A blog. Index. | Photographs, drawings and AI work have their own places now.
l finally got to see Deafinitely Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis.
It's brilliant and I loved it. The extraordinary staging and the use of BSL, mime, visual vernacular and speech combined to make the most affecting and arresting theatre I've ever seen .
Just see it. It's amazing !
I’m 50 next year, so I’m just leaving this here. In case… you know…..
Just how cool are this lot?!
One of the best contemporary drummers; no contest.
Our night up a tree by the estuary was utterly perfect.
#bigcanopycampout
I’m going to be sleeping up the nearest of these lovely holm oaks tomorrow night.
Right here.
It’s part of the Big Canopy Campout in aid of critically threatened rainforest through the World Land Trust. You can donate here! Please!
The tree is an absolute cracker, with a nice spreading canopy and right on the waterfront of the River Exe where the canal meets and the wildfowl nest.
Huge thanks to Clive, the landlord of the Turf Hotel, in whose garden the tree lives.
“The technology has the support of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has hailed it as a “big step” in efforts to tackle the worsening global scourge of plastic pollution.
Head of sustainability at Carlsberg, Simon Boas Hoffmeyer, said once the Snap Packs are rolled out worldwide the company will reduce its plastic use by 1,200 tonnes a year - the equivalent of 60 million plastic bags. “It’s a little bit of magic,” he said of the design. “It’s glued together so you can’t actually see the packaging. It’s almost not there, and that is what is extremely exciting from a sustainability perspective.”
Carlsberg’s vice president of product development, Myriam Shingleton, said she wanted the glue to become the new packaging norm.”
I'm cautious about being my own echo-chamber, but it's hard to resist when an article perfectly encapsulates your own point of view.
This article by George Monbiot in today's Guardian is perfect, and important; and opens the door to further thought (though not much further) about the power to change things. Anything. Read it, please, but the main thrust of the argument is that individual change (so far as one can, in the wider context) is trivial within that context:
“Last month, a request to Starbucks and Costa to replace their plastic coffee cups with cups made from corn starch was retweeted 60,000 times, before it was deleted. Those who supported this call failed to ask themselves where the corn starch would come from, how much land would be needed to grow it, or how much food production it would displace. They overlooked the damage this cultivation would inflict: growing corn (maize) is notorious for causing soil erosion, and often requires heavy doses of pesticides and fertilisers.”
As he says, "The problem is not just plastic: it is mass disposability." Any change exists within its own ecosystem and generates effects throughout that system. The change that is required is not that supermarkets be granted the additional income stream of mandatory charging for plastic bags - bags that require tens to hundreds of uses to offset the impact of single-use plastic - but that the economic ecosystem that demands growth at the expense of all else be changed. How does that happen?
The automatic response to that question is government, policy and law. But single countries exist within their own political ecosystems. A tax change in one country causes the corporations to relocate to a more favourable setting. A global treaty in this respect is fanciful at best and risible at worst. Individual companies exist within the ecosystem of their industry marketplace, and one company obtaining its raw materials from anywhere other than the cheapest source will be beaten and eaten by its less ethically-conscious so more profitable and powerful competitors. Likewise sole traders.
This is a species-level issue, and while individual people or semi-mobilised groups clicking online petitions might chip away comfortingly at their own personal impacts, it will have no effect on the trajectory of the top-level zero-sum ecosystem of our planet.
Read Monbiot though. He's more positive than me.
“The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic thinking is an endangered species.”
I don't know why this is so compelling, but this live map of where the trains are on the tube is great!
That's it, I'm off Twitter too. Just because.
You don't cry when you chop up a ukulele.
I am very much enjoying Rob Scallon's latest, ridiculous, Jazz/Djent fusion. Nice.
After a useful piece of advice on the RTCUK group that said you should clip to an 'O'-ring on your bridge rather than directly onto the bridge, I started to do exactly that. The rationale was that a carabiner will wear in the same place and abrade the bridge quicker than a ring that will wear uniformly all round it. Fair enough.
Well yesterday I was putting up a high hammock and had set up a Y-rig with two doubled ropes off the bridge. One was on my ring, but the other was clipped straight to the bridge. Because each leg was attached to anchors quite far apart, the tie-in points migrated to the ends of the bridge - but the directly-clipped one went beyond the bridge-end fittings.
This is not a good thing. Lesson learned. I'm buying a second 'O'-ring.
Thanks Jos for the great picture! An oak that can't help but make you happy.
At my funeral, this is the piece to which everybody leaves.
"Mastodon is a decentralized social network that uses standard interoperability protocols and is completely [FOSS]. What this means is that anyone can run a Mastodon server, and the users of those servers can talk to each other. More than that, non-Mastodon servers are also part of this network if they conform to the same protocols. This means that Mastodon is more future-proof than Facebook or Twitter: Even if Mastodon-the-software falls out of fashion, the network can be simply continued by other interoperable software. You don't have to tear out your entire social graph to have all friends migrate to something new if that happens. Furthermore, Mastodon allows self-determination and control. When you run a server, it's yours. Your rules, your community, hosted on your hardware... you don't depend on anybody, definitely not on a [Silicon Valley headquarters]."
from BoingBoing
Find me at @collapsibletank@mastodon.social
Rafael Nadal looks like Tom Cruise with his face smushed against a window.
There are a number of great maths channels on YouTube, such as Numberphile and Mathologer - but the most beautiful and elegant is Think Twice, where smart and smooth animation visualises otherwise complex formulae or theorems. For example, here's the derivation and properties of the Dragon Curve.
(Mr Puzzle has a nice review of some laser-cut puzzles including a Dragon Curve one here.)