General

“Go on then, make us laugh.”

Those words would probably make anybody curl up and die.  Many of us would freeze up, go into our heads and try to think of a clever joke.  We often think being funny is a special skill reserved for ingenious stand-up comedians, or witty wordsmiths like Stephen Fry.

Not so for an Improv Comedian - they’d be more likely to do the first zany thing that comes into their head.  And hey presto, it’ll probably be funny. Unlike stand-up, Improv Comedy involves short scenes made up on the fly, often with instructions from off-stage to change scenes or characters mid-flight.  When it’s impossible to plan ahead, spontaneity and total participation rule over being clever or witty.

Improv is often funny because of the eccentric and unexpected performances that happen in the heat of the moment.  As an audience, we can’t help but laugh in relief or recognition, as the performers first appear to be in dire straits, but then dredge up a convincing scene seemingly from nothing.

Can you learn this stuff?  Apparently you can - over the last couple of weeks I’ve been taking classes with Steve Roe of Hoopla.  His workshops attract everybody from rigid newbies (such as myself), to experienced actors and bona-fide theatre types. As a software engineer and logic junkie, spontaneity feels like a great skill to unlock within myself.  

Public speaking groups such as Toastmasters have helped me to feel comfortable speaking to a group, but speaking off-the-cuff requires a different bag of tricks.  Improv has taught me that convincing scenes often develop out of thin air, as long as the group is totally present and heading in the same direction.

The Hoopla workshops usually start with simple, fun warm-ups to build a safe, supportive atmosphere.  Next come specific skill-building exercises, where we take turns to act out scenes in small groups. There are many techniques, but one of the most fundamental is called “Yes, and”.  If my partner tells me that “This is the best biscuit I’ve ever tasted!” and I reply with “What biscuit?”, then I’d be denying their contribution.  With the “Yes, and” mentality I might reply “Yes and that’s the last one, you greedy pig!”  

When there’s an agreed reality, the scene gains traction. Mike Myers successfully “yes ands” a mischievous James Lipton in this exchange: JL: “Ants and caterpillars can be - in certain circumstances - delicious.” MM: “Yes, and I had them yesterday.” JL: “You had them yesterday?  Here’s a strange coincidence - so did I.” MM: “Yes I know, because I was across the street watching you.” JL: “It’s very odd because I was eating in my bathroom.” MM: “Yes, and I was in the medicine cabinet.”

The “Yes, and” technique is a way to avoid mistakes.  But even when mistakes do occur, Improv performers take them in their stride.  In fact, “mistakes” don’t even exist in Improv - they are simply “an offer which hasn’t yet been acknowledged”.  These offers turn into a “game” between the performers which is much more fun than a straight scene.

During one workshop, we formed pairs, and acted a straight scene such as a job interview.  As soon as the first mistake happened - for example, when someone says something inconsistent - we’d stop.  We’d acknowledge the mistake by turning it into a “game” occurring within the scene.  

For example, the “what biscuit?” mistake from earlier could have gone another way: Mary: “This is the best biscuit I’ve ever tasted!” John: “What biscuit?” Mary: (Unperturbed) “It doesn’t go so well with this tea though.  I prefer Digestives for dunking.” John: (Continuing the game) “Tea? Where? What are you talking about?” Mary: “I think you should try some.  Here let me pour some into your cup - ” John: “What cup? - whoa!” (Mimes being scalded by boiling water) The “game” is that John denies the existence of anything Mary says.  Mary uses John’s mistake as an offer, and eventually “traps” him.  

Mistakes like this are a fantastic way to generate material.  Pre-planned, logical thinking would never have arrived at the same result. These two techniques only scratch the surface.  Each idea we learn feels like a rediscovery of Things That Already Work - in everyday life as well as on the stage. In fact, learning improv has felt like an “unlearning” of sorts.  The creative, spontaneous part of the brain seems to work best when given space to work unimpeded.  Planning, preparation and self-criticism are thrown to the wind, and the result is fun and sometimes even hilarious.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the US state of California was a fairly quiet place, mostly made up of natives. Then suddenly people turned up from all over. In two years, the population of San Francisco ballooned to twenty-five times its former size.

People from all over the world risked a dangerous ocean voyage to get there. They either sailed around the tip of South America, or camped along a cholera-infested route from coast-to-coast along the California Trail.

The massive influx of settlers changed the state of California forever …

Why all the fuss and bother? The answer is that something highly scarce and therefore valuable was found in riverbeds and streams: it was of course the Gold Rush of 1849.

At first, anybody could turn up (assuming you could get there) and pan for gold, tax free. It was a free-for-all.

Panning for Gold

There really isn’t much gold in the world: all the gold ever extracted would only fill 82 cubic feet.

Gold mining is not exactly a walk in the park. First you have to find some. According to the colourfully-titled Hard Rock Miner’s Handbook, “it takes 25,000 claims staked, to find 500 [sites] worth diamond-drilling to find one mine”.

Then you have to dig your mine - up to 4km underground - which is unbearably hot and subject to “major seismic events”.  Once you cart your ore back to the surface, the extraction process involves a dangerous cocktail of cyanide, sulphuric acid and mercury.

You could certainly say that gold is scarce, both in terms of quantity and extraction costs.

All this is worthwhile though, because once you’ve got it, gold is fantastically durable to the elements. Glowing nuggets of it can theoretically be found lying about in their natural state.

This durability means that 24 carat (pure) gold is fairly uniform stuff, so is highly fungible (easily traded like-for-like). It is also incredibly dense, so a small volume of it conveniently represents a high value.

These properties make gold a highly suitable symbol of value. If you could embody the value of human endeavour into a coin, it would be a gold one.

A quantity of gold could also be said to be a “proof of work”. It is a proof of work because it is relatively easy to prove that a certain amount of work was done to extract it. Therefore the value it represents can be easily established.

Bitcoin

Another proof of work is a solution to a difficult mathematical problem. The Bitcoin system of “digital currency” relies on this fact. A Bitcoin is “mined” by means of a computationally-intensive search for solutions. A solution (or ‘block’) yields a number of Bitcoins. These Bitcoins are demonstrably unique, and can be cryptographically linked to their owner. They can then be traded for goods, services or even exchanged for another currency.

A Bitcoin block could be likened to a nugget of gold in economic terms. It’s fungible, easy to verify and relatively difficult to “mine”. Therefore it’s much like a commodity, assuming there continues to be a demand.

With the current hype surrounding Bitcoin, there certainly is a demand. The price for a Bitcoin on the digital exchanges has risen many times over this month: a bubble, no doubt.

However Bitcoin is not just for speculators: a number of online retailers accept Bitcoins in exchange for goods and services. Why? Several quoted advantages of Bitcoins are that they are (currently) anonymous and therefore (currently) tax-free. Some of the more sensationalist articles claim Bitcoins are “dangerous” and that governments will have to ban them (how?).

Gold Rush Over

However, the Gold Rush is already over for Bitcoin. It is no longer a “free” commodity, like gold was during the Californian Gold Rush of 1849. Ordinary CPUs are no longer capable of generating Bitcoins in a reasonable timescale: the FAQ quotes a period of ‘years’. Now, only massively-parallel hardware such as GPUs can possibly mine for them (whether they can do so profitably is another matter). Over time, the yield of Bitcoin extraction will wane, until no more can be produced.

Only 21,000,000 Bitcoins can ever be produced by the year 2140, with a restriction to allow only one block to be generated every 10 minutes. Those who got in early essentially have all the Bitcoins already. Assuming demand keeps up, the price for Bitcoins can only rise as the supply drops. Therefore, it could be the case that many of the early-adopters are now holding out to sell later on.

Ordinary currency exchanges won’t sell you Bitcoins. However there are a number of independent Bitcoin exchanges which will (if you can trust them). With all the hype and speculation, these exchanges are highly volatile (like any real currency admittedly).

The only way to get in on the market now is to either buy at a high price, or wait for prices to go down (implying confidence for Bitcoin has also dropped, effectively making it worth less).

Another way to join the market is to sell your own goods or services for Bitcoins. Of course you’d be limited to customers who are already in the market. But these customers are going to want to hold onto their increasingly scarce Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin Market

Modern currencies are backed by a government fiat: a law that says everybody must accept it. Therefore, if you have some of the currency you are reassured of its value.

Of course, Bitcoin is not a fiat currency. So, some argue that the Bitcoin currency “is not backed by anything”. The organisers challenge this criticism by saying it’s backed by the goods and services sold by merchants that accept it. This small cohort of merchants tend to be internet services or online gaming companies.

Some small web retailers are accepting Bitcoins in exchange for material goods. These retailers appear to be quirky individualists, perhaps revealing the cross-section of those who are holding out for Bitcoin.

To be fair, Bitcoin was always intended to be an online-only currency. You can’t exactly print them out to pay for your lunch. By nature they are a peer-to-peer concept, relying on a circle of cryptographic trust.

But as the price rockets and people wonder what’s going to happen next, is confidence going to go up? As a retailer, I’d hesitate to accept Bitcoins, because I’m not convinced the next person will want them. The Bitcoin market seems quite closed and quirky, and too small and narrow to hedge against big movements.

If Bitcoin survives, it will become a sealed market, where only a few can afford to buy them (due to their scarcity and deflationary nature). Those few will buy and sell goods and services from each other. Nobody else will be able to get in because no more can be mined, and the barrier to entry will be too high.

For the last decade, US and Allied forces had searched for Osama Bin Laden, flushing out caves with cluster bombs, studying video evidence and looking for pins in a haystack of intelligence data.  Finally, closure was achieved for many Americans on Sunday night when Bin Laden was finally found, shot in the head and immediately chucked into the sea.

Unlike Saddam Hussein, who was hauled out in his underpants from a squalid underground lair, Bin Laden’s hideaway was positively “Five Star”.  The Al Qaeda figurehead had been enjoying the fruits of his labour in defiance, relaxing in what appeared to be an enormous, purpose-built Al Qaeda retirement villa in a quiet suburb of Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan.

It seems Bin Laden had lost his marbles back in 2001 (the caves of Tora Bora are full of dark corners), as he had not even bothered to hide his whereabouts very well.  There is some merit to the “hiding in plain view” approach, but not when everybody can see you.

The obvious, picture-postcard terrorist hideout was situated in a sleepy suburb, just outside Islamabad.  The mansion was surrounded by 14-foot walls topped with barbed wire, basically suggesting a lack of cohesion with the neighbourhood.  The residents only entered and left the premises in an armoured vehicle, through high steel gates which closed immediately after. The mansion was built about six years ago, and locals had always been wary of it.  It had been busted at one early stage during its development, but that seems to have blown over.

In the words of Loyd Grossman, “Who would live in a house like this?” Indeed, the question had simply been “Which high-ranking terrorist lives here?”  The resulting intelligence exercise was perhaps a little like a special episode of “Through the Keyhole”.  A list of the usual suspects had been drawn up.  For reasons which remain unclear, after a process of elimination, the only name left had been Osama himself.  It seemed there was no doubt. Even James Bond evil villains know to hide their obvious lair inside a volcano, away from Neighbourhood Watch schemes.

Strangely though, it took them a while to find him. Perhaps the hideout was easy for the local council to tolerate - after all, the residents burned their own rubbish inside the perimeter, rather than burdening refuse collection vehicles.  It was fairly close to the military academy, so perhaps it was something to do with that.  Maybe the residents of the compound were just very nice people, making huge, generous donations to local causes, and hence didn’t warrant investigation. To be fair, ears had pricked in Washington when it was discovered that there was no land-line or internet connection to the mansion.  With no telephone line to tap, there could only be a devious, suspicious, terrorist-y purpose to the building, and it was time to do some homework.

However, all this leaves us wondering: “Why now?” Perhaps it’s significant that the recent Wikileaks release revealed the name of Bin Laden’s courier.  Within the week, Navy Seals were paying Osama a special visit. Obama could do with more support at this time, too. Anyway, now that the body of Bin Laden is reduced to fish food, perhaps his hideout could be used for other purposes?  Indeed, users of Google Maps have granted it 3 out of 5 stars, with username “Joric” claiming it is a “Nice little B&B if you want the rustic life and be completely off-the-grid, in complete privacy”. Future occupants may want to take advantage of the “Do Not Disturb” door hanger though, to prevent untimely Special Forces visits.

Life in a basement flat is not easy. Pick a reason, any reason.

One of them is the simple, everyday process of receiving mail. Basement flats tend to have their own separate door (a number of steps below street level), while at street level there is another door, for the ground and upstairs floors. Both doors are really part of the same street address, and addressing mail for the “Basement Flat” is not enough to ensure it goes through the correct door.

So, every now and then, I’d visit the upstairs flat to collect my mail. Sounds easy doesn’t it. One of those things, like washing the dog, or painting the cat. This was different. First, I had to convince somebody upstairs to actually answer the door. Knocking didn’t cut it, which was weird because I thought that’s how it worked. Knock-and-answer. Not at that door.

To be fair, they’re all separate tenants up there; if nobody was expecting anybody then I don’t blame them for not answering the door to unsolicited visitors. For all they knew, I could have been a con-man or even a Jehova’s Witness.

If I was lucky enough to be granted an audience, I’d have to convince the door-answerer that I was legit. That I really did live downstairs, and really did have the right to riffle through the pile of envelopes in the hallway. That I could cheerfully declare a handful of it as ‘mine’, simply by smiling a lot, and sounding sure of myself. I never really could be sure they didn’t think I was a confidence trickster, which didn’t sound so bad when you thought about it. An avant-garde trickster-rogue.

This story begins with my subscription to a “DVD Rental By Mail” service. Nice service really, especially the “DVD Rental” part. The “By Mail” part was a little more troublesome. It was something I really didn’t want to mess up, because after all it was only a rental service, which implies a “giving the DVD back” part.

So, when no DVD arrived to my Basement Flat address, I knew it could only be locked in stasis behind the sturdy, inaccessible upstairs door, and that everything was in limbo. I could declare the DVD “undelivered”, but what would happen then? They’d send a new one out, which would suffer the same fate as the first. Perhaps after enough iterations, the resulting stack of DVDs inside the door would be too heavy, and they’d all come crashing through.

I was about to cut my losses and cancel my account, being apparently incapable of simply receiving a letter addressed to myself, when a chance encounter occurred. Returning home, I saw a woman walking up the steps from my basement flat. Passing her on my way down, I loitered with my keys in the door, feeling the tingle of a sixth sense. Sure enough, she began to climb the steps to the upstairs building. I ran up after her. “Excuse me, do you live here by any chance?”

She turned, and seemed lost in thought. “Oh no, I’m just … for the referendum … - “. She held up some pamphlets.

“Oh that’s fine, no problem.

I was just checking because - it doesn’t matter, it’s a minor problem.”

At this point, she should have said, “OK, no problem, bye!”. But she didn’t, and it all got complicated. “A minor problem?” She seemed genuinely curious about my minor problem. More “Genuinely-Confused-Curious”, than “Genuinely-Helpful-Curious”.

“Well, I live downstairs you see, and sometimes my post goes to the upstairs house …” At this point I was wondering why I was telling her this, and why she was still listening. “So I sometimes have to go upstairs to check, but nobody ever answers.”

“So nobody lives here then?” Confusion reigned.

I attempted to overthrow its reign. “No, they just don’t answer the door. Anyway - "

We both looked up as the upstairs door opened very slowly. The oldest woman in the world stood at the threshold, inert. I seized my chance, bounding up the steps. I explained things again, this time to the 100-Year-Old Woman. Several stacks of envelopes were perched on a small table just inside the threshold. I could see my DVD; I could have reached out and touched it.

She wasn’t getting it. No response from the 100-Year-Old Woman. She didn’t even seem to see me standing in front of her.

Meanwhile at street level, the Referendum Woman was still mulling things over. “I don’t understand why your post goes to the wrong house.”

I wanted to tell Referendum Woman that her part was entirely played out, and she ought to consider exiting stage left. Instead, I tried to cross the dusty plains of Time, in order to get through to the 100-Year-Old Woman. It was “me” who lived downstairs, and it was the same “me” who wanted to collect his post. A lot of gesturing. I pointed at the stacks of letters, and then at myself. “Me!” “I can’t hear you,” she croaked.

I grabbed my DVD, then pointed at the name. “Me!” I could have just taken the DVD. After all it was rightly mine, but it still somehow seemed like theft. I felt as though the jury was still out.

I held up the DVD packet like a trophy to The Referendum Woman, still loitering at street level, as if to show everything made sense now.

In return, she further thickened the plot by holding out some leaflets for me to collect. Stupidly, I bounded back down the steps and took them from her. Dutifuly, I bounded back up the stairs and held the leaflets out for the 100-Year-Old Woman. “These are from HER, for YOU.”

I tried to grin the absurdity of the situation away. Referendum Woman called up. “No, they’re for you.” She’d already been to my door, so why did I need more leaflets? I would never know. Why was she still involved anyway?  I could only imagine she was waiting around in case I tried to mug the 100-Year-Old Woman. After all, she was delivering leaflets for the Lib Dems, so was probably socially conscious and all that. Probably thought it was her day of glory when she’d catch a vicious con-man in the act. Or avant-garde trickster-rogue.

Still at the upstairs door, I started going through the remainder of the orphaned mail. But 100-Year-Old Woman seemed determined to keep strangers out of the house, and was preventing me from getting more than a hair’s-breadth across the threshold. It was clearly an uncomfortable situation. I had no idea what she thought, or if she thought anything at all. I had to admit defeat. I had my DVD, but who knew what other trophies of correspondence I’d have won, given time.

Back in my own flat, I looked at the referendum leaflet. Perhaps I’d vote. I’d have expected my voting slip to arrive by now.

The four points of the magnetic compass have been used for centuries, to help us navigate around the world. A compass is a simple device: the needle is magnetised, and aligns itself with the magnetic field lines between the North and South Pole.  

But there is no West or East pole, so what do East and West mean in terms of magnetic fields?

You can think of the Earth as a gigantic bar magnet:

If I walk due North, I am travelling parallel to the Earth’s magnetic field lines, towards magnetic North.  This is roughly similar to following a line of longitude.  Eventually, I will arrive at the North Pole (both the magnetic poles can be seen as final destinations).

If I walk West however, I am travelling perpendicular to the Earth’s magnetic field lines.  This is roughly similar to following a line of latitude.  There is of course no West Pole; I can continue walking West forever. In fact when I travel West, I am rotating around the axis of the Earth’s magnetic field.  

It turns out there is some special significance to this. If a charged particle passes through a magnetic field, it is induced to rotate around the field’s axis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2_wUDBl-g8 The charged particles are induced to move West or East (in a circle around the magnetic field lines). This phenomenon is one way the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the dangerous charged particles emitted by the Sun.  These harmful particles are either deflected, or trapped into moving in a circle around field lines (see the pink/yellow arrows at the poles):

The same principle is used in the Large Hadron Collider, to steer particles in a circle.  Large magnetic fields are used to keep particles moving in a doughnut-shaped path, so they can be accelerated to very high speeds.

So in summary, movement to the North or South can be interpreted as travelling parallel to field lines, towards a pole. Conversely, movement to the West or East can be interpreted as travelling perpendicular to field lines, or rotating around the axis of the magnetic dipole.

I was faced with the enviable question of what to do with a modest allowance of leisure time.  These days, a flight abroad costs about as much as a loaf of bread and a pack of cheese slices; there aren’t many excuses to stay on the geographic leash.  But for those who long to breathe the air rather than fly upon it, the gentle duet of ferry and bicycle might just be music to your ears. It was to mine.

There’s an odd liberation in the limitations of ferry routes and pedal power.  There are only a handful of routes one can take from the south coast of England, and then a compact scope of destinations on the continent unless you have months to spare, and an insatiable wanderlust.  So it’s relatively easy to sketch out a simple plan, then add the details as you go.

Having never done this before, I reasoned I’d have a few things to learn.  What I did not know is that I was effectively in primary school when it comes to independent travel.  Figuratively speaking, this was a level up from being thrown in at the deep end, perhaps a more apt metaphor would be being kicked out of a helicopter into the February North Sea, blindfolded and minus Speedos.

Out of curiosity, I recently installed the controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software on my (soon to be replaced) home computer.  This is the content filter software mandated by the People’s Republic of China, billed as providing a “green, healthy and harmonious internet environment”. 

It is currently aimed at restricting online pornography but could be used for … (sinister flourish) … other purposes. From July 1st 2009, all personal computers sold within mainland China (included imported ones) must contain this software either preloaded or packaged for easy installation.

This is clearly a far-reaching move, particularly because most people are unlikely to toy around with the software pre-installed in the factory, and are certainly unlikely to re-install the operating system (there is no option to uninstall GDYE in Windows Add/Remove Programs - perhaps native Chinese speakers can find an option somewhere within the program).

When launching the quaint, dated installer program, a cartoony splash-screen pops up which is clearly encourages us to “think of the children!”. This reminds me of the youth-centric motive behind this software - it must be installed on all computers bought within China, but there must be a way for adults to control its behaviour otherwise why limit it as a ‘Youth Escort’?  Unfortunately, I cannot test this with my limited powers in Chinese linguistics (how many people do you know who can even say the words for ‘hello’, or ‘yes’, let alone read them in their native typography?)

The remainder of the installation process is - for those unable to read Chinese - an exercise in intuition and guesswork.  Sometimes there are a choice of three buttons - presumably OK, Cancel, and … ? - labelled with characters my home computer is not even set up to display.

There is a licence agreement which, if you scroll down, has a translation in English.  This is a third-party package included with the GDYE - namely the Intel Open Source Computer Vision Library.  The original text of the licence shipped with this framework is faithfully reproduced (there is no licence agreement provided in English for the content filter itself).

The inclusion of this “Computer Vision” library is - at first - perplexing.  It is an image-processing toolkit, specifically aimed at “facial recognition, motion tracking and mobile robotics”.  A little imagination leads to fears that the software uses the on-board webcam most laptops today ship with, to identify the user of the computer.  But the truth is not as sinister - Green Dam ostensibly uses this library to detect images of nudity displayed in a web brower for example, and block them.

As the installation proceeds, several more chinese prompts are displayed and then there is a promising disappearence and system reboot as we gather the software has been successfully installed. Perhaps the contents of my home computer are now being long-hauled back to China?

I try a few URLs to test the pornographic filter (pure imagination of course, I don’t have them committed to memory).  I cannot get them to load in Firefox: successful block. I call up a few sites that are outside the advertised jurisdiction of GDYE’s content policies but may be considered sensitive by the Chinese government - Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Twitter, BBC News (including some pages about Tiananmen Square).  All loaded as I’d expect, however this is not surprising, as the sophisticated and comprehensive Golden Shield Project already exists in China to block censored information at the network level.

In a moment of disturbed clarity I run a command to find out whether the program has opened an information pipeline between my computer and China.  There were no unusual internet addresses listed, although this does not prove that the program does not periodically ‘phone home’, or whether a hidden back door has been left open on the latch.

From this very brief experiment, Green Dam appears to be just another page in the vast encyclopedia of Chinese censorship techniques.  Although the dam has its holes, these are more than adequately patched by a raft of strategies on many levels in China today.

I decide I’ve had enough fun with my colourful escort for today, so I take my usual route to remove a recently installed program.  But it’s not listed.  In all fairness, no less can be expected from a government-mandated content filter. I’m not sure which software I’d prefer installed on my computer - a virus hell-bent on identity theft distributed by a motley crew of hackers, or a program colourful in name and appearance originating from the Chinese government to protect children.

I’m glad I kept my recovery CD.

I’ve rediscovered the power of Mind Maps - especially their use for rapid note-taking and review.

Last night I was at an Officer Training for Toastmasters, and this included the formation of breakaway sessions, where small groups of us went off seperately and had discussions about specific things. My group covered mentoring, and there was a need for somebody to act as scribe and then present the findings to the entire group.

Now the mentoring session went on for around 10-15 minutes, and a lot was discussed, jumping from topic to topic and then curving back round to expand on points that had been discussed earlier. I started - through bad habit - to start notetaking in a linear form, just writing point after point, but very quickly realised that wasn’t going to work. Knowing that I’d have to report this all back in around 10 minutes with barely time to review these notes, I knew I needed to change my approach. And then came the mind map: by giving each broad subject an area on my paper, I could easily return to subjects I’d noted earlier, see the visual connections instantly, and draw logical conclusions between things.

So the conclusion was that 10 minutes later I was able to give a clearly structured presentation about a group discussion that was - although well led - bursting with ideas, connections and interesting points to the degree where I wonder how well I’d have done without using Mind Mapping. I also felt a lot more relaxed, knowing that I understood the structure of what had been discussed, and I knew the presentation would go well.

Now one of the great things about Toastmasters is that you are exposed to people who are Really Good at this kind of stuff. And I’ve always wanted to be able to deliver a quality verbal evaluation with around 5 - 10 minutes preparation (as we often do) without extreme-adrenaline-notetaking. And I now seem to remember some of those who are Really Good at this kind of stuff putting it down to Mind Mapping and my thoughts at the time were probably “One day I’ll look into that” … Well at least the day eventually came!

All hail Mind Mapping!