personal

Listography: 5 Tips for Bloggers

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Kate’s Listography this week is for us bloggers: she asks us to write about our top five tips learned so far on our blogging journey. OK, so here are five top tips …

1. Write about whatever grabs you. It’s your blog, you can write about anything you like and in any way you like. But it will be most successful, and enjoyable, if you write about things that grab you, that interest you. Don’t write about something just because you think you should. Your passion, or lack of it, will come through in your writing and that’ll affect your readers interest. And writing about things that interest you will give the blog your personal stamp. It will also keep you interested and writing. If you find a niche market along the way, so well and good.

2. Write readably. Be careful with your style. What you write needs to be readable and intelligible. But the style it doesn’t have to be formal; probably better if it isn’t. Don’t write long meandering sentences that your readers can’t follow — nor long meandering posts! Don’t ramble: make sure your argument is coherent, concise and developed. Style variations and surprises are useful, but don’t overdo them. Like this! See!

3. Think about your audience. Who are you writing for? What message are you trying to get across? I find that as I write a blog post I’m always writing it “for” someone specific; not always the same person: a particular friend, my wife, even myself. That will help you develop and angle your story; and it gives the writing a more personal and readable edge. This, for instance, I am writing with Kate in mind: ‘cos she set the challenge and I know she’ll read it. At other times I will be writing for a specific friends. And there will be times when you are writing for yourself: as a way to help you develop your ideas — that’s fine as long as you don’t always do it and you know when you are doing it.

(Of course, if you’re writing a formal entry, say a scientific article, you may need to write more formally and in the third person. That’s fine if that’s your niche. But it isn’t for most of us.)

4. Try to think up snappy titles. There are two aspects here. The title of your blog itself and the titles of the individual posts. Your blog needs to be called something memorable and informative. “Fred’s Blog” doesn’t help anyone. “Blue Cats in Custard” at the very least is arresting and makes people curious. It’s all about marketing.

The second aspect is something I consider I’m not very good at: snappy titles for posts. The post’s title is the first thing someone will read, and if it doesn’t grab them they may read no further. So the title, and the first sentence, need to grab their attention as well as providing some clues about what follows. Titles also help the search engines index you, so people will be more likely to find you. If they’re amusing too then so much the better.

5. Design. Good design is paramount. If your page doesn’t appeal to people they won’t read it more than once. Keep it clean and uncluttered. But also try to make it some reflection of you. You don’t need a designer to do this for you — just a bit of time to fiddle around with the various style combinations your blog hosting service offers. Personally I don’t like loads of white space, fancy fonts or twee backgrounds. Develop a design (it may take time) and stick to it. Use one typeface you like and stick to it — except for occasional emphasis. Restrict variations in font size and weight. Avoid flashing things, pop-up boxes and adverts (especially ones you can’t control): they all distract and annoy the reader. Occasional pictures in your posts help break up chunks of text and provide some context and interest. But don’t overdo the pictures: more than two or three big images and they should be put somewhere like Flickr and linked (using thumbnails if necessary).

Bonus Item 1. Don’t expect instant success. If you track the number of hits you get to your blog you can get an idea of whether you’re going in the right direction. But don’t expect thousands of hits a day to happen instantly. Unless you have a lot of luck, a large advertising budget or a major sponsor people will take time to find you. Just keep writing. Encourage people who respond to comments. And, if you’re doing it right, slowly your audience will grow.

Bonus Item 2. Re-read what you’ve written before you post it. Check your spelling and ensure it all makes sense. Bad writing is one of the biggest turn-offs of all.

So there you are: seven top blogging tips. Hmmm … maybe I’d better take some of them to heart myself! 🙂

links, medical, photography, science

In Case You Missed It …

Links to a selection of the curious and interesting items you may have missed in the last week or so.

Do You Have Free Will? How can we know?

Heroes of the Hot Zone: pen portraits of some of the guys who are trying to clean up Fukushima.

Waterstones ditches apostrophe. English must be under threat when a bookshop ignores good grammar and makes it’s possessive Waterstones’s which is worse!

OK, here’s one for the mathematicians out there: 153 and narcissistic numbers. I want to know how they’ve proved what the biggest such number is.

Here are some seriously stunning 100 year old colour photographs of Russia (see right).

Difficult to work out here who is the madder: Amish men jailed over reflective triangle dispute.

Cats occasionally like all sorts of unsuitable things. Apparently some even like mushrooms.

And finally, just to prove it is worth goig to the gym … Scientists name rare horse fly after Beyonce “in honour of its impressive golden behind”.

history, science

My Heritage is Under Threat

Yet again those dastardly Jonnie Foreigners want to slaughter my heritage. This time they’re after destroying Greenwich Mean Time.

They’re not content that our stupid government want to move us onto European time (equivalent to Summer Time) — permanently an hour adrift from real “astronomical time”. Oh no!

Now the scientific community want to abandon good old GMT completely and replace it with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)**.


But wait! Isn’t UTC the same as GMT?

Well no, actually. Not as currently defined. Although it looks the same at the moment, the proposal appears to be to do away with leap seconds (of which there have been 24 in the last 40 years) which are inserted into UTC to help our electronic time keep track with the actual motion of the planet. Inserting leap seconds is a pain and a technical challenge, but not an insuperable challenge. But the proposal is in favour of apparent simplicity: to abandon leap seconds in favour of some currently undefined (and doubtless cocked up) solution in years to come when our modern atomic clocks have drifted too far from astronomical reality.

But surely GMT, when originally defined, did not have leap seconds defined? That’s true. Leap seconds weren’t invented until 1972, by which time GMT had been the universal time standard for almost 100 years.

So where’s the problem? Why can we not return to the original GMT, without leap seconds, if that is a scientific imperative?

Ah, now, that’s because GMT defines noon as the time the sun is exactly overhead at Greenwich. And in days of yore that was reset at regular intervals (daily?) so in effect GMT kept in track with every slight wobble in “astronomical time” automatically. But with atomic clocks that doesn’t happen. Time progresses regularly like, well, clockwork. And without leap seconds modern “electronic clock noon” (UTC) would drift away from “astronomical noon” (GMT) and that spells disaster for things like GPS.

So let’s just redefine GMT to be atomic clock time? But that would make it neither “mean time” nor “Greenwich time”, so it would be a misnomer. At least with a new name it is clear that the time being measured is different.

So … We have a working system which we are proposing to break. This is absurd. We should keep GMT (with leap seconds). It is a valuable part of our heritage. It tells people the history and science of measuring and recording time. Why are we throwing our history away so carelessly? Is nothing sacred?

** I’m sure the acronym for this should be “CUnT”.

thoughts

More Rules for Life

Following on from my earlier posts about my guiding principles and lessons for life, I’m reminded of the 11 Rules for Life often attributed to Bill Gates. Except that they ain’t by Bill Gates. They appear to have first surfaced in a 1996 piece in the San Diego Union Tribune by Charles J Sykes** and subsequently been pared down. But wherever they first appeared many people, not just youngsters! (present readers excepted, of course!) would do well to take them to heart. So, in case you missed then the first few thousand times around, here they are:

Rule 1: Life is not fair — get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

In fact the original had another 3 rules (which I’ve only slightly edited):

Rule 12: Smoking is not cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for purple hair and/or visible pierced body parts.

Rule 13: You are not immortal. If you think living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule 14: Enjoy your youth while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now.

Hands up anyone who can honestly say they’ve never fallen into any of these traps.

Mmmm. Yeah. Not me either.

** Sykes appears to have subsequently published the list in his book 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School.

links

Just in Case You Missed It …

… here’s a few links to the curious and interesting that I’ve read in the last few days.

Scientists have now worked out why not all chillies are hot. It’s easy logocal stuff; no science required.

How good is your science? Well it’s got to be better than most of the British! Britain’s biggest science misconceptions revealed.

Would You Get a QR Code Tattoo? Would you get any tattoo? Thoughts on why we do this.

I’ve always said Shaun the Sheep would be a good alternative to the lawnmower. Now someone is doing it!

Gawdelpus! Now the government wants every under 11 to have read Harry Potter! FFS why can’t politicians stop meddling in things they don’t understand? Oh, hang on then they’d have nothing to do. No change there then.

Finally I was going to say this could only happen in Japan, but I suspect the Americans could do it as well. It was the “maternity suite” which finally tipped me over the edge! Hopefully we British don’t scrape quite so much off the bottom of the barrel.

quotes

Thoughts for the Week

A collection of recently culled thoughts on life, the universe …

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
[Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895]

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence
[Thoughts of Angel]

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
[Thomas Edison]

If you treat people the way they are, you make them worse. If you treat them the way they ought to be, you make them capable of becoming what they ought to be.
[Goethe]

Religion convinced the world that there’s an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there’s 10 things he doesn’t want you to do or else you’ll to to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! … And he needs money!
[George Carlin, You Are All Diseased]

In the face of all the challenges we face today, is my optimism about the future of humanity idealistic? Perhaps it is. Is it unrealistic? Certainly not. To remain indifferent to the challenges we face is indefensible. If the goal is noble, whether or not it is realized within our lifetime is largely irrelevant. What we must do therefore is to strive and persevere and never give up.
[Dalai Lama]

Don’t think, it’s bad for the government.
[Touretteshero; this is one of her tics but it is so true!]

food+drink

Steaming Beef Curry with Gin

Yesterday I cooked curry. For my birthday. A hot curry. I like hot curry!

If you’ve been following along you’ll know I like my recipes easy, adaptable and forgiving. So here’s my special Steaming Beef Curry with Gin. The gin and the lime give it that extra zing.

[I’ve already posted the method for Noreen’s Very Lemony Rice separately. It makes a great accompaniment to almost any curry.]


I used:

  • Steak; diced
  • 1 large Onion; roughly chopped
  • 4 large cloves garlic; roughly chopped
  • 2 inch piece of fresh ginger; finely chopped
  • 400gm tin Chopped Tomatoes
  • half Cauliflower; in bite-size pieces
  • half jar of Patak’s Vindaloo Paste
  • tablespoon ground Turmeric
  • juice & zest of 2 limes
  • half large wineglass of Gin
  • glass White Wine (or water)
  • small pinch Salt
  • Olive Oil

This what I did:

  1. Sauté the onion, garlic and ginger in some olive oil until the onion is just going translucent.
  2. Then add the diced steak and continue cooking to sear the meat all over.
  3. Slacken the curry paste with the wine (or water) and add this to the pan, stirring to ensure everything is coated in the curry mix.
  4. Add the turmeric and stir that in well.
  5. Now stir in the tomatoes and the smallest pinch of salt.
  6. Followed by the lime juice & zest and the gin; then the cauliflower.
  7. Bring to the bubble and cook for 10-15 minutes.
  8. [If you’re doing Noreen’s Very Lemony Rice to go with this, put the rice on when the curry has been bubbling away nicely for a couple of minutes. This should get the cauliflower just nicely cooked, but not mushy, in time with the rice.]
  9. By the time the cauliflower is done the sauce should be reducing nicely; it should be tick not watery.
  10. Serve with your choice of accompaniments.

Notes:

  1. Despite the big dose of Vindaloo paste this isn’t outrageously hot. (Actually I think Patak’s Vindaloo is milder than their Madras paste.) The heat of curry does seem to me to be ameliorated by the addition of lemon or lime juice. But you could use any strength of curry paste to your liking — or make your own.
  2. Use any (selection of) vegetable of your choice. I happened to have cauliflower to hand.
  3. And of course you could use any meat — or none at all! Yes, I used some steak because I think it is worth using decent meat to make a good curry especially as this doesn’t get cooked to death.
  4. You can use this method for any curry you like. For an “ordinary” version just leave out the gin and lime. The only real essentials are onion, protein, curry paste (or powder) and some liquid.

Picture credit: Fastplaeo

food+drink

Noreen's Very Lemony Rice

I’ve talked about Noreen’s Lemon Rice before. We find that plain rice gets, well, plain and boring, with curry. This special lemon rice makes any curry (or indeed almost any rice dish) both look and taste special: it is very lemony and a lovely golden yellow colour.

This is doubtless not the approved way to cook rice, but it is easy and it works.


You need:

  • 50-60 gm Long-Grain Rice (Basmati for preference) per person
  • 1 large, or 2 small, Lemons
  • half teaspoon ground Turmeric
  • small pinch Salt (optional)
  • Boiling Water

This is what you do:

  1. Grate the zest from the lemon and put it aside.
  2. Now juice the lemon (not too hard, you want a bit of the flesh left) and put the juice aside as well. Keep the lemon half-shells.
  3. Put the rice in a saucepan with the lemon half-shells. Add the turmeric and a tiny pinch of salt.
  4. Add most of a kettle of boiling water, bring back to the boil, stirring a couple of times to make sure the rice isn’t adhering to the bottom of the pan. Cook until the rice is done.
  5. Just as the rice is done remove the lemon pieces to a plate and scrape the flesh and juice from inside them. Discard the lemon peel.
  6. Drain the rice in a sieve and rinse with some boiling water. Shake to dry and tip it into a warmed dish.
  7. Add all the lemon (zest, juice and recovered flesh) and stir it in gently.
  8. Serve with curry.

Notes:

  1. This method produces a slightly wet, but not sticky, rice, which works fine with curry.
  2. The turmeric gives the rice a lovely bright yellow colour — but it needs the acidity of the lemon to do this. If you leave out the lemon (or in fact anything acid) but not the turmeric the rice comes out a muddy beige colour. That’s all down to the chemistry of the pigments in the turmeric which are yellow in acid but red in alkaline (ie. most tap water). I think the acid also helps fix the colour to the rice grains.
  3. You can do this with lime as well, though the flavour is more subtle.
  4. Or you can cook plain rice this way — just leave out the lemon and turmeric.

Picture credit: Robyn Lee

beliefs, nudism


If you’re interested in nudism, need your mind expanding or have kids with body image hang-ups (ie. most teenagers) this should be worth watching.

My Daughter the Teenage Nudist
Channel 4; Thursday 12 January; 10pm
Filmed in collaboration with British Naturism