All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
beliefs, current affairs

Not Already!!

Watching BBC Breakfast yesterday (22 October) I spotted my first Remembrance Day poppy if the year. It was being worn by some female, the head of one of our plethora of regulators, who was being given an easy ride of an interview.
This is obscenely early, given that Remembrance Day (11 November) isn’t for another three weeks.
But then, as I’ve said before, I sometimes think I’m the only person in the country who finds everything about Remembrance Day sick and obscene. I’m with novelist Evelyn Waugh who in his youthful diaries described Remembrance Day as

… a disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality. If people have lost sons and fathers, they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary of a disgraceful day of national hysteria.


And no, before you start, that doesn’t mean I’m unpatriotic or un-anything-else. It means I have no wish to glorify war and prefer to go forward rather than continually look backward — and believe the country would be a better place if everyone did this.
Remember: those who look backward get turned into pillars of salt.

links

You may have missed

Another instalment in our irregular series of items you may have missed. Let’s start, as usual, with the more nerdy stuff, but today with a cartoon …
An interesting cartoon form XKCD which shows the relative (angular) sizes of various celestial objects compared with ground-based ones.
Brooke Borel on all the possible uses for cadavers and why she wants her body cut up for science


Unlike our hunter-gatherer forebears we aren’t great insect eaters. Maybe we should be as they are surprisingly nutritious. Here are seven insects we may be eating in the future. I still think I want them cooked first.
So following on from faecal transplants, scientists are now beginning to make progress on putting a mix of faecal bacteria in a pill. I think I could swallow that.
Only slightly less worryingly, someone somewhere ate a dead shrew in the interests of science. Another curiosity from the IgNobel Awards.
The octopus is weird, surprisingly intelligent and mischievous. Wired investigates.
Another interesting piece, this from the New York Times, on why superstitions may make sense after all.
Christie Aschwanden writing in the Washington Post, looks at the problems with mammograms for all and why she has decided to opt out. Yep, this is the age-old problem with screening: it picks up far too many false positives and leads to over-treatment.
So why are pregnant women warned to stay clear of just about everything? Well there might be a risk, but we really don’t know.
Another Guardian piece this time suggesting that breastfeeding, and indeed the effects of motherhood on the normal (ie. any and every) female body, won’t be treated as normal until photographers and the media are much more open about showing photographs of the same. Yes, indeed, and the same goes for the rest of our bodies — male as well as female.
And let’s also be clear that motherhood is no rest cure. Here’s one guy who is upset that everyone thinks his stay-at-home-and-look-after-the-kids wife doesn’t do anything.
Now we’ll change track. The former railways minister Tom Harris (Labour, Glasgow South) wants the government to “invest in the daily hell of commuting, not HS2” which seems to make sense to me.

So from the ridiculous to the crazy … It’s a slightly old link but here’s a piece about the Codex Seraphinianus, a modern day Voynich Manuscript.
How and why do words become unusable and an investigation of auto-antonyms.
Have you ever wondered how cats see the world? Well scientists have been working it out. Here are some examples.
And finally bizarreness of the month. Fukushima Industries just made a very unfortunate branding choice. Surely has to be a candidate for a sporting mascot!? Enjoy!

photography

Weekly Photograph

This week’s photograph is one I took about a year ago when we visited Norwich for the day. As at many cathedrals, at Norwich you get some interesting views of the tower/spire/crossing/etc. from the cloisters. There’s no special story with this photo, it’s just an image a rather like.

Norwich Cathedral Spire from the Cloister
Norwich Cathedral Spire from the Cloister
Norwich; October 2012

amusements, food+drink, topographical

October Plenty

October Plenty 2013 is on Sunday 20th October starting at 12 noon on Bankside, Southwark outside Shakespeare’s Globe. (Yes, that’s in London!)
October Plenty is an Autumn harvest celebration held annually in Southwark. Beginning on the Bankside, by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, October Plenty mixes ancient seasonal customs and theatre with contemporary festivity, joining with historic Borough Market, Southwark and Borough Market’s Apple Day.


October Plenty is a collective celebration of the seasons, weather and food, in a public place, with access to everyone. The event is free, and happens whatever the weather.
There is loads more information about this event at www.thelionspart.co.uk/octoberplenty/. It looks as if it should be great fun; must see if I can get there.

environment, topographical

Goats on the Roof

Goat Grazing Fun Day in London
Saturday 19th October from 12 noon

Live goats graze the wildflower meadow on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on London’s South Bank.
To mark the end of the season, and to help the wildflowers grow stronger next year, goats from Vauxhall City Farm will be nibbling away at the roof garden. Why? Because in the wild, animals would naturally keep wildflower meadows in good shape.
There will apparently be lots of other free activities during the afternoon, including seeds and plants from the roof garden being given away free, woodworking and refreshments.
So why not enjoy this opportunity to see a natural process played out in the urban jungle.
More details at www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/goat-grazing-fun-day-79295
Such a shame I can’t go. Goats eating a meadow on a London roof really should be something to have done/seen.

quotes

Quotes

Another of our spasmodic collections of inetersting or amusing quotes encountered. In no particular order …
Walk nude, and people won’t need to undress you with their eyes.
Thomas Fuller
Men honour what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.
Chuang Tzu
Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.
Buddha
Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
Robert Sarnoff
One thing I have learnt is that transport, rather like banking, is at its best when it is boring. That is when it tends to work.
Alistair Darling
Without deviation progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.
Jules Henri Poincare, 1854-1912
Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
GC Lichtenberg
Jung concluded that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story.
Found at www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Jungsum.html
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
Jorge Louis Borges once described an empire that wanted to build a map. But the maps they had seen before were not precise enough. They had too much compression and approximation. There was too much inexactitude. And so the empire eventually made a map of the empire that was the size of the empire, and “coincided point for point with it.” But even this map, the size of the empire it described, could not capture the totality of experiences within the empire. Sure, it could tell you exactly where the castle is, or which roads intersected with which others and where, but it couldn’t, for example, tell you what that intersection smelled like.
Rose Eveleth, Seeing Maps of Sounds and Smells
The wise man is one who knows what he does not know.
Lao Tzu
Light thickens, and the crows make wing to the rooky wood.
Macbeth

natural history, photography

Weekly Photograph

OK, for this week’s photograph we have something slightly different. A tiny little beast which although scary looking is harmless to us, but scary indeed if you’re a caterpillar as it is a predator and parasite.
This is an Ichneumon Fly. They parasitise caterpillars and other creepy-crawlies by laying their eggs in them for their larvae to eat from the inside.
These are the four best shots of a tiny ichneumon which wandered into the house. I suspect it if being a member of the Braconidae, possibly Apanteles glomeratus; almost certainly one of the Ichneumonidae. Its head and body about the size of a British black ant (so around 4-5mm) with the antennae and ovipositor each roughly the same length as the body. Its legs were definitely reddish. It liked walking about (it was quick too) and then suddenly flew off into oblivion.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Ichneumon Fly?
Ichneumon Fly?
Greenford; July 2009

food+drink

Chocolate Week and National Baking Week

Yes! The week of 14-20 October brings a double win as it is both Chocolate Week and National Baking Week. And what better excuse could any of my fiends have to bake me a yummy chocolate torte!
Chocolate Week promotes fine flavour chocolate, celebrating the work of top chocolatiers and chocolate companies. But of course there’s nothing to stop you all participating at home!


National Baking Week supports the Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of the top five paediatric research hospitals in the world. So the idea is that by baking and selling your results money is raised for the GOSH charity.
As always there is more information over on the Chocolate Week website at www.chocolateweek.co.uk and on the National Baking Week website, www.nationalbakingweek.co.uk.