Ripple

I think of our lives as ripples spreading out as we pass briefly through this world - interacting with other ripples, for better or worse. As the ripples spread long after we have dropped beneath the surface, we should strive to send out positive energy, love, humanity.

Black, White and Grey...

Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene", has been presenting a series on BBC TV about "The Genius of Charles Darwin". He also wrote "The God Delusion" and is always being trotted out to give the counter argument to the religious viewpoint.

Darwin is one of Dawkins' heroes and both of them have had their work twisted  to mean something they did not intend.  The Eugenics movement  which reached its acme in the Nazi's "final solution",  mistakenly understood Darwin to be saying that survival of the fittest justified the weeding out of the "inferior" by the  self-proclaimed  "strong".

Dawkins work has similarly led to an idea for which he is accused of encouraging known as "Veneer theory". This says that civilisation is a thin veneer and when stripped away, humankind is revealed to be a nasty piece of work. Regular readers of these pages will know that I subscribe to a similar sounding view - namely that we have as yet uncharted instincts beneath  our civilised layer, our learnt culture, and that if we don't delve into how these underlying forces affect and poke through our civilised layer and how our culture can indeed be stripped away to an extent, then we fail to know ourselves adequately.

Here's my point, this is a question of degree, of grey areas rather than black and white positions. Veneer theory sees us as essentially bad with a veneer of good  where I see our very nature to include our cultural layer and the interplay between it and our older, deeper instincts to be a variable which we must try to understand.

I was listening to an account of how the two candidates for the American Presidency were being grilled by a leading churchman on their moral positions and of course - where do they stand on Abortion. They responded predictably by espousing Pro-life (McCain) and Pro-Choice (Obama) and here too it has to be black or white (no humour intended). I don't like abortion and know the strong price it exacts on those who have one and being a man am thankful not to have had to make that choice. I believe that the possibility of choosing abortion has resulted in a laxness in responsible contraception but I would not like to tell the victim of rape that she should not have the choice to terminate or that someone with a medical condition who risks their own life should have to do so.

To be "Liberal" is often to be accused of being "wishy-washy" - to fail to be decisively black or white in one's views! Why must it be all or nothing? Can we not cope with the subtleties of grey areas, the dificulty of weighing up dificult issues and finding creative, balanced solutions that cover a variety of situations...

posted by: Frewin at 06:26 | link | comments (3) |
instinct v culture, ballance

The Lttle People need YOU!

Even if computers are only a means to an end (after all you're reading this on one) this concerns you one way or another...

I am insensed after reading an article in the Sunday Times about how two big businesses - Microsoft and Intel, tried to kill off a project to bring $100 computers to millions of children in the developing world.

Why do I even mention the names of these reprobates except that I hope their marketing departments pick up this message and take note. I hope that you will all pass on the message in some way and consider your options next time you buy a computer...

In a nutshell - one Nicholas Negroponte decided that connecting children in the developing world to each other and to the World Wide Web would be of enormous educational and developmental value.

He designed a computer which is Solid-state Memory, no moving parts, Solar Powered - even the keyboard is a touch screeen and both it and the screen can be read easily in all light. Never mind the children -I want one! If ten children are in a room, the XO as it is now called, will create its own wireless networkand if available will "mesh" with the WWW and other XO users thereon.

Intel were invited to supply a cheap chip but prevaricated until, too late, they discovered that AMD had not ignored their request and had pipped them to the post. They have gone to extraordinary lengths to wriggle out of this stupidity and tried to discredit the project.

Windows too were aghast that the XO was designed to run on OpenSource software ( a version of LINUIX) and after trying also to squash the project - eventually agreed to supply Windows for just $3!!!!! You might like to think about this when you buy a new computer which has been forced to buy Windows at a high price. And too, you might reflect on how computers never come down in price and are stuffed with more and more stuff you may not need. The XO rethinks computer design from the ground up and it still comes up cheap or rather it therefore comes up cheap!

Aside from being ripped off by the computer industry, why should you care about the XO's fate?

Going back to the original idea of Negroponti - being connected to the WWW is not a trivial thing for children of the Developing World. It will not be mainly about Facebook, Java Games, or Celebrity Spotting though it may also be about these things too. No, knowledge is power and the WWW is first and foremost a source of data and information and ideas. Providing that the WWW is unfettered (and we see in China that it is difficult to keep a lid on it forever) then access to the treasures of the WWW leads to empowerment - if the book is mightier than the sword then the WWW is the ultimate weapon for education and development. For people who don't have much, it opens their eyes and minds to new worlds - to the whole world - it offers the keys to the kingdom...

posted by: Frewin at 13:14 | link | comments (2) |
a better computer

Wood for the trees...

In my last post, I referred to Metadata, in particular the song information which is downloaded from the Gracenote website by iPods and the like. Another vast amount of metadata nestling in the innards of your computer (if you have a digital camera), is the information about the camera settings for every picture you have taken. Of course, if photography is your hobby or profession, you will have accessed this data and made use of it, but for most people, metadata is part of the vast amount of information to which they have access to but don't know what to do with, or even that it exists and wouldn't want to know about anyway! Nevertheless, having been created by your act of photography, it sits there anyway, oblivious to whether you will ever use it - a collection of digital 0's and 1's imprinted on your hardchip.  No wonder that Theodore Zeldin in his An Intimate History of Humanity suggests that one of the great problems of our age is a surfeit of information and knowing what to do with it all.

Incidentally, once you have a digital camera and the cost of film and development are no longer issues, how quickly you accumulate pictures. Especially if like me, you promise yourself you will use this or that collection of images for a "project". You will improve this or that image in PhotoShop "when" you have time! The old problem of accumulating albums that you will rarely if ever look at is compounded and you still have to organise your shots into albums in the first place...

When I asked my father once, what was the most amazing change in the course of his lifetime, he said that when he was a boy, his family took a crystal radio set on holiday with them and the first thing they would do is et it up with its 100 foot copper aerial and earphones to listen to the BBC Home service. By the 60's, he said, we put men on the moon and bounced a message carrying laser beam off a mirror just a few inches across that they placed there.

For me, I think the great change would have to be the information revolution brought about by computers and the development of computers themselves. When I was at school in the early 70's, there were no personal computers and even in Oxford University, only a few mainframes. Yet our school thought it worthwile to run a course on computing for us that introduced us to the basics of logical queries, programme routinesand sub-routines. To this day, the grounding I got on that course stands me in good stead - more power to those teachers for their leap of faith into unknown territory.

I went on to study Geography at university where still I had no access to computing. Nowadays Geography is riven through with computing - map-making, statistical analysis, mash-ups of data. Let me give you an example. It has been calculated how much global warming resulted from the collision of the Indian sub-continent with Asia which resulted in the thrusting up of the Himalayas. How was this done? well newly upthrust mountains are subjected to rapid erosion and much of the rock eroded was limestone whose chemical dissolution releases carbo dioxide - but how could they calculate the amount? Well, the limestone contained a particular isotope which can be detected in the sediments in the Indian Ocean - measure the isotopes in sediment cores, extrapolate the amount of limestone sediment and you can calculate the carbon dioxide and thus the global warming. Could it have been done without computers - not likely!

So there is much good and vital stuff that contributes greatly to our knowledge of the world and our place in it and data that people are only beginning to think of ways to use and combine. And then there is us scribblers in cyberspace, weaving our fragile nets of sociability, spreading our memes, devloping our understandings, making friends, voicing our angst and our triumphs - where will all these 0's and 1's go in the end...

 

posted by: Frewin at 13:15 | link | comments (3) |
too much information

iPod musings

I love my iPod!

It's not just the music it contains which continues to evolve into a near perfect mix of my eclectic musical tastes, but I love it for sentimental reasons and for the aesthetics of this seductive little toy!

Dealing with the last first, the iPod Mini is not the most popular iPod - it was soon superceded by slimmer, lighter versons - even if their screens did break when you sat down with them in your pocket... No, the Mini is as heavy as an old mobile phone but its smooth curved form is much more satisfying to feel in the palm of your hand than its anorexic successors.

The sentimental reason is that my electric blue iPod Mini was a generous parting gift from my fellow staff at Sligo Institute of Technology and it brings me fond memories of my days there - thank you all! They, like the students, had picked up on my not so secret love of gadgets or rather of small worlds, compendious pocket tool kits, bottle gardens and the like. My iPod is a whole world of music.

Which brings me to the meat of my post. I remember reading a newspaper article about what the iPod would do to music - long before I owned one myself. People would cherry-pick their favourite album tracks - consigning them to "infernal playlists" and listening to whole albums would be a thing of the past. This was just another attack on proper listening - like Classic FM Stations which plays movements from symphonies but not the whole thing. Now I agree with the music Professor at my university - one Ivor Keys, I kid you not - that "a symphony is a journey from darkness into light" so playing just one better known movement for a symphony is like having half a map of a journey, but as to the rest of this article, I beg to differ.

It was a long time before I created any playlists on my iPod and then it was only because I wanted to burn some music to CDs. No, the thing I cherish about my iPod, is that by Shuffling all the tracks available, you get to listen to ALL your albums - eventually! If there was any change I would make to the design (are you listening Apple?) - it would be a button that took you from Shuffle to Album Play when you hit upon a track from an album you hadn't heard for a while.

With 1000 songs capacity, I didn't believe I would fill my iPod straightaway - how wrong I was and so I did have to make choices straight away and as time goes on, I confess that parts of albums have had to go to make way for new material. Call that cherry-picking if you like - I prefer to look on it as distillation and the result is that the number of items in all categories has increased Composers, Albums etc.  So finally a thought on Metadata - an example of which is the track information which your iPod downloads if you are connected to the internet. From this, I learn that whilst under Artists, I have not a single song vocalised by Bob Dylan, I have no less than 52 cover versions as accessed by Composers! Amazing!

I love my iPod!

posted by: Frewin at 13:19 | link | comments (2) |
ipod

Human Traces

A few weeks ago, I fulfilled a promise to invite the widow of the upholsterer whose workshop it was that we now live in as a house. The estate agent (realtor), had said that she wanted to see the house when it was finished and popping in to invite the estate agent to come and have a look at the finished conversion, she told me that the widow, Mrs K., was selling her house in a nearby village so imagining that she would be moving away antime soon, I called to invite her round as promised. In fact she had already gone to live in Spain ages ago where she has been joined for the last few months by her son who also hopes to make a life there whilst his sister has been renting the family home till it sells (which is looking less and less likely in the current market). However, as luck would have it, the mother and son had just returned that very evening for a short visit and as we were off camping for a week the next day, Mrs K. and her son and daughter all agreed to come round immediately to see the house.

Well it was a very moving experience. Mr K. was only 50 something but had had a lot of health problems including his heart and this had led to what is now an early death. What we hadn't realised was what a centre of family activity the workshop had been. Mrs K. had also run a Dried Flower business from the extension so the children had spent many happy hours here as they grew up. On the great beam of the roof truss upstairs, there are two six inch nails which for some reason or rather irrationality, I had always been loath to attempt to pull out and as they are high enough not ot be a bother, I left them as a trace of the buildings past. There were many nails and hooks along the beam when we came, some still with bunches of upholsterers thread as well as children's drawings but the two nails, it turns out, were where Mr K. had hung a swing for the children and their continued presence brought tears to the daughter's eyes.

The son answered some questions that we had long wondered about. The building was originally a stable with the upstairs as a hay loft and we had heard rumours that it was variously the stable for the mill owner from the vanished mill that was adjacent here or that it belonged to a brewery but I had not heard of a local brewery. It turns out to have been a distribution point for Fentiman's "Botanically Brewed" soft drinks - a brand which is still going today in whole-food shops and delicatessens. The K's in their turn had found traces of this business tucked away in corners of what had been since 1921, a joinery workshop. There were big flagons of ingredients such as sarsparilla and ginger extract and they said that they would bring one round. They shed light on the earthquake story - there is a subsidence between the two front doors and we had been told that an earthquake had happened soon after the building was built and that houses two streets away show a similar fault line. This is as maybe, but the K's experinced an earthquake here when they were building the extension some twenty to twenty five years ago - there was a loud noise and Mrs K. who was downstairs thought that Mr K. and the workmen who were who were on the roof, had dropped something. Certainly there is no recent movement as the doors which had had to be specially tailored to the distorted openings, were not binding however it is as well to know that the fault is more recent or active than we thought.

But the real message of the K's visit was that this building was more than a workshop, it was a home from home for a family and invested with many happy memories. It was important for the family to get some closure by seeing the place again and painful though it was, to reconnect with the memories and it turned out to be much more important than we would have imagined to receive some sense of the continuity with the past of this place which for us too, was a moving experience.

I find myself moved to tears more and more often by the ephemeral nature of human life  and the things we do to counter that briefness - I guess I am the age where intimations of mortality start to become more real. The friendships we build and treasure (watching Sex and the City had me moist eyed!), the memorials we make to people long dead, dramas about William Wilberforce or the tombstones we carve for our Dear Departed. And there is a growing consensus that though life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the cosmos - with trillions of stars we simply can't be the only ones - yet the distances in space but also in time (we have been around only for a cosmic blink) mean that the chances of connection are slim. If by chance some aliens ever swing by the Earth, we may be long gone, swept away by global warming, mega volcano or crashing asteroid and nobody will ever know the lives we lead, the things we saw, the knowledge we figured out, the love lights we lit in our small dark corner of the universe.

posted by: Frewin at 07:41 | link | comments (10) |
friendship, baby teeth marks for posterity, eternal memorials, lachrymae, closure

The Handover - 30 second story

The young blonde woman in the cheap dark suit of an office worker is hurrying down the hill - is it catching a bus that gives her urgency?

Two car lengths up the hill I pass a middle aged woman with a baby clasped to her shoulder and she too is moving briskly but in the opposite direction.

The baby is peering down the hill over the shoulder, pointing arm outstretched, hand clutching air. Though clearly at ease with the woman carrying him swiftly towards an open cottage door, the baby's expression shows both slight puzzlement and worry. If he could speak into the ear beside him he would say "That's my Mummy, why is she going away?"

posted by: Frewin at 13:13 | link | comments (3) |

More English heritage

More pictures from the Skipton Waterways Festival 2008.

posted by: Frewin at 13:18 | link | comments (5) |

Identity, Style and Carnal Knowledge

Have you ever wondered as you see a young (or old) person decked out as a Goth or some skinny Lothario in regulation Rock and Roll drainpipe jeans (black of course) and black T-shirt with shades and pony-tail, just what made them adopt that particular style?

When you come down to it, there are only a finite number of styles to choose from (although that gives plenty of scope) and it seems to me that any "new" styles turn out, upon scrutiny, to be slight variations on past styles. Dandy, Punk, Grunge, Deb, Laura Ashley, Teddy Boy, you name it, they all borrow from past styles or appropriate elements of other looks, the S & M bondage elements in Punk, the Edwardian long jackets of the Teddy Boys (Teddy/Edward) and so on.

Can you escape the confines of style by say dressing eclectically - nah!!! that's just another style! So we all pick some look as we grow up, some uniform by which we want to be recognised. Its all about identity and Style is the skin we can choose for ourselves. A skin we can slough off at weekends and choose an alternative identity, Casual, Clubber, Sportsman, DIYer, Dominatrix, Slave, and there are degrees and wrinkles and a new version of the same style offers the promise of a refreshed or madeover identity hence Retail Therapy.

But to come back to my original question, when a person f tender years first begins to choose their own style as opposed to wearing what their mother bought them, how do they make that choice? How do they know the associations that go with a style? is it idol emanation, well researched choice or blindly following fashion as it spins around the same old circuits?

An old hobby horse of mine is that unlike most animals, the human male gets the drabber choices in clothes and that goes for style too, there have been far fewer ages when mens fashion has been exuberent and colourful - so our choices are limited and thus easier.

How deep does style go? Can we really infer anything meaningful about someone because they dress like a Goth or is it all teenage angst and fury signifying  not a lot as they get older?

I have a similar questin around sex. Does Carnal Knowledge really let you know someone better? Of course when we see someone Hot, we may wonder what they might be like in bed - will they be as hot as they look or might they be diasppointing, selfish or lazy lovers whilst the plainer less prepossessing partner might prove adventurous, generous or downright kinky! Curiosity has killed many a cat I am sure.

The dear friend who first brought me to this site (never a lover), said that sex in England (she is Brasilian) was weird, like jumping over a wall, one minute you are talking to someone at a party, next miute in bed. In Brasil, by contrast, if you fancied someone in your group, you might flirt by siitting on everybody's knee except his! You might hold hands as mere friends do, things would evolve. having jumped over the wall with an Englishman, you never knew what you would find either.

So are we all much more similar than different in the sack? If you were a fly on the bedroom wall of your next door neighbour, would you soon be bored by the essential similarities? Does it matter that we dont have Carnal Knowledge of very many people around us, does it really complete our essential knowledge of a person or is it as superficial as the fashion style they might chose to project?

Answers in a comment box below please...

posted by: Frewin at 17:58 | link | comments (1) |
style, friendship, carnal knowledge

Strange English ways..

A group of Morris Dancers called "The Powder-Kegs". Their rag adorned costumes symblise the strips of rag that farm workers used to line their coats with to keep warm and the blacked out faces were to prevent their landlords from identifying them in their "illegal" dancing activities and throwing them out.
File under English culture...

posted by: Frewin at 09:23 | link | comments |

The answer to better learning?

This story is a fascinating account of a man who just may have cracked the mystery of how to learn things and not forget them again! It is also a well written tale of the people and endeavours behind the science of remembering - a tale of heroic feats of memory testing and of the frustration of having onres work ignored. So if you want to remember better...

posted by: Frewin at 06:02 | link | comments (5) |
remembering

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