Last night I had the misfortune of listening to the radio for a few, agonising minutes. It really wasn’t my fault. I try to avoid doing so for one remarkably simple reason. What I hear on the radio is, in my experience, crap, formulaic music, lacking, on the whole, any creativity.

And as luck would have it, the snippet I stumbled unwittingly across was the discussion of a new Radio 1 project, where all members of the station crew were banding together to produce a ‘hit record’.

The logic behind it was, I am forced to concede, sound. According to the discussion, all modern hits follow the same basic formula. And, presumably, given their ‘unique’ spot in the market, they will be able to flog the crap out of this record, which will ultimately result in this record achieving number one status on, at least, Radio 1’s chart.

This statement, in itself, did not cause palpitations and quickened breathing, but rather, it was the train of thought I entered into after hearing this which caused my despair.

As far as I am concerned, the radio should champion new sounds, new angles of attack on the music scene, and most importantly, creativity.

What Radio 1 is doing here is exactly the opposite of this. This is glorifying the mediocre. Sleeping with the enemy. And most importantly, lacking in creativity.

You, Radio 1, are admitting that the music you force down the throats of the general populace is formulaic, and display just how simple producing a ‘pop hit’ is, by doing so yourselves. You are performing some sort of ‘me too’ act on the music scene. The self-same music scene which you should be leading, by celebrating creativity and uniqueness, and embracing the ever flowing change of the music industry.

A scene you most certainly should not be mimicking.

I’ll let you all in on a secret. I don’t feel the gush of love and all conquering sadness which seems to have come over all 6 odd billion of you with the passing of Steven P Jobs. Respect for a shrewd business man, yes. Amazement that one who does not preach on matters religion was able to arouse such a large and devoted group of believers, yes. But this cyber canonisation which has gone on? Not me, Sir.

However, the news that Dennis Ritchie had passed on to the petabyte in the sky saddened me deeply. It wasn’t the fact that he had gone to write code to write code (some of you will see what I did there) in the sky which caused hurt – after all, it’s the one thing of which we can all be certain – but the fact that this has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream media.

Dennis Ritchie is, for those who don’t know, the father of the Unix operating system. Unix, for the Apple users amongst you, may be a vaguely familiar word. You’ll have noticed it deep down in some of the options and menus on your beloved Mac. It’s the basis of all iOS systems (that’s your Mac and iPhone), as well as Linux and Android.

Arguably, when he and Ken Thompson developed Unix, they had a bigger impact on computing, as a whole, than they could have imagined. Their operating system, which was a foundation to the open source movement,
became the standard operating system for the internet (that’s pretty much everything behind the scenes), and was moulded into several other operating systems which are now commonplace in our tech universe. Corporations have been built as a result of this operating system. Countries are run using this operating system. Every flight you catch is managed (in part at least) using this operating system. Everything we do in the digital world is impacted on by this operating system.

Enough for one lifetime, you might suggest?

No, Sir. Dennis Ritchie did more than that. He also brought us the programming language with which almost every developer is familiar. Known simply as C, this language is the basis of most of the programming and scripting tools in use today. It’s thanks to Dennis and C that we have JavaScript, Objective C and Cocoa, Python, Perl, and PHP. Pretty much everything which puts this website in front of you is down to this man.

Obama, apparently, made reference to the fact that 80% of the people who learned of Jobs’ passing learned it whilst using one of his devices. I questioned that figure at the time, but it is unquestionable that 100% of the people who learn of either Jobs’ or Ritchie’s passing online would have done so courtesy of Dennis Ritchie.

And yet almost no one on my social graph commented on it, and it certainly wasn’t a front page story on any newspaper I saw.

It brings to mind a phrase I once heard. True greatness does not shout. It whispers.

As I’ve explained to several of my friends, I am unwilling to jump out of a fully functioning aeroplane for one, very simple reason. I’m a firm believer that, were we as a species meant to fly, we would have evolved wings.

Birds did it. Bees did it. Some educated lizards even managed to do it. But mankind just got left behind on that whole fork of evolution. Sure, we’ve got opposable thumbs, walk upright, and can communicate with other members of our species on the far side of the world in real time, but at the end of the day, we were not destined to fly.

Clearly, Jeb Corliss never got that memo. If you haven’t seen his video which has been doing the rounds on Facebook recently, check it out below. Stragely named. Insanely cool.

This is proximity flying.

I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with significant poker hands through history, both in legend and in fact, so I thought I’d share them with you as I discovered them, for no reason other than to appease my own curiosity.

The first one which came up happens to be one of my favourite hands, so it seems like a great place to start – The Dead Man’s Hand.

The dead man’s hand, so called because it was the selection of cards Wild Bill Hicock was reportedly holding when he was shot and killed by John McCall, while at Saloon 10 in Deadwood, South Dakota, consists of black aces and black eights. There is, to this day, wide speculation as to what the final card of the draw was, and whether it had actually been dealt yet, but by the same token, it’s reputed he was playing 5 card draw, so a card may well have been discarded, leading to this uncertainty.

Through history, this hand has worked its way into popular culture, and the dead man’s hand is frequently referenced in both movies and songs. In film, particularly westerns, the hand has become a foreshadowing of death and is particularly popular in movies by John Ford.

On the music front, artists including Bob Seger, Bob Dylan and Motorhead have all made reference to the dead man’s hand.

Old Bill Hicock may not have survived that hand, but the drama surrounding his death has cemented the Aces and Eights in poker and western folklore for ever.