I just realised that my camera can screw directly on to my telescope tripod. Expect me to come back from Crete with lots of attempted panoramas.
Can you tell I’m procrastinating because I don’t want to pack?
Category: Culture
I bought a new notebook yesterday for my upcoming trip to Crete. This is the previous one, with a feather I found near the birdfeeders, presumably from a parakeet. I do like Moleskine notebooks. I’ve used masses of different notebooks of various kinds over the years both for birdwatching and poetry, but these are the only ones I really enjoy as objects in their own right.
They’re a fine example of why you can’t judge a product just on its functionality. Any old notebook which contains a supply of paper and is small enough to be portable would fulfil my requirements; I hardly ever use them for sketching or anything, just noted jotted in biro. The elastic to keep the notebook shut, the ribbon bookmark and the built-in pocket are nice touches but not really necessary.
It’s just a likeable object. It looks good: simple, old-fashioned, functional, ungimmicky. Even more important is that it’s very tactile; the oilcloth cover, good quality paper and twangy elastic all make it a nice thing to hold. I think it’s worth paying three times as much to get a notebook that gives me pleasure as well as doing its job. I just wish I got as much enjoyment out of using, say, my mobile phone.
I was watching the football this evening (and no, I haven’t done my napowrimo poem yet, and yes, that’s probably what I should be doing now instead of this post), and all the players looked rather short and squat. And changing the format setting on the TV didn’t seem to help.
I came to the conclusion that what Sky had done was take a picture which was being filmed in the traditional 4:3 ratio, cut the top and the bottom off, and stretch what was left to a widescreen ratio. So they had reduced the amount of the game you could see and distorted the picture in order to produce fake widescreen, on the assumption that as long as the punters thought they were getting a widescreen broadcast it didn’t matter if they crippled the picture. Which, frankly, I took as an insult.
Oh, and I couldn’t help noticing that these days Solskjaer still has the baby features, but now they’re combined with the premature aging effect of sport played at the top level, he looks more like a baby who has been preserved in a Swedish peat bog for a few hundred years.
I know, I know, less wittering, more poem-writing.
Categories
The Campaign for Better Smilies
Smilies used to really irritate me. But I’ve been persuaded. So much online communication now is chit-chat, banter and small talk. And informal conversation is driven as much by tone of voice as by actual words. A real example. Someone leaves a nice comment on this blog, and I don’t really have anything to say in reply but want to acknowledge the comment. This seems too curt:
Thanks.
This seems too effusive:
Thanks!
So what I often use is this:
Thanks :)
Which seems a genuinely useful thing to be able to do. It’s just a bit friendlier. But you’ll notice WordPress hasn’t converted that into a smiley, because I have in fact turned smilies off. They’re just too ugly. These are the ones that ship with WordPress:
They’re not the most horrible smilies ever, but I didn’t spend hours tweaking and fine-tuning the design of the site just to clutter it up with yellow cartoon faces. What I like about the classic emoticon is that it’s visually unobtrusive but clear. It is in fact like punctuation, which I think is the state all smilies should aspire to. But emoticons are limited. I know that people have expended endless ingenuity in coming up with ways to convey everything from ‘laughing hard while covering mouth with hands’ to ‘silent resignation’, but they tend to be large, ambiguous and, of course, obviously cobbled together out of other symbols. What I want is for fonts come with a range of emoticons designed to match the font. The most important one is a smile; the other ones I’ve found most useful in internet forums are ‘confused’ ‘roll eyes’ and ‘grin’, but they might as well include the other obvious ones: ‘angry’, ‘sad’ and ‘winking’ at least.
They don’t even have to be designed to look like faces; conceptually these similar to the exclamation mark and the question mark, and a similarly arbitrary symbol would be fine. But since emoticons and smilies are currently in widespread use, they seem like a good starting point. Perhaps something like this:
I am, obviously, not a type designer, but you can see what I’m trying to do. The more complex symbols, like confused or roll-eyes, would need a bit more ingenuity, but humans are nothing if not ingenious.
Can you tell I’m short of inspiration for napowrimo? And, btw, if WordPress is going to insert curly quotes, I wish it would bloody well get them right. The automatic formatting seem to be screwed up in several ways since the release of WP2.1, and it’s really irritating. [angry smiley could go here]
If you started reading this blog in the past 11 months, you may not know about Napowrimo. Napowrimo is modelled on Nanowrimo—National novel-writing month—a scheme which encourages people to try to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words) in the month of November. Napowrimo is national poetry-writing month, and the target is a poem a day for 30 days; in April because April is National Poetry Month in the US. And yes, the ‘national’ part of the name is a bit of a misnomer; blame whichever short-sighted person came up with the name for nanowrimo. I’m occasionally tempted to refer to it as wopowrimo or glopowrimo, but I think the name has pretty much stuck now.
Which means that this blog is going to be taken over with poems for a month. I can tell you now that many of them will be truly awful. Sorry about that. I’ll probably write the occasional non-poem post as well, but if you really can’t stand slapdash amateur poetry, you might want to avert your gaze until May.
There’s no convenient central napowrimo website as there is for nanowrimo. The idea was invented by Reen, who was the first ever napowrimo-er back in 2002. I introduced the idea to PFFA in 2005, so this will be my third year. I reckon in 2005 I produced some quite good poems, like this one, this one and this one. Last year I was much less pleased with my output and I didn’t manage the 30 poems anyway. So my target is to improve on last year. In the meantime, here’s a picture of a fluffy kitten:
Max, originally uploaded by Tante Bluhme’s.
Wish me luck.
I’ve just finished Monkey Girl by Edward Humes, an account of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case about the constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design in biology lessons. I was slightly underwhelmed by the book—you can read my review here—but the subject is interesting. How do you manage science education in a country where so many believe that the mainstream scientific orthodoxy is not just false but offensive and morally suspect?
If you have to resort to the court system and the separation of church and state to keep evolution in the classroom, and creationism out, you’ve already lost. It seems clear that teaching religious beliefs in state-run schools is unconstitutional, and that principle is worth defending; but evolution should be taught in biology lessons not because it’s the secular option, but because it’s what working biologists believe to be true. Teaching anything else isn’t just a victory for religion over secularism, it represents a complete collapse of respect for education and scholarship.
And although keeping religion out of the classroom is vital, it sounds like the equally important battle to keep evolution being taught is nearly lost. Even in places where evolution is specified on the curriculum, it sounds like many or most biology teachers teach as little evolution as possible and glide over the most potentially controversial areas of speciation and human origins; not necessarily because they themselves doubt evolution but because they know it will create too much awkwardness with the parents.
Since I am occasionally fairly forceful about my atheism, I imagine this post might come across as part of that, but really it’s not. It’s as an enthusiast for natural history that I find this most troubling. Children should be exposed to the ideas of natural selection and evolution because they are beautiful, surprising and have enormous explanatory power even about the most directly observable life around you. Of all the great theories of science, natural selection is the most approachable by an interested amateur. It can be explained without reference to mathematics. The subject matter—birds, fish, people—can be seen without the aid of a radio telescope or a particle accelerator. Of course the study of modern biology gets you on to statistics, biochemistry, genetics, radiometric dating and other more technical disciplines, but an enormous amount of the study of evolution was done, and is still being done, by direct observation of easily approachable things: digging up fossils, dissecting animals, breeding pea-plants, watching finches.