Jean’s First Electronics age 5 (by sarah)

Again old photos but this is Jean doing her first ever electronics with Alaric - it was the first Christmas Holiday of Jean starting school - Daddy explained and Jean drew a sort of circuit diagram and then they made it 🙂

Shortly after this Jean received two electronics kits as presents.

Food Safety (by sarah)

As the horse meat issue rears it's head once more, we are faced with a bigger problem than most people realise. As I said before when this first came out - food needs to be what it says it is as if it doesn't it can kill or make people sick through food allergies and the like.

The issue is not that it is horse meat but that it is an unknown in there and the horse meat has turned out to have drugs in it that are not safe for humans. This is an issue on two levels - first off it means they are not food animals, have not been raised for it and have been medicated with things that would not be given to livestock. Such meat should not enter the food chain - wasteful perhaps in some eyes. And secondly where on earth have they been getting the animals from did they just fall from earth from space??!

People are saying that this is a reason to buy from your local butcher which is great except a lot of people can't afford to do this - this is the point; it is the cheap foods that are being hit. Families that are struggling anyway are now being hit with the fact that the cheap food they can afford is not what it says it is and good be harmful to their families.

Also from an economic point of view it gets worse - people understandably will stop buying the products affected or a lot of people will. It has hurt the brand name which is good in same ways as it might well drive business back to the local farmers and butchers but... it could have a knock on effect resulting in all meat producers being hit.

Hopefully there will be an upsurgence in ethical farming practice and better food standards but how long has this been going on?

The people who investigate the food - Trading Standards have steadily had their funding cut so that they can't police everything the way they used to. And beef is not the only thing that is iffy.

I'm seeing lots of veggies going 'hahaha see you should all be veggi' - but how many of them really know what they are eating?

There have been instances of meat turning up in veggi processed food, as Alaric said - who's to say that your veggie mince doesn't have horse meat in it - has anyone checked?

But worse there is an entire swathe of counterfeit foods in this country ranging from cheese analogue (not cheese at all it just looks like cheese and though you may think this sounds good and vegan it is harmful).

And it is not just the cheaper foods that are affected, things like Extra Virgin Olive Oil are often fakes as well - not good if you are trying to control what fats and oils you are eating.

Ok so as I myself have said the only way to be sure of what you are eating is to make it yourself from scratch but more than that you have to grow the products on a patch of land that isn't itself contaminated by something. This is not realistic for most people - I wish it was, but modern life does not allow this.

My personal suggestion is give away free veg and put a tax on processed food. It is stupid that processed food cost less than fresh. Add in a policy to try and get as many people as possible growing rather than building on the allotments. Make more of them - people want them - there are huge waiting lists!

And yes I realise this would have an economic knock-on but then so does horse meat in the beef burgers.

Free cooking lessons at community centres and the such like would be good too so that people are not afraid of ruining the food they have just bought.

Also importing less food would be good for our economy, due to not having to convert our money to buy and transport costs and so on. It would be good for the environment too.

Mary Leaky’s 100th Birthday (by sarah)

Today is Mary Leaky's 100th Birthday - later today I shall bake a cake like I did for Alan Turin and draw a picture.

For now here is a google doodle!

Mary Leaky's works are extremely important to us as a species and to me as an individual. To us as a species knowing where we came from helps us in so many ways including why we get sick etc... What happened in the evolution of hominids in general can tell us so much.

For me as an individual she was important as it was her writings that helped inspire me through my A'levels and onto a degree in geolog. Even in my final year I wasn't sure weather I wanted to work in her field or the origin of life.

During my GCSE's and A'levels I read all the books in our local library system to do with the Leaky's and paleo and geology things. It became a bit of an obsession - enough that my in-laws who live in South Africa send me books on the Leaky's.

Day 3 of making the ladder (by alaric)

Well, after two days of prior work on the ladder, yesterday I settled down to another day.

I started by welding together the second side of the ladder, to match the first. With that done, I now had the two sides of the ladder, ready to join them together with the rungs:

With that done, I carefully aligned everything on the welding bench and ground the welds on the inward sides down so that the rungs could fit on nicely:

I set the rungs back half a centimetre where they were attached at the same point as a spacer, so they were welded both to the uprights and to the spacers, as I felt this would be stronger. The pieces of wood you can see under the rungs are maintaining that spacing.

Now, as I mentioned before, I'm not very good at welding; I can make things structurally sound, but not pretty, because my welds often go wrong and I have to go over them again. This usually leads to big, messy, welds, and on a couple of occasions with this job, I actually melted a hole in the metal and had to patch it up. Here's one particularly terrible weld:

I ground the lumps around the edge of the hole down:

Then welded a metal plate over it:

This, in contrast, is I think the neatest weld I've ever made:

With all that done, the ladder was actually a ladder:

I sanded it down to get the weld gunk off, then washed it thoroughly in white spirit to remove the grease the metal came covered in, and laid it out in the kitchen to paint:

Then I gave it a priming coat and left it to dry overnight (I did it in the kitchen so it would be warm and dry overnight, rather than the cold and damp of the workshop):

It'll need another couple of coats of paint, and I need to cap the open ends of the uprights at the top, then I can mount it on the wall.

Part of welding that I always find quite profound is the way that a bunch of bits of metal, initially held together with clamps, and gingerly handled in case it comes undone, slowly transforms into a structure made of solid steel. This was driven home with the ladder project when, finishing the welds on the rungs, I found the best way was to lay it on its back like in the last photos and sit on it so the welds were flat (the best orientation, as molten metal likes to run away when the weld is vertical) and comfortable to reach; it didn't even flex!

I can't wait to be using it to get up on the roof. There's a flap of plastic sheeting lifting up in the wind and letting rain in, and I can't reach it in any other way...

Continue to day 4...

The Danger of Quotas (by sarah)

Recently a Ruby on Rails conference was destroyed and never took place because feminists complained there were no women on the panels and talks etc... when it was pointed out that no women applied the response was that they had not tried hard enough to find women. This attack grew until the sponsors pulled their money.

This is a shame and horrible, a lot of work had gone into the event and I'm sorry but it is not the organisers fault no women applied. They should not be forced to look for women for fear of events not going ahead. Now what should have happened is that the event went a head and effort was then put in to encourage female programmers to apply to the next one.

Even if women had applied but were not as good as other candidates, there should not be an obligation to take them on just to fill the quota.

Now obviously there is the issue that some people for some reason still seem to think women are not as capable with things such as science and maths and programming but really forcing them to put women on panels is not going to help. The quota thing is being banded about in the science world but to me this can be nothing but damaging to the image of females in science and tech.

The reason is that it devalues what they do - ok so they are there because they are actually really good at what they do - but no one is going to be thinking that - they will be thinking oh she's the token woman isn't she? I wonder if she actually knows her stuff.

Now I had issues with this during my degree. I found out about the area I really wanted to study due to an outreach programme for getting women into the sciences and this was good. In conversations I've had since with various people in charge of universities they agree that the intake of girls on the courses suddenly increased to around 50% and that this was streadily trickling upwards through the science hierachies. There was some winnowing away with the issue of women hitting the glass ceiling with finding themselves at home with kids if they went for families in their 20's, they would often then find themselves also look after sick relatives or some such making a return harder but this was being metered out by older women joining the ranks once family were off hand.

This was great and I never experienced any problems with sexism from staff or established scientists (though disability was another thing and I believe a friend who found herself pregnant had one person say she wasn't coming back so why make a fuss - she got her degree and that staff member was horrible in many other ways). I agree that evidence of women succeeding is needed but it does not need to be rammed down peoples throats. The issue is that we are heading towards equality right?

Not female supremacy.

My main beef with quotas is that though I did not receive any sexism from the lecturers or those I worked with during my work experience I did from fellow students. And the main thing they bullied me over (and yes I mean that in all it's nastiness) is that I ticked three boxes, I filled three quotas with just one person so of course I got in. I was a disabled, poor, female, the only way I could have been better for the books is by being a minority preferable not the creamy pale white I am.

And the thing is there is no come back to this - how did I know that wasn't why I was on the course?

I already knew that I'd been offered a lower grade boundary to get in than others had - a correction made as those in 'normal' schools tend to score lower grades than those in schools you pay for but tend to actually work their buts off if they manage to get in. As it turned out I got the grades needed to get in without the concession which was a great help with the confidence when arguing my right to be there.

The most important thing for succeeding is self confidence but how can you have this if you yourself are worried that you are only there because of some damn quota. A female lecturer told me this was why women had to be better than men to get to the higher jobs in the modern science world, no longer is it to get noticed but more to keep the wolves away once you are there.

To me it is saddening to see that people are still worrying about this, and I have seen 'feminists' do and say some awful things. Things that make me not want to say 'I am a feminist' - when I say it I mean that women are equal to men. When they say it they mean women are better than men and men are all horrible and must pay for centuries of persecution against women.

Well you know if that's the case then they need to look at who's ancestors persecuted who's and start worrying.

People are people.

Scientists are people that do science - end of.