2008 to be quite a ride
Travelling by car back from relatives yesterday, a woman’s voice, inside a box as small as my hand, knew exactly where we were at all times, and gave my mother detailed directions at every turn.
Earlier this year, a multinational corporation simulated a brain the size of a mouse’s on a supercomputer. This almost interactive simulation will help people learn more about the function of our own cerebral cortex, and hence how our minds work. They are moving on to a rat’s cortex, which is three times larger.
For a Christmas present, and on a whim, I gave two of my relatives a year’s education for a girl somewhere in Africa. Neither I nor my relatives will ever meet her or know who she is, and none of us fully understand the economic system that makes this either necessary or possible.
The chief economist for an economic forecaster worries that the world is on the brink of a financial crisis that could “make 1929 look like a walk in the park”. He tries to be reassuring that the central bankers will act correctly to avert this.
Last month, the spokesbody for British businesses released a report begging the Government to regulate them more (yes, more). They hope that a tough carbon pricing system and other measures will safeguard their businesses against chaotic worldwide weather patterns in coming years.
European and African politicians and engineers are planning to build hundreds of thousands of mirrors (image top left) in North Africa. These mirrors will focus sunlight into towers, and create steam to generate renewable electricity for Europe and fresh water for Africa.
Beneath the Alps, scientists are getting ready to turn on an arcane sixteen mile circumference machine in May (image right). It will fire particles with unspeakable energy, in order to unearth the fundamental laws of how our physical world works.
2008 is going to be quite a ride.
Let’s make it a good one.
posted by Francis on 28 December 2007 at 23:29:56 - 2 comments
Sometimes there are victories
Some people complain that all the activism, campaigning, trying to change the world for the better never has any affect. In the last year I can think of 4 major victories, all in campaigns I’ve had a small involvement in.
Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - I posted about this boring sounding but deadly Bill at the beginning of last year. We had to set up a whole Save Parliament campaign to try and stop it. The Bill was still passed, but was much less dangerous partly because the Government rewrote it under public pressure.
Statute law database - At the end of 2005 I posted about the School without rules, explaining how the laws of our land are not freely available. This was fixed at Christmas by a new Government website. It’s not clear what affect our external agitation had on the decision not to commercialise the data itself, but I suspect it was some. Congratulations to the then Department for Constitutional Affairs for doing the right thing.
Reed Elsevier and the arms trade - At the start of 2006 I wrote up in two posts my trip to the London Book fair, where they tried to kick me out of a Freedom of Expression seminar. Last week, Reed Elsevier’s board were finally forced to abandon running arms fairs. This Guardian article explains how the campaign was won. I’m a bit miffed to be honest, as my T-shirt now doesn’t tell the truth any more!
Freedom of Information Amendment Bill - This recent Bill attempted to exempt Parliament and MPs from Freedom of Information law. We sent out a Public Whip newsletter which explains more. The Bill was passed by the Commons. But luckily our unelected Lords have more sense, and news just in is that the Bill has been abandoned because they can’t even find one Lord to support it. WriteToThem was used by the public to send over a thousand faxes to Lords telling them that they did not support the Bill. In my day job, we had to set up a second fax server to meet the demand.
So there you go, four victories. Never let anybody tell you it isn’t worth campaigning.
Oh, and of course I’m lazy, so I cherry pick campaigns. Those were all won because they were achievable and reasonable. Easy ground to fight on. I admire those who spend years on much harder campaigns. But even they have major victories.
posted by Francis on 13 June 2007 at 23:06:36 - No comments
Life
Three weeks ago my friend and colleague Chris Lightfoot committed suicide. He’d been taking anti-depressants for a long time. My mind flips like a necker cube between loving anger and complete compassion. Anger with anyone for deliberately leaving the privilege of being in this beautiful world. Compassion for the extreme pain that he must have been in, and that I am lucky enough never to have known.
I met Chris originally because he was my new ISP, and because of our shared interest in politics and computers. Tom’s written an excellent post summarising Chris’s achievements in software, politics and policy. He was argumentative, cussed, and super bright. He was loving and affectionate, for the world and his friends.
The picture is of Oggie (as many called him) with a friend’s baby. He loved the natural world, walking, cats, animals of all kinds. He had a dagger-like, cheeky, loving smile, which is how I’m remembering him, right now.
(Thanks to jfairbairn for the picture, click on it for others taken at the same time, and for larger versions. The official announcement is on Chris’s blog. You can find comments and links to other tributes there. And instead of flowers for the funeral, give money to no2id, a campaign close to Chris’s heart.)
posted by Francis on 5 March 2007 at 19:36:32 - 11 comments
Restricted shorts and newspaper hagiography
The unusual short film competition with board games which I was at two weeks ago was fantastic fun. Again, Mark has a bit to say about it. There’s also loads on the Really Restrictive Shorts blog which I wrote some of. Click the “1, 2, 3, 4… next… last…” links right at the bottom of the page to see more. There are photos and videos and so on.
Also today, there’s a good description of mySociety in the Guardian. That’s the, also unusual, charity that I work for. Given we’re anarchically structured, Tom Steinberg clearly can’t be my boss. Instead you could think of him as the person the rest of us delegate fundraising, client management and making sure the accounts balance to. I missed it, but they put me in the week before last talking about PledgeBank.
Cambridge is sunny today, and the snow has just melted from the roofs. Enjoy your this next precious year, wherever you are!
posted by Francis on 24 January 2007 at 10:47:39 - No comments
Short films and long journeys
I’m in Wales, helping out at a most unusual short film competition, with boardgames. I can’t do better than my flatmate Mark at explaining it, so if you want to know what we’re doing read his post on the subject.
Also since writing here last, I’ve spent a while in North America. New York ate all my money. I found the Statue of Liberty surprisingly moving - it’s original purpose, representing real freedom, is important to remember. Toronto was fantastic. I stayed with Martin Crawford, who knows the extensive and fun live music scene like the back of his hand. The food in Toronto is amazing, and the layout of streets with busy tram-field, small shop, main roads, and quiet cross streets of wooden houses all different. Canada really is the best bits of Europe and best bits of America mixed together in one country. I was quite surprised.
Then I went to Georgia, the one in the Caucases between Russia and Turkey. This was initially on work, a project to do with Georgian Parliamentary informatioon. It’s a very harsh place to travel in December. I went to Stalin’s birthplace, Gori, and to Borjomi where a mineral water comes from (the one the Russians have recently banned import of). Georgia was (roughly) the second country to become Christian, and it has its own orthodox Church. There were gorgeous, and sometimes very remote, old churches. It’s also a very European seeming country. Despite its poverty, it felt familiar in the way that only European countries do.
Enough for now, I think I have to write a blog post about the board games we had this evening for the Really Restrictive Shorts website…
posted by Francis on 9 January 2007 at 19:22:35 - 2 comments
Quadruply offset
So, I just bought a return flight from London Heathrow to Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, cheap short haul flights haven’t got that crazy yet!), leaving the day after tomorrow. This cost a mere £308, which is very cheap. Today is the day the Stern Review came out, which means it was impossible to do anything other than go directly to Climate Care’s website and buy some carbon offsetting. Or think of it as a voluntary aviation fuel tax, whatever.
Now, in the past, companies like Future Forests (now the CarbonNeutral Company, and quite corporate) offset CO2 emissions by planting forests. This doesn’t work, as you have to plant new forest which is guaranteed to be kept as forest forever. Every tree that dies and rots one hundred years hence has to be guaranteed to be replaced by a new tree, and so on into the infinite future. Otherwise all the CO2 the tree took out of the atmosphere to make itself just gets released again when it burns or decays.
It’s much much more efficient, by which I mean easier, to stop people burning fossil fuels which they definitely would have otherwise burnt. Of course, that’s a fuzzy thing to define, and open to abuse. Climate Care have an “approach” to this which involves selecting projects in countries which aren’t in the Kyoto treaty (to avoid double counting of other CO2 reduction commitments), which are verified by a third party, and which perform intervention that they can be confident wouldn’t otherwise have happened. This seems to mainly involve replacing ovens with more efficient ones in developing countries. But see for your self, there are quite a few projects.
Climate Care it is then. Nobody has any better suggestions. I guess you could give the money to Rising Tide, but you may as well just give it to David Cameron, who has done more in the last year than anyone else in the UK to make it politically acceptable, important and normal to be concerned about Climate Chaos.
So I enter in my flight details. It will, apparently, extract the energy from ancient sunlight stored in sufficient oil to spit out a huge 1.445 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. That’s including the return journey. Total cost to offset it? Just £10.85. I was shocked, it’s hardly anything. OK, 3.5% of the cost of the flight, so substantially more than the 1% in the Stern Review. But even so! All this whinging from Climate Change sceptics about the cost of mitigating Climate Change is just that. So much whinging. And not only does my money, at least in theory, compensate for CO2 emissions of my flight, it’s also a donation to 3rd world economies in capital, and thence in long term savings for them in the cost of energy.
Of course, part of me knows this must be nonsense. £10.85 is really not much, and can I trust Climate Care at all, or their criteria? Already feeling guilty before buying the flight, I was going to doubly offset it anyway. But seeing how cheap it is, instead I went for quadruple, or £43.40. Still very reasonable, especially given the insanely cheap price of the ticket. Well, compared to getting a train to Manchester (about 70 quid return) anyway.
Meanwhile, if you know anybody in Boston I should meet or can invite me to a cool party or something, then do mail me! I’ll be in the US for the next three weeks.
(Photo by A@lbi and licensed for reuse)
posted by Francis on 31 October 2006 at 02:56:09 - 3 comments
Sand and clay
For three years now I’ve subscribed irregularly to a box of fruit and vegetables from Cambridge Organic Food Co. On Sunday or Monday, If I’m going to be at home enough later in the week, I leave them an answer phone message. Then on Wednesday afternoon there’s a knock on the door, and a friendly man gives me a crate of freshly selected seasonal goodness. (Photo right is illustrative and actually in New Zealand, it is licensed for free reuse by darren131)
A few weeks ago, on a Saturday, Mark and I went on their organic farm tour. We had Duncan from COFCO as our guide, and there were two stops. I didn’t take notes, so any truth below is damaged by the forgetfulness of the mind, or the dangers of fact checking with Google.
LEAFs and Clover
Russell Smith Farms is 2000 acres nestled around the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. His posh country clothes, accent and manner, along with the fighter jets passing overhead, led me to stereotype Robert Smith as a Tory farmer gentleman, in the nicest possible way.
Until the late 90s they were a conventional, that is to say industrial, farm. Amazingly, it is Waitrose who persuaded them to start converting to organic. There was me thinking they were a posh, expensive supermarket, when actually they’re leading a national food revolution. OK, same thing. Waitrose also promote the, new to me, LEAF marque, which indicates that a farm is nice to skylarks, and counts how much pesticide it uses. This is quite separate from being organic, and something to watch for.
When the current set of field conversions are finished two fifths of Russell Smith Farms will be organic. I think Robert said it takes 5 years to convert a field, during 2 of which it produces no produce at all. Instead you grow grass and clover, and plough them back into the soil. To my surprise clover is nitrogen fixing, a legume. That is, bacteria in its roots magically turn the most common gas in the air into what an industrial farmer would get from fertilizer.
Robert Smith was fascinatingly excited about his farm. He talked about modern hoeing machines used to clear weeds from between rows of organic crops. He constantly gave costs in thousands of pounds per acre, of how much was lost one year when a crop was blighted, or how much is spent on Polish labourers. He talked about bore holes and building reservoirs. Of badger banks and field margins. He was glad they had converted parts of their farm to organic as it made his job much more interesting, dealing with living breathing, rather than sterile fields.
Loam and bumblebees
Most of us think of organic farming in the negative, by what it doesn’t do compared to the industrial farming that we’re used to. So, organic farms use no pesticide or fertilizer. Put like that it can sound foolish, mad, inefficient. Actually, organic farmers think of it in the positive, as a totally different way of farming. Organic farming is about soil, growing crops in sustainably maintained, high quality soil. It’s not about exact control of nature, but about manipulating nature to our advantage, while working with the grain of her needs.
Our next stop was at Adrian Izzard (who we didn’t meet, but photo of him right, taken from COFCO’s website), a small organic farm in an area where every house has a huge plot of land. Most of them now are used as paddocks for horses, but Adrian’s is a thriving business. Greenhouses full of the most delicious cherry tomatoes, forests of cucumbers surrounding us. We walked through them snacking, and looking at the curious insect pods. You can buy, in packets in the post, little pods of insect eggs. These hatch, and eat the pests which you would otherwise have used pesticides on. There were also tiny hives of bumblebees, it was most curious.
One last thing that Duncan showed us at Adrian Izzard’s farm. Soil, put simply, is a balance between sand and clay. A quick way to test quality of soil is to grab a lump of it and then pretend you are a small child. Roll it into a sausage-shaped lozenge, and then try and bend it. If you can’t even roll it in your hands, then it is too sandy. If when you bend it, it breaks up, then it is just the right mix, known as loam. If you can bend it round, and mould it into whatever shape you like, then there is too much clay.
In conclusion
The nicest thing about getting an organic box delivery? I can’t remember exactly why I originally started ordering one a few years ago. Perhaps it was for ethical reasons - to treat the countryside better, to reduce food miles and hence carbon emissions by buying local food. But actually, the best thing is this. It is good being given seasonal fruit and vegetables, without having to select them yourself. An antidote to option paralysis. It is good being forced to work out how to cook things whose name you don’t even know. Tasty, fresh and fun.
posted by Francis on 8 October 2006 at 09:41:22 - 1 comment
In March the gypsies returned
I have a rule, implied in the text at the top of this page, not just to post links to other stories and websites in this blog. But these crazy American artists are too much fun not to.
“This summer we are building rafts and floating down the Mississippi River. Here’s the plan: We meet in Minneapolis in late July with sections of our raft in tow. We piece together our pontoons and fill them with salvaged blocks of foam. We make it beautiful and tie on anything that floats, adding it to our junk armada, our anarchist county fair, our fools ark. Our precious cargo is everything we hold dear: pieces and parts of the culture we are already creating. Our zines and puppets, sewing projects and poster campaigns. Mutant bicycles and punk rock marching bands. Plus our thoughts and dreams and irrepressible energy. Together we float down the Mississippi river, as far as we can — anchoring here and there to perform, give workshops, and create the big huge spectacle we wished would have stopped in our hometowns. And at each place we invite anyone to contribute performances or workshops of their own.” - Miss Rockaway Armada
I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this reminds me of the start of that. A quiet distant place, no contact with the world. Until the gypsies returned.
posted by Francis on 7 July 2006 at 21:13:13 - No comments
Great firewall
China has a new great wall, which blocks parts of the Internet from its citizens. This is partly done by absolute blocks, for example banning the BBC because it has a Chinese language news site. But it is also done by more subtle means - letting the companies who run forums know that they might be shut down if they don’t remove unacceptable posts, but never quite defining what unacceptable is. That way the companies have to err on the side of caution, and require less direct supervision and enforcement.
Sites I couldn’t access from within China: BBC News Online, Google News UK, Chinese Google News on google.com, Wikipedia, any WordPress.com blog. An expat told me in seconds how to get round some of these. For example, by searching Wikipedia at A9.
In contrast, I was surpised I could access: CIA World Factbook and EastSouthNorthWest (a Hong Kong run blog about China). The restriction really does seem to be only on Chinese language content.
For all that, the most physical censorship I found was of English, in the Economist I bought at Xi’an airport. There was an article about the Cultural Revolution. Curiously, I could read the leader which said “this editorial will probably not be read in China”. Then I turned to the main article - suddenly in shock. Pages 29 and 30 excised with a neat tear. As well as the Cultural Revolution article, one on the back about Japan.
Visions of factories full of censors, desperate to ship the Economist to educate businessmen into booming the economy, eager not to see China insulted by revision of Mao. Carefully turning the pages of the foreign magazine, one by one removing the offending page.
posted by Francis at 21:11:55 - No comments
Four more photos of old Shanghai
(For background, read my posts Chinese family history and Child of the atom bomb first)
In Shanghai, Rosemary and I went to a few more places related to our family history. Shanghai has undergone massive development, knocking down of whole areas, building of new skyscrapers. Amazingly, everywhere we went was still there. A hundred year old colonial buildings, with quite different architectures to those surrounding them. And still used in modern China. It was also great that the guards and porters would let us in. When Rosemary went 20 years ago, all she managed to do was peer from a distance. China is opening up, and relaxing.
The red building on the right of the left photo is the school that my grandmother used to teach in. She was a Physical Education teacher, and it was a school for Eurasians, people with one Western parent and one Chinese parent. The date above the entrance says 1893/1894, and it is now the Shanghai Installation Engineering Co, Ltd. The men on the left were arc welding some metal railings together.
The photo on the right is of the back of the hospital where my mother was born. It’s still a hospital. At first they wouldn’t let us in, I think because I’d been taking photos too obviously. Rosemary insisted she wanted to go round the back, I wasn’t sure why. Eventually a kind Doctor who spoke English was summoned, and escorted us round. The gardens were beautifully kept, and the rear of the hospital (photo) better architected. You can see the tall tower of the new wing rising up on the right behind the old building.
The bottom left photo is of the former Jubilee Court, where my grandparents, mother and aunt lived before they were interned by the Japanese. There was a sign on it saying “Monument under the Protection of Shanghai Municipality”. It’s still residential, we chatted to a woman whose mother lived in one of the other flats.
The right hand picture is of Yuyuen Rd camp. It’s where they were first interned before being taken to the Yangtzepoo camp at the end of the war. The camp used to be a school, and now is again. It’s called the Shi Xi High School, and had very well kept grounds. There were some kids playing basketball, even though it was the weekend.
posted by Francis on 4 July 2006 at 22:07:02 - 2 comments
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