So. Photography degrees. Thanks very much for all the advice both on and off-line - I’m touched so many people took the time to help, and it certainly turned me around from my initial negative reaction. I just accepted the offer. 

Four weeks of thinking and the major worries are still there: the travelling will be expensive and likely take over my week, the theoretical parts of the course look worryingly postmodernist, I’ll probably be paying off student fees for years and I’m still concerned I’ll feel small and pathetic compared to better photographers. But screw it all: interesting things only happen when you say yes. Therefore: yes.

I’m not a Labour party member and haven’t been particularly following the Deputy Leadership elections, but there’s been plenty of discussion amongst B4L members. The Labour Humanist Group recently questioned each candidate on a series of issues of interest to humanists. Roughly paraphrased, the questions were:

#1 - What is your stance on faith schools?
#2 - What do you think of schools that declare their intent to ‘nourish’ religious children and ‘challenge’ non-religious children?
#3 - Would you repeal compulsory Christian worship in schools?
#4 - Do you support religious organisations taking charge of employment and other social services, if they would use their position to promote their own religious beliefs?
#5 - Do you support a fully-elected house of lords, with no religious privilege?
#6 - What is your view on assisted dying for the terminally ill?

I haven’t seen these questions asked elsewhere - good work, LHG! So, how do the various candidates compare?

Hilary Benn

#1 - answers oddly - his sentence is either badly constructed or deliberately worded as to be ambiguous. Wouldn’t scrap them, though.
#2 - blah
#3 - no, because more debate is needed as we ‘live in a Christian state’! WTF.
#4 - thinks religious discrimination is bad except ‘where this is part of our long standing culture’. See, it being long-standing makes it ok.
#5 - is in favour of fully-elected HoL, but doesn’t mention Bishops.
#6 - not yet persuaded due to potential abuse of system, although can see there is a strong case.

Hazel Blears

#1 - big fan of faith schools.
#2 - blah
#3 - flat out ‘no’, without reasoning
#4 - no - all should be ‘equitable’.
#5 - thinks there should be more faiths in the HoL (no comment on 100% elected) and adds she doesn’t support disestablishment of the CoE.
#6 - blah

Jon Cruddas

Blah #1-6. Says nothing at all. Well, maybe that he supports a 100% elected HoL, but that doesn’t really answer the question.

Peter Hain

#1 - result! Suggests faith schools perpetuate ’sectarian division’. Says parents have ‘right’ to send their children to a school with a particular ethos - interesting choice of word, I think - but standards of curriculum must be upheld. Closest to an anti-faith-schools position of all candidates
#2 - hmm. Says ‘parents have the right to determine whether or not their children are taught particular religious beliefs at school’. Depends on definition of ‘taught’ - as general knowledge or as indoctrination? I’m unconvinced parents have any more ‘right’ to decide on the former than they do whether their child gets taught maths.
#3 - doesn’t believe it is for the state to compel acts of worship. Yay! This says nothing about individual schools, of course, but is nevertheless pretty good
#4 - no. ‘Everyone is entitled to equal access to all services’. Ruled out all faith-based exemptions in Ireland, too.
#5 - in favour of 100% elected. No comment on bishops.
#6 - blah.

Harriet Harman

#1 - seems to be skeptical, but makes a classic mistake in placing discrimination against religious belief on a par with discrimination against gender, race, age and disability. Religious belief is just an idea and doesn’t deserve such protected status. Your race, age, disability or gender say nothing about your ideas or opinions. Your religion does, and you can change it at will. Giving it special status is like allowing discrimination against people who dislike nuclear power, or vote Conservative. But she seems to broadly have the right idea, and wants to ensure faith schools wouldn’t divide the community.
#2 - same as Peter Hain. Unclear.
#3 - same as Peter Hain. Doesn’t believe it is for the state to compel acts of worship. Yay!
#4 - no place for discrimination. Didn’t think Catholics should get an opt-out on adoption agencies.
#5 - supports 100% elected HoL. No direct comment on Bishops, but says all ‘unquestionable rights’ are bad, religious or otherwise.
#6 - supports assisted dying! Only candidate to say this.

Alan Johnson

#1 - Thinks faith schools provide good education and services to community. When he mentions government policy he is supportive, but his own opinions suggest he wants them heavily regulated. Only person to really mention staffing discrimination issues - says schools must prove that staff need to be religious. Adds that he opposes religious exemptions generally.
#2 - Same as PH and HH. Unclear.
#3 - blah. Risky to read between the lines, but seems to think that allowing children to be withdrawn is sufficient.
#4 - blah.
#5 - Wants 80:20 split. Mentions Bishops and thinks it would be difficult for them to stay ‘in their current numbers’. Unclear what this means. Close to blah.
#6 - is skeptical.

I think Harriet Harman comes out top on Humanist issues, very closely followed by Peter Hain. Hazel Blears is at the bottom, and Jon Cruddas doesn’t get to play as he didn’t answer the questions.

Update: the BHA points out a proper writeup on Comment is Free, which happily comes to the roughly the same conclusions as me.

Forget deputy leadership elections, opinions of Tony Blair and the merits of Doctor Who series three - if there’s one thing all Bloggers4Labour surely agree on, it’s the need for more political LOLCats. Hence, B4L-lolcat-mashup-a-go-go:

Or, one could say, the commentaricat. I kill me.

Unfortunately¹ I can’t get it to work with the full-post feed. Oddly appropriate wongaLOLCats can be found here.

1. really it is [↩]

I love Google Docs. It’s become my regular word processor / spreadsheet package, and the sharing features are incredibly useful. I used it to write my 50,000 word NaNoWriMo novel last year and it didn’t break a sweat. On the rare occasion I need proper WYSIWYG or more advanced calculations I’ll use OpenOffice, but Google Docs is the future for casual work. I’ve been extolling its virtues to Abi, and for the last couple of weeks she’s been building a spreadsheet. Yesterday it abruptly stopped working, and I couldn’t figure out why.

‘Trying to reach google.co.uk…’ flashed red in the top left after the spreadsheet opened, but it never connected. Her internet connection was working fine otherwise. The culprit turned out to be Norton Internet Security. I could find no exception lists for websites, so the only solution has been to disable it entirely (NAV still runs, and her router has a firewall anyway, so it’s no big loss). I’ve no idea why it suddenly started happening - maybe something from LiveUpdate? Or it detects the every-few-second-saves as some kind of attack, and blocks the IP? Whatever, I thought I’d put it here for Googlers with similar problems.

I was recently asked to help with an abandoned website. The domain name was registered by a defunct hosting company, yet the website was still running, somehow. I contact the company who apparently took over the hosting, and after two quick emails they changed the IPSTAG for me. Great response, except they didn’t do any kind of identity check, or even ask for the old password. I could have been anyone and they’d have simply handed me the domain! Maybe they were just happy to get rid of it, but still…The domain was originally with E7even, who were taken over by 186k. (post edited so it actually makes sense)

Philosopher Stephen Law is generating plenty of discussion with his suggestion that private schools be banned. He says the current system is inherently unfair, and reasons as follows: there is a clear bias towards the privately educated in high-status jobs. This is because the wealthy advantage their children by paying for a ‘better’ education. Whether the education is ‘better’ in terms of educational merit or simply the doors it opens is moot - the end result shows a significant advantage to the privately educated, who aren’t actually any different from the non-privately educated in terms of intelligence or potential¹, but who happen to have wealthy parents. This is clearly unfair to those who happen to be born into poorer families, who don’t get the same chances.

Anyway, an obvious solution is to ensure everybody is educated to the same standard. The idea of banning private schools immediately sets right off against left, but needn’t. The same result could be achieved with only private schools, if top-ups weren’t allowed - every child would have exactly the same amount of money spent on them. The usual Libertarian the-state-is-rubbish-at-everything argument doesn’t apply. Here’s Prof. Law’s actual suggestion, posted this morning:

Let’s a have a voucher system with no top ups. A voucher is the only way you can purchase your child an education.

Let both the state and private firms compete for these vouchers by providing schools.

Schools can select by ability if they wish.

Let’s add a further feature to this system - the value of the voucher is not fixed, but is dependent on the socio-economic intake of the school. The more middle class and well-off the parents are, on average, the less the voucher is worth. The more impoverished they are, the more [it's] worth.

Why the variable-value voucher?

This last feature deals with the effect of people moving to the vicinity of highly middle class schools to get their kids in. That school would now receive less funding than the school with working class kids down the road. Take your voucher to that other school, and it’s worth more. And so are the vouchers of the other kids at that school.

The precise difference in voucher value can be fine-tuned over time, to cancel out the effect of the middle-classes gaining an advantage by moving nearer to middle-class dominated schools. (In fact, by increasing the difference, we could ensure that they actually tend to flee from them.)

Incentive to run a good school? Private companies will extract their profit from the vouchers, competing with each other by two means - providing better schools so as to attract more pupils (so they grow) and by efficiency - the more efficient they are at providing quality education, the more of the voucher they can take in profit. But take too much in profit and standards will drop and parents will chose to send their kids elsewhere.

I’m trying to think this through. You’d obviously need a strong regulatory body to ensure private companies weren’t being too ‘efficient’, and there’d still be the usual problems with how to judge school standards. But these issues are hardly unique.

I’m sure there’ll be some comments about parents’ ‘rights’ to pay for their children’s education. But children aren’t property, and should get an equal opportunity regardless of where and to whom they happen to be born. But then I’m a lefty and would think that.

The only real problem I can think of is that wealthy parents might simply pay for private tutors, which would break the system if it happened in high enough numbers. Not sure what you do about that. Would it be practically possible to regulate private tuition, and bring it into the voucher scheme? Hmmm.

Selecting on ability is gnawing at me a little. Wouldn’t the best teachers still head for the schools with the most intelligent children? But then I suppose that’s the point: it’s far fairer for educational standards to be weighted towards intelligence than wealth. And it’s possible separation by intelligence within an individual school, by sets etc., is the only way to ensure everybody reaches their potential (in theory, anyway), so what’s the difference? I don’t like that less-able kids would probably get a lower standard of teacher, but at least it would be as a result of something inherent to the child, rather than his/her parents.

I don’t know whether it’s practical, but it’s an interesting idea and I’m sure Prof. Law’s comment box will soon be overflowing.

His posts all have the same title and it’ll be confusing once they drop off the front page. The Private Education label is currently showing them all.

1. he assumes an average distribution of talent and native intelligence across the social classes [↩]

The reimagining of Battlestar Galactica is much beloved online, but I’ve been slow to catch on. I finally got around to borrowing the season one set at Christmas, and recently watched the final episode. It’s very different from the original, but in a good way. Gone are robotic dogs, regular laser battles and Jane Seymour. In are a female Starbuck, cylons that can look like humans and a fleet with two leaders: one political, one military. The music is quiet, minimal, and haunting. The plot progresses slowly, in multiple locations, and without much exposition. I found it a classy show and quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, particularly in its mixture of styles:

• Sci-fi adventure. The premise - a fleet carrying the last remnants of humanity flees a robotic race of their own design - is little changed from the initial series, and is, I think, a great concept. The action can be impressive, but much of the time it’s a backdrop, with more attention paid to other aspects:
• Character study. Starbuck is particularly fascinating, and unlike any other female sci-fi character I can bring to mind: brilliant, but unpredictable, moody and violent, she’s a good contrast to the reliable, classically heroic and close-to-boring Apollo. Cmdr. Adama is more volatile than your average leader, and struggles continually with his military responsibilities. Gaius Baltar, resident genius with a secret, is impressively crafted, although revealing more would spoil the plot.
• Political drama. Whether they’re intended as allegories to current events, the series certainly deals with large political questions. The fleet’s media are hostile to the administration, and in emergency situations the military reaction to their presence is less than favourable. Democracy is of vital importance to the incumbent President, a relatively minor political figure before the rest of humanity was wiped out, but what do you do when a charismatic terrorist gains massive popular support, and demands an election? Lock him up indefinitely? Cmdr. Adama’s father was a civil rights lawyer, and his management of security problems in a fleet full of potential cylons is less right-wing than you’d expect. My favourite episode saw the establishment of an independent military court tasked with determining how a particular cylon slipped through the net, and the hunt for an individual scapegoat quickly escalates.
• Tricia Helfer modelling portfolio. Think Seven of Nine meets Mrs Robinson. She’s always beautifully lit, wearing dresses that take up half the budget and sultry as hell. This is, to be fair, the idea - her worship as a goddess is just about justified by the plot - but you come to know her figure as well as your own.

The first season veered in unexpected directions. As it progressed I found the characters actually became less likeable, and the situation less familiar. Each character has unpleasant traits, and while they seem more human as a result, they’re harder to root for. Religion plays a major role in the plot, with the cylons (apparently) believing they are doing God’s work and the human characters worshipping multiple deities and following strange doctrines. Prophecy, always an easy but unsatisfying plot device, plays a role that intertwines with the religious aspects, and it’ll be interesting to see how that progresses in a universe with an apparently rational premise. The opening credits promise the cylons ‘have a plan’, but the story is clearly only just beginning, and it’s hard to tell whether this is an X-Files ‘play it by ear and we’ll come up with something’ or a Babylon 5 ‘let’s figure out the story arc of the entire thing before we even start filming’.

There were a couple of dodgy moments, but imho the show’s only real misstep is the 30-second spoiler session at the start of each episode, during which highlights of the next 45 minutes are show trailer-style. I’ve no clue who thinks this is a good idea. I just shut my eyes until the music ends.

I’m definitely hooked, and shall get hold of the second season asap. Anybody interested should first watch the mini-series, as the plot set-up is important and the details relevant.

I finally saw Mirrormask last night, after possibly the most expensive DVD rental period ever. Dark, unpredictable and visually gorgeous, it’s full of wonderful ideas: the library where books must be caught with nets, a woman held prisoner by her cats, intricate and stylised backgrounds that are still pencil drawings, the continual imagery(s)¹ of the mask…Dave McKean is credited as Director and Designer, from Neil Gaiman’s script, and there’s not an uninteresting frame in the film. Its one of the few movie posters I wouldn’t get bored of five minutes after putting it up. I’d call it a modern fairy tale, but what isn’t? A great couple of hours if you fancy something otherworldly and beautiful.

1. possibly a made up word. I mean both visual and metaphorical imagery [↩]

This afternoon I walked into my parents’ lounge to see bits of dirt falling out of the fireplace. Something on the chimney was amusing itself by standing in the roof detritus and shuffling its feet, making a mess of the carpet below. I tried to check nothing was trapped up there, but noise and movement stopped after a while so I figured it was fine.

Two hours later loud noises came from the back of the house, and I investigated to find an enormous black bird strutting about the lounge, making a painful looking dash into the glass door every few seconds. I opened the door, but in the process startled the bird so that it took off.

I don’t think it was large enough to be a crow, but was much larger than your average blackbird. Whatever, it was big enough to cause serious damage to body and property, and I figured the best policy was Get The Hell Out Of The Way. After a few seconds of taking out ornaments it gracefully swept past me and through the conservatory into the outside world. I’m glad somebody was in. It would have wrecked the room.

It was surprisingly pretty close-up. I once had to remove a magpie from the conservatory and didn’t like it at all - magpies are pretty unpleasant at short distances, and it kept looking at my watch.

Falling down a chimney. That’s gotta be bad for your bird self-respect. I guess it was black already so the soot marks won’t show, but still, the rest of the nest¹ are going to mock for a long time.

1. my idea of bird communities is based entirely upon Disney movies [↩]

Here’s an odd little thing. I’ve accumulated numerous email addresses over the years, and currently they all forward to my gmail account, from which I can send using any one of them. But it’s actually impossible to reliably filter them on the original address. If the email was originally sent via blind-carbon-copy, then forwarded to gmail, only the ‘delivered-to’ header contains the correct information. But it isn’t searchable.

A small thing, really, but it’s strange that such information isn’t accessible. Not much of a problem for me, but today I was working on an account with hundreds of forwarded emails, and could find no way to separate them. I ended up turning off forwarding and using the Mail Fetcher, which can automatically assign labels to individual accounts.

Some terrible news this morning, when I heard the father of a very good friend had unexpectedly died in the night. I’d chatted to him many, many times over the years, and whether about the West Wing, current affairs or the coolness of modern technology, it was always a fun conversation. He was a real character who died far too young, and will be missed. My heart goes out to his family.

On Saturday morning a group of us headed over to the Hay Festival. Originally only two of us were planning to go, but we’d been explaining its literary nature the night before, and at breakfast a few others asked if they could join us. The Hay Festival is a week-long event, run by the Guardian, at which authors and thinkers debate, lecture and engage with anybody who wants to come along. I’d never actually been before, and was looking forward to it. Hay-on-Wye turned out to be further away than I’d anticipated, and after a lengthy journey via the sat-nav’s favourite country lanes we parked in the wrong car park and walked up to the festival site.

It was a gloriously sunny day, and we wandered beneath the tents. While the others bought “sheeps’ milk” ice cream I wandered into the official bookshop, and looked up to see Neil Gaiman:

He’s one of my favourite authors, and for a few moments I hovered in front of a woman I later realised was Anne Fine, and took a couple of pictures. I had Fragile Things in my bag, and made to join the signing queue, but a lady ahead of me was turned away as they’d closed the line. She was most annoyed, wanting to know why. I wasn’t, strangely. It would have been cool to get something signed, and I even had something not-too-stupid to say - I was going to wish him luck with his new dog - but I didn’t mind not being able to say hi. Maybe I’m not as dazzled by celebrity as I used to be.

I think the Hay festival isn’t designed to be something you just turn up to. There’s a huge amount going on, but most of it is scheduled and ticketed, and the most interesting things were sold out well in advance. I’ll certainly go again next year, but shall plan ahead. We walked around the stalls for a while, and just before lunch caught the shuttle bus into Hay.

This is an incredibly obvious thing to say, but there really are a lot of bookshops in Hay-on-Wye. I can’t understand how I’ve never been before. I’ve also no idea how they all stay in business. One in particular was enormous, and I nearly got lost upstairs. Every aisle looked like this:

It was too much, actually. I could easily spend ten minutes going through the contents of an individual shelf, and spend days in there without realising. I’ll have to go back with Abi. None of the bookshops we visited had any comics or graphic novels, strangely. I wonder whether it’s because they’re too niche, and keeping a decent stock would require a reasonably detailed knowledge of a subject your average book lover doesn’t find interesting…I can’t think it’s a snobby thing.

The town itself was decked out in bunting, and it was a lovely day to walk around. Despite numerous warnings from Lynsey, I got sunburnt. No excuse.

We had some good times dancing, too. It’s rare to have a ballroom not in the basement, and it was nice to dance in the evening sunlight:

On Sunday we drove home via Ross-on-Wye, complete with steampunk fish and enormous houses, and Ledbury with Mrs Muffins and happy dogs. I also drove into this particularly evil bit of kerb:

on my new-last-week tyre. Whoops.

But the best thing I saw all weekend was the people who ran to Harry’s side on Saturday night. Although ultimately unsuccessful, they knew what to do and didn’t hesitate. I was barely aware what was happening, and they were already working. They’d undoubtedly deny it was brave, but anybody who has the ability and presence of mind to react and help in such situations has my full admiration.

Not a weekend I’d want to repeat, but there were good times too.

The dancing weekend had some great highs, and one sad, horrible low, when on Saturday night the other group’s teacher collapsed on the dancefloor. Despite strenuous efforts from dancers with medical training, he died shortly afterwards. The following isn’t particularly pleasant reading and I’ll hide it from the front page.

Continue reading ‘Symonds Yat dance weekend - the (very) bad’

I’m back from the dancing weekend, but, as you might have seen on the twitter updates, it ended abruptly and sadly when one of my fellow dancers passed away. I’ve written it up, but want to re-read it in the morning to check it’s ok and appropriate. I didn’t sleep much last night - hopefully tonight will be easier.

My to-read pile is teetering perilously. It’s all because of Neal Stephenson’s excellent but enormous Quicksilver, which I’m now into the third month of reading. It’s the first in a trilogy of similarly-sized titles, too. I’m going away this afternoon, and taking it, Fragile Things, Scott McCloud’s amazing Understanding Comics, and the latest Steampunk magazine. Waiting at home are many books borrowed, stolen and given as birthday presents. It’s all good, I just want to read them right now.

This afternoon I’m heading to a dancing weekend in Symonds Yat, and on Saturday we’ll pop over to the nearby Hay Festival. I’ve just discovered that Neil Gaiman is going to be around, so might have to leave a Sandman graphic novel in the car just in case he’s signing. Incidentally, I’ve decided it’s stupid to wait until I can afford pristine new copies of the Sandman books - what do I want to do, read the story or look at the shininess on the shelf? - so am bidding for the cheapest, most battered eBay copies, as well as finding out which ones my local library can supply.

Best get packing. The last two dance weekends have seen me running around like a chickenless head after unexpected events ate up my morning, and I’m hoping for this to be slightly more relaxed…I fully expect a computer crisis to develop in the next half hour. We’ll see.