“Hattie’s Map” Unveiled At Last
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.
August 8, 2011 Comments Off on “Hattie’s Map” Unveiled At Last
Nuclear Power You Can Trust?
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.…”
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
June 21, 2011 Comments Off on Nuclear Power You Can Trust?
Re-learning basic life skills
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.
June 19, 2011 Comments Off on Re-learning basic life skills
Peripatetic Dining with Alice
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.
May 15, 2011 Comments Off on Peripatetic Dining with Alice
UK Local Elections 2011: Goodbye Compromise
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
May 6, 2011 Comments Off on UK Local Elections 2011: Goodbye Compromise
Time to change the voting system
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.
April 26, 2011 Comments Off on Time to change the voting system
A sad day for virtual Frank Lloyd Wright fans
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.
December 3, 2010 Comments Off on A sad day for virtual Frank Lloyd Wright fans
Where will voters on the Left go?
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.
September 20, 2010 Comments Off on Where will voters on the Left go?
When does ‘Skepticism’ become dogma?
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:
September 18, 2010 Comments Off on When does ‘Skepticism’ become dogma?
Setting basic poetry in WordPress
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?
August 12, 2010 Comments Off on Setting basic poetry in WordPress