'echoes'

2011-01-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year / The Seven Habits of Mildly Effective People

The more astute of you may have noticed that there were no posts at all in 2010… I just didn't get round to doing anything on this. It's probably pretty much symbolic of how 2010 went in general - far too quickly for me to get a handle on anything. This was a year where TINWOLF appeared to nosedive, and where the world of my PhD continued to unravel, although on the flip side, make pla(y)ce had a wonderful 2010 with a series of fun workshops and performances culminating in a well-received piece for Light Night Leeds back in October.

Never mind, it's 2011 now. My New Year's Resolution is to get my life in order, and while it's easy to blame the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for everything, the truth is that I'm quite lazy, scatty and stubborn even without it. If I can overcome all these other things, it'll just be the CFS standing in the way of total global domination, and that's a far better place to be, I'm sure you'll agree.

Seven Habits of Mildly Effective People

I'm not sure I'm ready for all this self-help stuff (although I was contemplating the ISA Experience in the Autumn), but I thought I might start with trying to make myself at least mildly productive. All this "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" type stuff is all very well if you're already on the road to being a bit of a high-flyer, but if you're trying to reach a basic level of function it's probably far too advanced. With this in mind, I think I will start with developing some of the habits of mildly effective people and taking it from there…

1. GET UP

It's been nearly 8 years since I was doing the 9 to 5, and things tend to slip when you no longer have to get in for 9 o'clock every day. In order to be effective we need the time to be able to work (so getting in at 3pm when you have to leave at 5 is somewhat useless). Yes, Chronic Fatigue means being tired all the time, but a lot of people are tired all the time and still manage the 9 to 5, a relationship, a family, keeping the house clean, doing the cooking, doing lots of community and arts stuff and having a great social life. Everyone else manages it…

So time to stop being so useless, start getting up in the morning, and getting on the first step to being mildly effective…

2. SORT OUT WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO

There are a lot of ways of trying to sort out what you have to do. I've tried many of them and failed miserably. When I was at school, I used to keep lists of things to do. The ones written in red were overdue so needed to be done ASAP, and the rest were put in order of when they had to be done by.

This presents a problem nowadays… it's difficult to prioritise some of the tasks (except when "firefighting") and "do your PhD" or "make the world a better place" are large and nebulous tasks which are quite hard to split down into their component parts. Obviously, those are more like missions than individual tasks, and "go to the moon" was obviously split into things like "build a space capsule", "test your ability to withstand the g forces" etc. etc.

Sometimes I think of this stuff in the morning when getting up, other times I have kept "to do" lists on my calendar, on physical and on-screen Post-it notes, and on my home and office whiteboards. None of these seems to have worked for any great length of time…

There is another approach, called "Getting Things Done" which may work, but then again it might be more of a tool to help people who are already productive… maybe not procrastinating so much and finding out might be a better idea…

3. TRY AND FOCUS

Life is full of distractions… home has TV, books, the ability to use housework as displacement activity, and very occasionally a borrowed cat. Cats are the worst productivity tool ever.

Once the cat has decided to go and do something else, you still have the internet. If you work in an office with internet access, or indeed need the internet for work, there is also Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Also in the office are other people to talk to. When I worked at Loughborough University, we wouldn't be so ridiculous as to spend our afternoons working, coming up with amazing insights or discoveries - no, we'd get together in our little Portakabin and spend the whole afternoon chatting, only leaving at about 7pm because we were hungry and wanted to go home to cook and eat.

So focus has hardly ever been my strong point. Perhaps it's time every so often to turn the internet off, leave the office behind and sit in a café being productive over a cup of coffee. This is something I aim to do more of in the coming year, especially as we're blessed with some quite nice cafés around the University of Leeds and Hyde Park (of which I'll probably say more on another occasion)

4. DON'T GET SIDETRACKED

Point 4 is a reminder that point 3 is very important.

Don't get sidetracked, stay focus, leave the cat alone (he's not even yours for God's sake), and there's no need to find out what's been happening on Facebook for the last 5 minutes. Leave it. Get something done.

5. REST WHEN YOU NEED TO

Managing Chronic Fatigue is partly about understanding when you need to rest and when you can work. I've never been very good at this. The solution to this is obviously not to strain to stay up when you're really tired, and to try and go to sleep at a reasonable hour (perhaps before 3.30am…). This is probably the flip side of point 1.

6. HAVE PROPER BREAKS

Knowing you're not doing enough work leads to stress, stress leads to not being able to relax properly and to not being able to take a break without getting worried about work, which leads to more tiredness, which leads to things slipping more, which leads to knowing you're not doing enough work, which leads to stress, which leads to not being able to relax properly, which leads to… well, I think you get the picture.

Being able to get work out of your mind occasionally, on a weekday (or even a weekend) should hopefully lead to being more bright eyed, bushy tailed and productive when you're supposed to be working. Just remember not to mix work time and non-work time.

7. LEARN HOW YOU WORK

Apparently, we all have our own sets of rhythms of when our best times are for working. Some people are better at working in the morning, some in the evening or even late at night. With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome you start off working whenever you can, then forcing yourself to work, and in the end abandoning the whole thing as a lost cause.

It's been suggested I keep a diary of my good and bad days. I have ignored those suggestions (along with a whole range of other suggestions which could have made me Mildly Effective™… As well as charting good and bad days, and attempting to work more on good days and rest more on bad days, an understanding of your circadian rhythm will allow you to be more effective by allowing you to (hopefully) regulate your sleep/wake cycles to when you can work better.

Developing the 7 Habits

So my own personal task over 2011 will be to develop these habits, and hopefully end the year Mildly Effective™ and, even more hopefully, on the first step to being Highly Effective (or whatever the current buzzphrase is). At that point I can start to think about reading about all these time management and personal effectiveness things because I ought to be in a state where I might be able to cope with one of them… but we'll see…

2009-08-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

The culture vulture strikes again

Once upon a time, there was a blog on MySpace. Actually, it's still there, but I hardly have the time to post on it any more. On this blog was a lot of stuff about arts events, and we seemed to get about 50 readers per post.

Anyway, since I've not even posted here for ages, I thought I'd try an arts post here to see what happens (if anything)...

It's OK to like...

It's OK to like the Pre-Raphaelites at the moment, what with a recent rebroadcast of a documentary about them on BBC4, and the dramatisation of "Desperate Romantics", a book about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood showing on BBC2. This bodes well for me, as I have long been an admirer of what might be called the wider brotherhood.

In this spirit, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where the original three painters of the PRB were students, and against which they rebelled so strongly before the Academy caught up with them; is hosting its first ever exhibition of the work of John William Waterhouse. Waterhouse was not one of the PRB, but was influenced very strongly by their style, especially in the depiction of scenes from Romantic poetry and Classical mythology (as well as the Odyssey and Iliad etc.). He's either the one who takes the Pre-Raphaelite depictions of women as femmes fatales or temptresses to their logical conclusion, or he's a pretender depending on your point of view.

The RA gathered some 40 Waterhouse paintings from around the world, together with rarely seen sketchbooks. Some of the great classics were in view, from "Hylas and the Nymphs" (normally in Manchester City Art Gallery) and "The Lady of Shalott" (the one in the boat, not the one in Leeds City Art Gallery!) to works now resident overseas (such as one of my favourites, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", which is based in Germany).

Waterhouse's painting style rests between Dante Gabriel Rossetti's passionate, seemingly hurried brush strokes and Millais' obsessive photorealism, with an obvious concentration of detail on features he was obsessed with, in particular hair, costume, and shiny metallic things - his paintings seem to draw the eye in certain directions, so to speak. A strange thread running through the paintings present (though possibly heightened by the notable absence of paintings such as "Miranda: The Tempest" is the almost total lack of sky, with scenes either framed entirely below the horizon, or in dense woodland. For example, "The Lady of Shalott" (in the boat) has only a small patch of sky visible, and evokes the sense of a coming storm, whilst the patches of sky visible in many of the Classical mythology paintings seem naïvely painted. "Miranda" (not the one in the tempest) has by far the best sky, while in other paintings (such as "The Magic Circle"), the sky is darker and overcast. These dark or absent skies add to the feeling of darkness or a closing in of space in the paintings, which is apt as many contain themes with a dark edge (apologies for the rant, but one of my former lecturers is a meteorologist obsessed with painted depictions of the sky!)

The titles of Waterhouse's paintings are a little confusing, possibly because several different scenes have been painted from some stories (for example The Lady of Shalott, Miranda from The Tempest and Circe from The Odyssey). Sometimes two paintings are popularly known by the same title because of this. That's not the only thing I find annoying about Waterhouse, but I will come back to "The Mermaid" later...

The subject matter, given its dark or non existent skies, is either Pre-Raphaelite in nature, or political and disjointed, such as the paintings of Roman Emperor Honorius, which show him tending to his pigeons rather than the needs of the empire. He was arguably far less political than any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but certainly as fascinated by powerful female figures of legend and poetry, from Keats' "Lamia" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" to the Lady of Shalott, Circe and Medea. Many of these (including the sirens and mermaids) were figures of mystery and even fear, drawing men to their doom, and have been described as indicative of a misogynist streak - although this ignores the attraction many men have to 'dangerous' women, and whether the power and sensuality of many of the women shown can be interpreted as showing Waterhouse as having a sexually submissive nature is probably open to question. I would argue that he certainly fetishises the powerful woman, and doesn't necessarily depict them as totally evil - in "Jason and Medea", the sorceress famed for killing her children is shown preparing a potion (presumably medicine) while Jason looks at her in eager anticipation while Medea concentrates on getting the quantities right.

The nature of light within the paintings is also interesting. In view of the positions of these powerful women, the luminosity of their skin and brightness of their clothes often appears to be the main light source under a dark or non-existent sky, and metallic objects always seem to shine brightly. Waterhouse was obviously keen on the metallic sheens he was able to achieve, and was also very keen on costume, sometimes shown in the detailing of draping fabric, and other times in the patterning and cut of dresses. How much this was down to finding costumes for the models and how much was his own imagination (or even costume design) I don't know.

The notebooks were also interesting, although, as so often with notebooks in an exhibition, only one spread of each was visible. They gave clues as to his construction of scenes and also his drawing technique - the frontispiece of his book of Tennyson's poems, adorned with outline sketches of women's heads was something I spent ages looking at, trying to draw inspiration for my next session at Dr. Sketchy.

There is also the annoying. As much as I love most of Waterhouse's work, there are niggling things. Firstly, the Mediterranean phase. Waterhouse spent a lot of time in Italy, and produced some very nice paintings, but he does seem to romanticise Italy as a lazy place, where women lie amongst cushions and pigeons and revel in doing nothing. The women depicted don't seem to serve any purpose other than to be beautiful, whereas the characters from plays, poems and myths are doing things, or having things done to them (such as "Mariamne", being condemned to death). Secondly, is the painting which got Waterhouse his Royal Academy membership, "A mermaid" (which, curiously, on my print, is titled as "Resonance"). Where the Renaissance painters such as Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci studied anatomy (da Vinci even dissecting cadavers), and applied their knowledge of the human body to produce anatomically correct and possible poses, Waterhouse seems to have ignored all of this in his mermaid. Whilst the upper body is well painted (obviously from a live model, and one who appears several times in his work), the lower body, aside from the amazing detail of the scales, cannot possibly work (if I rabbit on here, it's because I also do a little mermology on the side). Her tail is far too long, more like an eel than any fish which might be supposed to be the tail of a mermaid, and the tail is far too small for her to actually be able to swim (mermaids, like fish and dolphins, steer with their tails, which need to be big and strong enough to do the job). The tail also has a ridiculously sharp kink, which would again be impossible given the necessary bone structure. All of this could have been avoided by using the Renaissance technique of trying to build the body up from its bone structure. Nevertheless, there is something about the image, as annoying (and annoyingly well painted) as it is, that I keep a print of this painting by my desk.

Waterhouse is often seen as a pretender to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or an overly commercial artist with little to say, but I would disagree on both counts. The depiction of strong, powerful women, either devious or doomed, shows perhaps an awareness of the power women have over men and the terrible ways they have sometimes been treated, and maybe in that sense was of its time, between the restraint in 'polite society' of the Victorian era and the rise of the Suffragettes. Alternatively, Medea, Circe and Lamia (for example) are misogynist stereotypes of the beautiful, powerful woman as evil.

J.W.Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite is at The Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, London until 13 September 2009. Entry £9 (£8 concession, £7 student, £4 unwaged with proof)

Gatecrasher

Before arriving at the Waterhouse exhibition, and after arriving at the Royal Academy on a heritage Routemaster bus (having changed off a heritage liveried Green Line bus from Bracknell), I managed to gatecrash the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. Cleverly, pieces were identified only by number, and only people with tickets had a catalogue to tell them what was what. I didn't see an awful lot as I worked out where I was and was worried I might get carted out, but there were a couple of highlights in what I saw:

In the Architecture Room, there were a couple of nice house designs, and a few for pavilions. Only one for Shanghai was recognisably tied to a place, but there was a nice piece of Urban Design in the form of a street reconstruction with a covering over the street and quite cool lighting. I'm not sure it would be residential with that level of street lighting though...

In the paintings, one of a nude woman, shown only in monochrome outline (possibly pastel) but with tattoos in full colour was interesting. There were also some huge pop art style flowers which I really liked, as well as some cartoon style art, influenced (as ever) by Japanese Manga and Disney (Piglet from Winnie the Pooh made an appearance on one of the canvases for some inexplicable reason).

The Summer Exhibition shows new work by reasonably established artists, although you probably need to pay for a ticket to find out what's what.

Summer Exhibition 2009 is at The Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, London until 16 August 2009. Entry £7 (£6 concession, £5 student), or gatecrash and wander through pretending you've worked everything out.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Design Art is the strange offspring of conceptual art, sculpture and furniture design, producing pieces which are usually of practical purpose but with their form derived from artistic reinterpretation of an idea.

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has brought together a number of works relating to storytelling, in particular themes from fairy tales in "Telling Tales". While often dealing with old or traditional tales (including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Adam & Eve), the production processes are often quite modern (using techniques such as laser cutting and etching, for example). More modern fears are also dealt with, from nuclear war to psychotherapy, with mushroom cloud cushions and a sensory deprivation tank shaped like a skull.

On the fairy tale side were items such as the Robber Baron's lair, filled with golden furniture, a free standing bathtub shaped like a boat ("Bathboat" by Wieki Somers), and the "Fig Leaf Wardrobe" by Tord Boontje, where clothes are hung on the branches of a fig tree, and the whole wardrobe is surrounded in a dense matting of fig branches and leaves (this is a piece of furniture, so the whole ensemble is largely made of wood).

"Hide Away Type 02" by Dunne and Raby is a playful, convertible piece of furniture; a table that turns into a playhouse, and another wonderful piece is the "Storm Chair" by Stephen Richards, made of seemingly randomly placed sticks.

Telling Tales is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London until 18 October 2009. Admission is free

You may also be interested in Adelphi Story Nights in Leeds, on the first Tuesday of the month from 8pm, at The Adelphi, Hunslet Road (bottom of Leeds Bridge), Leeds. Entry £4 (£3 concessions)

Future Fashion Now

The Royal College of Art, a short walk away from the Victoria & Albert Museum, exhibits selections of its students' work at the V&A's costume gallery. This year, a varied mix of designers and designs was in evidence, with designs including a shirt printed with the pattern used to make it, reflective ponchos and some interesting dress designs, and the use of digital photography for producing patterns for knitting machines.

Timothy Lee uses neoprene as a structural element, bonded to other fabrics to force and create shape. His jacket displays an über glamorous style with its high, turned up collar, held in place with neoprene. Another designer, whose name now escapes me, uses patent leather in a similar way, producing seemingly impossible angles on shoulders and bustlines, made of triangles of patent leather stuck to each other, although the effect does make the dresses look quite plasticky.

David Hopwood produced an evening dress made only of 12 layers of tulle, which of course become quite opaque (and thick!) when all layered on each other, but increasingly transparent as each layer falls away from the next. The design, with each layer cut smaller than the one below it, allows the dress' form to fade out along the draping back and train.

Iacopo Calamandrei is a name to watch - exhibiting a beautiful black evening gown with a deceptively simple cut, embellished only with a red band at the end of the sleeve, as well as a heavily structured dress with puffed up shoulders and side panels.

Future Fashion Now: New Design from the Royal College of Art is on until 31 January 2010 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London. Admission is free

That's more than enough rabbiting on from me...

2009-05-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

I was lost, and now am found

Interesting day today, certainly one worth blogging about.

Today was the day of the Keighley mapping party, organised by Bradford Linux Users' Group. All very well, you may say, but it was my first mapping party, and with the Open Source GIS nature of my PhD, and my inability to code, it was time I learnt how to contribute something back to the community.

Those of you who work with me will know that mornings are not my forté, and having to get up at 7 on a Sunday is not the best way for me to start the day - never mind that the downstairs neighbours' burglar alarm went off at 4am - they're not around at the moment, and I was pretty sure my landlord wasn't going to answer the phone at 4am... It eventually stopped, and despite there being no signs of a break-in, the neighbours two floors down say they heard someone walking around...

So I duly went off to town, not quite bleary-eyed thanks to the espresso, to catch the 0900 train to Carlisle, getting off at Keighley. My plan was to go around with someone, using both my department's GPS unit (a Garmin eTrex Legend for the GPS-heads) and BuddyWay (which turns out to be a bad choice as it needs the phone to upload data via its mobile data connection); and record the experience with audio and possibly some photos.

...only that while checking through the stuff on the train, I happen to have left the digital audio recorder (which shares a pouch with my IrisPen) on the train. Oh dear. Carlisle is a long, long way away.

Anyway, so I went off with David Carpenter of Bradford LUG, mapping Keighley in the vicinity of North Street / Skipton Road. There's some interesting and convoluted local history to be gleaned from walking around, trying to classify streets, and occasionally getting drawn into conversations with residents (Keighley turns out to be quite a friendly place on a Sunday - even the Jehovah's Witnesses!) - and after I got back the data was unloaded via an expensive Orange data connection to the "cloud", then out again as KML files for Google Earth (and eventually for categorisation and loading onto OpenStreetMap).

We finished about 4, with one of the group suggesting that the 0900 to Carlisle ought to be making its return journey through Keighley soon. Sure enough, perusing the timetable it appeared that the next train to Leeds would be the return journey of the one I lost my voice recorder on (it takes about 3.5 hours to get to Carlisle from Leeds, and the train stays at Carlisle some 2 hours before returning... hardly the best use of resources...). I had asked at the station after realising I'd left it on the train that morning, and again about 4, but to no avail. I sat in the same location I had on the way out, and asked fellow passengers if they'd seen anything. Then I asked the conductor as he passed through. He told me to follow him, as the other conductor had had something handed in. it was a small black puch containing a voice recorder and an IrisPen. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but I didn't get to make voice recordings, while £250 worth of my research kit went on a 200 mile round trip without me...

Back to Leeds (via reduced price items at Sainsbury's at a quarter to 5), I found a new sign had been placed outside my house. It showed the wildlife which could be found on Woodhouse Ridge (including the Tawny Owls which keep us awake some nights, and the butterflies we never see). Thanks to the Woodhouse Ridge Action Group for that - it must have been the project for this month's workday. I also asked my neighbours 2 floors down about the burglar alarm when it went off... there's no sign of our landlord by phone (we both call again), and eventually I hit on the idea of emailing him via Unipol's (the University housing office) website, which means they keep a copy. He arrives in about half an hour, and another half an hour later has sorted the problem - the alarm sounding a warning because the power's been cut as the downstairs neighbours have moved out.

So eventually, all is well with the world - apparently. It's been a strange and tiring day, so much so that I missed a very unusual gig round the corner (a Georgian folk choir at the Yorkshire School of Music and Drama) as I wasn't up to going out again. Oh well... tomorrow's another day!

2009-05-15T19:27:00.001-07:00

practical epistemology

or: don't let your first epistemological exploration end up in a slanging match with a mate

It's finally gone through - after a nervous night before my PhD upgrade, trying to understand this "e" word beloved of my supervisor...

Epistemology, or the theory of the nature of knowledge, is not Epidemeology (the study of disease in populations), although the words look very similar and, to be honest, theories of knowledge in a University look very much like infectious diseases you don't want to catch.

My problem, as well as mixing up words and not understanding many of the concepts, is that I am very poor at explaining myself

Explain yourself

The way you explain yourself is really very simple. Your thoughts exist as electrical impulses in your brain, darting around neurons. That's all very brilliant, and many amazing fantasy worlds, views of what's outside and fantastic theories dwell within (unless you're me, in which case you're thinking about trains, coffee, muscle pain and the constant battle against fatigue). Turning all the wonderful stuff inside someone's head into wonderful stuff inside another person's head is the difficult part.

Whether you believe it or not, we are all visually led (unless we're blind), as over 50% of the brain exists purely to process visual information, so naturally, we turn the thoughts in our heads into abstract symbols that we can see. So far, so good? well, not quite, because, as amazing as that sounds, and as useful as it has been in developing civilisation as we know it, it's flawed. These words are not the contents of my head, but an approximation that I happen to be able to make at the time... and in contrast to people who can use the media of language and words to tell wonderful stories and share amazing ideas, I suck at this.

Even worse, once someone's approximation of what's in their head comes out, it then falls to soem poor recipient to turn those abstract symbols or sounds back into electrical impulses in the right places. We spend a lot of our lives, from a very early age, learning how to do this. The result is that we have a form of "chinese whispers" that we manage, with a lot of training, to make work. The alternatives are telepathy (which has little proof of its existence in the real world) and neural transmission, which is the subject of esoteric, and frankly, quite scary experiments (see Doctor Frankenstein about that, he's down the hall)

Theories of knowledge and wisdom

Yes, so let's leave the psycho-physiology behind, and talk about fluffy abstract things. Everyone understands them, right?

Anyway, everyone knows what knowledge is, which is why the field of epistemology is so confusing. We can call it the learned ability to be able to turn memories into something useful, but that would be oversimplifying it (note also, that I'm being a bit slack by referring to Wikipedia), and everyone knows what wisdom is, right? Well, no; and since there seems to be no physiological basis for wisdom in the brain, it appears to either be a social construct (something we've developed a "feel" for in our societal groups), or it's something spiritual (which means it transcends other things, and only means anything to other people because we're told to value it). Either way, there's no way of turning it into something we understand... which is a problem.

Just as there aren't actually 5 senses (really: you didn't count kinaesthesia, hunger, intuition or temperature, did you? ...and that's not all of them), wisdom is probably something we sense more in others, either as a direct intuitive process, or by deduction. Certainly in European and Asian cultures, we would not be comfortable with someone identifying themselves as wise. Wisdom is elusive - perhaps it doesn't actually exist at all and we form the concept in our heads to praise others? There are people I would describe as wise, but then you might not agree; but one thing I can tell is that knowledge of wisdom does not make someone wise themselves. If that were the case I should have been wise by now, but that's obviously not the case (see the messes I keep getting myself into, for example). Wisdom is surely ethereal, no?

Smashing the world into pieces

I bear some responsibility for the argument which followed, on what the relationship between knowledge, wisdom and personality type might be, and how open or closed my mind might be, or how much what I say is bullshit. I won't go into that - this text is essentially either bullshit, or what will eventually become bullshit when a bull eats it.

Epistemology is big picture stuff, and big picture stuff is what I'm doing now. I can't pretend to be any good at it (as I mentioned, I keep mixing it up with epidemeology), but it's what I'm doing now. I'm trying to model the connections between human knowledge and society to the buildings we build and inhabit, and how we do that. We embed information about our society in the cities we build, and layer other pieces of information on that over time (creating a palimpsest, or a book of many layers, one on the other). People read this as they move and live in the urban area, being dictated to in a game of chinese whispers which goes back over centuries, and only from the past to the present. How do we react to this? How can the layers we lay down in the future produce more positive and favourable reactions?

This is big picture stuff - too big. The only way to understand a problem like this is to smash it into little pieces. There is no magic here: what this does is turn alchemy into chemistry. My supervisor will (rightly) claim that it's reductionist to break these things into little pieces, are we not trying to understand the human mind here? Yes.

The only reason we know anything of the way the brain and the mind work is by looking at what's wrong with broken ones. From brain injuries to mental illnesses, broken brains tell us what's gone wrong with unbroken ones, and therefore gives us insight into what processes go on in there. In the same way, we are only beginning to understand climatic systems as they break down, and well, broken hearts tell us most of what we know about love (and cardiology). The only hope is that when you put the pieces back together, it works - which is very much like putting a dissected rabbit back together and expecting it to jump off the table. Breaking things irreperably helps us fix other things (which doesn't do us much good with the climate, but I digress).

We're never going to know everything, but we'll damn well try... and if your way is to collect and distribute sayings from other people, or if your way is to break cities into little pieces and put them back together, then fine... but it's not going to make any of us any wiser.

2009-05-13T06:53:00.000-07:00

so where have you been?

Just getting a small push back to the blog, it's easy to forget that I posted nothing for over a month, which of course is not to suggest that nothing's happened - quite the reverse in fact...

Having passed my Upgrade to PhD status, I am now desperately trying to work out how to rectify the major failings with my methodology - namely a complete inability to say what I want to say in a way that other people can understand me.

Green Drinks Leeds' relaunch went well, and we're looking forward to the next event on the 19th. It wasn't the best attended ever, but certainly the best attended for the last 3 years or so. We're hoping to see more new people there on Tuesday, so if you're around, look us up... if not, support your local Green Drinks.

Otherwise, I gave a pretty poor talk last week at the Climate Chaos Café in Leeds, mainly because I didn't give myself enough time to put it together. Never mind... If you actually wanted to know about the New Mobility Agenda, you'd visit the website and not ask me, wouldn't you?

2009-03-28T05:37:00.000-07:00

onwards and upwards

As usual after the end of a 4x4 Lecture Series, the diverse group of architects, planners, urban designers, engineers, environmentalists and others disperses for another 11 months in anticipation of meeting up again at Leeds Met the next year.

Clearly there's something wrong with this - not with the 4x4s themselves, which are excellent, but with the fact we all go back to our little silos again and do whatever it is we do that messes up what everyone else in their other silos do. Argulably, we're not going to make much progress in planning and managing cities if we carry on with this; and this position was argued at Thursday's lecture, suggesting all Built Environment degree courses should start with a common first year. But what is a Built Environment degree, and who is a Built Environment professional? Aruably the guy who collects the wheely bins from the end of my street is as much a Built Environment Professional as the Mayor, not to mention everyone in between.

Anyway, to sidestep the issue and begin to make whatever small steps we can, I am proposing a new event, along the lines of the very successful Café Scientifique (which also started in Leeds), where we have a speaker every month, introducing an idea or topic for 20 minutes, followed by a discussion. I'm off in the next few weeks (after Easter) to talk to a lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan's School of Built Environment, and Leeds' most high profile architect, Ian Tod; both of whom are interested in the idea... because as much as it hurts our professional pride, the bin man (for example) can probably see things we can't.

2009-03-24T17:53:00.000-07:00

be careful what you wish for

I passed my upgrade viva today, so now I get to study for a PhD... except, I don't get to change my supervision regime, so it's probably going to go the same way it's been going for the last year an a half. I might as well have failed. Never mind, eh...

This evening's Café Scientifique was "Science: A 4,000 year history", which was Cambridge academic Patricia Fara taking us through the last 4,000 years of science history as she saw it, recognising the contributions of lab assistants and the important and unsung scientists' partners (usually wives, and of course with the tactful omission of Millie Einstein...). While the connections were made between 'science' (meaning the natural and physical sciences, she being from Cambridge after all) and arts (meaning predominantly painting, literature and history), the social sciences (which I would argue include history) were ignored. There wasn't enough time for the discussion on this though.

I have always maintained that I have something 'in the blood' that makes me want to learn dressmaking. My mother is a 4th generation (at least) dressmaker, and nobody of my generation of the family has taken up the cause. After an abortive attempt a few years ago, when I nearly went into business with a friend making corsets and dresses, and another abortive attempt to learn dressmaking at Swarthmore, I went back to concentrating on my upgrade report. When I saw George Davies on TV talking about how he felt fashion design was in his blood from having dressmakers for a mother and aunt, I understood. I don't like to use the word 'fashion', it's not something I care about, but what appeals is the art, the engineering, and the sensuality of clothes. In a sense it's the same kind of work as my PhD - how to create a physical object which surrounds a person, and affects the way they feel by interacting with various senses. My Mum is going to teach me a bit over Easter, and I'm quite excited!

2009-03-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Think about impending doom, don't think about impending doom...

So, Sunday I went off with fellow Green Drinks organiser Adam and eco-home builder Heimir to see The Age of Stupid, which of course is about the impending doom of climate change and the necessity to do something about it (says me, who really needs to get lower power lightbulbs, these 11 Watters are doing my head in)...

...and today, I am sitting here, watching telly and writing my blog, trying not to think about tomorrow's impending doom - the Upgrade viva. The end of my first year at University (a year of 18 months!) with an oral exam on a report that's taken me 3 months to write (since the last time I scrapped the text) and has turned out 3 times the guideline length. A lot of it doesn't make sense, and it is self-contradictory in many respects. Never mind, I am not scared of failure now, I just need to do some more reading and commenting... and so to lounging in front of the TV with a pencil and a cup of herbal tea. See you on the other side.

2009-03-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

Police Profiling

After the London bomb attacks in 2005, various crazy suggestions went round about making all train passengers (and their luggage) go through a security scan when entering a station. This was before it was realised that 6 million journeys are made a day from some 3,000 stations and tram stops. Oh.

Anyway, West Yorkshire Police, in their infinite wisdom, and under the guise of an attempt to reduce knife attacks in Leeds Ciy Centre on a Saturday night, decided to pull over male passengers coming out from the ticket barriers - presumably on the basis that they looked shifty, aggressive, or Asian (I'm making this up, but it sounds better that way). I got pulled over, had to deposit the contents of my pockets (mobile phone, cards, cash, keys, iPod, torch) in a tray, and walk through a metal detector. Never mind I was carrying a heavy backpack and a jute shopping bag which weren't searched. Both of them contained sharp objects which could be used to cause injury (swiss army knife, screwdrivers, sharp nosed pliers)... but hey, they were the West Yorkshire Police - I wasn't exactly expecting them to be thorough, or effective.

2009-03-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

Research Workflows on the Mac

A really brief, skimming introduction to a basic research workflow (ie mine) on the Mac, published in Yorkshire Mac Users' Group's magazine "Enigma".

It's available for download now

2009-03-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

Return from the dead

After some prodding from the editor of World Streets, I have had to resurrect my old Blogger account, which means looking at this old blog. I might as well do something with it.

What's probably going to appear here are random musings about my research, and about life in general (everything from my MythTV setup to Sufi spirituality and environmental stuff). I'll get to witter on far more than I do on Facebook, which probably isn't a good thing, but there you go.

welcome to 'echoes'

2006-04-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

Hello,

Welcome to the new 'echoes', transcience's online newsletter. It has been nearly 2 years since the last paper issue of 'echoes', and during this time we also launched the abortive "in a world where..." magazine.

So now we're online, and we can bring you...

• more information on stories
• more frequent updates
• information on all the various things transcience gets up to