Park Run Issues (by sarah)

So a while ago now as in more than a year ago I went to the Ignite talks in Bath (part of a Tech festival I believe) to tell the world about why I designed Cuddly Science - the theme was Tech/Science for the wider good or something like that.

Whilst there we came across a group who had made a system for timing people and getting people to run and train and do exercise together. Without it costing the participants a butt load of money because that is a huge issue with exercise - I know when I was younger and even now I never really went to the gym or swimming that much because they cost money.

In fact one of the big draws of working at the campsite was that I got to use the climbing wall, lake, rifle and archery ranges for free after work (which was teaching those things except lake stuff due to pathetic swimming abilities). At uni I wanted to take part in loads of things but it was all too expensive and had a tendency to mount up cost wise but I did manage a bit of caving and Kung Fu.

My own struggle with wheelchairs and walking aids has shown how much of a difference having access to equipment can make not to mention people to encourage you and kind of group learning when you are doing things wrong as well.

Part of my miraculous recovery resulted from me having enough money to get a recumbent exercise bike with back rest and large wide padded seat - with a busted pelvis there was no way I could even get on a normal bike. But the bike, pool, chin up bar, pedometers etc still set me back hundreds of pounds because equipment is not cheap and needing what I did meant I couldn't just wait for free cycle and though social services where brilliant in providing me with bedsticks and aids to get in and out of baths etc... they could not provide what I needed for my physio. (to be fair I have bought all this stuff over like a decade but I did kind of need it in one hit and the thing is that because I was going to have to get a taxi or something to the gym in the first place the cost of gyms for a couple of months was enough to get the bike etc... and I can use it whilst the kids play at home etc...).

I digress some what - the point is there needs to be free stuff our health is kind of dependant on it. People need to climb, swim, run, we need a variety of stuff so those with various injuries or medical conditions which the longer you go in life is more likely to be you, can exercise.

This did not used to be such an issue but it is with modern lives and yes we could argue about that for a millenia and not change a single thing. Bikes are expensive, bikes get stolen or damaged but... there are great projects a foot to refurbish old bikes so they are accessible to everyone - fit free clean transport for the win (just please don't moan about me and my kids being in the cycle lane when the vegetation has grown over our pedestrian bit of path and hey they are scooters anyway! and never mind there is a mobility scooter coming and we all need to navigate the hideous junction with the lorries and more lanes than I can work out).

Back home in Essex and London there is gym equipment in the playgrounds or rather in the parks just outside the playgrounds - for grown ups to use! And people use them - for FREE (except you know they are paid for by taxes and that is the sort of thing I want my tax spent on!).

So bikes good, walks good (whilst we still have access and the national parks to walk in 🙁 ), and we have basically already lost swimming and climbing as free accessible things unless you are really lucky - but running and pull ups etc... there are games set up to help walkers and runners, Bristol even has a playable city!

And that brings us to the reason that I am writing this post - Bristol.

They want to charge the Park Run runner with path maintenance - something most of them will already be paying for in tax. They are saying they can't expect the non-runners to pay for it equally - erm... but community, society, COMMON SCENSE!

Because yes people cause erosion - big problem with some areas of outstanding natural beauty and so on but there is a lot of wear and tear from just WALKING, from dogs scratching, bikes biking, kids scooting... also are they planning on charging everyone to just run? Regardless of weather you are with the Park Run?

Charging for the free sports and exercise that will help people lead fitter and healthier lives - which will drastically reduce the cost on the nhs (injuries costs are minimal compared to long term chronic conditions which exercise can help control (if you can and have access to the exercise!)).

This is more than short sighted - looks like I am not the only one who thinks so.

The same park seems to charge for the football club to use it on Saturday mornings - is that normal practice?

Now obviously we are angry - mainly because as geeks neither of us has liked sport that much - that is because we perceived it as aggressive and bully-tastic - this changed with the Olympics where we got to see it more as striving for personal bests and being the best you can be - a world of self improvement.

We did not see the climbing and shooting as sport they were activities we liked - again that barrier came down. We were no longer doing those things because - money. We spend too much on the kids clubs and activities but that is because we have learnt that a) confidence is important and b) they are both girls related to me and yes they maybe lucky and take after Al but.... they need their core muscle strength and they need good metabolisms and they need strong lungs and hearts.

But we are paying alot for that and many don't have that (we don't really have that and rely on people giving classes or equipment instead of presents for the girls).

And the thing is it isn't just me - Alaric is actually the one who takes part in the park run as part of him sorting his body out - for years he had bad back pain but it got worse and worse - its siatica, he's lucky the Dr spotted the problem - we had to pay a physio to sort it as though it would have resulted in him needing a hip replacement in 2 yrs time the nhs could not pay for the preventative yanking the leg back out of its socket but they would pay for the hip replacement :/ So obv. he had loads of physio ad stuff to do afterwards - it's acting up again which is a bad sign but it is more than the 2 yrs on now - he is working on his general muscle tone and stuff.

He does Krav, that costs money... but he also does park run - he was running by himself but motivation is hard - but park run... that is different.

It's free, it's all together, it's mildly competitive but mainly supportive.

I was/am looking forward to running in it but am still struggling with getting round the block - but hey I am getting round the block and now mainly not weeing myself in the process (yes literally and yes probably TMI). We are planning on including the kids which is another thing taking kids to gyms doesn't work - it used to when I was a kid - I remember sitting at the edge of the gym whilst my dad and uncles weight trained but that doesn't happen anymore - so what do you do with the kids whilst you use the gym?!

So we plan to run as a family but that has to wait on Mary levelling up with Ballet as the times currently clash.

I hope Bristol does not set a trend - it would be a shame and a tragedy to loose something that is designed to help everybody.

(p.s. written whilst Jean was at her pre-school free running club which is fab but not sure how wide spread those are!)

Ok so I side tracked myself a lot but basically park runs make running and exercise accessible to everyone allowing a reduction in the impact poverty can have - it is a good thing why break it. (or course you also need access to tech so we need the libraries as well for people to get the full goodness of the thing and sadly also the foodbanks :(.) Also positive impact on health, attitudes.

Here is the petition.

Society 2 (by alaric)

Six years ago, I wrote up some opinions on how people complain about society, and how I'd like to improve matters. Since then, I've been thinking about the problem on and off, and two different models for human societies that, I hope, might be more fair, productive, and downright pleasant to live in than our own.

So what do we want out of a society? This is largely a matter of personal taste to many. Some want a worl d in which total human happiness is maximised; some want a world in which their own happiness is maximised (these are not nice people); some want a world in which people have the most freedom rather than happiness; and so on.

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Libertarianism (by alaric)

I've long been fascinated by libertarianism. Creating social structures that are self-maintaining and do not require central control seems like a noble goal; things that are owned by organisations tend to end up either stifled by conservatism, destroyed by mismanagement, or fall into the hands of the greedy and end up taking advantage of everyone who has to use that service. The blockchain technology behind bitcoin is particularly interesting; it implements a form of democracy that requires no central body to hold elections and tally votes. Anyone can join the community of miners (although the cost of a sizeable vote is getting higher and higher with all these ASICs), and a proposed change will "become law" if you can convince the owners of enough of the mining power it's a good idea. This is vulnerable to somebody having enough money to buy enough mining hardware to dominate the system then being able to dictate their own terms to the world; but, fascinatingly, anybody who owns that much of the mining equipment will now have such a sizeable stake in the Bitcoin economy that it's very much in their economic interest to act in the interests of the Bitcoin economy as a whole - making it not vulnerable to abuse by the greedy; at most, it's vulnerable to abuse by the ideologically driven (somebody who's willing to spend a lot of their money just to destroy the Bitcoin economy).

However, "libertarian" has become a dirty word. A lot of the folks discussing decentralised social structures back when I first starting reading about them in the mid-1990s have turned into complete loons, ending up arguing for the replacement of every social structure by free-market economics, denying climate change, adopting evolutionary-psychology models of genetic competition to explain human mating behaviour in a way that fails to account for human free will and then allows them to justify misogynistic ideas, and so on.

Which is a bit of a shame. Can't we all get back to working out social structures that actually maximise individual liberty, rather than focussing on particular tools for that and elevating them to the status of worshipped idols?

I mean, free market economics is great in many ways. An ideal market will force suppliers to compete for the business of consumers, leading to better services and better prices. But that doesn't mean that abolishing government will lead to a Utopia as organisations scrabble to provide the best healthcare, protection from crime, social services, roads, and so on for the lowest possible price. Suppliers of products and services don't like free markets, as they introduce competition, and have historically shown great ingenuity and determination in disrupting the markets they sell into through anti-competitive practices. They will attempt to make their products hard to compare to those of competitors, lie barefacedly in advertising, use market leadership in one area to weight other markets (eg, Microsoft's use of its operating systems near-monopoly to bundle Web browsers that understood a different dialect of HTML, thereby pressuring the creators of web sites to target them to that widespread browser, thereby causing web sites to not work so well on competing browsers), and so on. Companies like Twitter, Amazon, Google and Facebook have a lot of control over the primary means we use to find out about and compare products and services to buy, so can easily give their own products an edge over their competitors.

Free markets only remain free (as opposed to capture by monopolies) when there's some body capable of setting standards through which comparable products can be fairly compared, enforcing advertising rules, and to stop monopolies. Left to their own devices, they stagnate.

High-profile libertarians seem to fall into a trap of hating government. They seem prone to sliding into extreme right-wing ideology; interpreting "using taxation to fund a welfare system" as "robbing me of resources I earned myself in order to fund people who, despite having the same opportunities as me, did not take them". They decry the compulsory nature of taxation as a removal of their individual liberty to choose to donate to charities or not, while failing to recognise that "were my parents rich enough to properly feed and educate me, provide me with adequate healthcare, and support me while I developed my business idea, rather than requiring me to go into the first job I was capable of as soon as I was educated enough to work at all" is hardly a good criterion for the fair distribution of the individual liberty this is all supposed to be about; they seem to fail to realise that we do not all have the same opportunities. Nothing is a better predictor of an individual's future economic success than the wealth of their parents. I see that as a terrible failing of society, and far more anti-liberal than having to pay taxes.

I suspect it's maybe just a "vocal minority" problem (Wikipedia lists many different forms of libertarianism than the far right wing stuff), but I think it's a shame that the actual search for individual liberty is being steamrollered by people who seem keen to enhance their own liberty at the cost of others'.

Ada Lovelace Day 2015 (by sarah)

Ada Lovelace was a victorian lady who loved maths, she was also the astranged daughter of Lord Byron the poet, she has a computer programming language named after her and a day... the day is to celebrate women in science and technology. A chance to tell their stories.

Me and Alaric have written quiet a few stories of women who have inspired us or we feel are essential to where our current modern tech and meds are.

We have covered innovation, science, engineering, computing, medicine and technology. We love reading the stories that pour onto twitter each year.

But... that is not what I want to talk about today - not the successes but the struggles. As one of the most dangerous thing is not being allowed to fail.

If you are the role model, or figure head, or just in an environment where some aspect of you like gender or race or disability is highlighted continually and you are fighting to maintain your position... there is no room to fail, no space to just step back and go "you know I could use a little help here" because as soon as you do that it becomes because of that difference that marker, that things that makes you not one of the boys. And all those who have helped you and believed in you will be let down.

But if you can't fail, can't ask for help without undermining your own position then you can not progress as smoothly or easily and when the stakes are high it adds to the stress.

Because failure becomes not a little set back but a full blown retreat - a being chucked out the door.

When you can be a lousy scientist and it's just because you are lousy (or need more training) and not because of your gender, orientation, disability... - then equality isn't reached - until then it is just another stress to add to catastrophic collapses and retreats from the world of science and tech feeding the "leaky pipeline" we hear so much about i.e. why there are less and less women as you go higher and higher in science and tech even though the numbers are up and have been up for a decade or more at the lower ends like A'levels and undergrad degrees.

This is one of the reasons I actually hate quotas (I am not saying they are not needed) - I've seen good arguments for them but my personal experience of them has been being told I am not actually good enough - "you're only here because you tick three different boxes, you fill three quotas" this is crushing and if you are not careful it makes you feel that perhaps you really do not belong. You try and hide what subjects you are struggling with rather than just getting help with them and if you didn't "tick the boxes" then it would be fine to ask for that help - ask for it whilst being one of these groups and get told "this isn't the place for someone like you" and you end up having to threaten legal stuff and that just makes it all extra stressful. And how do you know you if you were good enough to get in?

Cheer yourself up with some of my puppet comedy involving Ada (not for kids this one!).

Also I made pendants, and key fobs and badges using the pictures of Ada I had drawn and hot melt glue straight from the gun! They are not the best - they were the first attempt at this technique but the girls loved them 🙂

I was going to do cake but am saving that for the actual Bicentinnial in December.

There is also a colouring in sheet people are welcome too, which I produced last year.

And yes I am grumpy - I never felt as if I'd left science, I felt like it was taken away from me and worse that I had let down those who had invested in me. I actually dread trying to talk to those people again but life is crock full sometimes. Maybe one day....

The School Holidays Begin (by sarah)

It is that time of year again when there are no school runs and I have no completely free child time - Jean however is almost ten so I can work whilst she is around now. In fact at the moment she is helping me!

So we let Jean plan the first day of the holiday - it was without Mary for most of it as it was a pre-school day and they continue during the holidays.

We constructed a plan based on the sorts of things she wanted to do - namely Home School which she loves and I initially came up with when we were snowed in at The Bakery back in her infant school days.

We started with an American breakfast - Jean's school had done an Independance Day breakfast but the last term we have kept missing dates and time changing and the such like, probably due to my concussion. Jean was quiet upset about this so we investigated the sorts of things Americans eat for breakfast and decided it was a combo of a Canadian and Full English and set about creating our own probably very wrong breakfast!

This of course started with us grubbing up potatoes from the garden - I used the bags we had for moving (from Essex which then got used for lots of things but all had busted zips or handles etc...), to grow potatoes in - I am phasing this out as most of the bags have reached the end of their life, and we now have an allotment!

We were after the "new" white potatoes rather than the bigger potatoes and the pink/red potatoes so Jean kept checking with me she'd gotten the right type until I pointed out I was just grubbing up all useful potatoes as I needed to make a casserole with the turnips and beetroot from the allotment anyway.

We harvested an entire pot of tatties which Jean then selected the ones we wanted for breakfast - we went with sauteed potatoes rather than the chips we'd seen in some of the breakfasts as we just couldn't cope with the idea of chips for breakfast.

She then scrubbed them and chopped them whilst I started on the rest. Once that was done she mixed up the pancake mix, got plates out and general reminded me what I was doing! She also went to the shop to get three missing ingredients.

We used the flat bed sandwich toaster to cook the pancakes, this was the first time either of us had cooked this thicker type of pancake. It was fun and I put the coffee perculator on for me. Jean poured us juice.

She took a stack of ten pancakes so it would look like the photos! And she doesn't normally eat maple syrup but she poured it on. She made up a granola and home made yogurt mix too.

It was a HUGE breakfast - fresh sliced tomato, suateed potatoes, baked beans, 2 rashers bacon, 2 suasages, a fried egg, and 2 slices of toast! She basically ate the bacon and cereal and then nibbled on the pancakes all day. The rest did me and Mary for a meal each. 😀

We then learnt Latin, she did some at a language day at school and come home obsessed. She had a piece of paper she had already made notes on (mainly she observed that the Harry Potter series had used latin for the spells). When I say we learnt Latin, what actually happened was that I found a series on Youtube of which I followed the first lesson and then left her to it, she was on lesson 9 at the end with pages of notes.

I found her on google translate trying to check her own translation before she restated the vid to find out if she was right. Her translation was closer than google translates. I discovered I know random bits of latin - I assume from my Classical Civilization A'level. Later on I corrected Alaric's pronounciation as well coughs.

Then it was time for the first ever Stubby Marathon!

I am still struggling with reading and writing, I am using voice tech or just going really really slowly in short bursts. But it is easier for me to do long hand rather than typing and it is a writing challenge month so I looked around and thought "you know what I have a ream or two of lined paper and lots of pencils that haven't even been sharpened!" - BAM!!!

The idea?

It is a writing marathon that will last at least the summer holidays - me and Jean sit for at least an hour writing trying to wear the lead out in the freshly sharpened pencil. Each day we see who has used their lead the most - we re-sharpen the next day so the points are the same so there is a day to day winner and an over all winner (you can write outside of the allotted time and I can't write for very long at all and have to make coffee in the middle etc...). Jean has written 2 stories and twice as many pages as me so far. I am designing a medal for her 🙂

This summer is our marathon summer but more on that later.

I think we then mixed things up a bit by having our outside time and snack before we started on our hour of art. This was basically us working our way through various kits Jean's had for birthdays etc... WHY OH WHY are the instructions in kids craft kits so dire? I mean they really are bad and I think most people think it's the kids just not getting it but it really isn't - it's the instructions :/

It took me most of the hour and a very bad keyring, to remember some basic stuff that I could do before the concussion and have been doing since before I was Jean's age 🙁 This hour was frustrating for both of us but we decided to see it too the end and not jump kits and she at least made a lovely bracelet though with improvisation and not the technique that the kit was designed for!

She then played outside on the trampoline whilst I rested my brain, she then set herself up with her maths - these are GCSE level maths but with the questions in accessible easy comprehension which were ones my mum had for teaching those who had failed or not sat GCSE's the first time round. Some of them my mum had made herself and some were from packs provided by the college - the course was cut leaving my mum with all the teaching stuff and no one to teach 🙁

Then Al and Mary came home and we wizzed off to pick up some garden fairy lights which the girls put together whilst Daddy made dinner - they are bees and ladybirds and hopefully there will be a blog post on what we've done with the garden soon!

Mary went to bed and then Jean and Alaric played with the electronic kits and only got shouted at once by me for making the radio they'd just built too loud (issue was they couldn't work out how to control the sound level - or so they say!).

We forgot to practice the recorder which Jean was going to attempt at 9:30 but I banned!!!

So I think that was an epic start to the holidays - since I started writing this blog post she has been writing schedules and naming each day - this was Home School Monday. But we have also had:

Tidying Tuesday, Wet Wednesday, Friend Thursday and today which was going to be Allotment Friday but then got turned into Cinema Friday has actually been named Freedom Friday as she decided to go home with her friend for a sleep over instead and pointed out that me and Al (Who has a day off of work) do not have either kid with us today.