Situated near the SW Sicilian coast is the town of Agrigento, home of the so-called “Valley of the Temples” (Valle dei Templi), a ridge of land above the ancient city that is the site of a linear cluster of (mainly) Ancient Greek ruins, many of which are quite spectacular — the place is well worth a visit. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

In addition to the Greek and Byzantine remains, there is the Villa Aurea, which was home to 19th Century British military officer and archaeological patron Alexander Hardcastle, who financed, among other things, the re-erection of the pillars at the Temple of Heracles on the site.

Today, the Valle dei Templi is not simply a collection of ancient sites: it’s also a location for modern art which is distributed among the ruins and elsewhere, such as in the Villa.

Thus it was that on a recent visit I encountered this remarkable piece of statuary in the Villa Aurea garden, in brilliant, shiny white material showing a group of fashionably-dressed young people poised to kill one of their number with various weapons. What on Earth was this amazing piece of work? There was no indication on or near the piece to indicate its origin or significance.

After a surprisingly lengthy Internet search, I found the answer. It is a (small) part of a multimedia collection of works by the Moscow-based art group “AES+F” titled Last Riot/Last Riot 2.

AES+F are named after their initials: the group, founded in 1987, was originally AES — Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich and Evgeny Svyatsky — but they were later joined by photographer Vladimir Fridkes — hence the “+F”.

Last Riot first appeared in 2007 at the Venice Biennial as a three-screen video providing windows into a highly detailed 3D virtual environment, inspired apparently by the US Army video game “America’s Army”, created to encourage young people to enlist. You can see excerpts from it here:

AES+F say about the work:
“The virtual world generated by the real world of the past twentieth century as the organism coming from a test-tube, expands, leaving its borders and grasping new zones, absorbs its founders and mutates in something absolutely new. In this new world the real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com, and prison tortures appear sadistic exercises of modern valkyrias. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment and techniques into a fantasy landscape of the new epos. This paradise also is a mutated world with frozen time where all past epoch the neighbor with the future, where inhabitants lose their sex, and become closer to angels. The world, where any most severe, vague or erotic imagination is natural in the fake unsteady 3D perspective. The heroes of new epos have only one identity, the identity of the rebel of last riot. The last riot, where all are fighting against all and against themselves, where no difference exists any more between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethic.”

In addition to the video, there are series of glossy white sculptures of which the example at the Villa is one, and remarkable still images featuring the same weaponised, brand-name-dressed young people, in a kind of superrealistic style that somehow echoes works of the Renaissance as much as they do CGI-created videogame characters.

Here’s the statue from the Villa in an art gallery setting (from the AES+F web site):

…and one of the images from the same source:

I would love to experience the original video as well as the other pieces, especially given my interest in virtual worlds. Kudos to the people who arrange the art exhibitions along the Valle dei Templi for introducing me — and many other people I hope — to the stunning work of a fascinating group of artists.

Visit the AES/AES+F web site
Last Riot on the AES+F web site

YouTube search for “Last Riot”

Last weekend I was lucky enough to get up to Durham, in the NE of England, to spend a couple of nights experiencing the latest event from Artichoke, titled Lumiere. And a magnificent event it was too.

Lumiere was in fact how I first heard about Artichoke, via a TV documentary on Sky Arts (in the old days when I used to subscribe to Murdoch TV — we’re now on Freesat). That first Lumiere happened in 2009, and of course I’d missed it. But they planned to do it again, and when I heard about the 2011 event I was quick to block out the time and book a hotel.

The event, which brought dozens of international artists working with light into the heart of the mediaeval city, turning it into a vast illuminated art gallery, lasted over four nights, nominally from 6-11pm, and featured around three dozen separate exhibits. Some of the higher profile installations were in the city centre, but many were rather further out, and in fact you would have needed all four nights to catch everything. I only had two nights, and that simply wasn’t enough — I probably saw about 2/3 of the installations and missed some that I really wanted to see. Thankfully the weather was kind to us — no rain and in fact quite warm — a good deal warmer, in fact, than the last Artichoke event I attended, Dining with Alice, back in May!

What I had rather underestimated was the number of people who would throng the centre of the ancient city as night fell and we approached 6pm. We gathered next to the statue of the Marquess of Londonderry — not one of the nicest people in life, allegedly — who had been transformed, thanks to Jacques Rival, into an immense snow-globe with the words “I Love Durham” on the plinth. Hehe.

The crowd control was excellent, despite the enormous numbers of people, but what the organisers could have done that would have helped was to have had a fairly serious PA set up in the Market Place so that the crowds could be informed about what was happening. The bull horns in use had an effective range of about 10 feet, so most of the time none of us had any idea what was happening or going to happen. It turned out that we were waiting to be allowed up the cobble streets to the Cathedral, but we didn’t all know that. However, that is the only mildly negative comment I have about the whole festival, and hopefully the planned 2013 event will take this suggestion into account.

Via Twitter, @ArtichokeTrust asked what my favourite exhibit was, and it’s really difficult to say. Of course the amazing son et lumiere at the Cathedral, highlight of the original 2009 show, must rate up there, and that’s the first thing we were effectively queuing to see. Titled Crown of Light, it consisted of marvellous images of the Lindisfarne Gospels and much more, illuminating the front of the Cathedral with multiple sections sliding up and down independently, accompanied by a powerful surround audio and music soundtrack including actual environmental recordings from Lindisfarne itself (though I think it would have sounded better in Ambisonics, of course). Crown of Light was created by Ross Ashton, Robert Ziegler, and John Del’ Nero.

It’s actually quite hard to convey much of a sense of Crown of Light as it was so immense. But here’s a taste:

The above video includes two extracts, one from near the beginning and the other from the end. It’s a hand-held mini-camera running at its highest sensitivity, so it’s not wonderful quality, but hopefully you’ll get the idea. The first extract is 16:9 and the second pillarboxed 4:3, the latter showing rather more of the building.

Following the presentation (there were three per hour), we could either go off to the left, and down towards the river, or we could file into the Cathedral itself, where there were some amazing things going on in the Nave, the cloisters and the College gardens behind.

Compagnie Carabosse had hung the Nave with lamps made of white vests on frames, while at the far end of the Nave, next to the pulpit, was a gentleman performing on electric guitar, synth and vocals, in a rather cool neo-Steampunk environment. This photo of him is a bit ropey, but hopefully you get the idea from that and the (even more ropey) raw iPhone video below (the audio improves dramatically at 2:22).

In the cloisters and gardens it was fire — with amazing metal frameworks and sculptures with flames issuing from various parts — from the enormous (a rotating globe covered in firepots in the cloisters) to fiery fountains and strange little figures.

Emerging from the gardens through an ancient archway, we turned down the hill to be confronted by a sequence of marvellous illuminated wire-mesh sculptured human figures, sometimes flying, sometimes sitting nonchalantly on a roof, or reclining in a garden. These were Les Voyageurs (The Travellers), by Cedric Le Borgne — a number of French artists were represented here.

We proceeded down the hill, marvelling at these overhead, nearby and distant figures, until we came to Prebends Bridge, which gave us a passage through a progressive rainbow of colours.

And then it was back towards the centre of the city along the riverfront, with the trees and bridges illuminated by gently shifting coloured lights — and virtually all the lights in the Festival, incidentally, were low-energy varieties, with some City lighting turned off so the overall energy impact of the event was minimal.

Some of the exhibits were lower-key, but nonetheless effective. Real and imaginary stories were told in illuminated text; a clock on a far building spelled out the time in lower-case Helvetica; and a series of illuminated panels hung high above the narrow streets. Possibly the best-known artist’s work at Lumiere was Tracey Emin’s: an illuminated phrase, “Be Faithful to your dreams” in blue, handwriting-style text on the side of the chapel in a disused graveyard, approached along a path lined with trees softly shining with slowly shifting colours.

Elsewhere, an enormous light bulb made of lights hung over the river Wear:

…while commonly-thrown-away objects were montaged and lit with LEDs:

We had an invitation to join friends and sponsors in the Town Hall on the Saturday night, which was good fun, and I had some interesting chats — with Artichoke co-Director Nicky Webb and with the people who organised the food for Dining With Alice, who had quite a tale to tell, to name but two.

All in all, Lumiere 2011 was an amazing, magical, marvellous festival of lights and art – exactly what I have learned to expect from Artichoke. I do hope they are able to do it again in 2013.

For more videos of Lumiere (including some from the first event in 2009) on Vimeo, click here.

Whenever I’m in the NE of England, I try to get over to Beamish - “The Living Museum of the North”. It’s a wonderful place built around a road/tramway loop on which run vintage buses and trams.

On this occasion (20 November) I was up for the weekend to go to Lumiere in Durham, so nipping over was a chance I couldn’t miss. It was foggy on leaving Durham but approaching Beamish the sun came out and it was gorgeously sunny until the drive home, when the fog closed in again.

Different sites around the tramway loop recreate different eras, each created from buildings that have been lovingly transplanted from their original sites: the Town, for example, is Edwardian, with a Bank, a gorgeous Masonic Hall (rebuilt with the help of the Masons, apparently), a Co-Op department store, sweet shop/factory and lots more. It also has an adjacent Steam Railway and station and a steam-powered fairground.

The Pit Village is perhaps somewhat earlier, and features a colliery and a relatively new addition: a coal-fired fish & chip shop that uses beef dripping to cook with, resulting in utterly tasty meals that you have to queue for twenty minutes or so to get, it’s so popular. Yet another area, Pockerley, is more Georgian, with a Waggonway that features steam locos from the earliest times and Pockerley Old Hall. I’ve talked about Beamish before, here.

From this time of year until Christmas itself, Beamish is having a series of Christmas weekends, including Santa’s Grotto somewhere over by Pockerley I think, complete with snow, an ice-rink in the Colliery Village (above), and decorations up in the Town.

I had to pop into some of the terraced houses, several of which contain businesses, such as a solicitor’s and a dentist — the torture chamber itself is shown below. In those days you would have had the option of (unregulated) nitrous oxide (with a fair risk of death) or cocaine as anaesthetics, the latter effectively removing your short-term memory, so things hurt but you didn’t remember it (rather like intravenous Valium it would appear, which I always loved as an adjunct to dental operations).

Another house included period Christmas decorations in the front room.

Across the street is a little park, with a bandstand, and there was the Murton Colliery Band preparing to play some suitably seasonal music, which they proceeded to do beautifully.

Here’s some video of extracts from their programme:

The band was formed as the Murton Gospel Temperance Blue Ribbon Army Band in 1884, and players were requested to wear a blue ribbon on the second button of their waistcoats. They became Murton Colliery band in 1895. When the colliery closed, the band became self-supporting — and it still is today. They’re also one of the few remaining bands to continue to call itself a ‘Colliery Band’, and they still proudly march through the village during the Durham Miners Gala and Armistice Day. I don’t know about you, but brass band music and Christmas do seem to go together rather well.

There was time for a good wander around and trips on some of the trams — including a 1930s enclosed double-decker Blackpool tram, which is technically a little late for their re-creations but very impressive — and I had some good chats with the tramway staff, noticing that they wore the archetypal “wheel and magnet” emblem of British Electric Traction (later to become the parent, surprisingly, of Rediffusion Television) on their caps. The shop at Beamish should sell those cap badges — I would have bought at least one.

Finally it was time to head off on the 3+ hour home, and soon after getting back on the A1 the fog closed in, and it ended up taking a good deal longer than that. But it was a great day out.

Wednesday 2nd November saw the 75th anniversary of the opening of the BBC Television Service.

To commemorate the event, the BBC held a special celebration at Alexandra Palace, where the Service opened.

Originally, the intention was to hold a special Open Day on the 2nd, at which members of the public would be able to visit the studios and see audio-visual presentations. However this was eventually moved to November 5–6, leaving only an internal BBC event happening on the actual day.

I managed to obtain an invitation, for which my thanks to the ebullient Robert Seatter, head of BBC History, and technology journalist Bill Thompson.

The invitation said “3:45 for 4pm” and as a result I found myself in the Alexandra Palace Tower end car park well in time for the off, giving some time to take in the views over the city, experience the continual wind and enjoy some dramatic skies over this “Palace of the People” located at the highest point in North London.

When the BBC decided on Ally Pally as the site for the new BBC Television Service in the wake of the Selsdon Report in 1936, the place was already decaying somewhat. It’s a process that has continued since BBC Television left here several decades ago, and although the team now fronting the Trust that runs the site today is incredibly, and impressively, enthusiastic and upbeat, there is no way it can be other than an uphill struggle in these austere times. But you can’t say they aren’t trying hard and I wish them every success.

The BBC still maintains active offices in the block under the mast. But instead of entering through the doors there, adjacent to the GLC blue commemorative plaque on the wall, we were motioned into an entrance along to the left, up a metal ramp and into what had originally been the Transmitter Hall. It may be noted that this was probably not the first, but possibly the last, time that anyone had the bright idea of placing a pair of powerful VHF transmitters and a pigging great set of transmitting antennae right next to a set of television studios full of sensitive equipment.

Inside, the room had been decorated with panels against the walls, each carrying information and images of some aspect of Ally Pally TV history, and a free-standing photo display of historical images, mainly provided by the Alexandra Palace Television Society. A jazz quartet played suitable 1930s style music; servers glided among the assembled invitees dispensing water, orange juice or Prosecco.

We had the chance to mingle and chat, and I was very pleased to meet TV cook Zena Skinner, who probably coined the phrase “Here’s one I made earlier” — though in her case she really had made it earlier, herself; I also met Professor Jean Seaton, the BBC’s Official Historian and Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster; and talked briefly to John Trenouth, Technology Adviser to the BBC Collection, whom I met during his time at what is now the National Media Museum in Bradford.

In the centre of the room, a make-up table and lights were set up, where various young women were being made up using the colours required by the Baird System.

When the BBC Television Service was established, the Government required two television systems to be used. On the one hand was the all-electronic Marconi-EMI system, which offered 405 lines, and on the other was the Baird electromechanical system which delivered 240-line television. Early on, it became evident that the Marconi-EMI system was significantly superior, but it had been Baird who had tirelessly promoted television as a concept, and lobbied the GPO over licensing and the Government to legislate for a Television Service. Baird highlighted the fact that his was a British invention – though it could equally legitimately be claimed that the Marconi-EMI system was British. Almost certainly the Government decision, a typical British compromise, was made at least in part to avoid suggestions that they were turning down a British innovation, the decision mandating the use of both systems on an alternating basis for six months before a choice was to be made before the two. The problems experienced with the technological dead-end of the Baird mechanical scanning system resulted in the decision — in favour of Marconi-EMI — to be made after just three months.

Baird Television actually used two systems. The fundamental feature of both was a “flying spot scanner” in which, almost completely counter-intuitively, the scene was scanned with a spot of light and photocells collected the light reflected from the subject. The “Spotlight Studio” used nothing more than this; the Intermediate Film Technique used a conventional film camera, exposed film from which was then passed immediately through developer and highly poisonous cyanide-based fixer (particularly nasty when it got loose), then scanned with a a flying spot actually under water. The flying spot scanner was very sensitive to red light, so if you were appearing in the Spotlight Studio, you needed the special make up: black lipstick, blue eye-shadow and a pale white face. Very neo-Goth. You checked it by looking through a red gel.

This was the make-up that was being applied to the young ladies at Ally Pally on the 2nd. Apparently the idea had originally been that BBC London would be sending a crew up to cover the party, but they had pulled out and the job was left to an enthusiastic team from BBC News School Report.

Meanwhile, we were treated to welcoming presentations: by the PR gentleman from the AP team, and from Robert Seatter, who encouraged us to relinquish our glasses and proceed upstairs to Studio A.

There were two main studios at Ally Pally originally, one above the other. Studio A was the Marconi-EMI studio, while directly above it was the Baird studio, Studio B. You can’t go into B today, because it’s riddled with asbestos and things are likely to fall on your head. But Studio A is accessible. At one end of the room is a tableau representing the production of the magazine programme Picture Page, which ran from 1936–39 and 1946–52 and was initially presented by Joan Miller.

Around the room are assembled old TV sets, and various exhibits in the room itself included an EMItron camera, which John Trenouth of the National Media Museum in Bradford kindly removed the lid of so we could have a look at the innards (sans tube).

In Studio A we were treated to a couple of brief audio-visual presentations, the first assembled mainly from clips from the film documentary Television Comes To London, which was made to tell the BBC Television Service story in 1936. Rebecca Kane, the MD of Alexandra Palace Trading Ltd, introduced Michael Aspel, a newsreader at AP during the period when BBC Television News was based here, to cut the cake.

And what a cake it was: made in the form of an old bakelite television with a picture of Alexandra Palace on the screen, deliciously thick icing and succulent innards. Very nice.

After that, we all wandered around Studio A and chatted to each other. I got into an amusing discussion about the way in which the Television Service closed down at the start of the Second World War, on September 1st, 1939 – about which a number of myths have arisen, most of which are incorrect (including the perpetuation of the main myth in Alan Yentob’s Imagine documentary, re-shown on Wednesday) – see The Edit that Rewrote History on the Transdiffusion Baird site, which includes a number of articles on television prior to 1955.

And then we gradually sloped off home.

See also:

The birth of television: the “Baird” microsite at Transdiffusion

75 years on from BBC television’s technology battle — a nice piece by John Trenouth

BBC Celebrates 75 Years of TV - Nick Higham visits Alexandra Palace

August 6th saw the unveiling of something rather special in our NW Cambridgeshire town of Somersham: a free-standing graphic panel in Church Street, somewhat mysteriously titled “Hattie’s Map”.

The Hattie in question is Hattie Skeggs, long-time resident and member of the Parish Council, who passed away recently. Her knowledge of the town and the original names and locations of places was legendary, and the Map commemorates her and the long history of the town.

The panel is double-sided: one side shows a map of footpaths around Somersham, provided by Cambridgeshire County Council, while the other depicts an aerial view of the Parish, for which I was very pleased to be invited to create the artwork. Indicated on it are around 50 places in and around the town, primarily of historical interest, along with some pictures of the centre of town and the Station area taken from old postcards, and a brief history of Somersham.

Putting it together has taken quite a long time, not least because of the difficulty in obtaining and licensing the aerial imagery around which I based the Map. When I was originally invited to create the panel, it wasn’t specified how it should be done, and I looked at a number of possibilities. The one that appealed to me most was the idea of showing the Parish from the air rather than simply drawing a map. I contacted numerous companies that offered aerial imagery with the appropriate licensing, and obtained quotes, some of which were within the kind of budget the Parish Council had in mind for the project. I did a mock-up using Google Earth imagery and presented it to the Council’s Working Group on the project, and they liked it and gave me the go-ahead to create the artwork.

Unfortunately, now having had the idea agreed, when I went back to the potential suppliers to order the mapping they had previously quoted me for, the prices were mysteriously now significantly higher, despite the fact that I had been meticulous in my specifications for the project. Some claimed they had updated their imagery since I had asked for the quote and the new imagery they were offering was much more detailed and better in every way – a privilege one had to pay for. Others simpy denied they’d provided the previous estimate or that it was only valid for a surprisingly short time or that the person I spoke to had got it wrong. One of the new figures was ten times the price I’d been quoted originally.

I continued to try one company after another as time ticked by, and continued to look for other sources – including the County Council, who had everything I needed but not the licences – but eventually I found one, GetMapping, towards the end of last year, which not only offered the resolution I needed but came in well within budget. They also had an exceptionally helpful staff member in the shape of Jake Lauder, who bent over backwards to get me what I needed. And when a little later we had to make some revisions due to boundary changes that extended the area for which I required imagery, they very kindly supplied a new, larger area file at no additional charge. Kudos to GetMapping and Jake in particular.

Click on the map above to see a larger version.

I worked on the project in several different graphics applications. I’d initially brought the rough Google imagery into Adobe Illustrator as a template and over that drawn and labelled the major roads and other features – like the course of the two railway lines that used to pass through Somersham. I also considered how to indicate the places of interest. I decided to go with numbered callouts in circles with a line pointing to the exact location.

It quickly became evident that building the entire A0 panel in Illustrator was going to become too unwieldy. It was fine with the low-resolution Google imagery, but the real hi-res file would be enormous and rather too big to scale, rotate and position precisely in Illustrator: it was so big that it would also slow the application down no end. As a result, I decided to build the panel in InDesign, and create the numbered callouts direct in the InDesign document on their own layer. This was also a much better idea for setting the text which, while not extensive, was much easier to manage in InDesign.

Helpfully, you can bring all kinds of files into InDesign with a great deal of flexibility – in particular if they come from another Creative Suite application. So I could import the Illustrator file in its own .ai format and turn different layers (such as the roads and labelling) on and off as required without having to re-export the image.

The Big Imagery File ultimately arrived and was surprisingly easy to bring into InDesign, size and rotate to the correct angle. To allow the imagery to be displayed as large as possible, I rotated the entire map so that the Parish ran from bottom left to top right. This put North at around 45 degrees. It also left a large area bottom right for a key to the Places of Interest and top left for the history of the town. Meanwhile along the bottom there was room for a pair of panels to include pictures of Old Somersham, kindly provided by the local Historical Society.

The Working Group determined the final list of locations. Some went back to the 18th century (and a couple back to Roman times), and while the obvious ones were easy to find, some were much more tricky. And I also came to find out a lot more about the history of the area and where some of the names came from. I was soon studying 1st Edition Ordnance Survey mapping, and earlier maps too: happily a lot is available on-line these days. I found the sites of old windmills; the origin of the name “The Pykle” (it dates back to around 1200 and means a field remnant: it is nothing to do with Parkhall Road formerly being called “Parkle Lane” – Parkle was a village to the North of town – and indeed, the name Parkhall had nothing to do with the Manor Hall that stood on that road); and the site of a weir used for cleaning cartwheels. I also discovered that nobody seemed to be able to agree on the exact location of the Special Operations Executive airstrip that was active during the Second World War. Evidently its secret was maintained. Fascinating.

Finally the map was finished and I was able to get my friends at local display graphics company Cameo in St Ives to run up some full-sized proofs: the final result was approved and I gave the Parish Council a hi-res PDF for the panel manufacturers to work from. We suffered a bit of a delay as the County had to come up with their own footpath map artwork, but eventually it was supplied and the project went into its production phase. Ultimately the panel was delivered and a date was set for its installation.

Sadly, during that time, Hattie herself passed away. The map was erected on Friday 5th by Michael Murray, who kindly provided these photographs, and it was unveiled officially on Saturday 6th August 2011, representing a fitting tribute to Hattie and recognising her love and good works for the town and people of Somersham. Here’s a video of the unveiling, and you can read more about it here.

Having been involved in the environmental movement in one way or another since the 1970s, I’ve always been in the “anti-nuclear” camp.

Indeed, I think I was the first person to create an English version of the famous “Atomkraft? Nein Danke” logo – for the cover of an edition of Undercurrents magazine – a magazine that was into renewables (mainly of the DIY variety) before a lot of people. (You can read some copies of it here.)

Of course there are plenty of reasons to be wary of nuclear power – of the current variety at least.

• There’s the question of energy security: Uranium doesn’t come from here, we have to import it, or reprocess other peoples’. So although I gather there might be deposits off the British coast, it doesn’t seem at this point to help decouple us from potential problems with dependence on overseas sources.
• There’s the problem of nuclear waste disposal, though some people (James Lovelock for example) are convinced that this can be done safely and permanently.
• Nuclear power as we currently do it is absurdly inefficient. What you do is you let radioactive decay heat some water and then pass it through turbines. It’s just like a conventional power station, except you heat the water differently. I can imagine the efficiency is significantly less than 50%. Whatever happened to innovative direct conversion technologies like MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamics), where, for example, you can run a plasma back and forth in a magnetic field and pull electricity directly off the plasma, in a kind of fluid dynamo? The Soviets had some pilot plants generating several megawatts. What happened?
• And there’s the risk of disastrous accidents, like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima, which can potentially spread significant amounts of irradiated material over a wide area, with potential health effects like increased long-term cancer risk and other problems beyond the direct effects of radiation poisoning.

Counter to the last of these, there’s the fact that remarkably few people have actually been affected by radiation from nuclear power plants. Many, many fewer than have been killed or injured by coal-mining accidents and other fossil-fuel-related disasters. If Germany was as sensitive to risks to life from bacteria as it is from nuclear power, it would have closed down the organic food industry by now. But instead, it’s closing down its nuclear plants, which, as far as I know, have not caused any deaths at all, unlike the contaminated beansprouts.

But of course, it’s never as simple as that.

The fact is that right now we need low-carbon energy sources, and quickly, to combat the threat of anthropogenic (human-created) global warming (AGW). There is no doubt about the threat of AGW, and I’m not going to entertain discussion about it here. Sorry.

Much as I am in favour of renewables, and much as I like the sight of elegant, virtually silent wind turbines dotting the landscape (and I would as happily have some in the field behind my house as James Lovelock would have a nuclear waste storage facility behind his), the fact is that renewables are almost certainly not enough, and we need something more to replace our ageing and horrifyingly destructive carbon-spewing fossil-fuel powered generating stations. Nuclear is the obvious option, so after years of taking an anti-nuclear stance, I am changing my mind. And in doing so find myself aligned with people like George Monbiot and Professor Lovelock.

In my opinion, even if we did no better in the international nuclear power industry than we have done to date, any threat to human life from nuclear power, past, present and future, is as nothing compared to the billions whose lives are threatened by AGW and will be over the 50–100 years ahead.

I will be a little controversial and say that in my personal view (and I am not a nuclear power expert, so may be wrong), the current level of nuclear power technology is much safer than the chain that ends in a conventional fossil-fuel-driven power station. That, to me, is not the question.

Instead, the question is, can we trust anyone to build, maintain and operate nuclear power stations safely?

You could argue that by and large, the answer to that question is yes. Nuclear power as it is practised today is in fact extremely safe compared with fossil-fuel generation. But there is a bit of a knife edge here. Fundamentally, however intrinsically safe the current technology is, the fact is that I do not trust for-profit corporations to do the job properly. I am not even sure I trust governments. They will always be looking to cut corners and save money, time or whatever else, and the result will be a greatly increased risk. Take a look at this:

This is the segment on nuclear power from Adam Curtis’s Pandora’s Box series on some misuses of scientific research. I’m a big fan of Curtis’s work (although I have some issues with his latest series, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace) and I think the above is spot on.

So, I think the technology of current nuclear power is fine in theory, but we are going to screw it up in practice. How can we have our cake and eat it? What we need is a method of nuclear power generation that you can’t screw up [very easily].

The answer just might be hinted at in this article from, of all places The Mail On Sunday, a paper I would never have thought I’d find myself recommending in, er, a month of Sundays. It’s also recommended by the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation. Talk about strange bedfellows….

The piece is about the “Electron Model of Many Applications”, or EMMA. Here’s the article. Research into this technology is going on in Cheshire and it might just provide the key to one method of using Thorium in a reactor to generate electricity – assuming the UK government continues funding the research properly, which I doubt. Here’s the beginning of the piece:

“Imagine a safe, clean nuclear reactor that used a fuel that was hugely abundant, produced only minute quantities of radioactive waste and was almost impossible to adapt to make weapons. It sounds too good to be true, but this isn’t science fiction. This is what lies in store if we harness the power of a silvery metal found in river sands, soil and granite rock the world over: thorium.

One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, or 3.5 million tons of coal, and the thorium deposits that have already been identified would meet the entire world’s energy needs for at least 10,000 years. Unlike uranium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. Happily, it produces energy without producing any carbon dioxide: so an economy that ran on thorium power would have virtually no carbon footprint.

Better still, a thorium reactor would be incapable of having a meltdown, and would generate only 0.6 per cent of the radioactive waste of a conventional nuclear plant. It could even be adapted to ‘burn’ existing, stockpiled uranium waste in its core, thus enormously reducing its radioactive half-life and toxicity.…”

Now read on.

It seems to me that this technology could answer many, if not all, of the environmental concerns about the acceptability of nuclear power. Of course I want to read the full report that is apparently soon to be published, and no technology comes without drawbacks (or unintended consequences for that matter), but preliminary accounts, like the one above, seem to offer promise.

For more on other possible uses of Thorium for power generations, see this Wikipedia article. You’ll see it’s not entirely problem-free – but then nothing is.

*Header image from MensPulpMags.com

I remember clearly one of the first pieces of really useful information I ever got from the World Wide Web.

It was back, probably, in the early-to-mid 1990s, when I was essentially coding HTML by hand, as one had to do. The previous year, I’d completed a demonstration of what a magazine I was working on at the time might look like on the web as a method of international electronic distribution instead of sending PageMaker files to various locations via AppleLink, and the client had liked it. I was interested in finding out how to make it, and other sites, look better.

I stumbled upon the web site of a designer and digital typographer. My memory suggests (though I could be wrong about this) that he was David Siegel, the designer of the Tekton font, who was demonstrating techniques for making your web pages look halfway decent from a design point of view, long before the advent of CSS and other web layout tools. That would make this in 1994 — I designed my first web site the previous year. Siegel went on to write the best-seller Creating Killer Websites.

In those day, the idea of the web was that it carried information, and that information had a structure and hierarchy — different levels of headings, text and so on — and as long as you identified those structural elements accordingly, that was all you did: the viewer decided what the fonts were and what the page actually looked like.

But it’s not  web site design I’m talking about today. On one of his pages, I found a really fascinating set of illustrations. They were solely there to show how you could lay them out, but they were on the subject of how to tie your shoelaces.

Now you wouldn’t think there was a lot to learn about tying your shoelaces. It’s a life skill we learn really early. We also, I suspect, learn it essentially the same way. The page noted that the problem with this was that shoelaces, especially those round-section nylon ones, tended to come undone very easily. The diagrams showed a better way, that stopped this from happening. In a nutshell, what you do is instead of going once round and through, you go twice round and through. It’s not necessary to go into any finer details, as you’ll discover in a moment.

I immediately tried this, of course, and it worked! And that’s how I’ve tied my shoelaces ever since. Well, until the other day.

Back in 1994, I really never thought that I would be re-learning how to tie my shoelaces. But I am all in favour of learning new things — even if that means un–learning old things. So at the age of 43 or so, I learned this basic life skill all over again, and used it all the time for the next seven years or so.

The method he described has some issues, I should point out. The big one is that if you are unlucky how you pull an end to undo them, you can end up in a very complex knot that can take a while to untie. This, of course, will happen when you are in a hurry, or in the dark. But the benefit of the technique outweighed the downside.

Then the other day, I was getting to know the shiny black new Boxee Box I acquired. I’ve had Boxee on the little Mac Mini connected to the TV as a media centre type computer for ages but never used it that much. But with the Boxee Box it all becomes much more accessible and, give or take a few bugs which I am sure will get fixed over time, it’s a very impressive piece of kit.

One of the main ways of accessing content with Boxee is Apps, and one of them is for TED Talks. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It’s a non-profit that holds two international conferences a year where some amazing speakers talk about some amazing things — you can learn more about them here. Their slogan is “Ideas worth spreading”. It’s where I first heard about the company Better Place, for example, and their amazingly sensible idea of having swappable electric car batteries so you don’t have to sit around while they charge (you can see the video here).

On the front page of the Boxee TED app is a set of panels promoting a selection of talks. One of them was from Terry Moore and it’s called How To Tie Your Shoes. I wondered immediately if he was showing what I might call “Siegel’s technique”. Well, he’s not. He’s showing you a new way of doing it that also doesn’t come undone — and doesn’t have the risk of knotting. It’s in fact both simpler and better. In essence, instead of going once round anticlockwise, you go once round clockwise, and get a stronger form of the knot (note that if you’re left-handed you may already be doing this). But don’t let me say any more: just watch the video. It’s only 3 minutes.

There are in fact loads of ways of tying your shoelaces. This web site suggests at least 18 possible knots and also describes the technique discussed above.

I first heard about the brilliant people at Artichoke Trust through seeing the TV coverage of their 2009 Lumiere event in Durham (and apparently there’s another one later this year).

Artichoke describe themselves as “a creative company that works with artists to invade our public spaces and put on extraordinary and ambitious events that live in the memory forever”, and based on their latest event (“extravaganza” in fact is not too strong a word), Dining with Alice, which runs until 21st May 2011, they have succeeded in that goal once again. If you’re reading this before the end of the run, do try and get tickets if you can – but be sure to wrap up warmly if you attend.

Dining with Alice is presented as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, around the gorgeous 15th century private house Elsing Hall in Norfolk (see view of the North Front, left). Artichoke have taken over the extensive and almost labyrinthine gardens and turned them into a wonderland of theatrical experiences and al fresco dining. As to the concept, Director Hilary Westlake suggests that the event is the answer to the question, “Just what happened to all the character’s in Alice’s adventures when they were no longer needed in her dreams?” It’s in fact a re-staging of an event originally created for the Salisbury Festival in 1999, when it was commissioned by now-Artichoke co-director Helen Marriage when she was the Festival’s director.

Peripatetic dining, inspired both by the seating arrangements at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (where you keep moving round the seats at the table) and by Lewis Carroll’s interest in mathematics, is at the heart of Dining with Alice, which is punctuated (and concluded) by a series of amusing theatrical presentations from a small cast of around 10 “Hosts” – in the form of the familiar White and Red Queens, the Queen (and King) of Hearts, the Duchess, the White Knight, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum & Dee,  butler Mr Alastair, and no less than half-a-dozen Alices – including “Alice After Wonderland”, “Alice in Wonderland”, a Tall Alice and some Tiny Alices. Plus a host of others, notably the “Turban Team”, about whom, more in a moment. Most, if not all the performers are from the East of England. The food is provided by Bompas and Parr with the aid of City College Norwich.

To begin with, you walk into and through the immaculate gardens via a circuitous route to find a marquee, with crisps and Victorian accompaniments, Hendrick’s Gin and a live string quartet, and have a wander around, talk to people – I was lucky enough to have a brief chat with Artichoke co-director Nicky Webb, whom I met originally in the Cambridge Picture House bar thanks to Bill Thompson – read the fascinating programme and find your name on the curiously-named “Seating Plan”. I say “curiously”, because there is, in fact, no indication where you’ll be sitting. Instead, there’s a colour and a number – and you notice that your colour/number combination is different from those of anyone you arrived with. Hmmm. After the guests have all arrived, the main characters march in to the accompaniment of a brass band and the first part of the event begins.

It turns out that the colour and number identify the waiter (“server” is not the right word, as they don’t serve the food) who will lead you, personally, to your places during the course of the evening: the former indicating the colour of their turban and the latter a number the member of the “Turban Team” holds and announces. You are separated from anyone else in your party as you go off, following your waiter on a circuitous route through the darkening gardens, while the sounds of Wonderland are heard around you in the forms of the calls of strange birds and creatures echoing across the lawns and emerging suddenly from nearby bushes. You have a chance to get to know the others who have the same colour and number as yourself – I was lucky enough to find myself in the company of three women with whom I had the opportunity to chat on our walk, before being separated as we were shown our tables for the first course. The main characters flit among the tables as you eat, engaging in conversations or not, until your waiter collects you for a further intricate walk to the next course. The tables are littered with strange things: little cards with riddles, labels, and other paraphernalia. You are indeed led into a kind of Wonderland, with a marvellous fantastic atmosphere unlike anything you’ve previously experienced.

The evening was a series totalling six courses of excellent food, each taken at a different table, and after the first course, with one or more different people previously unknown to me – a truly wonderful idea and I’m pleased to have enjoyed several excellent discussions over dinner. Soon you find yourself in the company of the rest of your party, among others, and ultimately you’re led to a dining area that’s laid out almost like a conventional restaurant – except that it’s under the sky, and in front of you is a stage and live musicians before the South Front of the beautifully illuminated Elsing Hall (see main photo) – for the dessert and finale (above). The dining area was actually built out over the moat.

There’s a certain amount of walking involved, of which you should be aware (apparently arrangements can be made if your mobility is limited, but I don’t know the details) and the night we were there, the temperature dropped to around 6º Celsius, so do wrap up well. But do be sure not to miss this marvellous event. Congratulations to Artichoke and the whole team involved for a quite remarkable and unmissable experience. Definitely the best event I’ve attended for some time.

Why did the Lib Dems do so badly yesterday? The short answer is “probably not what you think.”

The commonest evaluation that seems to be floating around currently, the day after the election took place and now the results have become clear, is that, exactly a year after the General Election that brought the Lib Dem/ Tory coalition, the voting population expressed the view that it didn’t like the cuts and other disastrous policies proposed by the coalition. As a result the Labour vote rose; but in addition, the Liberal Democrats took a particular beating while the Conservatives got off more or less scot free (with a slight increase in seats in fact). There seems to be some mystery in many minds as to why the Lib Dems should have borne the brunt of the nation’s displeasure while the Tories remained unscathed.

In my mind, there’s no mystery at all. Imagine a conscientious Labour voter on the Left, perhaps quite far to the Left, who over the period since 1997 (actually before that in fact), saw the party drifting significantly rightwards until it was more centrist than anything else. That was a cause for concern, but even more disturbing was the behaviour of Blair, over Iraq and the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction which never were, and of course that many believe he knew all along never were.

The only significant party to oppose the Iraq involvement was the Liberal Democrats. And as time went by, and Labour never repealed the excesses of Thatcherism (just as Clinton never reversed Reagan and Bush senior, incidentally*) never reined in the financial institutions (that were to bring ruin upon us as an inevitable result of the combined efforts of Reagan and Thatcher), never in fact took any moves to the left at all to any great extent while at the same time increasingly threatening civil liberties, kow-towing to big media companies over internet use, media ownership and behaviour, the Lib Dems came to look more and more attractive.

Trouble was, the Lib Dems were by and large from two backgrounds. There were those who were originally Liberals, many of whom were of course quite remarkable and progressive people — my particular favourite being Beveridge, who conceived a model of the Welfare State before the end of the Second World War which, implemented as much as was practical by the 1945 Labour government, worked pretty well on the whole until Thatcher started attacking it.

But the others were formerly members of the Social Democratic Party, a spinoff of what was essentially the right wing of the Labour Party when the latter was rather closer to being (though not actually being) a Socialist party than it was today. They were certainly to the Right of the Labour Party at the time of the Gang of Four, but where they stood with respect to “New Labour’ was possibly a different matter.

Those of us firmly on the Left, dissatisfied and betrayed by the Christian Democrat-style New Labour edifice (whose policies, using techniques learned from Clinton, had been crafted by focus group and market research and not by fervent belief in the need for representation of working people; and who were funded, like the Tories, by big business and others inimical to their needs) wanted somewhere to go. Somewhere where we might actually have a chance of the party we voted for actually winning some seats (ie not Respect or some other fringe Leftist party). The Lib Dems said enough of the right things for us to be interested in supporting them, especially when everyone else in the country seemed to be on the right.

Unfortunately, of course, the Lib Dems were on the right too — or at least part of them was. Many of us were dismayed last year that the Lib Dems formed a coalition with the Tories, even if we knew full well that a partnership with Labour would not have been workable. However we consoled ourselves with the thought that at least “our lads” were making the Tories less toxic than they would otherwise have been. With hindsight, this seems debatable.

What has happened in the past year is that we have seen threats from the Government  to many things we hold dear, from Council services to the NHS to the BBC, and cuts that are very evidently ideological rather than fiscally necessary. It’s Thatcherism in a skin. In the meantime the Labour Party under Miliband has sought to distance itself somewhat from New Labour and even appear to move leftwards a little and behave a little more at least like a Social Democrat, rather than a Christian Democrat,  party. No doubt many of us would like it to move further to the Left, but we’re also conscious that a right-wing press would persuade the majority that a hard Left party was unelectable and dangerous. It will take a lot of effort to depose the influence of the Right in the media, and modern technology is only part of the answer — one of the most popular web sites in the UK is, I gather, that of the Daily Mail, for example. That’s one reason why the unbiased nature of the BBC , though we may complain about it from time to time, is so important.

So what we did yesterday is we went back home. Tory voters remained Tory voters – and why shouldn’t they. We bolstered the Labour vote, even in areas where only the Tories were in with a chance — like where I live in the East of England. Here, there hasn’t been a Liberal (let alone a Labour) MP for 60 years, and if I wasn’t voting Conservative it didn’t matter one little bit who I voted for, thanks to First Past the Post (which we are now stuck with indefinitely… I wonder if we could propose the Scottish system of FPTP plus Lists to ensure proportionality?). Last time I looked, my vote here was actually worth 0.01 votes in terms of how likely it was to change things. So I voted Labour, and I hope the pundits look at the popular vote, something that was always ignored before the Information Age, and note the numbers well.

We post-Socialists and friends of like enough mind withdrew our support from the Lib Dems, and without us, their vote went, in most places, back to much earlier, primaevally low levels.

We withdrew our support because we disagreed with the statement that “compromise is not betrayal”; because we don’t believe the compromises should be being made. You cannot make acceptable compromises with the Right when the correct answers are to the Left of both your positions — something I wish Obama had grasped in the US, incidentally.

And because we suddenly realised that of those two wings of the Liberal Democrat party, the Centre Right one was very much in control. And we did not come all this way to vote for yet another party of the Right. We had already made our compromises by supporting a party with a known right-leaning tendency, which hitherto had been ameliorated by a small number of Lib Dem figures who shared our views, for example, on the environment.

We didn’t like discovering that we had been supporting a party of the Right for some time. So we went home.

So what happens now? Well, the atrocious behaviour of Cameron with regard to the antics of the No to AV mob – about which I am absolutely certain that absolutely nothing will be done – will no doubt sour relations in the Cabinet. But Blair and Brown hated each other for years and managed to run the country. So there is no reason the coalition should fall apart for that reason. And falling apart now is anyway too soon.

The important thing in my view is to ensure that Tory policies are stopped. My expectation is that as time goes by, Labour support will continue to rise. It’s already jumped in a year: as the cuts bite and public sector workers are turned out of their jobs across the country, that can only increase. At a point in the future, a stand by Lib Dem MPs on some issue they feel passionately about would bring about a vote of no confidence in the Government, or some other route to a collapse of the coalition, and we’ll have a General Election – one that Labour will win.

OK, the Labour Party still needs to demonstrate that it really is a party of the Left, for example a manifesto commitment to re-nationalising the rail network and undoing some of the ravages of Thatcher might be a good start, but hey, we are so used to voting for the “least worst” we can probably live with that as long as it keeps a slide back to Thatcherism off the table.

Image courtesy of secretlondon123 via WikiMedia Commons

On 5 May in the UK, we’ll have a choice, via a referendum: whether to keep the “First Past The Post” voting system – where the person who gets the most votes in an election wins, even if under half those who cast a vote actually voted for them – or instead opt for the fairer “Alternative Vote” (AV) system, where you rank candidates in order of preference.

I am personally in favour of a fully proportional system, but that’s not on the table. AV, however, is a step forward and I’d urge readers to vote in favour. To find out more, click here.

I’ve heard an enormous amount of rubbish about AV, mainly from the “no” camp, and I am rather surprised that there is no mechanism for holding them to account for a campaign of what, in my view, amounts to a lot of lies and distortion.

If you’d like to know which of the claims on both sides are fact, and which are fiction, check out Channel 4’s FactCheck blog.

My nasty suspicion is that the “no” camp will win as a result of deliberately misrepresenting what AV would mean. If you are also in favour of AV, I would appreciate it if you could do your best to stop that happening, and help people understand how it works.

There must be something in it, too, because it’s used for virtually every other type of UK election: electing Mayors, electing representatives to the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, and choosing the Leader of not only the Labour Party but (via a close relative of AV) the Tories as well. It’s even used to elect hereditary peers in the House of Lords (honest!).

So forget the erroneous protestations of the nay-sayers and try this instead. The truth is, AV is really simple. When you go to the polls, you rank the candidates in order of preference until it doesn’t matter to you any more. That’s it. Or as someone rather more graphically put it, imagine all the candidates are trapped in a burning building. In what order would you prefer them to be rescued?

Dan Snow’s excellent video below clearly explains why AV is a good idea and how it works.