While I know I’m well behind the times on this, I finally got around to watching Asif Kapadia’s documentary about the life of Formula 1 racing driver, Ayrton Senna. I have to say I found it well deserving of the plaudits it has received and it provided a great insight into the life of a man who few would deny was born to drive.

Strangely Ayrton Senna is one of those names that sticks out quite vividly in my childhood memories although I really don’t have a great recollection him racing due to how young I would have been. He raced during a period where my dad would wake me up at whatever ungodly hour was necessary to watch the races live.

A lot of the documentary talks about how fast he was in the car but it was more than just speed that made him great. The best example of this as far as I’m concerned is the finish to the 1992 Monaco Grand Prix. Senna found himself in the lead ahead of the much faster Nigel Mansell with 3 laps remaining and managed to hold him off with the Williams’ car swarming all over his tail.

At school when I was 11 or 12 we were tasked with doing a project about the life of a celebrity and I recall choosing Ayrton Senna. Unfortunately I am sure that everything from that piece of work is gone now but it’s probably for the best knowing just how many important details I left out. I seem to remember that my essay and talk left out the 2 World Championships that were decided by crashes with Alain Prost, one “victory” for each man. I also neglected to mention how Senna was guided by his faith and believed that it contributed to many of his greatest achievements.

Most of my classmates went for footballs, singers and popstars with one noteable outlier and few were aware of who my project was about. It led to the best anecdote I have about Ayrton Senna falling rather flat and it’s a story from my father who told me a tale about sending a photographer out to get a picture of the racing driver who later returned with a picture of….

…Ayr Town Centre.

While my reasons for watching the film stem from wanting to add some colour and detail to what I remember from the races I watched as a kid I would recommend it to anyone, F1 fans or not as the study of relationships and politics of the sport should be interesting to all.

Every year in January and February there is a lot of talk in the blogosphere about what the hot trends are going to be on the internet. One site that has come up in a large volume of posts is Quora.

Quora is a large question and answer resource. In fact if you ask it “What is Quora?” the response is as follows:

“Quora is a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The main goal is to be the best possible resourcefor someone who wants to know about each question.”

The primary difference between Quora and other sites out there appears to be the heavy integration with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter since every question you ask can be pushed out to your friends and followers on these sites. I have had an account on it for a couple of months now but have rarely made use of it.

I can see the appeal of being able to find answers to common questions through crowdsourcing and the fact you can get differing opinions from a wide range of sources but if I have a question the little voice in my head goes “Let’s see what Google has to say about that!” instead of “Let’s go put it on Quora!”.

Until someone can convince myself and others to make that connection I fear that Quora’s place on the internet may reside closer to the dictionary definition of the word it is derived from:

Quorum: a gathering of the minimal number of members of an organization to conduct business

That said I hope that I am wrong and that we have gained a good educational resource. I’ll give it a chance and am now going to ask it for tips as to how I can better engage with it.

Apparently yesterday marked the 90th Birthday of the word “robot” having been coined in the play “R.U.R.” by Karel Čapek. Apparently the word stems from the Czech word “robota” which means “work” which makes sense given what we tend to use them for.

Given the name of this site I felt obligated to mark this occasion with a quick post.

On a similarly robot-related note I am looking for drawings of robots from anyone who knows me or otherwise feels like contributing one to me. Just hit me up anywhere you know how to reach me or drop me an email at scott@stompyrobot.net.