annoyingly I can't get the rewind/fast forward to work though.

>>Sexiest voice on the radio.

Something else you and Hoo agree on. I'm fonder of Fi Glover myself.

Oh, I'm sure Fi would be a lot of fun.

Mariella Frostrup

A while back, I was half listening to her series about memory. There was a psychologist on talking about how people use different kinds of cueing systems to retrieve information. I thought 'That sound remarkably like my dissertation.' When I heard the credits, it turned out to be my supervisor.

I e-mailed him afterwards - we'd not been in touch for years - and he told me that she's just as sexy in real life. He also said that my dissertation was one of the 5% of documents he culled to take with him when he recently moved from his *spectacularly* messy office to change jobs.

How's that for state-dependent retrieval.

The dissertation was actually about how people file and retrieve documents in their offices. I used a sophisticated interview/analysis technique (Repetory Grid analysis) to try and tease out some of the relevant dimensions. In the anonymised write-up, I reported that one subject appeared to a have a particularly dusorganised office. When he read it, he said 'That's me! Bloody cheek!'

I know I'm bad, but you should have seen it, though...stacks of paper four feet high. I visted him about five years later. The same stacks were there, only taller, and they'd multiplied. And avalanched.

With La Frostrup, he was talking about how some people of rigid, organised filing systems. But in some ways these aren't as useful as 'rich' environments that allow people to develop their own cues. ('Now...didn't I read something about that in that document I spilled coffee over just before I...')

Sounds about right. I'm as anal as they get, and do feel impoverished for it.

I've got a fairly organized filing system, as you'd probably expect. My boss's system is quite different; when I need to find something in one of his files, he generally has to dig it out for me. I put the files in alphabetical order, by year, then the contents sequentially. My boss just stuffs things into accordion files and tosses them into a drawer. Less "important" documents are occasionally embellished with coffee stains.

Hell, the stuff on the top of my desk is organized alphabetically... binder clips in the top basket, paper clips in the middle, rubber bands in the bottom... pens in order of the spectrum...

And we've discussed my alphabetized pantry and spice racks previously.

Go ahead, make fun of me. It's *not* being anal. It's being efficient.

>>Hell, the stuff on the top of my desk is organized alphabetically... binder clips in the top basket, paper clips in the middle, rubber bands in the bottom... pens in order of the spectrum...



Why?!!! Filing alphabetically by people's names, I can understand. At least my way is multilingual. I'd never find *elastic* bands in your system.

Hmm. Depends whether bands come under elastic or rubber i suppose...

zdt

I use the sedimentary system. Every horizontal surface is covered in layers. From the fossils I remember what I had for lunch on what day so I can date things.

Ah, a man after me own heart. I even refer to old documents as 'I think that's somewhere in my Pleistocene layer'

I'm as interested in archeology as the next person, but that'd give me an aneurysm.

Sometimes I get the feeling that someone is breaking into my house and Leaving things. I'll lift one of the layers looking for something and find something else that I have absolutely no recollection of.

I've been living here for thirty five years so a lot of my stuff is older than my memory.

Yeah - what's life without a little serendipity? So you can't find the thing you need? Find something else and do something different!

Any way...the unfortunate incident now has a permanent link.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7318173.stm
That's the first time I've seen a photo of her. Ah well! I guess you could keep the light out.