Where I go Tim follows....

Tim Berners-Lee has kindly decided to follow by starting a blog. Worth keeping an eye on.

Randoll Coate - Labyrinthologist

Randoll Coate, the labyrinthologist who died on December 2 aged 96, became a designer of elaborate symbolic garden mazes after retiring from the Foreign Office; there are examples of his work in Buenos Aires and at Blenheim Palace.

Coate saw the maze as a paradigm of life and as a reflection of human longing to reduce life's confusions. Working alone and in partnership with the maze designer Adrian Fisher, he created more than 50 mazes around the world.

In Britain he designed (with Fisher) the Archbishop's Maze at Greys Court, near Henley, created to commemorate the maze metaphor Robert Runcie employed in his enthronement address when he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1980.

Other creations include the Marlborough Maze at Blenheim, the Roxburgh Maze at Floors Castle (with Adrian Fisher), and the Sun Maze and Lunar Labyrinth at Longleat. He designed the Millennium Maze for the Borghese Gardens in Rome, and the memorial maze in Buenos Aires for his friend Jorge Luis Borges, inspired by the writer's short story The Garden of Forking Paths, and in which Coate used smooth stones to pick out in Braille the blind writer's celebrated quote that a book and a labyrinth are one and the same.

At Varmlands Saby, Falconberg, in Sweden, he created an Egg Maze, symbolising the Garden of Eden and featuring separate entrances and paths for men and women who meet up at Adam's rib at the maze's centre.

The son of an expatriate businessman, Gilbert Randoll Coate was born in Lausanne on October 8 1909. From the College de Lausanne, he won a scholarship to read French and German at Oriel College, Oxford.

During the Second World War, in 1941, Coate particpated in "Operation Archery", a commando raid on the port of Vaagso in Norway. Later, after being parachuted into Greece, he was captured by partisans with whom he was supposed to make contact; they threatened to execute him as a German spy until he showed them a small medallion with the Lord's Prayer engraved on it in Greek. This saved his life, and he remained with the partisans, joining their fight to liberate Kalamata, the most southerly town in Greece; he was mentioned in dispatches. In 1949 he published a book about Mount Athos.

Towards the end of the war Coate helped to co-ordinate the military campaigns in Italy and the south of France. With the return of peace he joined the consular service of the Foreign Office, serving in Salonika, Leopoldville, Rome, the Hague, Buenos Aires, Stockholm and Brussels. His final posting was as First Secretary in the embassy in Oslo.

After taking early retirement in 1967, Coate devoted himself to his true passion of designing symbolic mazes. His first commission was a 57x29-metre 3,000 bush yew hedge in a private garden in Gloucestershire laid out in the form of a giant footprint scaled to the size of a man as tall as the Eiffel Tower, one toe of the labyrinth forming a small island in the adjacent river. He was co-author, with Adrian Fisher and Graham Burgess, of A Celebration of Mazes (1984).
Randoll Coate was appointed MVO in 1966 and a Chevalier de l'Ordre de Leopold in 1965.
He married, in 1955, Pamela Dugdale Moore, a painter, in the Benedictine Abbey of Pluscarden in Moray, where he was later received into the Roman Catholic Church and where he is buried. His wife and two daughters survive him.

Someone Somewhere In Summertime

Stay, I'm burning slow

With me in the rain, walking in the soft rain

Calling out my nameSee me burning slow
Brilliant days, wake up on brilliant days

Shadows of brilliant ways will change all the time

Memories, burning gold memories

Gold of day memories change me in these times
Somewhere there is some place, that one million eyes can't see

And somewhere there is someone, who can see what I can see

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Moments burn, slow burning golden nights

Once more see city lights, holding candles to the flame

Brilliant days, wake up on brilliant days

Shadows of brilliant ways will change me all the time
Somewhere there is some place, that one million eyes can't see

And somewhere there is someone, who can see what I can see

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Someone, Somewhere In Summertime

Mobile - SMS vs email

SMS is a staggering success - mobile email in Japan is a three times more staggering success

The Mobile Data Association (MDA) announced in a press release on November 25th, 2005 under the headline "Text messaging soars during October" that SMS sent in the UK during October 2005 "have soared ... to a staggering ... 93.5 million SMS/day".

Read below to find out that Japan's numbers are at least three times more staggering.The Figures below show that Japan's figures are about three times higher - implying that SMS in Europe is impressive, but still has a lot of room to grow further taking Japan as a measure:


Data sources: Data for UK are official data published by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) on their www.text.it website, data for Germany are taken from the "Netsize Guide 2005 Edition - The Mobile is Open for Business" (ISBN 2-9523533-0-1), subscriber numbers for Japan are official data communicated by Japan's mobile operators to the telecom industry association, and the number of email data for Japan are official data from Japan's mobile operators. The data have been extrapolated using scientific/mathematical methods to render smooth curves. Solid data are obtained from official data, shaded curves are extrapolations by Eurotechnology Japan KK.

For more statistical and financial information about Japan's telecom industry:our JCOMM-reportabout 3G in Japan: our 3G reportClick here for a complete listing of our mobile market reports from Japan

In the beginning.........

Next Step - Unknown ....