Creative Technology Consultants

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.

[vod­pod id=Groupvideo.9234779&w=425&h=350&fv=vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2005/Blank/TerryMoore_2005-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/TerryMoore-2005.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=320&vh=240&ap=0&ti=1150&lang=eng&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes;year=2005;theme=ted_in_3_minutes;theme=new_on_ted_com;theme=hidden_gems;event=TED2005;tag=Culture;tag=Entertainment;tag=demo;]

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. 

The Frank Lloyd Wright Vir­tu­al Muse­um in Sec­ond Life is wide­ly regard­ed not only as a won­der­ful reviv­i­fi­ca­tion of the lega­cy of Amer­i­ca’s great­est archi­tect, but as one of the major points of inter­est in Sec­ond Life and one held in high regard by archi­tects and those of an artis­tic bent, many of whom are drawn to vir­tu­al worlds.

The FLWVM con­tains fas­ci­nat­ing exhibits on the life and works of Frank Lloyd Wright, 3D vir­tu­al recon­struc­tions of his key build­ings, and much more, and it’s host­ed by knowl­edge­able and help­ful staff. For the last year or so there has been a licens­ing agree­ment in place between FLWVM and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion, the organ­i­sa­tion that con­trols Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy.

One of the Foun­da­tion’s goals is to “Pre­serve the works, ideas, and inno­v­a­tive spir­it of Frank Lloyd Wright for the ben­e­fit of all gen­er­a­tions” – one of the things that the FLWVM def­i­nite­ly does. I was very much sad­dened and sur­prised at the deci­sion announced recent­ly, there­fore,  by the Foun­da­tion not only to ter­mi­nate its licens­ing agree­ment with Vir­tu­al Muse­ums, Inc, who run the FLWVM, but also to issue a Cease and Desist order effec­tive­ly requir­ing them to close forth­with. The Vir­tu­al Muse­um will there­fore close on Decem­ber 10 unless some­thing hap­pens to change that.

You can read more about the sto­ry sur­round­ing this deci­sion here in Prim Per­fect Mag­a­zine’s blog, and the let­ter sent to sup­port­ers of the FLWVM by the Chair of Vir­tu­al Muse­ums, Inc, Ethan West­land.

As a result of that deci­sion, I was moved to write the fol­low­ing email to the Foun­da­tion via their con­tact email address, info[at]franklloydwright.org. If you agree with me, you might want to do the same.

I was sad­dened to hear today of the immi­nent clo­sure of the Frank Lloyd Wright Vir­tu­al Muse­um in the vir­tu­al world of Sec­ond Life as a result of your Foun­da­tion with­draw­ing its exist­ing licens­ing agree­ment with Vir­tu­al Muse­ums Inc and appar­ent deci­sion not to renew it.

I was involved in a TV pro­gramme about the vir­tu­al muse­um some months ago and was excep­tion­al­ly impressed at the work they have been doing pro­mot­ing the work and lega­cy of Amer­i­ca’s great­est archi­tect in new areas of tech­nol­o­gy. It seemed to me at the time (the show went out just as the orig­i­nal licens­ing agree­ment was being signed) that the licens­ing arrange­ment was a per­fect idea in that it enabled the Foun­da­tion’s work and goals, and an aware­ness of the work of this great man, to be extend­ed into new realms with health and vigour.

I am thus extreme­ly dis­ap­point­ed that the Foun­da­tion has decid­ed to take the mea­sures, not only of fail­ing to rene­go­ti­ate the licens­ing agree­ment or some oth­er mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial agree­ment allow­ing the Vir­tu­al Muse­um to con­tin­ue, but with the addi­tion­al step of issu­ing a Cease and Desist order effec­tive­ly caus­ing the Muse­um to close immediately.

From what I have heard about this deci­sion, it appears to me that the Foun­da­tion has been labour­ing under the mis­un­der­stand­ing that as a result of the licens­ing agree­ment, the FLWVM some­how assumed respon­si­bil­i­ty not only for its own cre­ations based on copy­right designs and con­tent owned by the Foun­da­tion, but also those of com­plete­ly uncon­nect­ed third par­ties. I note this as a result of the fact that the Cease and Desist order was appar­ent­ly sent to the Vir­tu­al Muse­um and not to Lin­den Lab, the cre­ators of Sec­ond Life; nor did it take the form of a DMCA take-down order addressed to Lin­den Lab – the usu­al course of action in the case of per­ceived copy­right infringe­ments in the vir­tu­al world.

I would strong­ly urge the Foun­da­tion to recon­sid­er its action in this case and con­sid­er instead re-open­ing nego­ti­a­tions with Vir­tu­al Muse­ums Inc with a view to reach­ing a fur­ther mutu­al­ly-ben­e­fi­cial licens­ing arrange­ment that would allow the Frank Lloyd Wright Vir­tu­al Muse­um – wide­ly regard­ed as a prime exam­ple of the great pos­si­bil­i­ties of vir­tu­al worlds in pro­mot­ing art, cul­ture and design – to con­tin­ue oper­at­ing, con­tribut­ing so effec­tive­ly as it does to the lega­cy of this great man.

If you’re a Sec­ond Life res­i­dent and you want to vis­it the Muse­um before it clos­es on 10 Decem­ber, this link will tele­port you there.

I think there are quite a few clos­et Social­ists in this coun­try. They are peo­ple, whether they were alive or of vot­ing age or not at the time, round­ly endorsed the 1942 Report on Social Insur­ance and Allied Ser­vices by Lib­er­al peer Lord Bev­eridge (shown above) that laid out the struc­ture of the Wel­fare State, and the Labour gov­ern­ment elect­ed via land­slide in 1945 that man­aged, despite incred­i­ble odds, to imple­ment much of it in the suc­ceed­ing years.

The view at the end of the Sec­ond World War was an opti­mistic one: that Britain need­ed a new approach in which the old ways of priv­i­lege were cast aside and in their place was built a new soci­ety in which every­one helped each oth­er, ensur­ing that Bev­eridge’s “Five Giants” – Want, Dis­ease, Squalor, Igno­rance, and Idle­ness – were ban­ished from the land. Peo­ple had seen the way things worked dur­ing the war when things were large­ly cen­tral­ly con­trolled, and they had become used to hav­ing to work togeth­er for the com­mon good, and they want­ed peace­time gov­ern­ment to enshrine those same values.

The result­ing “social con­sen­sus” last­ed from that point through to the elec­tion of the gov­ern­ment of Mar­garet Thatch­er in 1979. Thatch­er delib­er­ate­ly and care­ful­ly took advan­tage of arro­gance on the part of some labour unions to dis­mem­ber that con­sen­sus and throw Britain deci­sive­ly to the Right, helped by the pop­u­lar right-wing press.

Quite a few ordi­nary peo­ple did very well out of the Thatch­er years, for exam­ple being able to buy their coun­cil hous­es at knock-down prices, a pol­i­cy that only more recent­ly has been shown to have a dis­as­trous impact on social housing.

To appear capa­ble of re-elec­tion once again, the Labour Par­ty had to move to the right too. As a result “New Labour” aban­doned tra­di­tion­al Social­ist val­ues and, under Blair, suc­ceed­ed in get­ting back into pow­er with the aid of press barons like Rupert Mur­doch. It arguably sold its soul to focus groups and those who craft­ed pol­i­cy based not on prin­ci­ple but on mar­ket­ing. The result was a gov­ern­ment that failed to redress the imbal­ance caused by Thatch­er, refused to remove the regres­sive and repres­sive leg­is­la­tion that had been put in place over the pre­vi­ous twen­ty years, and end­ed up fur­ther to the Right than Edward Heath’s ear­li­er Tory government.

“Social­ism” had become a dirty word. But plen­ty of peo­ple still held to those old val­ues. Where did those vot­ers go? Some went to the var­i­ous small Social­ist par­ties that remained, like George Gal­loway’s Respect. But quite a few moved to the Lib­er­al Democ­rats. The old Lib­er­al Par­ty, they believed, had come up with the idea of the Wel­fare State back in the days of Lloyd George, and then the Bev­eridge Report dur­ing the war. The Social Democ­rats had left the Labour Par­ty and even­tu­al­ly joined forces with the Lib­er­als to form the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems had prob­lems, in that some in the par­ty were quite con­ser­v­a­tive. But there was also a tra­di­tion­al Lib­er­al­ism that was fur­ther to the Left – far enough to feel like home to many.

Today, we have a coali­tion gov­ern­ment which is large­ly Tory with a hint of Lib­Dem. Arguably it is more “Lib­er­al” than it would have been if it was a Tory minor­i­ty Gov­ern­ment. But to a lot of peo­ple it is in many ways worse than the pre­vi­ous cen­tre-Right “New Labour” admin­is­tra­tion. Quite a few of those left-wing Lib­er­al Demo­c­rat sup­port­ers are dis­sat­is­fied. As a result, they are mov­ing else­where. I think some votes we see today mov­ing from Lib­Dem to Labour are not so much “soft” votes as Left votes. If Labour real­ly moves to the Left (high­ly unlike­ly in my view), then we will see more of this.

As Johann Hari has point­ed out, the actu­al views of vot­ers are on aver­age sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the Left of all three main par­ties. Arguably, pres­sures, notably from the pop­u­lar Press, how­ev­er, have tend­ed to keep those par­ties well to the Right of what used to be the Cen­tre in the days before Thatcher.

A size­able num­ber of left-wing vot­ers grav­i­tat­ed to the Lib Dems as a result, mak­ing the par­ty, de fac­to, a rather broad church. That breadth is prob­a­bly not sus­tain­able in the longer term, espe­cial­ly if the Lib­Dems are seen as sup­port­ing “ide­o­log­i­cal” rather than nec­es­sary Tory cuts, and if the lead­er­ship of the Labour Par­ty moves its stance Leftwards.

Cer­tain­ly a par­ty with a com­mit­ment to tra­di­tion­al Liberal/Left co-oper­a­tive val­ues of the Beveridge/Labour 1945 vari­ety would appeal to a great many vot­ers who feel that British soci­ety, whichev­er main par­ty is in pow­er, favours the rich and priv­i­lege, that the gap between rich and poor is widen­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly (the lat­ter being an accu­rate assess­ment), and that this is a Bad Thing.

It’s a real ques­tion as to where those vot­ers will go, espe­cial­ly if they feel the Lib­Dems have let them down and the Labour Par­ty remains cen­tre-right. The Green Par­ty will prob­a­bly not be in a posi­tion to pick them up for var­i­ous rea­sons. It may be that they will sim­ply, ulti­mate­ly, take to the streets. Indeed, they may already be doing so.

This is a process that cur­rent Gov­ern­ment aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures, which many see as ide­o­log­i­cal and favour­ing the rich rather than being nec­es­sary and fair­ly applied, will encour­age, and we may well see an increas­ing amount of civ­il unrest over the next few years unless the Lib­Dems in Gov­ern­ment can suc­cess­ful­ly ensure that cuts and oth­er mea­sures are imposed fair­ly. For exam­ple, many peo­ple want to see more empha­sis placed on lim­it­ing tax evasion/avoidance than on ben­e­fit cuts. Such suc­cess, to me, seems unlikely.

Mean­while, the Five Giants are return­ing. They have, indeed, been return­ing for thir­ty years.

• For a rather more pos­i­tive view of the future for the Lib Dems, see this arti­cle in the Inde­pen­dent by Mary Ann Sieghart.

For some con­sid­er­able time, I’ve been a staunch fol­low­er of those, like Richard Dawkins, who oppose estab­lished reli­gions and favour an evi­dence-based approach to our under­stand­ing of the world. Indeed, I think reli­gion has caused more death, pain and suf­fer­ing in the world than almost any­thing else and we would all be much bet­ter off with­out reli­gious privilege.

I am actu­al­ly more con­cerned with oppo­si­tion to reli­gion than I am with athe­ism. As far as I’m con­cerned, of course there isn’t any ‘evi­dence’ for God; thus God is hard­ly amenable to the sci­en­tif­ic method and is pure­ly a mat­ter of per­son­al belief. And tempt­ing though it might be to think oth­er­wise, my view is that peo­ple should be free to believe what­ev­er they like as long as it does­n’t restrict my abil­i­ty to do the same. Hav­ing stud­ied a lit­tle occultism in my time, I know that beliefs are very pow­er­ful things.

They are very pow­er­ful, too, in areas that are more amenable to sci­en­tif­ic enquiry, such as in the case of homœopa­thy. I am quite cer­tain in my own mind that homœopa­thy is to be dep­re­cat­ed, and that “there’s noth­ing in it” in phys­i­cal terms. The idea that water can con­tain the “mem­o­ry” of spe­cif­ic sub­stances, but not all the oth­er sub­stances that have passed through it at one time or anoth­er since the dawn of time (and still con­tain that even when the water is removed) seems ridicu­lous to me on a phys­i­cal level.

On what we might call a “mag­i­cal” lev­el, how­ev­er, it’s fine because belief sys­tems are very pow­er­ful indeed and should not be under­es­ti­mat­ed. The sci­en­tif­ic name for this par­tic­u­lar mag­ic, in the case of homœopa­thy, is “the place­bo effect”, and it can lit­er­al­ly work won­ders. The fact is, how­ev­er, that there real­ly is noth­ing else to it, and for the Nation­al Health Ser­vice in the UK to spend mon­ey on place­bos when it could spend it on med­ica­tions that have been proved to have an objec­tive effect, I find absurd. It is also absurd that vast amounts of mon­ey can be made by var­i­ous com­pa­nies sell­ing “homœo­path­ic” reme­dies that have noth­ing in them. (The real chal­lenge as far as I am con­cerned is how do we har­ness the unde­ni­able pow­er of the place­bo effect with­out being dis­hon­est and uneth­i­cal. How­ev­er, this is not the pur­pose of this article.)

I am whole­heart­ed­ly behind the “skep­tics”, there­fore, when they pile in on top­ics like homœopa­thy, snake-oil “alter­na­tive” or “com­ple­men­tary” reme­dies of one kind or anoth­er and oth­er exam­ples of heinous woo, like “bomb detec­tors” based on dows­ing (poor­ly-under­stood dows­ing, not prop­er­ly imple­ment­ed at that, though I doubt that made any dif­fer­ence) that appear to quite lit­er­al­ly kill people.

I’m in the audio field and noth­ing annoys me more than tales of spe­cial rocks or wood­en coathang­ers that, when placed on top of audio com­po­nents or in your lis­ten­ing room respec­tive­ly, will alleged­ly make them sound bet­ter. I do not believe that elec­trons must pass through a cable in one direc­tion only, or that they have to be “flushed out” from time to time by apply­ing DC to them. Nor that speak­er cables need to rest on ceram­ic pylons. In par­tic­u­lar, I believe that dig­i­tal audio does you no harm and even if it did, “applied kine­si­ol­o­gy” would not tell you any­thing about it.  And so on.

I am also firm­ly on the side of sci­ence when it comes to anthro­pogenic glob­al warm­ing. Indeed, there real­ly isn’t an oppos­ing view on this of any mer­it in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, and not because any­one is dis­cour­aged from look­ing or any of those oth­er ‘denial­ist’ accu­sa­tions, but because alter­na­tive the­o­ries just don’t have the evi­dence behind them. This is an exam­ple of one of those top­ics (like cre­ation­ism) where bal­anced cov­er­age ought to reflect the sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus, and oppos­ing argu­ments not sim­ply be giv­en equal time. Equal time is not bal­ance: it rep­re­sents bias towards the view dep­re­cat­ed by those best-placed to know, as I have not­ed else­where.

“Alter­na­tive med­i­cine” is impor­tant, because you are mess­ing with peo­ple’s lives. I have lost more than one friend because they were per­suad­ed to take woo reme­dies instead of get­ting prop­er treat­ment. The afore­men­tioned “applied kine­si­ol­o­gy” when used to “detect” aller­gies, for exam­ple, might be dead­ly. As far as I am con­cerned, there’s a name for “alter­na­tive” or “com­ple­men­tary” med­i­cine that works: it’s called “med­i­cine”. And you find out if it works via clin­i­cal tri­als, sys­tem­at­ic reviews of results pub­lished in peer-reviewed jour­nals and the rest of the panoply of the sci­en­tif­ic method as applied to med­ica­tions. Homœopa­thy gen­er­al­ly fails on these tests, for exam­ple, and its occa­sion­al suc­cess­es seem to rely more on “bed­side man­ner” and oth­er place­bo-relat­ed effects than any­thing else. Yes, I am aware that “big phar­ma” pulls tricks on what appears in the jour­nals and so on, but I am also aware that “big alter­na­tive phar­ma” is at least as duplic­i­tous (and big) and two wrongs don’t make a right.

How­ev­er, I get rather more uneasy when “skep­ti­cism” approach­es sci­ence’s bound­ary areas. (I am real­ly not sure what the argu­ment is for call­ing it “skep­ti­cism”, by the way: as far as I am con­cerned it’s sim­ply a US pre­ferred spelling that’s — as often is the case — clos­er to its clas­si­cal ori­gin than the way we spell it in Britain. I find the answer giv­en in this arti­cle rather weak.)

Para­psy­chol­o­gy is a par­tic­u­lar case in point. Over the years I have large­ly over­come my ini­tial dis­like of James Randi’s assump­tions that unknown things are auto­mat­i­cal­ly the result of fak­ery because he and his asso­ciates (see the James Ran­di Edu­ca­tion­al Foun­da­tion site) are so on the mon­ey about so many things, and excel­lent at expos­ing the char­la­tans who are out to make a dis­hon­est buck. But today the atti­tude there, and in many oth­er skep­tic envi­ron­ments, seems to me to be that the para­nor­mal is a con and thus any prop­er sci­en­tif­ic study of it is equal­ly at best not worth­while and at worst a con too. I am sure a great deal of “pop­u­lar” para­psy­chol­o­gy indeed is. But all of it? Prop­er “sci­en­tif­ic” para­psy­chol­o­gy? I tend to think not. You could say exact­ly the same about psy­chol­o­gy, for exam­ple, not to men­tion oth­er “soft­er” sci­ences like eco­nom­ics. But few peo­ple do.

As far as I am con­cerned, para­psy­chol­o­gy is a real and valid area of sci­en­tif­ic research. I am lucky enough to be acquaint­ed with two peo­ple with PhDs in the field, and although they came to rather dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about it (and I believe do not get on with each oth­er), their work and my own study of pub­li­ca­tions in the field over some years sug­gest to me that it real­ly is worth prop­er research. I am also aware that there have been dubi­ous pieces of work in the field over the past cen­tu­ry — as there have been in a great many areas of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery — and the odd bad apple is not a good rea­son to den­i­grate an entire field.

The big prob­lem in para­psy­chol­o­gy, it seems to me, is that while, over a cen­tu­ry ago when the para­nor­mal first began to be stud­ied sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, the big ques­tion was, “Do psy­chic pow­ers and/or phe­nom­e­na actu­al­ly exist?”, the answer today, as it was then, is, “We sim­ply don’t know”. That must be a rather depress­ing con­clu­sion for para­psy­chol­o­gists: that their field has­n’t got any­where since the foun­da­tion of the Soci­ety for Psy­chi­cal Research in 1882.

Susan Black­more (whom I recall, hope­ful­ly cor­rect­ly, as being respon­si­ble for the above obser­va­tion) is no longer work­ing in the field (today she works in con­scious­ness stud­ies), but her account of her expe­ri­ences in para­psy­chol­o­gy, In Search of the Light, is def­i­nite­ly worth a read.

I would be very sur­prised if she was of the opin­ion that the para­nor­mal was a scam and that every­one work­ing in the field was to be vil­i­fied and treat­ed as a char­la­tan. As far as I recall, her last word on the answer to the Big Ques­tion of para­psy­chol­o­gy was indeed “We don’t know” — despite the fact that she encoun­tered her own share of dubi­ous research dur­ing the time she was involved. Para­psy­chol­o­gy research inevitably involves a lot of sta­tis­tics, and occa­sion­al­ly peo­ple fid­dle the num­bers. I seem to recall that the odd astronomer and med­ical researcher has been known to do this too, how­ev­er the result has not been to dep­re­cate astron­o­my or med­ical research. Instead you sim­ply tack­le the per­pe­tra­tors, who are in a tiny minority.

Thus I find it annoy­ing, to say the least, when “skep­tics” take the posi­tion that we know the para­nor­mal does­n’t exist and that it’s all char­la­tanism. It’s sim­ply not the case: we do not know that. It isn’t even that there’s no evi­dence of psy­chic phe­nom­e­na: it’s that the evi­dence is incon­clu­sive. That is not the same as say­ing it does­n’t exist. There is per­haps an argu­ment for look­ing at what is most like­ly to move the field for­ward from the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of what might appear to the lay observ­er to be an impasse, but I am sure para­psy­chol­o­gists have plen­ty of ideas in that subject.

There are oth­er areas, and peo­ple work­ing on the fringes of sci­ence who have not been treat­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly well, and, I think, unde­served­ly. It’s been sug­gest­ed that Dr Rupert Shel­drake was dis­hon­est­ly treat­ed in the mak­ing of Richard Dawkins’ series Ene­mies of Rea­son. Lynne McTag­gart, author of The Field and The Inten­tion Exper­i­ment, who may be known to many peo­ple via the film What the Bleep… has been tak­en to task by Ben Goldacre as a result of what she claims was an error by some­one else , fol­lowed by unwar­rant­ed criticism.

Now, I have a lot of time for Ben Goldacre. I put up video of his excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion at last year’s Open­Tech con­fer­ence and I’ve sent him funds to sup­port his Bad Sci­ence web site. I think that by and large he does a won­der­ful job. But he does seem to me to have over­stepped the mark here. Equal­ly I also have issues with inter­pre­ta­tions of mod­ern sci­ence — of quan­tum mechan­ics in par­tic­u­lar, such as those of Fritjof Capra or those in What the Bleep… — that go beyond those of most rep­utable sci­en­tists in the field. But… I’ve nev­er liked the Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion and pre­fer the Trans­ac­tion­al Inter­pre­ta­tion of Cramer, which is hard­ly main­stream, so who am I to talk.

Sci­ence has dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased our knowl­edge of how the Uni­verse works and with­out it we would be in a state worse than the Dark Ages (it’s also got us into some big trou­ble, but that’s not what we’re talk­ing about here). It’s one of the tools to help us demol­ish super­sti­tion and espe­cial­ly, in my view, the dan­ger­ous, destruc­tive, evil and dead­ly super­sti­tion of religion.

But sci­ence does not have all the answers and nev­er will, because there is always more to dis­cov­er. In addi­tion, sci­ence moves for­ward by new hypothe­ses being pre­sent­ed, and test­ed by exper­i­ment, that give us answers that fit the facts bet­ter than what we pre­vi­ous­ly thought. The last thing it needs is to not look at some­thing because an a pri­ori judge­ment (ie one that does­n’t involve doing any actu­al sci­ence) asserts that said ‘some­thing’ does­n’t exist.

Just because you can use fak­ery to make some­thing appear to exist (such as a psy­chic abil­i­ty), it does­n’t mean that it does­n’t exist. You could use fak­ery to appear to send an audio mes­sage from here to the oth­er side of town, but that does­n’t mean that tele­phones are impos­si­ble. It does­n’t even make them less like­ly. And don’t give me any of that Occam’s Razor stuff.

Occam’s Razor in essence sug­gests that the the hypoth­e­sis embody­ing the fewest new assump­tions is most like­ly to be the cor­rect one. To most peo­ple, the idea of telepa­thy, par­tic­u­lar­ly in asso­ci­a­tion with tele­phone calls, is rather famil­iar, so the idea that you might guess cor­rect­ly who is call­ing you on the phone via telepa­thy is not an unlike­ly hypoth­e­sis at all (let’s not get into whether it’s telepa­thy or clair­voy­ance now, thank you). That it is regard­ed as unlike­ly to be thought pos­si­ble by sci­en­tists might result from the fact that they know more about how things work than the lay-per­son, and thus have a bet­ter idea (pub­lic opin­ion is so wrong on so much sci­ence); but it could equal­ly mean that they don’t regard it very high­ly because it’s not cur­rent­ly favoured as an expla­na­tion. In which case, how are you going to find out if it ought to be favoured if you don’t look, and say instead (with­out hav­ing looked) that it must be some­thing else? There is some­thing cir­cu­lar here.

The hypoth­e­sis we con­sid­er to be the most rea­son­able may depend on what we know, but that real­ly isn’t suf­fi­cient. To re-wire a pre­vi­ous anal­o­gy: if, dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry, I told you I could trans­mit a sound mes­sage instan­ta­neous­ly from here to the oth­er side of town, would the idea that I might be using a new, cur­rent­ly unheard-of inven­tion called the tele­phone be the hypoth­e­sis embody­ing the fewest new assump­tions? I don’t think so. It would, how­ev­er, have been the cor­rect one.

It seems to me that in para­psy­chol­o­gy, as in oth­er “fringe” areas, you need to prove things a lot hard­er than you would in more con­ven­tion­al fields, and this Occam’s Razor thing is the rea­son. If ordi­nary sci­en­tif­ic stan­dards of proof held for para­psy­chol­o­gy, there would be no ques­tion that it exists. How­ev­er because the claims made are extra­or­di­nary, the proof must be extra­or­di­nar­i­ly rig­or­ous too. I am not entire­ly sure that this atti­tude is jus­ti­fied, espe­cial­ly when it seems as if spe­cial efforts are made to ensure it stays that way. It becomes a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy. Extra­or­di­nary to whom? To peo­ple who have already made up their minds. If the evi­dence is incon­clu­sive (which I believe to be the case in para­psy­chol­o­gy) rather than non-exis­tent, then what’s required is bet­ter, more rig­or­ous exper­i­men­ta­tion, not no exper­i­ments at all.

There’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion between Dr Shel­drake and Dr Richard Wise­man which men­tions this top­ic on the Skep­tiko web­site. And again, inter­est­ing­ly, Dr Shel­drake appears to encounter a rather unhelp­ful atti­tude to open inves­ti­ga­tion from Dr Wise­man, the lat­ter again being some­one I nor­mal­ly have a great deal of time for. It real­ly piss­es me off when peo­ple I regard high­ly seem to me to “let the side down” in this way (Dawkins, Goldacre, Wise­man, I mean you).

We real­ly need to be care­ful about this stuff. We do need to be open to new ideas and not enter­tain a fixed, inflex­i­ble view of the way the Uni­verse works: that way lies sci­en­tism, a per­ver­sion of sci­ence into dog­ma that is as far from the sci­en­tif­ic method as is reli­gion. We need to be search­ing for the truth, not try­ing to score a point (I hate it in politi­cians: I hate it in sci­en­tists). We need to avoid set­ting arbi­trar­i­ly high hur­dles for proof just because we don’t like what is attempt­ing to be proved: the rea­son­ing behind such appar­ent evi­den­tial prej­u­dice has to be sound and transparent.

Here’s Shel­drake on “Skep­ti­cism”:

“Healthy skep­ti­cism plays an impor­tant part in sci­ence, and stim­u­lates research and crit­i­cal think­ing. Healthy skep­tics are open-mind­ed and inter­est­ed in evi­dence. By con­trast, dog­mat­ic skep­tics are com­mit­ted to the belief that “para­nor­mal” phe­nom­e­na are impos­si­ble, or at least so improb­a­ble as to mer­it no seri­ous atten­tion. Hence any evi­dence for such phe­nom­e­na must be illusory.”

Now don’t get me wrong: most of the time I’m with the “skep­tics” — even if they can’t spell. But what I would not like to see is for the word “skep­tic” become syn­ony­mous with what McTag­gart calls “Bully­boy Sci­ence”. Instead I would advise true “scep­tics” to do their best to avoid dog­ma and keep an open mind.

An inter­est­ing response to the appar­ent over­en­thu­si­asm in the skep­tic camp is the estab­lish­ment of the web site Skep­ti­cal Inves­ti­ga­tion, which attempts to redress the bal­ance some­what. It has five sec­tions cov­er­ing “inves­ti­gat­ing Skep­tics”, “Con­tro­ver­sies”, “Open-mind­ed Research”, “Sci­en­tif­ic Objec­tiv­i­ty” and “Resources”. I by no means go along with every­thing on the site, but it is very much wor­thy of study. Approach it with an open mind, wontcha.

Fur­ther reading:

• Rupert Shel­drake’s web site
• Richard Wise­man’s web site
• Lynne McTag­gart on “Bully­boy Science”
• Ben Goldacre on Lynne McTaggart
• Skep­tiko
• Skep­ti­cal Investigations

It would appear that one thing that Word­Press isn’t nat­u­ral­ly good at is set­ting poet­ry. The default Word­Press action is that hit­ting Return inserts a line break, which is fine for prose arti­cles but not for poet­ry, where you want a bunch of lines with hard returns but no space between them.

Leona has this prob­lem all the time in the Poe­sie sec­tion of her own site, The Great Return­ing. One of her prob­lems, of course, is that she writes in Microsoft Word, and the great temp­ta­tion is to sim­ply copy and paste the result into Word­Press. This is prob­a­bly the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds, as Word is noto­ri­ous for bring­ing all man­ner of HTML crap along with it that screws up vir­tu­al­ly any web site formatting.

If you’re writ­ing direct into Word­Press, the solu­tion is gen­er­al­ly straight­for­ward (sub­ject to weird­ness­es caused by your choice of theme): for blank lines between stan­zas, hit Return; for sim­ple line-breaks, use Shift-Return – they’re essen­tial­ly the equiv­a­lents of “</p>” and “<br />” in HTML respec­tive­ly. But who would write poet­ry direct into Word­Press? I’m not sure, but most poets I know tweak their copy a good deal more than many jour­nal­ists and prob­a­bly need some­thing a bit more like a word-proces­sor to be con­fi­dent of doing what they require. Cer­tain­ly the default Word­Press edit win­dow does­n’t show enough lines for prop­er con­text — you prob­a­bly want to see the entire opus while you’re writ­ing. Do remem­ber though, that in Settings->Writing you can adjust the num­ber of lines vis­i­ble in the window.

My per­son­al pref­er­ence when writ­ing for the Web – what­ev­er the con­tent, by and large – out­side the web appli­ca­tion itself is to use the sim­plest of text edi­tors (my favourite is Tex­tWran­gler from Bare Bones — but you can equal­ly use TextE­d­it on a Mac­in­tosh or Notepad in Win­dows: basi­cal­ly the sim­plest text edi­tor you have) and then copy and paste that.

If you are start­ing from Word, then copy the text out of Word and paste it into the text edi­tor (thus strip­ping any Word non­sense for­mat­ting, but note you will also lose all the text styling too).

Then fix the copy as required so it looks decent (bear in mind you can’t style it, with ital­ics etc yet), copy it out of the text edi­tor and paste it into a new post in WordPress.

But. Before you paste…

Don’t paste it into the “Visu­al” Edit win­dow – that will add some more for­mat­ting that will screw things up again (you’ll lose all the line-breaks). Instead, click the HTML tab at the top of the edit win­dow, make sure the win­dow is utter­ly blank, and paste it there. Then go back to the Visu­al tab and it should look fine. That done, you need to go through the poem and style any text that needs it, adding ital­ics, bold and so on as required.

Even with all the for­mat­ting infor­ma­tion stripped off the text before you bring it in, there may still be some vari­a­tion in the result­ing look due to the Theme you’re using. We’re using The­sis and this does­n’t seem to give much trou­ble. Your mileage may vary.

The above is fine for basic poet­ry. When it comes to spe­cial for­mat­ting, start­ing lines in odd places and cre­at­ing shapes out of the text, I think I would prob­a­bly con­sid­er set­ting it in Word (or what­ev­er) and then tak­ing a screen shot of it and insert­ing it as a graph­ic — which is a dread­ful workaround, frankly. There must be a bet­ter way. Any­one got some bet­ter ideas?