quietly breathing

Biofuels: It seemed like a good idea at the time

2008-07-07T22:13:00.003Z

I’m sad about biofuels. It just sounded like such a great idea didn’t it? We don’t need to dig oil out of the ground, let’s grow it instead! Plants could be a renewable source of energy, hooray! (I also got excited at university about the prospect of freakish plastic-producing GM crops – fields growing yoghurt pot ingredients instead of big horrible polluting factories.)

But the flaws with biofuels are becoming too big to ignore.

Let’s grow fuel instead of food. Oops, now there’s no food. Or not enough to stop spiralling food prices. And the glaring problem that biofuels are a pretty rubbish alternative to oil – considering that producing biofuels is very thirsty in terms of energy, particularly in terms of manufacturing fertilisers and pesticides to keep up crop yields. The rising prices for both food and biofuels are a great incentive for developing countries to cut down more rainforest. Ah, weren’t we trying to stop all that? (Good summary by Jeffrey A McNeely is chief scientist of IUCN, World Conservation Union here.)

It’s just a horrible big circle that brings you back to the problem of our excessive energy use in the first place.

In a brilliant fudge, the UK today said it would slow down introducing biofuels, while still actually introducing them, after a cautious review by renewable energy big-wig Professor Ed Gallagher.

The Global Forest Coalition picked up on Gallagher’s support for second-generation biofuels, which it says will still have an effect on food supplies and encourage deforestation. UK’s Biofuel Watch maintains “agrofuels” are not sustainable.

The biofuels debate just goes to show there aren’t quick-fix solutions to climate change. And that we can’t combat consumerism with green consumerism. Green cars are better than dirty, gas-guzzlers. Even better is living so you don’t have to drive miles to work, to the shops and so on. But now I’m sounding like a terrible hippy.

Greening Sainsbury's

2008-06-18T21:42:00.009Z

Sainsbury’s "take an old bag shopping" campaign has already been criticised for being sexist and oldist. Now it seems it is just a sop to green sentiment.

Going to the supermarket this evening I noticed I’d been awarded an extra point on Sainsbury’s Nectar loyalty award scheme because I reused a plastic bag. But does Sainsbury’s honestly think this is an incentive?

A quick look at what Nectar points will earn you suggests not. One Nectar point will buy you 1/1400th of Coldplay’s new CD. If you want to save up for two bottles of white wine you would need to reuse a plastic bag every day for 10 years. To earn a Sainsbury’s restaurant voucher, you would have to reuse between 13,000 and 21,000 plastic bags.

Real incentives could play a role in changing behaviour. Fresh & Wild, which was recently bought by Wholefoods, refunds customers 5 pence for every reused bag. Not a fortune, but perhaps enough to make people think twice. Experience in Ireland shows that small fines can also work.

But with it's paltry "benefits" for reusing plastic bags Sainsbury's is hoping it can be seen as promoting green lifestyles without making any real commitment to doing so.

Tropical Disease Warning for a Hotter, Wetter Europe

2008-06-16T16:14:00.003Z

Think climate change - think extreme weather like floods, droughts and hurricanes. But now Europeans are talking up another threat that could be equally dramatic – the coming of tropical diseases, aided by changing climates and globalization. More.

This came up when I visited the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm. With an LED display showing how close Europe was to potential life-threatening disease outbreaks and a world map on the wall with flags marking current disease hotspots, it was the closest I'll ever come to real-life War Games.

A couple of friends of mine have pointed out that animal diseases are also spreading as the climate changes. Bluetongue used to be found only in the Mediterranean during the summer months, but came to the UK for the first time last year. Bluetongue's an insect-borne viral disease of mainly of sheep and less frequently of cattle. (Thanks Ben and Sam.)

It'll never work, Sean

2008-06-12T15:02:00.002Z

There was a reggae song on the radio a little while ago: “You're way too beautiful girl, That's why it'll never work,” it starts.

With a couple of splashes of vocoda and a baseline borrowed from Stand by Me, Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls sounds quite jolly, until the next line – “You'll have me suicidal, suicidal, When you say it's over.”

Suicidal? Are you sure? Kingston doesn’t sound suicidal, he sounds bored and a bit whiny.

The use of the word suicidal annoys me in so many ways. I hate the casual way he just throws it in, like it’s a choice between that and nipping round the shops for a pint of milk. It’s so bloody unsubtle. If he really were suicidal he wouldn’t be saying so, neither would he be listening to Ben E King. It annoys me that it makes me come over all PC – but I think it really cheapens the word.

It also gets to me because it’s been done so much better – even Celine Dion sounds moving: “I can’t live, if living is without you.”

But for “you’re so wonderful I’d rather die than be on my own” sentiment, the bittersweet Smiths do it best: “If a double-decker bus, crashes into us. To die by your side, well the pleasure, the privilege is mine."

42 days - to my MP

2008-06-11T07:07:00.004Z

Dear Martin Linton MP,

Today is the day of the crucial vote on extending the limit that terrorist suspects can be held without charge to 42 days.

I am making last-minute appeal to you not to vote with the Government, because I think this move would mark a further deterioration of the civil liberties of everyone in this country.

I fully understand the need to protect the UK from terrorism, but holding people without charge is against their fundamental human rights. If a British citizen was locked up in another country with no charge being made we would expect the UK Government to intervene, and yet this is what the Government is proposing for Britain.

According to Liberty, the UK already has the longest period of pre-charge detention in the western world, and there is no evidence that a further extension will make us any safer.

I would also ask you to bear in mind Liberty’s concern that the Home Secretary will be able extend pre-charge detention in individual cases beyond 28 days without any evidence of a genuine emergency situation; that parliamentary oversight will be weak, as MPs are not allowed to vote when powers are activated; and that judicial oversight will be inadequate as courts will not be able to review the decision to extend pre-charge detention.

I agree with Liberty that an extension of the period that suspects can be held without charge from the current period of 28 days will not necessarily make us safer. Indeed, it risks one section of society – namely the Muslim population who are thought to pose the greatest terrorist threat – feeling unduly victimised.

Furthermore, the Government’s concessions, such as the proposal of compensation for suspects, should not distract from the true intent of the bill. The extension of detention without charge to 42 days is too important for Labour MPs to vote with the Government to state their confidence in the Prime Minister.

Liberty believes there are realistic alternatives to extending pre-charge detention, such as removing the ban on the use of intercept (phone-tap) evidence, allowing post-charge questioning in terror cases and hiring more interpreters to speed up pre-charge questioning and other procedures.

If the police have a good reason to suspect someone of terrorism, let them charge that person. If the police cannot make a good case that someone is a terrorist during a reasonable time limit, then they should let the suspect go. There is no reason why the person cannot be kept under surveillance, but we simply cannot lock people up for long periods of time without saying why.

I sincerely hope you take on board my views as a constituent and that you choose to vote against the extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days.

Yours sincerely,

Ailis Kane

Book recycling

2008-06-03T16:58:00.004Z

I recently had a great success recycling some of my old books by posting a list of them on Facebook and asking my friends to take their pick.

ReadItSwapIt is a website that helps readers give away books to willing homes and earn a couple of titles for their own collections. Not so great in terms of reducing the number of books on your shelves, but a great way to reduce the consumption of books in general. I’m pleased to be able to post the Facebook rejects on there and hope to pick up a couple of books for my upcoming hols.

Excellent ideas for cycle geeks

2008-06-02T14:13:00.007Z

What a great idea - a planter you can stick in your front garden and lock your bike to. My front hall is so grubby from bike grime and difficult to negotiate because of the bike. And it combines my two of my favourite things - plants and bikes.

Meanwhile in Stockholm I came across this lovely basket. Annoyingly it's loads more expensive on UK websites than those in the US, don't understand that given that we're closer to Sweden. In the end I decided that my very lovely but functional-looking bike might look a bit silly with this attached. That said, I love useful things that are pretty too.

Also, what about green chain oil? My bone-dry, rusting chain earnt me a telling off from the bike shop last time I took it in, so I have a particular need. According to its inventors it doesn't contain any oil-derived hydrocarbons, but its exact formula is a closely guarded secret...

References to explicit substance use common in popular music

2008-02-05T11:10:00.000Z

Approximately one-third of popular songs include reference to explicit drug, alcohol or tobacco use, varying widely by musical genre, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. See link.

Not saving the world, saving myself

2008-01-27T21:32:00.000Z

The problem with the phrase “save the world” is that it highlights the chasm between individual actions and the magnitude of problems facing the country. It’s easier to bury your head in the sand than “save the planet”. It’s easy to consign your empty beer bottle to disappear among the countless tonnes already dumped in landfill and instead of taking it home to recycle. Mentally conjuring up the display of night lights across the country it might seem pointless paying an extra ten pounds on your electricity bill a month for renewable energy. And why shouldn’t you join the thousands of commuting workers in their cars?

The same goes for language like “it’s not easy been green”. It’s all about depriving yourself, going back to rationing, struggle that kind of thing. It just doesn't sound as fun or interesting as a carbon-heavy business-as-usual lifestyle. If envinronmentalists truly want to promote change, rather than isolating themselves in ecofriendly bubbles and bemoaning the selfishness of the vast majority of humanity, they need the language that makes an environmental way of life seem attractive.

For individuals, living ethically may be all about taking personal responsibility. But its difficult to see it working on a larger scale. However, it's very convenient for governments to place the emphasis on personal responsibility, rather than action across society, because it allows them to talk green without having to take any steps towards real change. It allows them to place a premium on domestic recycling, while businesses are free to send masses of material to landfill.

It allows Brown to fiddle around with the idea of banning supermarkets from handing out plastic bags, despite the very small impact this would have on the UK's carbon footprint. (Although it would be a powerful symbolic signal.) The Environment Agency last year asked a panel of experts to give the top 50 things that would make most difference to the environment - not using plastic bags didn't figure at all.

George Marshall of the Climate Outreach Information Network says the contribution of plastic bags to climate change is “vanishingly small”. This puts into perspective VW’s arresting dancing plastic-bags advert which says driving its car could reduce your carbon footprint the equal of recycling 25,000 plastic bags.

Marshall is great on the language of climate change - a powerful psychological deterrent to action: One psychological response to climate change is to find language and images that create distance– to suggest that it will affect someone else in the future. So the talk and images are of ‘climate’ not ‘weather’, polar bears not hedgehogs, African children not our own.

See his take on the phrase Save the Planet here.

Patio heaters no more at B and Q

2008-01-27T21:21:00.000Z

Hearing that B&Q has pledged to end sales of patio heaters pleases me on two accounts.

Firstly, great news that it will be more difficult for people to buy a product that is so patently wasteful of energy. (Although the problem with this point of view is all about civil liberty, the unattractiveness of banning eco-friendly choices and smug eco-martyrs.)

Secondly, it could discourage my neighbours from their patio heater-fuelled parties of talking loudly in posh voices and playing Red Hot Chilli Peppers till dawn.

Boo to Ken

2008-01-22T12:00:00.000Z

We need more cycle racks, not more councils impounding our lovely bicycles.

See London clamps down on cyclists - Ken Livingstone has fought for low emissions in the capital, so why are the authorities now targeting bicycles? (Guardian unlimited.)

London: greyness and light

2008-01-21T11:11:00.000Z

Sometimes I get a bit fed up with the greyness of London, the rude, unfriendly people, the horrible traffic and the rain. (Especially in January.)

But some days it just seems brilliant.

Last night on the bus, London was divided. I couldn’t read my paper because a huge, slumbering guy behind me was blaring out R&B from his jacket pocket. There was nothing to see from the window but the concrete of Stockwell. It was an annoying Sunday night journey, slow and everyone on separate journeys.

Then a group of people on the back of the bus starting singing. It was a beautiful song in an African language. They were forgetting the words, and laughing through it. It was a beautiful lilting melody. The slumbering guy came to and turned off the music from his phone. They sang louder, and we all sat there listening.

Getting off the bus and walking over Waterloo bridge with the wind hitting the side of my face, the lights were lovely. Purples and peaches lit up the National Theatre. Lovely blue blobs adorning the Hungerford bridge. The yellow glow of parliament beyond that on the right, the blinking pyramid of Canary Wharf off in the distance to the left. The view was only marred by the London Eye, which was flashing psychedelically.

Heading towards London Bridge on the South Bank, the trees sparkled blue and white. Rather than being lit from above the benches along there have lighted underskirts. “Like wideboys’ cars,” said Tom. “Or pimp my bench.”

On the shore of the river, by Gabriel’s Wharf, a group of crusties were sitting around a fire on a sofa moulded from the sand. Further on was a sand “angel of the south” surrounded by flickering nightlights in reclaimed plastic bottles.

Along the way we had an impromptu tutorial on playing the berimbau (a musical bow) from a busker with dreads, who made a wonderful cacophony with the pitch-bent twanging of his bow which he accompanied by shaking a rattle and singing.

Coming back the same way we went past the mini beach party again and as Sunday faded towards its end we were in time to see the rising tide crumbling away a huge rounded skull. Thoughts of the impermanence of beauty, the power of nature and the inevitability of time were brought back to reality by a hippy emerging from weeing in the shadows.

Thrill seekers

2007-11-29T23:32:00.000Z

This week a York academic Professor Trevor Sheldon likened staying in an NHS hospital to bungee jumping, because up to 10% of hospital stays resulted in some kind of mishap.

I wonder if this says more about how safe bungee jumping has become, or perhaps hints at a new thrill seeking pasttime for middle Englanders.

Now there’s no need to try an extreme sport like snowboarding, or throwing yourself out of a plane. Why not get yourself down to your local NHS hospital. Wonder where the MRSA is lurking? So do the staff. Their guess is as good as yours, and if its smeared around your bed waiting to infect your open wound, chances are the cleaners will miss it too.

Trouble with your kidneys? Try having one of them removed. Just hope it’s the right one.

Time to save the world again

2007-11-01T14:10:00.000Z

The Environment Agency has asked an expert panel to list the top 50 things that will save the planet. I’m pleased to see that quite a few of the top priorities are actions that decision-markers need to take, rather than making us green people feel even more guilty. We need more government action on this! Also see Leo Hickman in the Guardian, who assesses whether they got their priorities right.

The top 20: What the panel prescribes
1 Dramatically improve the energy efficiency of electrical goods
2 Religious leaders to make the environment a priority for their followers
3 Encourage the widespread use of solar power throughout the world
4 Secure a meaningful post-Kyoto treaty on reducing the emissions that contribute to global warming
5 Encourage households to generate much more of their own power
6 Introduce tax incentives to "buy green"
7 Tackle the rapid growth in aviation emissions
8 Wean ourselves off dependency on petroleum
9 Encourage individuals to buy less non-essential "stuff "
10 Dramatically improve public transport
11 Aim for a "zero waste" culture
12 Install "smart energy" meters in all homes
13 Introduce a measure of economic success that includes the environment
14 Fully harness Britain's huge potential for generating renewable energy
15 Seek alternative, less damaging sources for biofuels
16 Bury carbon dioxide from power stations underground
17 Encourage hydrogen fuel cell technology in cars
18 Implement government policies to control global population growth
19 Reach international agreement on preserving rainforests
20 Create better incentives to improve energy efficiency in the home

I’m also getting worried about biofuels. The idea seems so nice. Petrol = bad, so let's turn plants into energy instead. But the benefits of biofuels may have been underestimated, and subsidies to produce biofuels is both creating an excess of bio-ethanol and skewing agriculture away from food production.

"The net greenhouse gas emissions of expensive European rapeseed oil-based diesel are a mere 13 per cent less than those of conventional diesel", says Martin Wolf in a thoughtful piece in the FT. I've also read in the Wall Street Journal that the biofuels gold rush is threatening the last bits of existing prairie-land in the US. Collecting bio-gas from landfills intuitively seems like a better idea, but don't know how this compares.

Chaos fans

2007-10-17T15:10:00.000Z

Fantastic site by The Institute for Figuring - "an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts". Including fractal crochet!

Climate change: little things won't make all the difference

2007-10-17T14:09:00.000Z

Green tips are all well and good, but are they just a salve for our conscience? Can they really make an appreciable impact on climate change?

No, says George Marshall, an environmental campaigner type who is founder of the Oxford-based Climate Outreach & Information Network.

This is a fantastic article of his about how there can’t be any real action against climate change without political change.

So forget about those top ten eco tips you've been following (or Wandworth Council's top 32).

Forget recycling carrier bags: "Their contribution to climate change is vanishingly small. The average Brit consumes 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact," says Marshall.

Or turning TVs off standby: "The electricity to keep a television in standby mode for a whole year leads to 25 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide. It’s more than plastic bags, but still very marginal: one fifth of one percent of average emissions."

Or even boiling the correct amount of water in the kettle: "According to the government’s own figures even if you are constantly boiling full kettles this will save all of 100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year, less than one percent of average emissions."

Well, actually don't forget about doing all these things. But don't expect them to save the world.

And be aware that thinking you are eco-good could allow you to turn a blind eye to the much more carbon-heavy lifestyle choices.

But the point really is that the burden of slowing down carbon consumption cannot be carried by individuals alone. It needs collective action. And what is really sinister about the government offering us "eco tips" is that it gives us the idea that they are proactively helping the environment, when they are actually foisting the blame onto us and sweeping things like aviation taxes back under the carpet.

"No major social or economic change has ever arisen from volunteerism and the suggestion that it can is a deliberate strategy to prevent any real challenge to business as usual."

Links:
* Abolish plastic bags - an admirable aim - plastic bags as rubbish are ugly and the production of a new plastic bag for every time we shop is wasteful but the campaigners energy could be better directed elsewhere, says Marshall. Although I have to admit I'm really attracted by plastic bag crochet. Pretty non-plastic bags that encourage you to shop green by giving you a discount in certain shops.

* Marshall has written a book called Carbon Detox. "Don't despair and don't give up," he concludes as he tries to combat "Eco denial".

* Eco blogs

Urban wildlife watching

2007-10-15T10:08:00.000Z

I went to Clapham Common yesterday and the common-or-garden mallards I saw were outnumbered by: two herons, two cormorants, a solitary moorhen, batches of coots, two Greylag geese, a flock of Canada geese (startling runners by trying to take off in front of them), a jay and a wagtail.

I have re-reminded myself that coots are the ones with a white face and moorhens the ones with red beaks (left). I'm sure I will forget this again instantly.

The angling pond is apparently full of toxic blue-green algae, but it doesn't seem to be doing the birds any bad.

Amy, Amy, Amy

2007-10-12T10:05:00.000Z

Global warming? David Cameron’s new Conservatives with balls? The deterioration of the social fabric of Britain? No, I’m going to add to the litres of ink already spent over Amy Winehouse.

Firstly, a disclaimer. I think Amy Winehouse is a fantastic musical talent, and if I could listen to Back to Black back to back all day I would.

It’s more-or-less a given that any sensible human being does not want to see someone with so much potential going mad on drugs.

But should we really be so critical of her drug taking when it goes hand in hand with her music? As her friend/producer Mark Ronson was quoted in the press this week: “That's Amy — taking her pain and turmoil and making it into the music we enjoy.”

I can’t stand the Daily Mail-esque moralising over Amy Winehouse. (See this one. Thanks for the marvellous insight that "it would be a tragic waste if her wild lifestyle destroyed a brilliant singing career". Actually I think most right wing commentators would be pleased for another told-you-so lecture on the evils of drugs.)

If her music comes from the same place as her more destructive behaviour then it’s hypocritical to blame her for it.

I think we should leave Amy Winehouse alone, unless we want to produce a million James Blunts. Please no.

We need people to live on the edge and to feel the emotions we are too busy to take notice of. The Amys of this world remind us that there is life outside a cosy suburban workaday existence. But it’s an uncomfortable place that perhaps we don’t want to visit too much. Poor old Amy has to live there all the time.

This article on the Guardian arts blog has come nearest to my thoughts on Amy.

"Every culture needs a totemic figure who is prepared to go into the wilder terrain of subtance usage, a place where the rest of us don't want to or don't need to go. And there is something defiantly totemic about (Amy) Winehouse. The tall figure, the tattoos carved into the arms, the boldly painted face, the huge pile of hair - they all resemble some fabulous totem pole.

"And the great, yodelling, soulful voice brings us news of a place we don't want to go to ourselves."

Crazy Catholic ranting

2007-10-02T10:05:00.000Z

This is really crazy.

Mozambique's Roman Catholic archbishop has accused European condom manufacturers of deliberately infecting their products with HIV "in order to finish quickly the African people".

Some conspiracy theories are easy enough to dismiss, but the ones about HIV can have a far more deadly effect, says Priya Shetty in her Guardian blog. She points out that some HIV conspiracy theorists are key political figures such as Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa's health minister.

Proscrastinating

2007-10-01T08:56:00.000Z

I’m officially “thinking about thinking about” a change of career.

But before I can move onto actually thinking, I have a number of essential tasks I need to get out of the way. Such as:

Defrosting the freezer
Defrosting the fridge
Cleaning the cooker
Cleaning out the grotty trays of bathroom stuff in the bathroom

But damn, I’ve done all of these this weekend. So now I need to move onto the more endless tasks…

Hacking the Triffid-like Wysteria
Putting plants in pots, doing bulbs for spring
Going through ten years worth of photos
Adding all the CDs I own onto iTunes

And if things get really bad:

Putting all my books and CDs into alphabetical order (no I’ll never do that)
Painting – the hallway, the front room, the bedroom, the backroom
Cleaning the carpets, cleaning the rugs
Chucking away old clothes and general rubbish
Finding piles of paper, looking through them, putting them back again
Cutting things out of newspapers, putting them in a new pile, forgetting to read them
Thinking of creative things to do, doing something else
Writing letters to aunties, old friends and school teachers
Baking cookies, making more mess to tidy up later
Treading water
Achieving a Zen-like state through continual housework

I could spend years just writing the list. Who has time to think about the important things in life?

A clean slate

2007-08-10T14:05:00.000Z

I’ve just wiped my iPod (after successfully transferring the tunes off it first, phew) and now I’m back to zero in my Most Played list.

I listened to so much Super Furry Animals about a year ago that nothing could replace them on my personal leader board. Haven’t listened to any SFA for, ooh, two weeks now. I look forward to seeing what I'm going to play to death next!

Current candidates include Ryan Adams, Amy Winehouse and Spoon.

This lunchtime, in between fighting off scraggy dogs for possesion of my dubious "chicken" sandwich and fending off offers from buff young men to lather me in suncream, I had a lovely time sitting in the sunny park enjoying the contrast with angry In Utero in my ears.

Who are you calling primitive?

2007-08-01T12:24:00.001Z

Yes, I admit it. I'm only writing this post for the gratuitous coelacanth shot below. And the fact I need to write something because its very slow in the world of pharmaceutical news this week and I'm not used to being bored at work.

That aside some really quite interesting new research is out that challenges the notion of evolution as some sort of escalator of superiority.

Coelacanths are thought of as the original "living fossil", since the first living (well only recently dead) example was fished out of the Indian Ocean in East London in 1938. (That's East London, South Africa.) Previously, this group of lobe-finned fishes had only been known from the fossil record.

But new research suggests we shouldn't dismiss coelacanths as being primitive.

For some time now, scientists have hoped that examining the lobed fins of coelacanths and lung fishes would hint at how fishes' fins evolved into the limbs of the first land-dwelling vertebrates.

But now researchers from the University of Chicago say that the fins of living coelacanths are just too specialised, after discovering a new coelacanth fossil.

"Our fossil shows that what we've using to define a primitive state is actually very specialised," says lead author Matt Friedman. "It might give a deceptive view of what evolution was like for these fin skeletons.

"If you're going to figure out how limbs evolved you need to have a good idea about pre-conditions," he adds.

This is where the new fossil has helped. It shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes.

It challenges the idea of coelacanth as a "living fossil" because the fishes have continued changing since coelacanths were fossilised, by continued evolution or random genetic drift, which surely must have happened in the 4 million years since coelacanths disappeared from the fossil record. Perhaps the lovely term of a lazarus species is more suitable.

It also reinforces the notion that every living thing adapts to its own niche, as Darwin tells us.

So a duck-billed platypus is only inferior to humans in our minds. A duck-billed platypus is perfectly happy is its own niche and has no desire for consciousness or opposable thumbs. (And that's the point, the idea of a platypus being happy or otherwise in this sense is a concept only we can think of.)

The identification of the first coelacanth's is a great tale of scientific discovery (see here) and is re-told in A Fish Caught in Time.

Desolation in Old Street

2007-07-27T09:51:00.000Z

When I feel that human beings can do nothing but mess up this really quite nice planet we live on I like to retreat to the idea that in a bleak dystopian future, the unloved bits of waste land will be some of the only places that wildlife will survive*.

Well you might think that the Old Street area is desolate enough already, but the car park where I park my bike during the day, while by no means a latter day Garden of Eden, was until recently a happy little place of sprouting buddleias, opportunistic nettles, the odd bramble and copulating lady birds.

I loved smelling the buddleias when I got off my bike. I kept on leaving my bike nestling against them even when the purple flowers were making it quite difficult for me to get to the railings to chain my bike to.

I think having some contact with wildlife must be really beneficial. A few years ago some researchers found that inmates of a prison with a view of greenery (trees etc outside the prison) had better mental health than those looking at the prison yard**.

Anyway, I think nature’s a powerful thing. I always feel calmer walking back to my Mum’s house along past the woods and the fields.

So last Monday I got to the car park to leave my bike and knew there was something wrong instantly when I arrived to see big yellow skip. The place isn’t really run by house-proud owners – in the brambly and nettly corners there were layers of everyday rubbish that must have built up over years…

But looking around the rest of the site I was met by desolation. Some neat and tidy person had scratched up every living thing in quite a terminal way. No more buddleia, no more happy little ladybirds, and no more the excitement of tying up my bike without being stung. It was rather sad.

May be I should do a bit of guerilla gardening and scatter some wild flower seeds. This could be another pledge!

*In fact this is not necessarily true – humans have intimately managed the land for so many years, particularly in the UK that we actually need to keep on managing it to preserve diversity. So on patches of railway land you get sycamore and Japanese knotweed – invasive alien species that distort the natural balance of things, so although “nature thrives” it’s not necessarily the “right” nature, or at least the nature that needs preserving most, or at least the most diverse bits of nature. It also doesn’t help that abandoned land is prime dumping ground for fly-tipping morons.

**I haven’t been able to find this on Google, so I hope it isn’t an urban myth. Also, it occurs to me that the yard side might also have been more depressing because they might have felt even more isolated from the outside world.

My Thursday night at the Foundry in list form

2007-07-27T09:50:00.001Z

Person next to me is reading “The Hominid individual in context”, conglomeration of courier cyclists, reggae version of Smokey Robinson song Get Ready (I know it from Ash cover), angel dolls hanging from the ceiling (some look gruesomely like being hanged), traffic cones, too much, posters, art, chalk boards, confusion, organic lager, mirror rounded by gold flames, Banksy CCTV sculpture, candles dripping bottles, flyers, dreads, revellers photos, old sofas, school chairs, wooden ladybirds, swap tables with old school friend, A-level looking fashion sketches.

John arrives with a copy of The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre and a roll of brown paper.

Keep em keen, keep em green

2007-07-26T15:34:00.000Z

Thanks to Pudsk for alerting me to Wandsworth's new green agenda.

For the record - here are my pledges:

* Push the off button and don't leave electrical appliances on standby: I already
* Sign up for a Home Energy Check with the Energy Saving Trust: I pledge to
* Walk short journeys of one mile or under: I already
* Drive down vehicle emissions and run my car in a more environmentally friendly way: Not yet
* Use the orange sack or orange banks to recycle all my paper and card, tins and cans, aerosols, glass bottles and jars and plastic bottles: I already
* Drink tap water rather than bottled water: Not yet
* Turn off the tap when brushing my teeth: I already
* Replace one bath a week with a shower: Not yet
* Stop taking plastic carrier bags from shops: I already I'm not always successful, but really try
* Write a shopping list and stop buying more food than I need: Not yet
* Not use pesticides in my garden: I already No, it's harmony with the slugs apart from those unlucky enough to come across "slug stinger" tape round my pots
* Plant a window box: I already Very nice geraniums, since you ask
* Leave washing to dry in the open air instead of using the tumble dryer: I already
* Replace all light bulbs in my home with energy saving bulbs when they run out: I already However, I think it is a myth that they last 7 years, some I've had to replace them much sooner than that. Very annoying bought a special shaped ecobulb the other day for about £15, but it blew when I put it on a dimmer switch - be warned!
* Get on my bike and cycle to school or work: I already Hooray for my lovely bike
* Leave my car at home and use public transport to go to work: I already Don't have a car, but do catch tube when I don't cycle
* Reduce the amount of junk mail I receive: I already Yep, have got a "no junk mail" sign and put myself on the mail preference service. Not entirely effective. Plus Abbey send me a pile of credit card cheques every month despite my repeated pleas not too.
* Find a new home for unwanted household items: Not yet well ish, do take quite a bit to the charity shop, but I am a bit of a hoarder
* Put a Hippo or a save-a-flush device in my toilet cistern: I pledge to - I used to have one, really easy way to save water. Hoping to get a double flush loo when I get a new bathroom
* Use water collected in a water butt to water my garden: I already v proud of my water butt, thanks Mum
* Buy products made from recycled materials, such as paper for my printer: I already
* Have milk delivered by local milk man: I already doesn't say why this is on the list, but certainly reduces a lot of plastic waste
* Give a home to birds by putting up a nesting box: Not yet I'm sorry little birds. I did try to feed you but you never visited the seed balls I put up and they melted last summer. I do have a box for red Mason bees though (sadly uninhabited).
* Plant native plants in my garden: I already Apple tree... actually thinking about it, not much else
* Sign up to a renewable energy provider: I already from Ecotricity
* Insulate my home effectively: Not yet Don't have a roof, but have been meaning to get that shiny stuff to put behind the radiators for ages
* Join a car club or car share: Not yet
* Take a 'no flying' holiday this year: I already Brecon Beacons here I come!
* Use a home composter for my garden and kitchen waste: I already in a wormery I designed which houses worms from my Mum's compost heap
* Encourage my school or work place to set up a recycling scheme: Not yet Not officially! I take home all bits of cardboard and stuff from work to recycle at home.
* Have my water company install a water meter: Not yet I know I should, just one of those things that seems like a lot of hassle.... bad me
* Volunteer to make Wandsworth's waterways cleaner and more bio diverse places: Not yet but it sounds fun
* Use green cleaning products: I already
* Reduce my 'food miles' by buying seasonal fruit and vegetables produced in the UK whenever possible: Not yet I try to shop at our local greengrocers when I can. Plus he's cheaper than the supermarket
* Construct a pond to provide homes for water loving wildlife: Not yet Although mini-pond in bucket plans afoot.
* Use grey water to water my garden: Not yet Although a really good eco tip is to stand a bucket in the shower to catch the water while its warming up. Enough to water all my plants. I've stopped doing it, so now should start doing it again.

I'm afraid I've not made that many pledges, so as not to let myself down.

I think these are all really good ideas, but I think its still a bit depressing that I think these are important and helpful things to do, but their effect is so limited. You could do all of these things for a year and wipe out all the good with one Easyjet flight.

Not green, just rich

2007-07-24T14:55:00.000Z

Very interesting piece from George Monbiot in the Guardian, which expresses my uneasiness at the idea that buying green products can somehow solve the climate change crisis and my dislike of the new fascism of greenies over non-organic shopping choices.

He writes about a new organic bible by Sheherazade Goldsmith - married to the very rich environmentalist Zac – on how to "live within nature's limits".

“It's easy. Just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards.” A fellow commuter sums up to Monbiot the fundamental problem with this approach: "This is for people who don't work."

I think that consumers can reduce their impact on the planet by choosing wisely when they shop.

But how helpful is it to approach life with an all-pervasive eco-guilt when often the government doesn’t give us the tools to making green choices easy?

It is often easier and cheaper to make the choose grey, so it is disproportionately difficult for people with less money to be green. A trip to Somerset for two on a Friday night costs £100 return (if you don’t book in advance) but £40-60 by car. Flying to Europe is too easy and too cheap – we should take the train. A friend with a new baby told me that to buy a complete set of washable nappies costs £300, quite apart from the cost of washing etc.

It can also be difficult to determine which option is greener - especially given the lack of clear labelling on how much energy is used producing something - eg food miles are not obvious. Even then, the best option for the environment difficult to see. For example, when green beans are out of season, it is apparently better to buy beans shipped from Kenya than organic ones those grown in Europe, because the energy costs of hothousing the beans in Europe are so great.

I really resented the government pushing eco-guilt around five years or so ago when consumers were told they should “take responsibility” for recycling when services provided by local councils was so poor. “Taking responsibility” for me meant manically storing up any recyclables until I could borrow a car, or struggle with them on the bus. Now improvew local services – including advent of doorstep recycling - have made it much easier for consumers to take action. (Although there are problems with this approach – it is more energy intensive than separated-at-source recycling and results in lower quality product.)

I agree with Monbiot that we should buy less not just buy green and his conclusion: “Green consumerism is another form of atomisation - a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.”

Getting it on in your fishnets

2007-07-19T15:35:00.000Z

“You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your night dress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis”
Fluorescent Adolescent, The Arctic Monkeys

I really like these lyrics from the Arctics. But I can’t help thinking this is a really male view of sex, or at least quite a crude way of looking at what makes exciting sex. Come on boys, fishnets is a bit of a cliche. And sometimes niceness is not such a bad thing.

As an aside, Google’s ability to match adverts with internet user is just too shrewd, but not so this music lyrics site. It marries these lyrics with details of where young Arctics’ fans can buy and dispose of fluorescent lighting.

QUICK.SAND.

2007-07-19T15:30:00.001Z

I’m not usually a big fan of advertising, but I do like words. I love the expressiveness and humour of this ad from lastminute.com despite its brevity.

I enjoy my retreat into infantilism with Harry Potter...

2007-07-18T14:03:00.000Z

But I agree with Nicholas Lezard on the Guardian's site. The writing ain't much cop.

"A nine-year-old might feel quite pleased with the writing in the Harry Potter books. It's pretty embarrassing coming from an adult," says Lezard.

The books are really gripping, but why so long? When I got to number 4 (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) I thought this woman needs is a good editor. In the middle it meanders off into boring details about the kids' homework, chop it out I say.

I think JK Rowling has imagined all aspects of Harry's world so acutely she doesn't want to leave anything out. So someone else should do it for her. But I think the first books were so successful that her editors treated her with kid gloves for the latter books.

I applaud Lezard for taking an intelligent adult look at the Harry Potter books. Too many people have opinions about them without taking the time to read them.

For me, writing’s like falling asleep

2007-07-13T15:15:00.000Z

Writing is like falling asleep. Not so easy, it's like falling asleep, but in that if you can’t watch yourself, you can’t do it.

You get into bed and are looking forward to a nice sleep, and start gradually dozing off. But if you consciously realise you’re doing it – ah, sleep comes at last – bang! you’re awake.

I think writing is the same. If after spending a morning of scratching your head checking your emails and generally proscrastinating you give yourself a sideways glance and realise you're writing away happily, the moment goes and poof! you’re scratching your head and wondering how you can start again.

So don’t look at the first spark of inspiration in case you get too dazzled to carry on.

Good angel cyclists (letter to Time Out)

2007-05-09T08:59:00.001Z

I’m sure Michael Hodge’s Slice of Life last week (Time Out 1915) was calculated to get hundreds of letters from irate cyclists, but I’m going to ignore that fact and write anyway.

I think his column misses the point. Every day I see the vast majority of my cycling colleagues flouting the rules of the road, often creating dangerous situations because of their carelessness.

But a leaked Transport for London report two weeks ago (reported in The Times) came to the shocking conclusion that cyclists who stop at red lights are more likely to be killed on the road than those who don’t.

Many pedestrians put themselves and others into danger by dashing across the road in front of cars and stepping out when they aren’t looking. But when do you hear the whole class of pedestrians being vilified, except perhaps by Jeremy Clarkson?

Law abiding “good angel” cyclists don’t deserve death on the roads just because fellow cyclists don’t obey traffic signs.

Noisy neighbourhood

2007-05-04T14:25:00.000Z

I'm working at home this week and have discovered my upstairs neighbour vacuums her floor about three times a day, no exaggeration.

I do mine er... up to once a week. Am I a slob or is she crazy?

(She does have builders in at the moment, but even so is three times a day necesary?!)

The noise is, incidentally, more irritating than the screams of her month-old baby.

I won't even go into "tuneless whistling man" who lives over the fence or the icecream van that plays the Match of the Day theme tune. (Gah!)

On a more positive note, I'm rather proud to have discovered a blackbird using my garden as a foraging patch.

Funky Mary

2007-05-04T14:15:00.000Z

Her name was Mary Func, so she couldn’t help being known as Funky Mary. But she wasn’t funky in the least sense, which made it worse. And it wasn’t the sort of easy nickname people tossed around like Sharpie, Mikey or Red. It was just another needle to needle her with.

She had short brown hair and moony glasses, because one could never be pretty with a pair of specs. Her skirts stopped below the knee showing a short length of stout calf before the start of her socks which led to her flat shoes.

And anyway, as a surname Dysfunc would have been more appropriate.

Did I wrong Stephen Isserlis?

2007-04-30T13:21:00.000Z

Listening to Classic FM while working at home today, a Bach cello piece was played. It would normally have been delightful, but now filled me with a sense of shame.

It was played by Stephen Isserlis, who I saw perform at a concert more than 15 years ago. I was learning to play the cello and my music teacher had secured front row tickets for me and my family in the (er) renowned Dorking Halls.

But I was foolish, I was young, I was bored. I took to flicking through the programme during an Isserlis solo. He was scraping away just in front of us and (according to my Mum) glared at this impudent audience member affecting studious scrutiny of his biographical details, rather than sitting listening awe-struck. My Mum snatched away the programme and I waited for the dressing down later.

So now I can’t listen to Stephen Isserlis without a feeling I’ve let myself down, whereas really I was a bored teenager and he was the seasoned professional who must have played to tougher audiences than you find in the Dorking Halls!

Gah, European bureaucrats

2007-01-15T17:00:00.000Z

I’m not always in agreement with the ways of the United States. But what I do admire is what must be the greater openness of government agencies – in particular in comparison with lumbering, backward bureaucrats in the EU.

In the US, for example, there is far more public scrutiny of the process of approving new medicines than in the EU. Where there are tricky scientific issues at stake when the federal agency the FDA is considering approving a new drug it calls in the heavyweight experts – a different committee for every discipline. These experts – who are usually academic clinicians at the top of their fields – openly discuss the issues in a public meeting.

The meetings are public in the truest sense. Patients can stand up and say what a difference being on the product in a clinical trial has made to their lives. Or family members can express concern that the drug could have harmful effects on their relatives. The experts, meanwhile, bat scientific arguments back and forth and then decide on the balance of the evidence whether a drug is safe and effective.

Science is not all black and white, and there is often subtle weighing up of the pros and cons involved in approving a drug. Regulatory agencies must decide whether on the whole the drug’s benefits outweigh its risks.

But in Europe, things are done very differently. The European Medical Agency convenes a scientific advisory meeting to discuss each drug up for approval, sometimes also inviting in external experts. But this is behind closed doors and rather than the committee voting in favour of approval of a new therapy, it “issues a positive opinion”.

This bureaucratic mincing of language acts to obfuscate who is actually making a decision. Rather than allowing us to see that a committee of highly educated people teases out the good points and bad points of a potential medicine – taking into account their different areas of expertise, different particular schools of thought they have been brought up with, varying points of view that they have adopted over the years and perhaps personal prejudices and professional jealousies. “Issuing a positive opinion” removes this human element and makes us more reluctant to argue.

CLINICAL TRIALS

I think the best example of the difference in approaches is the way the agencies have responded to calls for greater public access to information on what clinical trials pharma companies are carrying out.

This has led in recent years to firms with studies running in the US pledging to register them on the US government website clinicaltrials.org. The site gives a snapshot of all the studies currently testing new asthma drugs or new typical of cardiovascular surgery, for instance.

But in the EU, it’s, surprise surprise, not that simple. While separate drug companies publish information on their websites, a pan-European website is only available to drug companies and other organisations running studies. And even they have to plough through a Machiavellian security system.

WHY?

Perhaps the EU fears making information on new drugs and trials available and opening the doors of its expert committees because of the possible misinterpretation of scientific argument…

But surely it is far better for all the arguments to be aired publicly in the first place, rather than leave the agency open to claims it overlooked, for instance, a key safety issue which rears its head in later years. The FDA is more transparent and allows the public and the media to see shades of grey.

When I contacted the European Medical Agency to ask whether I would be allowed access to the clinical trials database, I was told this was not allowed at present but there were exceptions which would make some data available in future.

“As these two derogations to the confidentiality of directive 2001/20/EC are still in the process of being implemented there is no current publicly accessible database at the EU level,” the agency continued with a brilliant example of the turgid bureaucratic language that makes it so difficult to get to the bottom of what’s going on. European bureaucrats should stop tying themselves up in linguistic knots and be as open as possible.

Levitating fluffy animals, well ladybirds

2006-12-11T17:08:00.000Z

Levitating animals seems a bit mean and pointless don't you think - especially for the fish which "did not fare as well, due to the inadequate water supply". But the YouTube video of the Nasa project is really pretty.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/061129_acoustic_levitation.html

Spray-on condoms

2006-12-06T09:21:00.000Z

German sex educators plan spray-on condom

Dec 01 (Reuters) - German sex educators plan to launch a spray-on condom tailor-made for all sizes.

Jan Vinzenz Krause from the Institute for Condom Consultancy, a Singen-based practice that offers advice on condom use, told Reuters on Thursday the product aimed to help people enjoy better and safer sex lives.

"We're trying to develop the perfect condom for men that's suited to every size of penis," he said. "We're very serious."

Krause's team (spraykondom.de) is developing a type of spray can into which the man inserts his penis first. At the push of a button it is then coated in a rubber condom.

"It works by spraying on latex from nozzles on all sides," he said. "We call it the '360 degree procedure' -- once round and from top to bottom. It's a bit like a car wash."

Krause said the plan is to make the product ready for use in about five seconds. He said it would function more effectively as a contraceptive because it would fit better and not slip.

However, before the new condom can be sold in shops, the firm must ensure that the latex is evenly spread when sprayed, as well as optimise the vulcanization process.

Krause hopes the high tech condom, which will be available in different strengths and colours, will on the market by 2008.

He said the spray can would likely cost some 20 euros ($26) as a one-off purchase. The latex cartridges -- sufficient for up to 20 applications -- would cost roughly 10 euros, he said.

Krause said he had hit upon the idea when considering the difficulties some people faced using condoms, and drew inspiration from spray-on plasters now used in medicine.

Publish Date: December 01, 2006

-----------------------------

how do men feel about this mini car wash?
mmmm, the Institute for Condom Consultancy sounds like a fun place to work.

Chronic Armpit Rash Source of George W. Bush Swagger

2006-12-05T15:46:00.000Z

This made me chuckle:

Avant News - armpit swagger

Using God to sell dubious health supplements

2006-12-04T15:59:00.000Z

"Choosing a biblical lifestyle that emphasizes God-made, natural fruits, vegetables and whole grains as well as healthy habits and exercise will help you achieve a healthy body weight. But sometimes, that is not enough."

"At FaithMeds.com you will find biblically based answers to your health questions."

FaithMeds.com

Encouraging thought from Steinbeck

2006-10-25T11:15:00.000Z

"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."

(Rockpooling in Log from the Sea of Cortez)

Open plan offices: a more friendly environment?

2006-10-24T09:35:00.000Z

Why do we assume that open plan offices foster more friendliness and openness just because they are laid out like that? In fact I think that open plan offices are more likely to encourage the opposite behaviour because they allow people to hide in anonymity.

If you work in a small office, and your fellow colleagues give a cheery "hello" in the mornings, it is just downright unfriendly if you do not acknowledge them and wish them a "good morning" too. But the scale of open-plan offices is such that people can just keep their heads down and not reply.

Not having barriers is artificial because one cannot have a conversation without everyone, however unintentionally, listening in. Later on, when the subject is brought up again, for the sake of politeness you must pretend not to have heard already and greet the news with fresh interest.

Sad for the lost railings

2006-10-06T23:21:00.000Z

As I walk to work I pass many house flanked by walls pitted by sad little dimples, a reminder of iron railings salvaged during the Second World War and largely never replaced.

The thing is I always wonder quite how this salvage was carried out. Was it a compulsory thing with a glorified rag & bone man from the home guard clearing a whole street of its railings at once? Did people object? Was it a more voluntary thing where you would donate your railings to the war effort? Would neighbours frown if you were sentimentally attached to your railings? Would they excuse you if a couple of your sons were off fighting the war?

Some of the surviving railings near where I live are fantastic. It makes me sad that there are so few Victorian railings left, especially as it appears that a huge number were never used and just went to waste. Although its true to say that the dimples that remain are a reminder of the history of the war effort and that remarkable collective sacrifice that we can't imagine today.

Links
BBC war memories archive Brief remark on this site suggests that the railings were collected in an organised way.
Some old duffer who sensibly hid his gates down a well

A modern tragedy

2006-10-06T22:54:00.000Z

A week ago last Wednesday I came across a colleague in need of comfort. She'd had her bag nicked the previous weekend, losing her Oyster card and boyfriend's iPod. She was clearly very upset and I tried to reach out to her but she flinched in a "No, its too raw, please don't be nice to me" kind of way. "At least no-one got hurt," I said, deferring to a comfortable platitude. She shrugged, as if the damage had been at least that bad. She was wearing black.

This Wednesday I saw the boyfriend who also bemoaned the loss of the aforementionned iPod. "I'd always been really careful with it. I've had friends go through three or four iPods over that time, but not me. It was one of the first models, I got it before they were so popular. It [significant pause] could have been a collector's item [gulp]."

Its horrible having your bag nicked - granted - but while I was genuinely sympathetic during my encounters with the bereft couple but afterwards I found myself getting more and more indignant. More than a week in bereavement over an MP3 player! Its easy when you're feeling a bit self-righteous to counter this suburban overeaction with genuine day to day tradegies you've seen and experienced - death and illness, relationship break downs, unhappiness, depression - but honestly, get over it. Only having your stuff robbed once in five years of London life seems like a pretty good record.

As for the holy grail of having a genuine "collector's item", give me a break. Consumerism transformed with a higher purpose. That said, I've got a rare red vinyl 7" of Get Ready by the band Ash that I would part with at the right price. Anyone?

Idle thoughts and white noise of the brain

2006-10-06T22:25:00.000Z

My brain throws me random images from time to time. By random images I mean a perfect picture of some scene or other I've encountered at some point. Never very exciting they range from the high street in Abagavenny to my mate's road in Crowthorne, Berkshire. Its like a polaroid of an instant. One is the back garden of a house in North Wales where I stayed when I was little. Its just after the rain, droplets running off the green green plants, snails and fat orange-fringed slugs are creeping across the steep steps, which are made of earth held in place by planks. The memory of the smell of wet earth and smoke from coal fires accompanies this one. I can feel the drops of rain brush off on my face and clothes as I walk past the shrubs.

There's no real narrative, these scenes are a glance through a window or the flash of an instant. None of the "scenes" hold any particular significance, but are coupled with a mundane activity like washing up or sharpening a pencil. They are on the periphery of my conciousnes and I hardly notice them. But sometimes I'm struck by the weirdness of this funny brain filing. Does this happen to everyone?

Slightly more concious, but also a consequence of this white noise of the brain are recurring obsessions which absorb me on the way to work, but then evaporate. I idly obsess about all the iron railings that were taken down and melted during the second World War, more of which later. But my top idle obsession of the moment relates to the poster for the new Merrill Streep film, "The Devil Wears Prada". It features a picture of a high heeled shoe, with the heel substituted for a diabolical trident. But I can't help looking at the ad, from the bus or wherever, and consider the praticaticalities of wearing such a shoe. It really bothers me.

The little tridents would mean you'd get stuck in the mud and have to walk around with grassy clods stuck to the bottom of each heel. But more troubling, the tridents couldn't bear the weight and would snap off! Its wrong and makes me feel itchy.

Once again I'm startled at the genius of Dickens

2006-10-06T22:23:00.000Z

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously."

The first paragraph of David Copperfield

In my humble opinion...

2006-09-05T21:43:00.000Z

...this is brilliant

http://www.myspace.com/thestreets

The Streets - Prangin' Out
(feat. Pete Doherty)

Some quotes from Catch-22

2006-08-23T22:52:00.000Z

"Yossarian longed to sit on the floor in a huddled ball right on top of the escape hatch right inside a sheltering igloo of extra flak suits ... That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddamn cantilevered goldfish in some goddamn cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddamn foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire."

"In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human buliding rocking perilously on the brink of collapse." re Hungry Joe

"The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as ... the frog?"

"Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt..."

Anyone for a cup of tea?

2006-08-15T21:38:00.000Z

I have a primal need to put the kettle on everytime I get in through my front door.

It doesn't matter if I fancy a cup of tea or not, though usually I do, but I always go to the kitchen first, fill up my lovely shiny kettle, and light the hob. The kettle has a whistle and the interval before it whistles lets me go to the loo, look at my plants and wind down. When it has done its magic and whistled, I'm properly home. It marks the line between the outside world and my little domestic zone.

My kettle obsession is largely unshakeable even if I actually want a cold drink or a glass of wine. Once the kettle has whistled - like a hypnotist bringing me out of a trance - I am capable of judging whether I do want a cup of tea, which luckily, as I've already said, I generally do. I don't like needlessly wasting energy, but its like its not me doing it!

I'm sure its my inner cave woman speaking. May be there some ancient cerebral link between the kettle and the hearth or the fire in the middle of the cave. Its my little wifey bit in my character, which doesn't generally respond well to things like ironing, vaccuming and dusting.

I always turn to tea in a crisis. Its the least or the most I can do.

The day we told our neighbours we had to demolish half their house

2006-08-15T21:17:00.001Z

So we're sitting there sharing a cup of tea and a chocolate chip biscuit with our upstairs neighbours and every minute the conversation is edging towards the inevitable.

"So how bad is it? What will you need to do to repair it?"

The "it", of course, is.... the blot, the £20,000 question, the end of the house of which we do not speak, the room behind the door which is shut where we keep boxes of rubbish CDs, old letters and lots and lots of guitars (don't ask). It is the small question of the far end of our home sliding millimetre by millimetre into the latent floodplain of the Thames. We are sinking. And no-one thought to tell us before we bought it.

"Well," says my Dad expansively, "one of the things they might try is to prop it up."

"And what would that involve? How would they do that" says our neighbour slowly, he's grasping towards it, the cat is sharpening its nails and getting bored of its brown paper prison....

"Oh well," says Dad, adding comfortingly skating over the real issue with technical phrases such as "steel joist" and "RSJ".

Tom and I are desperately trying to maintain a serious, graven expression of concern as if it's all news to us too.

Then suddenly, without warning, its out! "Worst case scenario is that all this has got to come down," Dad says, standing on the balcony gesturing at the floor and the kitchen. His hands gesture the wall of their house away, he sweeps aside the roof and we're all standing on the ground floor surrounded by rubble.

I'm biting my lip, you've got to laugh really... haven't you? "I wanted a new kitchen anyway," says Gillie (or Ginny, after a year we're not sure), laughing to make us all feel better about it. But Anthony (previously Patrick) looks white, showing no trace of amusement.

And then we're off, thanking them for the evening, like we've all had a jolly time and they're not going to dream of demolishing balls and dust and destruction of their lovely home. I feel wretched about it, but the moggie is well and truly out of the bag.

A man who went a very long way to prove a point

2006-08-03T08:48:00.000Z

New Scientist press release

02 August 2006 The man who was both alive and dead under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT

TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.

Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see “Ahead of his time”, below), suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.

The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.

Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.

Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (www. arxiv.org/physics/0605001). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.

“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”

“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”

But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”

Author: Zeeya Merali.

Can my ipod read my mind?

2006-08-01T08:42:00.000Z

Walking to work today I lazily left my listening choice to "shuffle" on my ipod, wondering what it would come up with to suit my gloomy mood and the overcast day. I was left, not for the first time, thinking the thing could read my mind. I'll think you'll agree this is the ideal gloomtastic playlist for a grey Tuesday.

"Fell on Black Days" Soundgarden,
"I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine" Beth Orton
"Time Has Told Me" Nick Drake
"Fake Plastic Trees" Radiohead (I had to skip this one it was too much)
"Panic" The Smiths
"In Bloom" Nirvana
"Something in my eye" Ed Harcourt
"Season" Ash (Nothing like their typical poppy fare)
"Fruit Tree" Nick Drake (I mean, Nick Drake twice, there must be something going on)

Names of characters for books not yet written

2006-07-25T21:11:00.000Z

Shady Fishbane - a hard-bitten New York detective, who is in with the criminals as well as the goodies, and has to tackle his own dodgy past to solve the crime

Parvin Zolf - a friendly, colourful, space-travelling alien for a kids book

Toon Wilderbeek - probably a cartoon cowboy, but may be I just think that because of the "toon" and "wild" bits

Halgabron - probably the oldest of these names floating around my head. Halgabron is a beefy, Barbarian-type, man of the woods. I think Halgabron is the ideal man for a choose-your-own-adventure triology. He doesn’t need a surname or a first name, he’s heroic enough already. Although perhaps in the final chapter when his true identity as a lost prince or heir to the wealthy laird comes out, his proper name can be revealed (and go on for two pages).

Or perhaps Halgabron is a place where people live, a dark hamlet. It’s a wooded place on a nastily steep slope. Everything seems normal at first…

Halgabron comes from the name of a house near my parents. But I think “Halgabron” has a life of its own and it’s a shame to leave it in metal letters painted white on the gate of a surburban house with shingle drive. Appears to be the name of somewhere in Cornwall near Tintagel, but I think its bigger than that too.

Shifting picture

2006-07-25T19:37:00.000Z

I keep thinking of the future, but the future is shifting.

In Back to the Future, Michael J Fox’s character has a picture which alters as he tinkers with the past, making the future less and less certain. His brother and sister disappear from the photo because it looks increasingly likely that their parents will never meet, fall in love and have children.

I have my own version of the photo in my head, but it shifts constantly. Sometimes I see a family photo with curly haired children and a doting, slap-stick father. Other times it’s me alone, probably fairly happy with lots of friends and interests, but with a job not a family. In the first I’m fat and baking cakes. Surely my cheeks will never look that ruddy? In the second I’m thin, surrounded by books, and, although you can’t tell from the photo, probably listening to opera. My greying hair is swept back into a severe bun, but is set off nicely by my black dress. Like Marty’s photo, as things shift – lonely spinster to family matriarch – things fade in and out of the scene. Possibilities and impossibilities swill around like clothes in a washing machine.

Usually the future is a half-done sketch. Places, circumstances are still to be sketched in, but the bare bones are there. It’s not even a work in progress, but a doodle on the back of a gas bill tucked in between the books on the shelves. In time I’ll find it and think it was strange I ever thought the future would turn out that way, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it in the present.

But now I am like an irritable painter with the easel set up, the light in the attic room just right, my pens and pencils set out before me, the floor is neat and tidy and there’s no more procrastinating to do… but the inspiration is nowhere. I keep starting something and tearing it up again. I need to get it get it right. I can’t just put it away and forget about it.

In Back to the Future, of course, Marty gets his parents to fall in love, saves the day, and his siblings reappear in the photo. I’m not sure what’s going to set in mine yet.

metamorphosis

2006-07-18T22:02:00.000Z

The Tadpole by E E Gould

Underneath the water weeds
Small and black, I wiggle,
And life is most suprising!
Wiggle! waggle! wiggle!

There's every now and then a most
Exciting change in me,
I wonder, wiggle! waggle!
What I shall turn out to be!

Heavyweight postmodernists face off

2006-07-11T14:57:00.000Z

I don't know very much about either Italo Calvino or Paul Auster, and although I (so far) like Calvino - I think his dissection of the process of writing and reading insightful yet funny - and I (so far) don't like Paul Auster - he is cruel, in New York Triology the readers and characters are pawns in an apparently meaningless game for Auster's pleasure alone, I think they have quite a lot of similarities.

In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Calvino imagines two writers obsessively watching the other while they write; and a third author frozen in writer's block because he can only think of a reader reading the perfect book he hasn't written. In Auster's Ghost Story in the triology, an author can only write when being watched by a character whose only purpose is to watch him.

So I was surprised to read Auster dismissing Calvino out of hand in this interview

(http://www.bluecricket.com/auster/links/secret.html).

Interviewer: Have you read Italo Calvino
Auster: A couple of books. I'm not a big fan ... I get bored with it.

Beware the adaptationist paradigm

2006-06-29T18:47:00.000Z

The theory of evolution is one of my favourite things in the world. When scientists talk of an “elegant” theory, this is what they mean. People who deny evolution on religious ground without understanding it make me cross.

Evolution is not a belief, evolution is.

Part of the problem is that too many people don’t understand evolution – it doesn’t happen by chance, although variation, which itself is partly random, is a central part of how evolution works.

However, it is too easy to view everything as an evolved adaptation as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote in their seminal 1979 paper “The Spandrels of San Marco” (http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2004s/ees227/01/spandrels.html).

They called for a pluralistic view of evolutionary biology rather than for organisms to be broken down in constituents parts, like a box full of lego that was once a pirate ship. Although they were writing 27 years ago, I think their comments still have relevance. It may be easy to come up with an adaptive hypothesis without fully considering the alternatives.

They wrote that not every body part, for instance, has arisen for an adaptive reason, partly because the body evolved not discretely but as a whole, but this doesn’t mean that the particular body part has no role. In the sphere of architecture they point out that in St Mark’s cathedral in Venice one might assume that the richly decorated “spandrels” below the dome were designed as upside-down triangles on purpose. The fact is, they are actually holding up the dome! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel)

“One must not confuse the fact that a structure is used in some way … with the primary evolutionary reason for its existence and conformation.”

Further, using adaptations as an explanation appeals to the human mind, because we like stories. But telling stories is not scientific and a new explanation can always be invented if an old one turns out to be unsatisifcatory. “Since the range of adaptive stories is as wide as our minds are fertile, new stories can always be postulated.”

“Often, evolutionists use consistency with natural selection as the sole criterion and consider their work done when they concoct a plausible story... The key to historical research lies in devising criteria to identify proper explanations among the substantial set of plausible pathways to any modern result.” They called for a more holistic approach which “could put organisms, with all their recalcitrant yet intelligible complexity, back into evolutionary theory”.

Living language

2006-06-27T18:41:00.000Z

“Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies … then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain…”

From “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Italo Calvino

2006-05-10T17:37:00.000Z

hairy legs, men don't know

2006-05-10T17:22:00.000Z

This is something that has been really bugging me for a while. People [men] who say that the hair on women's legs can't physically grow thicker after shaving because it's dead cells.

Well I disagree, but please don't imagine my legs.

Surely as hair is rooted in a living cell it can respond to external stimuli? Anorexic girls are known to grow more hairy which is partly the body's response to getting colder after losing body fat (although maybe this is also a response to altered hormone levels). Surely it you chop off a hair at the root the cell the hair comes from can sense this through the reduced amount of pressure on this, and come back thicker to try and counteract this in future...

I admit my eureka moment needs a little more work, but surely, is this not at least possible?

top ten views in the UK

2006-05-10T17:03:00.000Z

In Japan I visited the "third best view in Japan" which is Miyajima, a bright red torrey gate to a shinto shrine set in the sea near Hiroshima. Japanese sightseeing was a bit like that. "I went to see an amazing castle at the weekend, but shame it didn't make the top three." "Did you like the nightingale floor in Nijo Jo?" "Not as good as the secret passages in Matsumoto, mate."

But who thinks that in England? I went to Hever Castle, but I wish it had been Hampton Court. I climbed up Pen-y-fan but I reckon Cader Idris has a better view....

So what are the top ten views/vistas in the UK & Ireland? Here are some suggestions: the Giant's Causeway (N Ireland), a white horse in Wiltshire (which one?), view from Parliament Hill/Primose Hill across London, the white cliffs of Dover/Purbeck, Stonehenge, Avebury stone circle, Tintern Abbey, Big Ben/Westminster, Fort William/Loch Lomond, St Paul's Cathedral (from the millenium bridge), Battersea Power Station (well I can see it from my flat), Hay Tor Dartmoor, Loch Nevis/Glen Nevis & Glenfinnan viaduct (featured in the Harry Potter films), Arthur's set in Edinburgh, all of the Lake District, Clifton suspension bridge (for industrial chique). And probably some really obvious ones I missed.

That's more than ten, and not many are suited to the pre-requisite of Japanese tourism - one perfect and easily reachable viewing spot with photographer. You may as well superimpose yourself on a postcard.

quietly breathing

2006-05-10T16:57:00.000Z

Quietly breathing. Sung in an erotically charged with faux threatening tone by indie limp boys Menswear. That's not really the image I'm thinking, more toddling on, just breathing. That's it for now.