medical, memes, natural history, science, words

Word of the Week

As my purpose in being here is as a catalyst is to educate all you barbarians bring you new and interesting insights and ways of looking at the world, I’ve decide that we’ll have a new regular series: Word of the Week. Yes, it will appear weekly — well most weeks anyway; no guarantee I won’t miss, or move, some! And as this is the first in the series, and it’s Wednesday, the series will appear regularly on a Monday.

OK, so here’s this week’s word, with it’s definition from the OED …

zygodactylous. Having the toes ‘yoked’ or arranged in pairs, ie. two before and two behind, as the feet of a scansorial bird. [As in the feet of most woodpeckers.]

Oh bugger. That means we’ll have to have a second word. So here’s your week 1 bonus …

scansorial. Used for climbing. Of or pertaining to climbing; specifically of the feet of birds and animals, adapted for climbing.

amusements, beliefs, books, current affairs, freedom of speech, nudism, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

So here’s this week’s cornucopia of quotations. There’s a philosophy PhD in this lot somewhere!

A clean house is the sign of a broken computer.
[Unknown]

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
[Rose Macaulay]

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
[Robert Frost]

The human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendour and its beauty … Nakedness as such is not to be equated with physical shamelessness … Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person … The human body is not in itself shameful … Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.
[Pope John Paul II, The Theology of the Body]

The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
[Jean Cocteau]

The best things in life aren’t things.
[Unknown]

Those who are at ease with themselves […] want to undermine authority rather than exercise it.
[Prof. Paul Delany]

[Tony] Blair has […] told us, “Hand on my heart, I did what I thought was right”. If a dry-cleaner said this after ruining our jacket, we would not be pleased with the explanation. Politicians are different: don’t look at any unfortunate results, they say, just admire my generous motives.
[Prof. Paul Delany]

A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason, and the real reason.
[Financier JP Morgan]

One of the basic human rights is to make fun of other people, whoever they are.
[Anthony Powell quoted in John Russell, Reading Russell: Essays 1941 to 1988]

If you don’t like our sense of humour, please tell us so we can laugh at you.
[Unknown]

environment, photography, science, thoughts

Oceanic Truths

A short but very sharp posting from Sheril Kirshenbaum on Wired today points out what many of us already know …

Oceans are Totally F*cked


So what can we do about it? Well you’ll point out that what I do as an individual isn’t going to make a whole bunch of difference. Which is true if I’m the only one taking action. But if we all make changes then it will help bring pressure to bear where it hurts: big business!

So what do we do? It’s a complex problem and there is no simple answer. However the more of the following as you can do the better:

  1. Reduce your dependence on oil. Walk, don’t take the car. Don’t jet around the world on holiday, especially long haul. Fight against excess, especially plastic, packaging. Buy locally grown produce wherever you can to reduce food miles. You already know all these things make sense. And they all help the oceans.
    The less oil we use, the less is transported around the world in mega-tankers, which run on … yes … oil (often horrible crude bunker oil, at that). And the fewer environmentally damaging oil spills there are. And the less off-shore drilling there is. (Yes, that may mean nuclear power; but that’s an argument for another day.)
  2. Buy only fish which is farmed or sustainably caught and which is as locally produced as possible. We have to stop over-fishing. As well as reducing food miles.
  3. Reduce your garbage output. A vast amount of our garbage gets dumped at sea!
  4. Reduce your wastewater output; and clean up wastewater as much as possible. Yes, that means sewage, amongst other things. As with garbage it is scandalous the amount of dirty/polluted wastewater that gets dumped in the oceans.
  5. We also need to reduce agricultural run-off. That means reducing pesticide, herbicide and fertiliser use, and also preventing animal slurry getting into waterways. Which in turn means more sustainable land management. Going organic isn’t necessarily the whole, or even the right, answer; but it should help.
  6. If you’re an aquarist, don’t keep marine fish which haven’t been captive bred. Catching marine fish from the wild is extremely poorly regulated (unlike the trade in wild-caught freshwater Amazonian fishes). Fishing (for the aquatics trade and for food) does enormous damage to tropical reef environments because of the methods used.
  7. And anything else you can do to improve air quality and reduce climate change will help too. A large part of the problems the oceans face is from acidification, which is caused by pollutants and increased carbon dioxide levels. And if we can slow down climate warming, we’ll likely slow down the rate at which the polar ice caps are receding too.
  8. And finally, support marine nature reserves, conservation areas and scientific efforts to better understand the oceans and their biodiversity.

Notice, however I am not saying be totally organic, don’t eat fish, stop using a car or an aeroplane, and grow all your own food. Yes, it would be great (for the environment anyway) if we could do all these things. But let’s be realistic, it isn’t practical and it won’t happen. But we do have to reduce all the harmful things we do and the more you can do the better.

Some of you won’t think about any of this, and won’t bother with any of it, which morally I find inexcusable. But it’s your karma. Many will already be doing something. But which of us couldn’t do a bit more. It all helps. I at least would like there still to be an inhabitable world for your grandchildren. And I think I have a moral obligation to do something the help ensure there is.

freedom of speech

How?

How does the international community (ie. all of us) allow nations such as Saudi Arabia to continue with barbarisms such as this? Even if one is in favour of the death penalty, there are less barbaric ways.

personal, photography

Alphabet of Me

For some time I’ve been working on the idea I saw a long while back, “an alphabet of me”: something about me for each letter of the alphabet. Som people do this one letter at a time, often in random order. I’ve chosen to do it as a single entity, with an appropriate image from amongst my photos for each letter.

The first and last images are the dust-jacket; A-Z runs through images 2 to 27 inclusive. Below you’ll find a key and links to the original images on my Flickr Photostream. Here then is the finished product.

  1. Me
  2. Anthony Powell: Anthony Powell Society Members at Wysall during a trip to the Widmerpool area of Nottinghamshire
  3. Books: Work in Progress
  4. Cats: Tabby Tiger
  5. Dora: My Mother at 92, (she’ll be 96 this October!)
  6. Eccentric: Deckchair Love
  7. Family History: David Masey Grave at New Romney, Kent. (David Masey is one of my great-great-grandfathers
  8. Girls: “Now I think we go that way …”
  9. Heroes: Dinner Party Meme showing people who are my heroes
  10. IBM: Office Reflections; one of the places I used to work
  11. Jessie: My Aunt Jessie with Portrait of her Mother (my Grandmother)
  12. Kent: Bales by Brenzett; land of my grandfathers
  13. London: Westminster Night. I was born in London and have lived most of my life in London.
  14. Marriage: OMG! Wedding 1979. Yes, this is our wedding. Scary!
  15. Noreen: Noreen in Rochester. See marriage!
  16. Obesity: With & Without. Nasty; maybe I should have banned this!
  17. Photography: Rose: Maiden’s Blush; I’ve been taking photographs for 50 years. Eeeek!
  18. Quirky: Self-Portrait of a Foot. Yes, I’m mad.
  19. Romney Marsh: Prospect Cottage Panorama. More land of my grandfathers. This is Dungeness.
  20. Sexuality: Reading in the Sun in the Bishop’s Garden. Yes, let’s not deny this is part of all of us.
  21. Trains: Double Departure from Alexisbad.
  22. University: University of York Cricket Club Tour 1971; taken at the end of my second year as an undergraduate. I’m in back row, third from right, in the full sized image.
  23. Victoria & Albert Museum: Megalopoda vitreum. Important because Noreen made her career here, which kept us living in London.
  24. Wine: Anti-Depressant; or beer!
  25. XY: In the Hotel. Guess what?! I’m male!
  26. Yummy Food: My Meme: Thanksgiving 12-Course Banquet
  27. Zen Mischief: Rites of Passage Meme. My motto!
  28. Me
beliefs, current affairs, medical, science, sexuality

Sex and Religion in Public Life

Jeana over at MySexProfessor writes an incisive post about why it is more important that we know about the religious lives of public figures than their sex lives — albeit the article is built on the words of one of my hate figures, Richard Dawkins. It isn’t that I disagree with the sentiments behind much of what Dawkins says (I don’t), but the bigoted and intransigent way in which he says it — he is just as fundamentalist as any of the religious believers against whom he rails.

As so often others have said what I think so much better than I can, so here are a couple of seminal extracts.

[O]ur society has so many hang-ups about sex that we’re practically responsible for creating an environment in which any sexual expression could potentially be deviant […] even fairly innocuous acts (which one could argue, taking pictures of one’s genitals counts as) are made out to be of huge significance because so many people are hung up on the idea that ANY sexual expression outside the norm is automatically inappropriate or gross or bad.
…
Dawkins asserts that it does matter what a public figure’s religious beliefs are, since those beliefs, far more than their sexual acts, may determine how they pursue public policy. He gives these examples: “[…] George Bush has publicly boasted that God told him to invade Iraq […] To push to an extreme, who would deny Congress’s right to ask whether a candidate for Secretary of Health is a Christian Scientist or a Jehovah’s Witness? Or take a Christian sect that fervently desires the Second Coming of Christ, and believes the key Revelation prophecies cannot be fulfilled without a Middle East Armageddon. Would you wish the nuclear button to be made available to a follower of such a creed?” This is scary stuff.
…
[W]e must grant people the dignity of privately pursuing things that oppose the sexual mainstream.** Just because a politician likes unconventional sex doesn’t mean they’re going to try to force it on everyone through legislation. Unfortunately […] politicians have done much to make anything that deviates from heterosexual monogamous reproductive sex a crime.

** And not just the sexual mainstream. People must have the right to deviate from and oppose mainstream thought and opinion on anything. For that is how opinions are changed, new ideas formed and progress made. But this doesn’t give anyone the right to force or attempt to force (violently or otherwise) their opinions on others.