occamstypewriter.org Open in urlscan Pro
82.145.41.43  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

GET https://occamstypewriter.org/

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" class="searchform" action="https://occamstypewriter.org/">
  <div>
    <label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label>
    <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s">
    <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search">
  </div>
</form>

Text Content

Skip to content
 * Home
 * About Occam’s Typewriter
   * Adventures in Wonderland
   * Athene Donald’s Blog
   * Blogging by Candlelight
   * Confessions
   * Deep thoughts and silliness
   * Girl, Interrupting
   * Mind the Gap
   * Nicola Spaldin’s Blog
   * No Comment
   * Not ranting – honestly
   * Reciprocal Space
   * Science behind the Scenes
   * Trading Knowledge
   * VWXYNot?


LATEST POSTS

← Older posts



IN WHICH I MAKE THE BEST OF THINGS

Posted on 6 May 2024 by Jennifer Rohn

Greetings from the tail end of a typical British bank holiday, where the big
highlight was gardening in the rain.

In all seriousness, it was rather lovely to be out tidying up the flower beds in
the fresh air, among the blooming lilac and the first roses, hacking order from
chaos through water-splattered specs. (When I was a kid I always longed for
windscreen wipers for glasses, and even though the year 2024 sounds like science
fiction, I’m still waiting.)

It made a nice break from grant writing, at least. I’m on the home stretch,
finishing up the last of four I’ve been wrangling this spring, probably the one
I’m most excited about. It’s due next week, and I’m confident everything is
under control. The competition will be tough, but I’ve got a great foundation,
building on our published work in a way that seems logical but also timely and
exciting.

It bothers me that I seem to spend most of my research time writing grants –
singing for my supper instead of eating, let alone enjoying the meal. I’m
painfully aware that there are a few manuscripts that would go more quickly if I
only had more time to spend helping their lead authors out. But the way I’m
funded at the university, I have to prioritise writing the bids that will bring
in small fractions of salary, cobbling together my two days a week buyout from
teaching. It’s not easy to mastermind a continuous 40% salary, but just when I
think I’m going to default, something always comes through for me. I could
honestly do without the stress, but having lived with it for nearly a decade,
I’ve learned how to keep the anxiety largely at bay.

I always feel guilty working evenings, weekends and holidays, though, which I’ve
been doing a lot recently. At least my family are understanding, for which I’m
grateful. When I have to work through my down time, I sometimes try to make it
seem more bearable by surrounding myself with a special environment, to make the
labour feel more like a holiday. Normally this time of year I’d park my laptop
on the bistro table under the grape arbour by the little cascade and pond that
R. built me. But this spring has been more or less a cold wash-out, so I’ve
spent a lot more time in our summerhouse cabin with a fire in the wood stove to
keep away the chill.



The cabin is my sanctuary. It’s quiet, bright, smells of seasoned pine, is
carefully decorated and offers a lovely view over the lush back garden terraces.
When the sun shines, a fountain splashes in a stone trough on the porch; when it
rains, the drops tap comfortingly on the roof. Birdsong filters through: robin,
wren, blackbird, dunnock, tit. The wood stove is a marvel of efficiency, burning
slowly through kiln-dried logs which I spice up with fragrant dried bark from
our eucalyptus tree, making the interior toasty-warm. A small glass of wine does
not impair my intellect.

In this space, I can pretend that the overtime is pleasure, is voluntary, is
what I would have chosen to spend my holiday on if I’d truly had a choice.

Posted in academia, careers, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, staring into
the abyss, The profession of science, work-life balance | Leave a comment


AMBIVALENCE, RELUCTANCE AND THE JESUS SCALE

Posted on 6 May 2024 by Erika Cule

About eight months or so ago, I started talking about the concept of a scale of
faith in Christ. I christened it the Jesus scale. Here is a diagram:

The Jesus scale.
Created with PGF/TikZ, the tool I used to create the figures in this post.

On the far left, you have antitheism, hard determinism, militant atheism, and
frankly a lot of rage. Moving along the scale, you come to spiritual but not
religious, vague belief in some sort of higher power but no deity, and
moralistic therapeutic deism. Somewhere along the line there is baptism,
cultural Christianity, regular churchgoing. Heartfelt profession of faith.
Further up the scale are people more churchy than you and that is where it gets
unsettling. The scale goes further still: the religious life, say. Anchoresses.
At some point we move out of my comfort zone entirely: young-earth creationism,
Biblical literalism. Damaging fundamentalism. Again: rage.

Political extremes are not a scale but a cycle. Communism becomes fascism if you
follow it far enough. So it is for religion. Both antitheism and fundamentalist
Christianity use their doctrines as justification for oppression. A pair of
inflexible positions rooted in fear and in hatred.

One weakness of this model is that it fails to account for other faiths. I would
be interested in exploring how this concept plays out there. Anyhow, my coming
to faith meant moving up the Jesus scale so fast I ended up with spiritual
whiplash. Just about now, as that seems to be resolving, I have hit a new
problem.


ALL POSSIBLE MEANS

I was prompted to come up with the Jesus scale after noticing that when I have
conversations about faith, and sometimes other topics, I carefully figure out
where other people might be on the Jesus scale, and pitch my words and behaviour
so that my range on the scale presents as overlapping with theirs. If I do not
do this, in either direction, I alienate them fast. When I dare to think about
what type of priest I can see myself being, I want to be the guy who can hit all
the bases, with the exception of the extremes. This is not a new desire. As the
apostle Paul puts it:

> 20TO THE JEWS I BECAME LIKE A JEW, TO WIN THE JEWS. TO THOSE UNDER THE LAW I
> BECAME LIKE ONE UNDER THE LAW (THOUGH I MYSELF AM NOT UNDER THE LAW), SO AS TO
> WIN THOSE UNDER THE LAW. 21TO THOSE NOT HAVING THE LAW I BECAME LIKE ONE NOT
> HAVING THE LAW (THOUGH I AM NOT FREE FROM GOD’S LAW BUT AM UNDER CHRIST’S
> LAW), SO AS TO WIN THOSE NOT HAVING THE LAW. 22TO THE WEAK I BECAME WEAK, TO
> WIN THE WEAK. I HAVE BECOME ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE SO THAT BY ALL POSSIBLE
> MEANS I MIGHT SAVE SOME.
> 
> — 1 CORINTHIANS 9:20-22, NIV



From an article in The Times
h/t Mads Davies

Middle-class, middle-England Brits feel comfortable with the
weak-tea-and-unthreatening edit of Christianity beloved of western Anglicans and
expressed well by David Cameron (right). When I am around people who fall in
this camp, we talk about how church is “just like any other organisation really”
(yes and no), how Christians are mostly just kind people (hah!), and lean
heavily on jokes about the CofE being, well, mostly tea.



> Fear not.

I reassure them,

> You’ve not lost me to those people.

gesturing at the terrifying other. I keep quiet about my relationship with Jesus
and how my prayer life is going, and am careful never to describe how by the
time the weekend rolls around I ache for the absolution and Eucharist. That
would not go down well and might make them afraid or hostile.

At the other end of the scale are prayer warrior friends who think nothing of
grabbing our hands and praying openly during teas and coffees after the service
(yes, really) and describing their lives in terms of the work of the spirit.
During that prayer bit, I felt a prat. But we were planning a New Year’s Party
at the time and had hit a roadblock. We prayed that the Lord would guide us to
the right venue, that a lot of people would join us, and for hot men. Reader, we
got all three. But if this kind of shenanigans makes me feel awkward, no wonder
when I try to talk about my sense of vocation with James, I clam up, feel
horribly vulnerable, and become all thumbs.


MY LORD I BEG YOU TO SEND SOMEONE ELSE, NOT ME.

> 13BUT MOSES SAID, “MY LORD, I BEG YOU TO SEND SOMEONE ELSE, NOT ME.”
> 
> — EXODUS 4:13, ERV

At our most recent meeting, James explained the expectation that I would be able
and willing to articulate my sense of calling. Not keen on this prospect, I
closed out the meeting by saying

> Right, I’m off to cry to my therapist

He seemed not to understand. James is at a different place on the Jesus scale.

I sought solace in a video call with a supportive friend. I explained the Jesus
scale to him.

> What I’ve gotta do

I continued

> is get more comfortable talking a bit further up the scale. I have to be able
> to articulate it.

> You,

I indicated, gesturing some sort of mid-range of values

> your range is here, but once I start talking about my relationship with Jesus…

and my friend visibly winced. The cringe is real, right? Zealotry is alienating.
But the opposite is also true. Priests who joke about not believing in God
provoke a related sense of disquiet for the nascent Christian.

When I am with a different cohort of people, such as my friend who led us in
prayer for the New Year’s Party, others in discernment, and God-fearing clergy,
I flinch less, because our conversation is pitched different on the Jesus scale.
For myself, I am now tasked with pulling what I am confident conversing about up
in line with my inner experience. The outer and the inner are in different
places. I am not worried about being not Jesus enough, but I do tend to frame my
experiences with God in terms of defensive jokes.

My flinching friend digested what I am up against, sat back, and reflected:

> I don’t envy you.

This made me feel validated, but hardly reassured. I am determined to get past
this, but at this point in time I do not know exactly how. It matters not
because I need to successfully navigate the Church of England discernment
process, nor because I need to somehow convince James. Those things are in God’s
hands. I could not fake them and nor would I want to. It matters for the sake of
possible future ministry to others. If I am going to be a religious leader, I
need a faith that other people can lean on – I like Matt Redman’s description of
an unswerving faith – and it needs to be visible. Being able to articulate it,
without shame, without flinching, without wanting to hide behind a cushion, is
part of that.

> 15…ALWAYS BE PREPARED TO GIVE AN ANSWER TO EVERYONE WHO ASKS YOU TO GIVE THE
> REASON FOR THE HOPE THAT YOU HAVE. BUT DO THIS WITH GENTLENESS AND RESPECT, …
> 
> — FROM 1 PETER 3:15-16, NIV

Posted in career, careers, challenge, Clams, discernment, doubt, Faith, Life,
PGF/TikZ, Prayer, the Jesus scale | Leave a comment


LEARNING TO FLY

Posted on 5 May 2024 by rpg

Hive and seek

I’ve written at length about our hens. What I may not have mentioned is that
last year we got a hive, and some bees to go in it.  The bees did what bees do,
and we had a few jars of honey.

Honey

Tragically,  the colony died in November, following that bizarre autumn we had
with temperatures of 20ºC followed by a chill. I harvested what I could
(including the ivy honey they’d made, which is an ‘acquired taste’), cleaned the
frames up, and stored everything away.

We started again in mid-April, with a fresh 5-frame nucleus, and although they
struggled a bit with the wet weather we’ve been having, they are doing the bee
thing now. We’re a little wiser, and hopefully this colony will fare better.



Part of the ‘wiser’ thing involves talking to people who have been doing this a
while.

I answered a call for help on the local beekeepers’ association WhatsApp last
week. Someone was worried about the behaviour of their bees. The consensus was
that they were swarming, but as she had just had a knee replacement (her own,
not a bee’s knee), she was unable to do the lifting of heavy hive parts needed
to inspect the colony.

Bee having the thyme of her life

As I had some time on my hands, I offered to help. I’d also noticed from her
video that she had the same sort of hive as me—a clever set-up that allows you
to drain the honey from the frames rather than needing to faff around with
centrifuges and whatnot. I thought I might be able to get some tips.

Inspecting the flow

I got there, we talked a little, then we suited up and starting looking at the
frames.

What we discovered was that the queen had not been laying eggs, and had probably
departed with the swarm (or had died or otherwise vamoosed). We also found an
empty queen cup—the special cell that queens grow in when the not-so-loyal
subjects of the old queen decide it’s time for a new one. We had no idea where
either queen was, and weren’t minded to check every single frame looking for
her.

We put the hive back together, and I was about to de-suit when Wanda’s husband
came home, suited up in motorcycle gear. Turns out Chris is allergic to bees,
although very keen on the art, and build all the equipment.

Chris, having no clue about what we’d seen in the hive, said,

“There’s a swarm in the lane.”

So I put my suit back on, grabbed a polystyrene bait hive that Chris dug out
from behind the shed, and went to collect my first swarm.

I snipped away a few branches and brushed as many bees as I could into the bait
hive, and then strapped it to the fence.

Looking for a new pad

When I went back a few days later to help Wanda instal a new queen to the
original hive (yes, you can mail-order royalty), she told me that she’d gone out
later and found the new queen in the swarm, and captured her in the bait hive.
So we split the old hive (finding another queen cup as we did so), so that the
queen Wanda had found would have some stores and brood in her new pad, and
installed the new queen in the old hive.

I will go back at the end of the week and check that both colonies are doing OK.

It turns out that Wanda and Chris have been keeping bees for about 25 years.
They had an operation with 100s of hives in Zimbabwe, and I am hopeful to hear
lots more tales of their adventures there, where beekeeping is more akin to
guerrilla warfare than the (mostly) gentile pastime it is here.



What fun.

Posted in bees, Gardening, hens, nature, Zimbabwe | Leave a comment


STUPID CHEMISTS (PERHAPS)

Posted on 5 May 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve recently returned from my annual visit to the High Polymer Research Group
Conference, held at the picturesquely named village of Pott Shrigley at the
Western edge of the Peak District. This is a conference about which I have
written before, following its evolution from the scarey place full of
established and unwelcoming male chemists I encountered as a young researcher
back in the mid-1980’s, to a much more diverse and inclusive group of people
working across the polymer domain. If you want to know about the science
discussed under the theme of Polymers in the Age of Data, I refer you to Richard
Jones’ excellent summary on his own blog. My take on the conference will be more
focussed on the human aspects.

Over the years I’ve been going, my own years have clearly advanced. Now, I have
reached the heady heights of chairing the committee that oversees this annual
event. One consequence of this is that I am expected to produce an after-dinner
speech on the final evening. For any international readers, this idea may be
somewhat alien, but it is a standard activity at more formal dinners in the UK.
I have, in my capacity as Master of a Cambridge college, had plenty of
experience of exhorting students in the college to better things, and
reminiscing about the College’s activities (and why donations are so important
to support our students) at alumni dinners. Neither of those sorts of speeches
would fit the bill very well at this conference, as I discussed in my speech
last year. (I may say my predecessor as chair was Andy Cooper. He gave an
excellent talk this year about his robot-based synthetic chemistry lab, on which
more later, but as chair for three years he managed to get away with only giving
one after-dinner speech, due to two years of cancellation because of the
pandemic.)

The challenge is, at least in part, because this is not a speech that can be
written in advance, as it needs to take into account what the different
presentations covered. So, the afternoon before the conference dinner may need
to be set aside for dreaming up amusing anecdotes to include. The strategy I
have taken, both last year and this, is to make notes, at the time, of the
particular bon mots I want to include and then weave them together. It works for
me, but probably wouldn’t for everyone. This year, speakers seemed to cover much
about the skills needed, and the skills that perhaps robots lack. As Andy put it
in his own talk, his ‘robots are the world’s stupidest chemists. We need humans
in the loop.’ However, it is also the case, as Tanja Junckers said, that ‘robots
are much more consistent than graduate students.’ Hence, using them (the robots
that is) for repetitive grunt work absolutely makes sense, with the added
advantage that they can work 24/7 without complaint.

Given that the whole theme of the conference was what can and can’t be
automated, what data we do or don’t have, and how we’re going to tackle the gaps
in knowhow and robust data, it isn’t surprising that much was said about how the
average researcher fits into this evolving landscape. Michael Meier, who was
obviously pushing the limits both of the chemistry and of his students, remarked
that he had ‘some students very frustrated with the Chemistry he was requiring
of them’ and that often there were various routes to some end point, but ‘all of
them were crap’. However, whatever his students might have felt, he himself
remained excited about his research, including one project that he called his
James Bond project; you can imagine the sort of flavour that had.

One of the major problems in this area is that there are data on only a subset
of all the possibilities – be it in molecular structure, or a particular
property over a specific if narrow range of parameters. How do you construct a
database under these circumstances? Jacqui Cole has been working hard at
scraping the literature to build a huge dataset, but up till now she has
concentrated on small molecules, often inorganic. To move into the polymer world
is hard, as she admitted, saying not only that ‘polymers are messy and
difficult’ but that overall ‘polymer science is really hard.’ I suspect those
words will have resonated with everyone in the room, even if not applying all of
the time. Polymer science is, of course, endlessly fascinating as well, or we
wouldn’t all be doing it.

But careers do not go in a straight line – something I frequently tell the
Churchill students (particularly at the Freshers’ and Graduates’ Dinners) as
well as writing about here over many years – and that sentiment turned up too in
the presentations, when Adam Gormley said flatly ‘I didn’t design my career to
get here.’ Who does ‘design’ a career, even if synthetic chemists may try to
design a macromolecule? Our final speaker, Filip du Prez, was perhaps being
flippant, or cynical, when he praised those students who ‘boost their
supervisors career’ – he was after all the only thing standing between the
delegates and the conference dinner, so perhaps a little lightheartedness was in
order.

It was an incredibly stimulating conference. I have picked out the comments I
have, because I noted how many people addressed some quasi-social aspects of the
area. I’m not sure that this is so common in conference presentations, but
perhaps this field particularly lends itself to rueful remarks about
human/machine-learning/robot/data interactions in ways that other parts of the
discipline do not. I’ll be watching out next year to see if the theme continues.

 

 

Posted in careers, data, Pott Shrigley, Research, robots, Science Culture |
Leave a comment


MY FIRST MUSIC LIBRARY CONFERENCE – APRIL 2024

Posted on 3 May 2024 by Frank Norman

Last month I attended the IAML UK & Ireland Annual Study Weekend (ASW).  IAML is
the International Association of Music Libraries, and this is an event run each
year by the UK & Ireland branch.

This was the first time I have attended a music library conference. I’m an old
hand at libraries generally but a novice in terms of music libraries, so I had a
curious mix of feelings. I felt a certain confidence but then kept remembering I
have no experience in music librarianship. I know little of its history and I
lack experience of what works, what’s been tried before, what all the factors
are that influence how systems are set up as they are.


LEEDS

This year the ASW was held in Leeds. On the morning before the conference
started I spent some time exploring the city and its 19th century glories – the
huge covered market, the opulent shopping arcades, the town hall. Leeds is an
impressive city.

Leeds town hall, built 1853-58. 40 years ago I sang the Verdi Requiem in this
building.



County Arcade.

The ASW organisers had arranged some library tours for delegates and I enjoyed
seeing and learning about the history of the Leeds Library – this is a private
library that was founded in 1768 with Joseph Priestley as it first Secretary.
The tour gave insights into the social history of the city and the reading
habits of its citizens.  If you’re ever in Leeds I recommend a visit to this
library – they have regular tours, or you can just visit as a guest at certain
times of day.

Interior of Leeds Library.



Blue plaque outside Leeds Library.

The first talk of the ASW was about a book recently published on popular music
in Leeds. It was given by three of the co-editors: Brett Lashua, Paul Thompson
and Kitty Ross.  The book, Popular Music in Leeds, brought together the
perspectives of historians, community historians, sociologists, journalists and
musicians and that mixture is reflected in its subtitle – “Histories, Heritage,
People and Places”.

Sounds of our City.

The three speakers described the book and the way it came about. In 2020 Leeds
Museums & Galleries created an exhibition (curated by Kitty Ross) called ‘Sounds
of our City’ to celebrate music in Leeds. This opened just before the COVID
lockdown, so it was quickly turned into an online exhibition. It focused on
places in Leeds where music of all sorts was made. By various twists and turns
the exhibition inspired the book.  An app is also under development which will
map Leeds popular music venues and history, as well as images.

Leeds is home to the world-renowned triennial Leeds International Piano
Competition (LIPC) and the 2024 event is already under way.  In a wide-ranging
presentation given by key staff of the LIPC we learnt about its history and the
achievement of its founder, Fanny Waterman, in creating LIPC, and how efforts
are now being made to address the gender gap.

Another session which focused on Leeds and its cultural heritage was the
after-dinner session of archive and special collection ‘speed dating’. We moved
around ten tables, each with a librarian and an item from their collection. They
had three minutes to explain what the item was and what it signified. At the end
we each voted for our favourite item, and then the winner was declared. This was
a great session and left me wanting to know more about all the items. I am
planning a separate blogpost about this.


MUSIC LIBRARIANSHIP

One of my aims in attending the IAML ASW was to learn more about the community
of music libraries/librarians in the UK. The conference was a nice size – about
35 attendees – so it was easy to interact with most of the people there, and
find out about their work.  I also gained insights into a number of other
interesting and/or inspiring tales from the broader music library world.

Three of the talks at the ASW gave insights into the work of music librarians.
Peter Linnett described a raft of EDI initiatives at the Royal College of Music
library. Sarah Lewis told us about her experience of moving into music
librarianship, as Subject Librarian for the Creative Arts at University of
Lincoln. She is developing a Libguide for the music dissertation module – it
looks very good and thorough, focusing on the needs of the learner rather than
on the resources. Charity Dove gave a very personal account of her 17 years
working as subject librarian for music at Cardiff University. She didn’t shy
away from describing some very challenging times. Her intense connection with
and dedication to her user community shone through strongly.

It’s always good to hear about successful innovations and Hannah McCooke’s
account of musical instrument lending in six Edinburgh public library branches
was very inspiring. It’s also a reminder that not all music librarianship
happens in places that are called music libraries.  The Edinburgh scheme started
in August 2022 and is a collaboration with the Tinderbox Collective – a
collective of young people, musicians, artists and youth workers in Scotland. 
The scheme has already accumulated more than 300 instruments and in 2023
recorded over 900 loans. They have a musician-in-residence who offers tuition
one day a week and puts on workshops.  The scheme has reached hundreds of
children, and adults too.  They have a heap of testimonials and events under
their belt. The scheme has spread beyond Edinburgh and I expect it will grow
further.

The session of most direct interest to me was the one about the lending of vocal
and orchestral sets in the UK, as I am volunteering in a library that lends sets
to choirs and orchestras.  Lee Noon, from the Leeds performing arts library,
outlined the complexity of current provision and the pressures that choral and
orchestral set collections face. Someone observed that provision of sets of
scores is a national service that is run at a local or regional level.  This
makes it harder to provide a national strategy and achieve economies of scale.

How can we move to a more unified system of set lending? The Encore21 catalogue
is a key piece of infrastructure, supported by IAML UK&Irl, but it needs to be
made sustainable. It uses Koha technology which works well and is flexible, but
Encore21 could be improved by adding a lending system to the catalogue. This
would allow users to move easily from locating a set to effecting a loan. While
desirable, this would be a big undertaking and would take some work to get
agreement from all current Encore21 participants. Even agreeing a common pricing
system could be very tricky. Someone suggested that the system should also cover
wind band and brass band music, and should try to bring in more providers.

I wondered whether something like the UK Research Reserve would be helpful for
music,  to help manage holdings of rarely-requested music sets. Exploring that
possibility would be another major project.

It was noted that a survey of current providers of music sets will be launched
soon, and this will be useful alongside the results of the Encore21 user
survey.  I see that the Music Libraries Trust also ran a survey in 2020 and
produced a report in 2022 that might guide thinking.


ETHICS, DIVERSITY, ARCHIVES

The session on cataloguing ethics was instructive and generated a lively
discussion. It was good to hear research perspectives from Deborah Lee, a
lecturer at UCL’s Department of Library & Information Studies with expertise in
music knowledge organisation, and from Diane Rasmussen McAdie, Professor of
Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University. Diane was a member of the
Cataloging Ethics Steering Committee which drew up the Cataloguing Code of
Ethics in 2021. Caroline Shaw (British Library) gave two very practical
examples. In  one project context notes were added to 200 catalogue records to
flag up offensive language in song titles. In another case, pushing for
inclusive language led to a change in an institution’s style guide.

Another talk, by Loukia Drosopolou, told us about an 18 month-long project to
catalogue the archives of some women musicians – Harriet Cohen, Astra Desmond
and Phyllis Tate. This is valuable work to increase representation and make
resources available to music historians.

History was also the focus of Geoff Thomason’s talk about the friendship between
Adolph Brodsky and Ferruccio Busoni. They got to know each other when they were
both in Leipzig and kept up links when Brodsky moved to Manchester as a
professor at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now the RNCM). Brodsky
suggested to Busoni that he could move to Manchester to become professor of
piano, but he declined. This detailed talk showed evidence of many hours spent
researching in the RNCM archives to unearth the history between the two
musicians.


IAML

Several sessions provided updates about IAML and the IAML UK&Irl branch, how
they work, and what they do. There is a need to broaden membership to include
people outside of libraries – someone said ‘Music is everywhere’ not just in
libraries, so it would be good to reach out to other places where there are
music collections. I think it would also be good to include people from the
music publishing business, and from the digital music sector. I think that the
inclusion of multiple points of view in the group can only be a good thing.

Janet Di Franco, the IAML UK&Irl branch president, gave us a good impression of
the challenges ahead, and the need for us to get involved in the work of the
group.

Overall I found it an interesting and engaging small conference and hope I will
be able to attend another IAML ASW in the future.

Posted in Libraries and librarians, Music | Leave a comment


WHAT I READ IN APRIL

Posted on 30 April 2024 by Henry Gee

Cixin Liu: The Dark Forest This is the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, which I
read last month. In that book, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie sends a signal into
space that alerts another species to human existence. The species inhabits a
planet that orbits chaotically in a system of three suns. As a result, this
planet, Trisolaris, is subject to extreme and unpredictable climate swings. When
the Trisolarans learn of Earth’s equable situation, they launch an invasion
fleet. In the centuries that the Trisolaran fleet will take to reach Earth,
humans do their best to think of ways to counter the Trisolaran menace. It turns
out that the Trisolarans have a way to infiltrate all human communication in
real time. But they have a weakness, for, unlike humans, they are completely
incapable of deceit. Human thought, in human brains, remains opaque to them.
Thus the humans come up with the Wallfacer Project, in which four humans are
chosen to think deep thoughts and possibly come up with a scheme to counter what
comes to be seen as an otherwise insuperable threat. The least likely of the
four Wallfacers is unambitious astronomer Luo Ji. Nobody knows why Luo has been
chosen — except that someone, somewhere, keeps trying to kill him. This leads
Luo into what at first seems an unlikely partnership with rough-hewn detective
Shi Qiang (my favourite character from the first book). This book is as rich and
as deep and as full of marvels as The Three-Body Problem — and as full of
absorbing red herrings, diversions and dramatic plot twists. To sum up, it’s a
cross between the fable of the Three Little Pigs and an exegesis on the Dark
Forest Hypothesis — that the reason why the Universe seems devoid of intelligent
life is that the civilisations that last are those that do their best to remain
hidden. For in the Dark Forest, there are wolves. Like The Three-Body Problem,
The Dark Forest is a tour de force of modern science fiction. Moving on to
Death’s End, the final book in the trilogy…

Cixin Liu: Death’s End This novel begins in an unlikely place and time —
Constantinople, as it is about to fall to the Turks in 1453. A prostitute
discovers that she has amazing magical powers… which fail just when they are
most necessary. The significance of this is revealed later. Back to the near
future, the United Nations, keen to raise funds, start a cheesy scheme to ‘sell’
star systems to the public. Few take up the offer, but one is terminally ill Yun
Tianming, a former college classmate of brilliant astrophysicist Cheng Xin, who
secretly has a crush on her. Having come into money just before his death, Yun
Tianming buys Cheng Xin a distant star system. The significance of that is
revealed later, too. Later still, Yun … or rather, his brain … is sent by Cheng
Xin in an experimental probe to spy on the advancing Trisolaran fleet, but is
lost. Meanwhile, the now aged Wallfacer Luo Ji (from The Dark Forest) comes up
with an ingenious deterrent that will prevent the Trisolaran fleet from
attacking the Earth — a threatened broadcast into space of the location of
Trisolaris, which will bring down a so-called ‘Dark Forest Strike’ from an
unknown alien assailant. He moves from being Wallfacer to Swordholder, wielder
of the deterrent. But this action runs the risk of exposing the Earth, too, at
some future date. The Trisolarans call the Earth’s bluff just as Luo Ji hands
the sword to his successor, Cheng Xin — who fluffs it. The significance of that,
too, becomes apparent later. The Trisolarans invade the Solar System, but the
deterrent is sent anyway by Gravity, one of the few spaceships that managed to
evade the invading Trisolarans. Trisolaris is destroyed, and Earth seeks to find
ways to either send a message of goodwill (thus preventing a strike) or to
discover ways to protect the Solar System. Centuries later they are aided by an
unlikely ally — Yun Tianming, who had been picked up by the Trisolarans and
reconstituted into fully human form. He drops hints about possible strategies to
Cheng Xin in the form of a fairy story, something that his Trisolaran handlers
will not understand. Sadly, the humans — as it turns out — completely fail to
understand the message, with dire consequences. But that is only the half of it,
and what I have written hardly begins to convey the beauty, grandeur and
melancholy of this stupendous book. Just like The Three-Body Problem and The
Dark Forest, Death’s End is full of old-fashioned SF super-science wound into
engaging personal stories that called to mind everything from the aliens in Carl
Sagan’s terrific novel Contact (read the book: please avoid the film adaptation,
so dreadful that even Jodie Foster could not save it) to Flatland, a fantasy on
life in two dimensions. For it turns out that space is not the wilderness we
always thought it was. What we humans think of as the unshakeable laws of
physics, such as the number of spatial dimensions, and the value of the speed of
light in a vacuum, have been repeatedly adulterated by hyper-technical
civilisations that are constantly at war, and the Universe we know is the
bombed-out wreck of what was once an Edenic state. Like its predecessors in this
majestic trilogy, Death’s End combines prose as delicate and beautiful as a
traditional Chinese brush painting with huge passages of exposition that
shouldn’t really work, but rather than hold up the narrative, they only increase
the tension. I found it by turns suspenseful, exciting and at times intensely
moving. I can safely say that The Three-Body Problem, considered as a trilogy
(for it is just one long story), is the first book I have come across that
knocks The Night Circus off its perch as the best book I’ve read in the past
decade, and that Cixin Liu is the most compelling author of hard SF I’ve come
across since I first read the nouveau space opera of Iain M. Banks and Alastair
Reynolds. Having devoured the trilogy as audiobooks, I shall now buy the dead
tree versions which I’ll set up at home where they’ll take pride of place in my
alphabetically arranged SF library between Le Guin (Ursula) and Lovecraft (H.
P.). Having said that, I might put The Three-Body Problem on a separate shelf,
all on its own, as a shrine, and worship at it. For The Three-Body Problem
trilogy is a masterpiece in anyone’s cosmos.

Donald L. Miller: Masters of the Air As you both know, Offspring#2 is the Gee
family’s resident projectionist, with a knack of discovering televisual
emissions that others might enjoy. So it was that she spotted Masters of the
Air, a mini-series about the lives, loves, horrible deaths, incarcerations and
occasional survival of the boys (they were, really, just boys) of the American
bomber crews stationed in East Anglia during the Second World War. And so
Offspring#2 passed me the book of the film, as it were, which turns out not to
be a drama at all but a serious and well-researched work of military history, a
genre I rarely touch, if ever. Well before Allied infantry set foot in Hitler’s
Fortress Europe, and while the sea lanes were still prowled by U-boats, the
crews of the US Army Eighth Air Force (the US Air Force did not become a service
separate from the Army until 1947) flew their B-24 Liberators and B-17 Flying
Fortresses over Germany, at first unescorted by fighter support, with the aim of
the pinpoint destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure (the
ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt feature strongly) and do so in broad
daylight, with rather small bombs. They largely failed, and that they were
mercilessly shot up by the Luftwaffe is to be expected, but US planners felt
that such a stiletto approach would be more humane than the bludgeon wielded by
the RAF, devised by the head of Bomber Command, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, of
saturation bombing of German cities by night, with much larger bombs. The
strategy only began to achieve success after D-Day, when fighters that could
escort the bombers became available, and when strategists finally realised that
striking Germany’s oil refineries and synthetic oil plants would cripple the
Reich. That, and Hitler’s hurried scheme of devoting resources into futuristic
weapons such as ballistic missiles and jet aircraft that would be payback for
the destruction of German cities, but which came too late. In the end, though,
the inaccurate targeting of the Eighth Air Force ended up converging with the
merciless slaughter dealt by RAF Bomber Command. Masters of the Air is an
intriguing if rather dense read, and shows, once again, that the schemes of
military theorists far from the front are tested by many others with their
lives, and underlining that old dictum that the best-laid plans of any military
strategist rarely survive first contact with the enemy.

Amor Towles: A Gentleman In Moscow Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, late of ‘Idle
Hour’, an estate near Nizhny Novgorod, returns to Russia from Paris after the
Revolution to set his grandmother’s affairs in order. He is rounded up by the
Bolsheviks, who, rather than shoot him for being a  ‘social parasite’, have what
seems to be a worse fate in store. He is made a ‘former person’ and confined for
life to the luxurious Hotel Metropol, just opposite the Bolshoi Ballet and
within sight of the Kremlin, there to live at the state’s expense, in a tiny
attic room, as he is forced to watch the collapse of his privileged world. But
the Bolsheviks hadn’t reckoned on the resourcefulness of their prisoner.
Rostov’s late guardian, the Grand Duke, had instilled in the young Count not
only perfect manners, but an unshakeable maxim: you must become the master of
your circumstances, lest you become mastered by them. So Rostov adapts to his
new life and finds in it contentment as he encounters poets, actors, waifs,
strays, journalists, diplomats, party apparatchiks, petty bureaucrats, movers
and shakers among the hotel’s guests. His old-world decorum finds him taking a
job as Head Waiter at the hotel’s prestigious Boyarski restaurant, as well as
advising the New Russians on how best to conduct themselves in foreign company.
This perfectly constructed novel is every bit as elegant and well-comported as
its protagonist, with wry, funny asides and delicate prose lightly concealing
the ups, downs — and horrors — of the Soviet Union from its birth until the
early 1950s. I found it most affecting. Now I’ve finished, I find myself missing
Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, known to his friends as Sacha, a man with a
steely resolve buried, seeming very deeply, beneath his well-groomed exterior.

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi A young man called Piranesi lives in a strange,
Borgesian world, an infinite series of gigantic marble halls styled on classical
lines, and ornamented by uncountable statues. The highest halls are full of
cloud: the lowest, inundated by the sea. Piranesi is content, making fires of
dried seaweed, eating delicious concoctions of seaweed, mussels and fish,
communing with the many birds that flock the halls, and tending to the needs of
the various mummified corpses found, now and again, in odd corners unoccupied by
statues. The only other living person is ‘The Other’, with whom Piranesi meets
each Tuesday and Friday. But all is not as it seems. There are intrusions from
another world, revealed at first by odd facts, such that the bones of one of the
dead people are stored in a box marked ‘Huntley and Palmer’s Family Circle’; and
the mention, by The Other, of nonsensical words such as ‘Battersea’. The
unravelling of Piranesi’s world is seen through his eyes — or, rather, through
his meticulous diary entries, for Piranesi documents  the events as obsessively
and seemingly as uncomprehendingly as the autistic boy in The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night Time. At first one is inclined to think that Piranesi is
a psychiatric patient, and all indications suggest that this is the case. But as
with everything in this story, nothing is really what it seems. Not even
Piranesi. A beautiful book, if slightly unsettling.

Ferris Jabr: Becoming Earth Those who seek for life elsewhere in the Universe
first need to understand this: that life does not just exist on Earth. It is
everywhere. Life clothes every surface. Everything that is living hosts other
living things on, inside and around it, and these motes host smaller things too.
Life modifies the Earth to make its habitat amenable to yet more life. Even the
inanimate world might be very different were it not for the all-pervading
influence of life. In this evocative hymn to life, journalist Ferris Jabr shows
just how much life has shaped the Earth during its long history. Life enhances,
speeds up, facilitates geology. Everyone knows that we owe our breathable
atmosphere to life, our nourishing soil. Fewer will realise that without life,
plate tectonics might not be what it is. Most of the minerals extracted from the
Earth would not exist without life.  In his quest to understand the
interconnections between Earth and life, Jabr climbs dizzying towers into the
canopy of the Amazon rainforest to show how forests create their own weather,
and descends deep into old mine workings to show how life thrives far
underground. And yes, he meets a centenarian James Lovelock, originator of the
‘Gaia’ theory of how living things regulate the environment to keep it equable.
Jabr is no blind follower of Gaia, though. To him, the whole planet is not a
living thing — instead, Earth has come to be shaped by life in ways that could
never have happened had life never existed. Loving and lyrical, in some ways
this reminded me of classic nature writing such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
While Jabr reminds us of the current threats to the climate from human activity,
he notes that progress is already being made. Things might not be as bad as they
seem. For we humans are just as much a part of nature as the worms that burrow
kilometres underground in search of bacteria, or the aeroplankton of spores and
living dust that the winds carry in the air far above. [DISCLAIMER: this book
was sent to me by the publisher for an endorsement].

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time BEWARE There are spiders spoilers spiders.
Generation starship Gilgamesh is the last hope of humanity to flee a dying Earth
in search of a new home. Eventually they discover a gorgeous green planet that
had been terraformed by an outpost of the long-gone human empire, watched over
by a half-mad quasi-human guardian determined not to let any human land there
and spoil her experiment in generating new sentient life. The life that arises,
however, is not quite what the guardian — and the desperate crew of the
Gilgamesh — had expected. Who will win the ultimate battle? Terrific, thrilling,
madly inventive hard SF adventure. Moving immediately on to the sequel…

Posted in Writing & Reading | Leave a comment


HIGHER

Posted on 29 April 2024 by rpg

This is a cross-post of something I wrote on LinkedIn.

It’s a treehouse rather than a strategy house but I still built it.

One of the most fun projects I’ve been involved in was the series of global
Annual Brand Meetings we ran for a client. In partnership with the client we
would come up with a theme for this 4.5-day meeting, build the agenda, organize
workshops and liaise with other partners to build the room and the stage.

And of course write the slides.

Oh, the slides.

It was a Global Commercial Marketing-led event, with participation from
affiliates around the world, and we would grapple with the Brand strategy and
activation plans to address the challenges (and celebrate the successes) of the
blockbuster product.

As a Writing team, we helped clients from Commercial, Medical and Market Access,
from Global, the Regions and from selected Countries, put together their
messages and presentations that recognized where we were, where we wanted to go,
and—critically—how we were going to get there over the following 12 months. And
we had to do all that in a manner that was clear, accessible, internally
consistent, understandable across the global operation—and without killing
people by PowerPoint. We had the opportunity to be reasonably creative with our
slides, although people would often still try to cram too much into their
presentation. A couple of times we even arranged some presentation skills
training for them.

As I say, it was fun, if very hard work trying to balance all the conflicting
demands of the different functions and personalities. On more than one occasion
we’d deliver the showfile no more than 5 minutes before the scheduled start of a
session, having been up most of the night putting the finishing touches on
slides, before someone would come to us at breakfast and say “Oh, one last
thing…”

One particular year just before the pandemic, the meeting had been reduced to
2.5 days to save budget. The theme of the meeting was ‘mountains’, because we
were encouraging the entire Brand Team to make that final push for peak sales.
Perhaps a little obvious, but we did get to play with some lovely photography
and graphics concepts for the meeting.

And, because cramming the messages and value from four days into two and a half
wasn’t enough of a challenge, someone made the decision (I honestly don’t
remember if it was us or the client) to have slides made to fill the super-wide
screen LED display that covered half of one wall of the 300-seater conference
room.

For the most part, we used the centre of the screen for a standard 16:9
presentation and the outer parts for repeater screens and close-up video feed of
the speaker. But for the intro talks in each session—i.e. the most senior
presenters—we filled the screen. We are talking slides that were 4320 pixels
wide and 940 deep. That’s more than four times wider than high, and a real
challenge when you’re working on a tiny laptop screen.

Admittedly for most of those presentations we cheated a bit and had some static
themed graphics either side, and only played with the middle third for content.
We still had to contend with crammed graphs and tiny text supplied to us in
standard PowerPoint and make them sing somehow, but it was doable.

Then as I was sitting in the slide room in the Barcelona conference centre,
reflecting on 2 days of successful meeting and thinking about going and getting
some dinner,the VP of Global Medical Affairs (the therapeutic area medical head)
for this multi-billion dollar drug came up to me and said,

“Richard…”

Now, I liked VPGMA. We’d done some great stuff together, and had some really
good discussions about the product and what we were trying to achieve. So I was
inclined to be sympathetic to his request. And then he told me what he wanted.

He was due to open the proceedings for the final day—recap the meeting so far,
give a 10-minute Medical Affairs talk, and introduce the morning’s speakers.
He’d seen the amazing slide work we’d done for his colleagues in the other
functions, and didn’t want to give the standard data-heavy medical spiel.

So we had a chat about how we could just use graphics with key numbers
highlighted, the fewest possible words, and fit it all in under 3 minutes with
some animations to bring it seamlessly together.

Then he dropped the bomb.

“And I want it to be timed,” he said, pulling up an MP3 on his laptop, “so that
the messages come on screen at the same time as the words in the song”.

We listened to the song and I searched up the lyrics.

“Sure,” I said, without knowing if it was even possible. “We can do that.”

“And I don’t want to click through. I don’t want to say anything after
presenting the agenda. I want it to run automatically from start to end.”

“Across the entire screen?”

“Across the entire screen.”

Dear Reader, I learned a lot about animation timings in PowerPoint that evening.

I sat in the slide room with the rest of the writing team, and as the night wore
on and one-by-one they finished their own “one more thing”s, they gathered
around the wide-screen TV I was using as a second monitor. Every now and then
I’d say “Right, here we go,” and test the next 20-second segment. There’d be the
occasional comment, such as “You’re a little bit fast, there”, and I’d go and
tweak that one slide and then check all the other timings that were affected,
before running the animation again.

We were heartily sick of the song by the time, a couple of hours after midnight,
I exported the file as an MP4 and sent it to VPGMA with a short note asking for
his approval.

In the morning, I had to upload the video to the AV desk, and explain to the AV
crew that no, the first part isn’t slides, you need to switch from the holding
screen to the video, and then back to the slideshow for the next presenter. They
got it eventually, and we even managed to test it—with 5 minutes to spare, of
course.

And the best part of this entire story?

It’s the only time I’ve ever seen Head of Medical receive a standing ovation at
a Brand—or any other—Meeting.

 

Posted in client, Me, Powerpoint, War stories, work | Leave a comment


MOVING ON FROM A VICTORIAN IDEAL

Posted on 28 April 2024 by Athene Donald

I’ve recently been reading How the Victorians took us to the Moon by Iwan Rhys
Morus. It’s an interesting book, but what particularly struck me was the
Epilogue, which has reflections on how the Victorian way of doing science in
many ways persists to the modern day. Back then it was individualistic and
imperialistic (one hopes there is less of that today), requiring self-discipline
and charisma as well as innovation. As Morus puts it

> ‘Men of science of the right sort could be trusted with nature because they
> exhibited the right kind of qualities for the job. Increasingly, they were the
> products of rigorous regimes of training…..Accuracy and precision were not
> just attributes of the measurements they took, they were meant to be moral
> attributes of the men who took the measurements. They were exemplary
> individuals….The Victorians had very clear ideas, by the end of the nineteenth
> century, of what men of science and their institutions should look like, and
> what they were for. It was a view we have inherited.’

In case any readers take exception to the use of the word man in that paragraph,
as he also points out ‘The possession of disciplined minds was what was supposed
to be the difference between men and women. Men could be trusted to keep
themselves under control while women were at the mercy of their uncontrollable
bodies.’ Sadly, there are those who still seem implicitly to believe something
along those lines about who should be allowed to do science. However, the point
I want to make is that, as Morus points out, how science was done was seen as
part of the larger narrative of society.

A long time ago I wrote here about the dangers associated with believing science
is done by lone geniuses. It’s bad for children in the classroom to be fed that
as a current descriptor, since it’s far from the modern truth, and it’s bad for
the public solely to be fed stories of this type: science these days is almost
invariably a team sport, however convenient the hero narrative may be to convey
great ideas. However, as Morus points out, it isn’t only in communicating with
the public we have a problem. Incentives still tend to reward the individual. In
this context, think of the science Nobel Prizes, which can only be awarded to a
maximum of three people although many more will have fed into any ultimate
‘discovery’. (The Peace prize is different with, for instance, the IPCC grouping
being awarded the 2007 Peace Nobel Prize.) It is good to see other organisations
moving towards the idea that teams should be rewarded, as with the award of the
most prestigious medal from the Royal Society, the Copley Medal, which in 2022
was awarded to the Astra Zeneca vaccine team.

However, have our universities caught up with this in their promotions criteria?
Has the REF factored this appropriately in to their criteria? With the concerns
expressed in some quarters about the move to increased emphasis in REF2029 on
People, Culture and the Environment, are the tentative steps to think more
widely about how labs should be configured to achieve that catch-all phrase
‘excellence’ going to be diluted? Is the Narrative CV having the effect desired,
in encouraging people to discuss what they have done that goes beyond papers in
Nature or PNAS and their ilk and which might include mentoring or work around
EDI?

I will admit I was an initial fan of the narrative CV, now expected by UKRI (and
very much a creation of Ottoline Leyser’s during a project at the Royal Society,
and implemented by her when she became UKRI’s CEO), which looked as if it might
be a step in the right direction. But I am less sure, from all I’ve heard, it’s
having the desired effect. As ever, some people know how to jump through hoops
whatever hoops are put in place, but having good support from those around you
makes it much easier and therefore is likely to advantage the already
advantaged. Additionally, it may not necessarily be being taken very seriously
by grant-awarding panels. I hope evidence is being collected to see what
difference it is actually making in practice.

Moving away from the Victorian vision of the ideal ‘man of science’, with man
substituted by person, seems to me long overdue. In this vein it was interesting
to hear Ottoline talk recently at a Royal Society event about the importance of
the science and (importantly) innovation system as a whole, with many different
people contributing to an overall outcome. This is obvious when talking about
team science at CERN, for instance, where clearly the people who design the
experiments, who build the equipment with great precision, who collect the data
and then interpret it represent a huge and diverse group of people with no one
person ‘doing’ the experiment. It is perhaps less obvious in many other
situations, but is likely to apply in almost all areas.

How can our whole science ecosystem recognize everyone who contributes
appropriately? Be it in recruitment or promotion, be it in prizes or grants?
Isn’t it time we moved beyond the great man of science, not just in how we talk
about science and scientists, but in how we configure our labs and universities?
The 2021 R+D People and Culture White Paper – again something Ottoline was
substantially involved with during its gestation, along with the then (if
relatively short-lived, moving on a mere two months after the White Paper
appeared) Minister for Science, Research and Innovation Amanda Solloway – tried
to address this. Although many of the recommendations of this white paper have
been implemented (such as the Young Academy, New Deal for post-graduate research
students and a pilot scheme for interdisciplinary science) sadly many others
have not. In the context of this post, I would highlight

> Recognition and reward of all the people and activities that lead to excellent
> research and innovation.

Other points I would say have hardly been touched upon and in particular the
welcome idea that ‘bullying and harassment is no longer an issue in the sector’
feels a long way off. There is work to be done by our funders and our
institutions to move on from the current reward system we typically have to
recognize the 21st century reality.

Posted in Amanda Solloway, incentives, lone genius, Research, reward, Science
Culture | Leave a comment


I’M STILL STANDING

Posted on 21 April 2024 by rpg

Big Vet doesn’t want you to read this post.

Chickens, famously, do not have teeth.

Instead they have gizzards, A gizzard is a kind of bag betwixt beak and stomach
in which foodstuff is ground by little bits of stone and the like that they pick
up from their surroundings—grit. Gizzards are muscular organs, as they need to
be able to grind items as hard as wheat and sweetcorn kernels. This is probably
why they were the source material for the production of a protein that was the
subject of a certain thesis.

Gizzards, or more commonly ‘crops’, are subject to a range of disorders, and in
particular, “pendulous, or spastic” crop, which “occurs when the crop muscle
becomes stretched and the crop will fill to a massive size“.

We got our first three hens in February 2020. This was an undertaking totally
unrelated to Covid, although you might be forgiven for thinking we were going
into survivalist mode. One of the hens suffered from a massive gastrointestinal
tumour and had to be put down in the first week of 2021.

We got two more hens in the February. One came into lay and then 2 months later
had a prolapsed vent and died. The other, Artemis, developed a pendulous crop.
After that, we changed our supplier.

But Artemis (Arty to her friends) is still alive today, and that’s what I want
to talk about.

A pendulous crop is, according to the veterinary profession, a death sentence.
Without being able to grind her food, the affected hen will starve to death in
the midst of plenty.

I took Arty to the vet in Maidstone—a 25-minute drive away. Poultry vets are few
and far between because chickens are not really kept as pets, and commercially,
if a chicken gets sick it’s goodbye chicken, thanks for all the eggs.

However, an hour and about £150 later I came away with little hope and seven
syringes of an intramuscular injection, the name of which I forget, that the vet
said might (might) stimulate the muscles of the crop to contract properly and
save Arty’s life.

Yeah, learning how to give i.m. injections into the breast of a chicken wasn’t
on my bucket list but here we are.

And, you know what, it worked.

For about a month. And then the pendulous returned, and I thought that’s it,
thanks for all the eggs.

Until we came across the concept of chicken bras.

There’s a little place that makes these things, just for this sort of condition,
and Arty has been wearing one (or two, because she keeps snagging them off on
the various branches in the run) for the last 3 years, almost.

And the damn things work, and she’s been laying eggs like a normal hen, but with
a natty blue and white bra.

Arty (left), trying to avoid me. Rhea’s cool.

Okay, so she hides from me when I have to go into the pen to readjust her
over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder (see ‘snagging’, above), and her crop is still
pendulously huge if you take it off, but it works.

Big Veterinary does not want you to know this.

Posted in bra, chicken, Cock, Don't try this at home, Gardening, hens, nature |
Leave a comment


SWEET HOME ALABAMA [2]

Posted on 14 April 2024 by rpg

It never ends.

Evil incarnate

There’s always something to do, whether it’s laying turf, repairing hoses, or
pulling up the wild onions.

I’m taking advantage of the unexpected time off to fix things around the house
and garden. In the best traditions of yak shaving, there’s always several things
you need to do before you can fix the thing you set out to fix. The chess pieces
you have to put on the board (and the multiple trips to Wickes) before you can
actually drain the hanging water feature to reseal it.

And of course while I’m going around the garden I spot other things (including
wild onions, natch) that I didn’t even think about before I saw them and I then
I have to sort that out before I get to job I started—or intended to, anyway—a
week ago.

And then there’s the stuff that critically fails just about just before you’re
about to go out for your pre-birthday dinner.

Gaffer tape is the best. Except when it’s black insulating tape.

Which resulted in another trip to Wickes on Saturday and, what of all days I’d
forgotten, was Vaisakhi, which explains all the magnificent dastars, not to
mention the surfeit of BMWs and Mercedes parked all the way up our road. And
what should have been a 5-minute dash turned into a 20-minute detour through the
less frequented parts of Gravesend and slightly elevated cortisol levels because
I had to finish fixing the hose (and several other things, ibid) before an
indeterminate number of people turned up for my birthday party.

Fire makes it good

I did make it back in time to light the pizza oven, lay out the kegs, and even
enlist the Pawns to help me decide whether any of our homemade wine was worth
serving (or even legal). They didn’t take much persuading, it has to be said.

And the win, the real win, was that the 2023 harvest (Pinot Meunier and
Chardonnay from the greenhouse vines and possibly even more Chardonnay from the
barbecue corner [we have no idea what it is because we didn’t plant that vine.
It just produces hundreds of pounds of grapes every year]) not only popped when
I opened it, but retained its fizz, and was eminently drinkable (if a little
cloudy at the moment). I have, finally, cracked the Merret problem, and we
opened another bottle today and it was just as good.

Sparkles

How was your weekend?

Posted in Birthday, grapes, Me, offspring, Pawns, personal, pizza, Science-less
Sunday, Spring, wild onions, wine | Leave a comment


THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

Posted on 7 April 2024 by rpg

Hard to believe, but 4 years ago we were in lockdown. Bit of a shit time,
really, with scary NHS bears yelling at us to STAY HOME, schools shut, people
being shouted at for being (gasp) outside, and all that NHS crapping clapping.
At least there was Joe Wicks.



Let’s not do that ever again. Please.

It wasn’t all bad. I built a scale model of London City Airport (and of all the
airports in the world this being the best is the hill I will die on). I learned
how to make bagels.

And I built a treehouse.



This started with me throwing a pallet up into the willow tree and then figuring
out what I needed to put on top of it, and then negotiating the shortages of all
sorts of building materials (because everybody was at it, remember?) and fucking
social fucking distancing at fucking Wickes to collect the damn materials once
they were in stock and cramming it all into my tiny Peugeot (God rest her soul)
to get them home.


Joshua, being 6 at the time, wasn’t exactly helpful, but at least he enjoyed it.

Today, nearly 4 years after assembling the roof and then disassembling it ‘cos I
had to get it into the damn tree, I finished the project.

Oh, it’s been loved and used (and almost turned into a gin deck) since June
2020, but the skylight was just just a hole covered by loose roofing felt.

One of my ‘sabbatical‘ projects was to actually fit the skylight.

Today, dear reader, that happened.



And Joshua was actually helpful. He was able to hold the window from the inside,
chip away at the rough edges, and even wield the No More Nails gun to immense
effect.

I guess 40% of your time on Earth will make that kind of difference.

How times change.

Posted in Don't try this at home, fucking scary NHS bears, Joshua, Lockdown,
offspring, Science-less Sunday, treehouse | Comments Off on The Times They Are
A-Changin’


WHAT I GAVE UP FOR LENT

Posted on 3 April 2024 by Henry Gee

The thing I usually give up for Lent is abstinence, but it turns out that my
deprivation this year was more substantial. As you’ll both know, for a while
I’ve not been listening to, watching or reading the news. It turns out, entirely
by coincidence, that the day I decided to do this was Ash Wednesday, so I
decided that I should return to the world of current events on Easter Sunday.

So what’s changed? Not much. It’s a case of Meet The New Boss, Same as the Old
Boss. There is still conflict in the Middle East. There is still conflict in
Ukraine. There is still antisemitism. There is still transphobia. The England
team invariably loses. If Norwich City gets promoted to the Premiership, it’s
bound to be relegated given another year, two at most. The governments of those
countries that feature prominently in the news seems as inept/venal/corrupt as
ever. Some politicians/football managers/celebrities have disappeared from the
feeds, to replaced by other politicians/football managers/celebrities identical
(to me) in all but name. King Charles III and his daughter-in-law, the Princess
of Wales, have been seriously ill, but are now getting better. This is a good
thing, but people are becoming ill, and getting better, all the time. Except
that some get worse.

So, what did I miss?

As it turns out, nothing much. So my return to the world of news was not marked
by a sudden rush to buy all the papers, log on to the news websites every five
minutes or impose a hush when news bulletins come on to the radio, still less
the TV. Instead, I find myself bumping into the news in a much more muted, less
enthusiastic way than I once did. I’ve not bought a newspaper (I find them all
universally dreadful). The only periodicals to which I subscribe are The
Literary Review (which I read avidly) and The Spectator (which I dip into only
now and then when I’m feeling especially depressed). I’m willing to bet that one
would have to wait many months — perhaps years — before the news became
substantially different. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So why are people (some people anyway) obsessed with news? I have no idea. It
all seems so — well — trivial. The only thing likely to stir the sludge of my
cynicism is the re-election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United
States, if only to confirm my dim view of the human condition, for the section
of humanity represented by Trump seems to be intent on diminishing the
reproductive self-government of women, and it seems a truth that’s self-evident
(to me) that the reproductive self-government of women is the only thing worth
getting steamed up about, as any and all benefits experienced by humans in
general, such as increased health, wealth, welfare, contentment, education and
longevity stem, ultimately from that sauce source. Societies that restrict the
empowerment of women will either fail to develop, or go backwards.

In sum, my experience of news abstinence (I have coined the term nayesrein) is
the cultivation of a kind of Philosophic Repose (on a good day) or Swiftian
detachment (on a less good day). For in the end, we’re all doomed.

Comments Off on What I Gave Up For Lent


THIS IS WHAT WE FIND

Posted on 31 March 2024 by rpg

While making Richard’s Famous Margaritas(tm) (note to self: post this on
Magirism at some point) this afternoon, I had to clear the Triple Sec optic from
the sugary lunge build-up. After cleaning, I picked up the wrong receptacle and
dropped two measures of triple sec into the dregs of my Tribute instead of the
cocktail shaker.



Jenny said something about my career coach and turning disaster into
opportunity, so I dropped in the juice of half a lime and a couple of measures
of pisco and made something that was quite wonderful.

Come to my birthday party and discover more about this metaphor.

Posted in 15MinutePost, Science-less Sunday | Comments Off on This is what we
find


WHAT I READ IN MARCH

Posted on 29 March 2024 by Henry Gee

Austin Wright: Nocturnal Animals Teacher Susan Morrow used to be married to a
failed writer called Edward. Twenty years later, divorced with two children and
comfortably re-married to a physician, she receives a manuscript from Edward,
from whom she hadn’t heard for all that time. Over Christmas, when her husband
is away at a conference, she dives in and discovers a terrifying crime story in
which a husband, wife and teenage daughter are hijacked on the freeway during a
vacation. Much of the rest of the novel consists of Edward’s novel seen through
Susan’s eyes, interspersed with Susan’s reflections on her own past and present
life, all the while asking the question of why Edward has sent her this novel,
after all these years — a question that’s, teasingly, never answered. This is
one of those novels that’s gripping at the time but which one forgets as soon as
it is finished, even though, so it says, it is now a ‘Major Motion Picture’, a
strap line that seems to ensure obscurity for almost any book to which it
adheres.

Michael Reaves and John Pelan (eds) Shadows over Baker Street I had never before
heard of this cobwebb’d grimoire: news of it was bruited forth to me, no doubt
by some eldritch form of astral projection, by my associate Mr. C___ D___ of
Leeds, our correspondent in all matters chthonic. The great thing about fanfic,
I suppose, is that the author is free to do mashups of otherwise separate tropes
of popular culture. Offspring#2 and I have wondered, for example, whether the
egregious intrusion of Tom Bombadil into The Lord of the Rings might be spun as
an incursion into Middle-earth by Dr Who circa Matt Smith, with Alex Kingston as
‘the River Woman’s Daughter’. But I digress. Conan Doyle’s well-loved stories of
the tenants of 221B Baker Street have inspired a legion of knock-offs; as have
H. P. Lovecraft’s demented demonology that is the Cthulhu Mythos. Some of these
are really good — I cite for example the TV series Sherlock in which Holmes and
Watson are re-cast in modern dress, and the novels of Charles Stross set in ‘The
Laundry’, the government’s department of the occult. But what if Holmes and
Watson were themselves to encounter the Elder Gods? Think about it. Holmes
succeeds by the application of pure reason. Lovecraft, by the conjuration of an
ectoplasmic atmosphere of supernal terror (or so they tell me) which almost by
definition defies ratiocination. So here we have a collection of stories in
which Holmes and Watson are invited to investigate cases of reanimation,
eructations of ancient cults, and people who seem to be turning into fish. The
best one is the first, A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman (of course) and most
of the rest are a lot of fun. Real people such as H. G. Wells get stirred into
the mix, along with — on one occasion — William Hope Hodgson’s character of
Carnacki the ghost hunter. The High Victorian atmosphere lends itself to
excursions into orientalism that might not be welcome nowadays except in the
guise of pulp pastiche. There’s a lot about Watson’s time in Afghanistan, for
example, and the abhorred Necronomicon of Abdul Al-Hazred makes several
appearances. I could have had more about Moriarty, to be honest (he only
features in two of the eighteen stories) and overall they get a bit samey after
a while, though nothing less than enjoyable for those of a certain cast of mind.
I am struck by Philip Ball’s contention in The Modern Myths that the literature
that gets into the popular imagination is that which is formulaic, and not
necessarily very good. One cannot deny the power of the Music of Erich Zann
Cheap Music. Your powers of deduction amaze me, Holmes, how did you work out
that our visitor was an acolyte of Nyarlathotep, the blind idiot God who resides
in the very vortex of the void, whisperings of whose existence have only
otherwise reached our ears through the terrified murmurings of those who have
delved too deeply into the occult, the forbidden, and the arcane? Elementary, my
dear Watson. It’s the tentacles.

Cixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem When one is listening to audiobooks, the
program will sometimes come up with suggestions of the
if-you-liked-that-why-not-try-this variety. So imagine my puzzlement when after
listening to Barbra Streisand’s memoir My Name Is Barbra the algorithm came up
with hard science fiction from China. Naturally, I dived in. I’d heard vaguely
that Chinese SF is cool and trendy, and that the big name in the field is
Chinese-American Ken Liu, but hadn’t heard of Cixin Liu, a Chinese author, here
translated by Liu (sensu Ken). I shall ask no further questions of the
algorithm, as  The Three-Body Problem is one of the very best modern SF novels I
have ever read. The novel starts in 1967 when a young girl, Ye Wiejie, witnesses
her father, a physics professor, beaten to death by high-school students during
the Cultural Revolution. This traumatic event shades her future, and —
eventually — that of humankind. We see her brutal exile to a remote logging
camp, to her involvement as a technician in a secret radio-astronomy program of
initially unknown purpose,  to her political rehabilitation, and, finally,
retirement as a physics professor at Tsinghua University, where her father had
once taught. But there is another strand to this — or, rather, several, as the
novel is somewhat nonlinear. In the present day, Wang Miao, a materials
researcher working on a super-strong nanofilament, is coopted by a bluff,
hard-drinking, hard-smoking cop Shi Qiang to investigate the mysterious deaths
of several scientists. This leads us, through various diversions, to a secret
scientific society charting the very limits of science; eco-terrorism; an eerily
realistic computer game set on a planet orbiting chaotically in a triple-star
system (hence the title); and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The
scope is vast, and some of the set-pieces are truly staggering. Witness, for
example, an analog computer consisting of thirty million soldiers arrayed on a
vast plain using black and white signal flags as ones and zeroes. And the
efforts of alien scientists to create sentience by etching microcircuits inside
protons. It shouldn’t really work, but it does. There is a lot of exposition,
which I don’t mind, but others might find it holds up the action. I was
captivated by the sense of exoticism: Ken Liu’s translation is compelling for an
English-language reader or listener while maintaining the original novel’s
distinctive Chinese flavour. Imagine my surprise, when looking up from this
bravura feast of diamond-hard SF, to learn that there are sequelae, and, not
only that, a televisual version on Netflix. Unlike Nocturnal Animals, I don’t
think I’ll forget this one, and I have already cued up the sequel. I may be some
time…

Serge Filippini: The Man In Flames To the modern mind, Giordano Bruno
(1548-1600) is a martyr to an embryonic science in an age of intolerant
religion, burned at the stake for his doctrine that each star was a Sun with its
own system of planets. There was more to it, of course. In addition to his
cosmological speculations, Bruno evolved a philosophy — even a religion — based
on the idea that God lived in all things, and that people should be free to
worship as they wished. It was a dangerous time to hold such views, and Bruno
was nothing if not tactless in promoting his prolific works and disparaging of
anyone who didn’t agree with him. Not surprisingly he made more enemies than
friends and was forced to leave the city in which he resided at any time and hit
the road. He never stayed anywhere long, and lived the life of a perpetually
peripatetic scholar (nowadays we’d call this a ‘postdoc’), picking up lecturing
jobs where he could before the tides of religion and politics turned against
him. Born in what was then the Kingdom of Naples and initially a Dominican monk
— before he was (inevitably) excommunicated — he progressed through Italy,
Switzerland, France, England, France again, Germany and was lured back to Italy
where, in Venice, he was betrayed, imprisoned, tried, transferred to Rome, tried
again, and finally executed. The Man In Flames is the autobiography he
(probably) never wrote, during the final ten days of his life, as revealed to
author Serge Filippini and translated from the French by Liz Nash. The book
stays fairly close to what is known of his life, but of course takes some
license,  allowing us to meet, through Bruno’s eyes, contemporaries such as
Montaigne, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Giacomo Archimboldo, Philip Sidney,
King Henri III of France, Queen Elizabeth I of England and even a young William
Shakespeare. A story of passionate love runs through the book like a thread: the
love of Bruno’s life is Cecil, a brother of Philip Sidney, who, as a diplomat to
the Venetian Republic, is unlike Bruno in every way. Cecil is calm and urbane
where Bruno is an excitable loudmouth who promotes his heterodox views to
everyone he meets, whether they are welcome or not. Even Cecil cannot save Bruno
from a fate that he seems to have brought upon himself. As a book, The Man In
Flames is an enjoyable, occasionally scatological romp through an often lethally
turbulent time in early modern history.

Posted in Writing & Reading | Comments Off on What I Read In March


THE COUNTRY LIFE

Posted on 24 March 2024 by rpg

I set up a WhatsApp group for the locals, so I can let them know when I have
eggs available.

“Hello Richard!” they’ll message, “Any eggs available today?”

At this time of year, with an average of 4 eggs daily, the answer is invariably
‘yes!’, and they’ll pop round, cash in hand, 20 minutes later.

There’s something deeply satisfying about the whole arrangement.

I also have a standing order (6 eggs/fortnight) and an advance order for Easter
Saturday, so I have to watch supplies, but I still had 2 eggs at lunch today, as
well as enough to make gelato and pavlova.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In news to warm the cockles of Henry’s, I planted out my potatoes today. Jenny
has been chitting the Maris Pipers and the Charlottes since January, and now
they’re looking alien enough to go in the ground. It’s also past the Spring
Solstice, so the time is right, and in they go.

I’ve got 2 rows of six of each, plus a couple of tubs for the leftovers. It’s
taken about 8 years but the main ‘physic’ patch in the garden felt like real
soil this afternoon, so we’re hopeful for a decent crop.

Po-tay-toes

 

Posted in 15MinutePost, community, eggs, Gardening, nature, potatoes, Spring |
Comments Off on The Country Life
← Older posts

 * Search for:


 * OUR BLOGS
   
    * Adventures in Wonderland by Richard Wintle
    * Athene Donald's Blog by Athene Donald
    * Blogging by Candlelight by Erika Cule
    * Confessions by Richard P Grant
    * Deep Thoughts and Silliness by Bob O'Hara
    * Girl Interrupting by Sylvia McLain
    * Mind the Gap by Jenny Rohn
    * Nicola Spaldin's Blog by Nicola Spaldin
    * No Comment by Steve Caplan
    * Not ranting – honestly by Austin Elliott
    * Reciprocal Space by Stephen Curry
    * The End of the Pier Show by Henry Gee
    * Trading Knowledge by Frank Norman
    * VWXYNot? by Cath Ennis
    * The Occam's Typewriter Irregulars by Guest Bloggers


 * OT CLOUD
   
    * academia
    * Apparitions
    * book review
    * Books
    * Canada
    * career
    * careers
    * Communicating Science
    * communication
    * Cromer
    * Domestic bliss
    * Domesticrox
    * education
    * Equality
    * Gardening
    * Guest posts
    * History
    * Hobbies
    * humor
    * Lablit
    * Music
    * nature
    * Open Access
    * personal
    * Photography
    * photos
    * Politicrox
    * Politics
    * Research
    * science
    * Science & Politics
    * Science-fiction
    * Science Culture
    * Science Funding
    * Science Is Vital
    * Scientific Life
    * Silliness
    * students
    * technology
    * The profession of science
    * travel
    * Uncategorized
    * Women in science
    * Writing
    * Writing & Reading

 * May 2024 S M T W T F S  1234 567891011 12131415161718 19202122232425
   262728293031  
   
   « Apr    

Occam's Typewriter
rg-d.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence
to @rpg