Occasionally there will be a spillover from my other work to my diary as indeed was the case with Samuel Pepys and his activities with the navy, not to mention his extra curricular activities.

Controlled weather

I do research on various trends that are going on in the world and this is a very small excerpt by a researcher called Deborah Tavares.   If you are minded, you can hear the full article here but – warning – it does last nearly two hours.

” I’m going to refer back to an article that I discussed a number of times over the years. It was found on the Wayback machine and it was  an article April 17 of 1976 from the New York Times archives and it reads basically as follows ‘ in 1976 when there was a few real reports so they start out by saying “from space one can to control the Earth’s weather and cause drought,  floods,  change the tides,  raise the levels of the sea and make temperate climates frigid”. This was what Linden B Johnson was told by the joint session of Congress in 1957  so you ask how long has this been going on. It’s (been) perfected.

This may explain to the readers of this diary why there is so much strange weather, floods, extremes, so-called wildfires. It is not what it appears.

Anyway back to business at home.

The delights of writing a transcript

I was part of a four hour seminar yesterday. There was such wisdom and knowledge displayed that I felt moved to write a transcript.   Anyone who has written a transcript from a live performance will know what a labour of love it has to be.   Even when people speak clearly there’s a lot of repetition, umms and ahs,  and interjections so if you are to produce an item that is true to the original and clear of noise you have to do the following.

While the seminar was going on, I was recording it on Speechtexter  which is a bit of free software offered by Chrome. Thank you very much, people.   It conveys the output from the microphone to a computer somewhere, who knows perhaps California and you get the text appearing a fraction of a second later on your machine.   There is an editing element. If I wanted to say a word such as s h i t,  it would send back sh**.   So there is surveillance of a sort.

What I am waiting for now is the copy from zoom  of the whole conference, all four hours of it.   I will then turn it on and compare what was said with what the recording says.  You have to stop and start the recording every few seconds.  The recording is just continuous raw text in one great lump.  It has to be made more friendly, made into paragraphs plus you have to capitalize where necessary.

I told my colleagues  in the organization that I reckon it would take about 10 hours work but that may be optimistic.  Why am I doing it? Particularly as a voluntary task.  The reason is that the average attendee is very unlikely to have the time to plough through four hours of video for a particular point they have missed.   My idea is to produce a searchable WORD  type document where people can quickly jump to what they need to hear.

Occasionally, speakers are truly inspired and they make so many key points one after the other you would almost think they were looking at the situation from above. I knew when a speaker by the name of Kingsley Dennis started talking yesterday that this was one of those inspired occasions and so I am glad to give my time and energy to this.  I must now twiddle my thumbs until they send the copy.

The transcript of the conference arrived at about 1.30 pm. I set to work. I had underestimated how technical the topic was and how many unfamiliar names of quoted authors were. I have just spent three and a half hours and have only done about 35 minutes of worthwhile transcript. The problem is that if you miss a word you have to go back on the recording just a little bit and if it is a long recording as this one is it’s very difficult to find the exact point where you were so you had to listen to things again.

I found that my recording  of the event which I thought was complete had missing chunks so I had to go back and fill in the gaps which was a very time consuming and frustrating job.

I had hoped to finish the whole thing within 24 hours but that is not going to happen so I wrote off saying that I thought the original should be sent off and my transcript would follow when it was ready. I don’t think there’s any point in working myself into a stew.   The topic had a great impact on me and the work has embedded itself in my mind so maybe that’s a good thing.

Justice siding with the perpetrator.

I was just listening on GBNews to a woman complaining that she got on the London subway with her two-year-old child and she was threatened by a knife wielding guy walking up and down the car. Although the event only lasted three minutes or so she was very traumatized and she wrote about it on social media describing him as in need of medical attention.

To her surprise, she got some abuse because of the way she described the assailant and she commented that these days public Sympathy lies not with the victim but with the perfect traitor. I have noticed this before and I think it’s a very dangerous precedent. Thank goodness I don’t live in London but when I travel there I shall keep out of trouble.

Prosecution of a Christian MP in Finland

It is not only in Africa and Asia that there is persecution of Christians. Finland is the last place I would think of, but here we have Finnish lawmaker Päivi Räsänen a devout Christian and member of the Christian Democratic Party, became a figure in the fight for personal freedoms while facing an “ethnic agitation” charge for a social media post criticizing the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for partaking in LGBTQ+ pride events in June 2019.

“I am prepared to go to prison if necessary to hold on to this message,” she said after leaving the courtroom.