Because… War (by sarah)

Most of the time I try and remain positive about humanity and where the future is going etc... I know that the world is actually becoming less and less violent and prejudice but that that is not a straight forward progression and slips back and forth but there is a positive trend there.

I know the dangers inherent in our advances in science and technology but see the good out way the bad on a daily basis. And then I get days like today. I was going to be researching Mongolian archery in the 11th century but I saw the news and there were the bodies of kids on a beach in Gaza for no reason than ideaology and then another plan down over the Ukraine/Russian area. This time the plane was carrying over 100 researchers and workers in the field of HIV and AIDS research and prevention. They were all on their way to a conference in Australia.

And this rips my heart out.

First off it doesn't make the plane crash worse - if it had been a bunch of 'ordinary' people who died on the plan then it would still have been horrendous it would still have been 100's of minds lost, hundreds of families and co-workers moarning. It does however give it more of an impact on a global scale, that is a lot of researchers lost in one field and there is no way it will not impact the science and rate of break threws and how quickly the medical care will get to the people who need it.

AIDS is still a global epidemic and still impacts ALOT of people. I have friends who are only alive now due to break threws in this field but also it isn't just this field. Most academics I know have been on plans full of people going to the same conferences, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

Politicians and business people do not travel like this, for this exact reason but budgets mean that scientists are all likely to be in the cheap seats on one plan - all together.

Worse though is that this is not an accident, even if it is mistaken identity it was still an active act, one human against another - BAM! Lives gone and lost.

Because... War... like the kids on the beach, like those sitting in camps within Australia and places themselves... because one lot of people fail to see the value in the other peoples lives. BAM BAM BAM.

Because land and food and wealth are seen as limited resources or faith renders them OTHER. But solutions are on hand to solve the food problems and humanity as a whole out grew this world at the end of the last century. Most of the time this is a mirage - there are enough resources its just even one is so scared of sharing. Add in expansionist regimes and the fall out of them collapsing and you have rebellions and separatists and counter rebellions. And at some point it stops being a fight for freedom and ends up with dead kids.

Of course to make things more depressingly complicated sometimes it is those in charge killing the kids or both sides of a skirmish have innocent blood on their hands and heros who saved foe and friend alike.

In war there are no winners same as the torturer gets post trumatic stress in a similar way to the tortured. And sometimes you do have to fight even knowing this but never should it be a light decision.

And how soon we forget the victims - remember the kids shot by a religous and political loon a few years ago? No you'd all forgotten. Because there is a continual feed of it all, drip drip drip, war, death, power play.

The plane crash itself was initially reported as part of the larger power games and those lost upon it were hardly mentioned at all.

Of course social media stepped up with the continual 'but that isn't as bad as this or that and my cause is being ignored and things are far worse here...' etc.... and yes that is no doubt true but it doesn't take the tragidy and pain away from those families.

But then the media and people in general do have a blinkered view and I am continually amazed that people don't know of the suffering that surrounds them in this world or even in their own country. Blinkered we are and suffering is ignored on a daily basis like the Congo and I have no solutions, no ideas or powers to sort any of this out.

I have kind of given up - I can not save the world, for a while I couldn't look after myself nor my family but when I can I help those I see who need help. Most of the time that is people around me or in extended friendship groups but it is something and it is what I have to give.

I sometimes hope that I am changing the world through my art and writing but know that I really am not. Perhaps I could have helped more as a scientist but that is no longer really me. So I do what I can. I don't think I can do much for those affected by today news.

Sometimes I write flash fictions about victims, sometimes I give happy endings or just voices to those who don't have them - it is probably a waste of time possibly even something considered bad taste - I don't know.

The thing that really gets to me though is that people watch this stuff on telly and they seem to not actually absorb it, not see it as different to the programme that was chopped in half to bring them the news. Grizzly pictures abound on my facebook but it's all 'this made me feel sick and I can't believe this!' no action no love, just a recycling of news to get the biggest NOW effect.

You still meet people who think the worst atrocity was the Twin Towers. It was an atrocity and one where the victims should be recalled and remembered like all those others that have happened globally. It was the worst for those who's city it was, for the families effected possibly even for the country it was in but IT WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE.

Violence is very cyclic and we are all capable of it, we respond and adapt.

But throughout all our history war and murder and abuse and violence and oppression have not even been the main thing that kills us. Humans kill humans often with war machines and other such trappings of our intelligence I wish we could turn the ingenuity of war into the fight for our lives for our survival against disease. Flu killed more people in the outbreak between the two world wars than those who died combined in the two wards and that is the case even taking the upper estimates for the camps.

And plague outbreaks of the past are pretty dam scary, ebola is scary, AIDS is scary... oh yeah look the people fighting to save our lives globally have lost theirs due to war. Because... WAR, like the kids on the beach and families in the camps and women in the Congo, because.... because... because... ?

I didn't really have a point with this, just that sometimes I find it all depressing.

Our existence as a species is precarious, life in the solar system is precarious, all of it is fragile, why destroy rather than making us more robust?

Disease kills us accidently. War does not.

You Fib, Voting and Representation (by sarah)

A dark malaise is pouring over my country
The hate is bile rising choking community
Dear politicians You Fib
Not even the old skool twist of the figures
You simple do not check them in the first place
And it scares me how reasonable you can appear
How you have lulled the desperate and greedy
How you have twisted the heart of my land
I fear the outcome of those he seek the easy answers
Not like those other parties
Unlike them and yet... ah yes there
Hate of the different just because it is not you

Choose wisely when voting - remember MEP is proportional representation so tactical voting is stupid - you get what you vote for - also think careful about the council elections and who you want running your area and the knock on effects. PAX

Though I don't agree with it, an out of Europe policy is a valid position; I just wish that there was someone to represent my friends who feel this way without all the other baggage. I think there is a minority of those that think this is what they are working for and getting, but evidence is against it and that is sad. I see images of people trying to discuss the actual facts and figures of Europe and it sinks into obscurity due to the racism, sexism and other such topics. They do not have anyone to represent them in reality and that is wrong.

Of course there isn't really anybody to represent me and Al either, and here we hit a crux of politics - are we voting for parties or people?

If it is a party then I want a big list of all the parties and policies and to pick what I want from that - if it is people then what they do and say is incredibly important and the idea that their words and actions are not party policy becomes void, especially if they say something or do something and retain their position of power.

Given the choice I personally would probably go for Pirate Party, Green, TUSC (trade unionists and socialist coalition followed by lib dem - this is from having been lib-dem/green depending on what the vote was for and who was on offer. Sadly my choices are very limited and options here seem to be lots of far right groups, which frankly scare me.

I think if UKIP had turned into the party that was planned, then I wouldn't be worried, but that is not what I am seeing - I am seeing xenophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic view and hate of the vulnerable and different.

And that is without the privitization of the NHS and business practices - of course, I concede that privitization of the nhs is a valid political standpoint; just not one I agree with.

And of course the big three (Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dem) are not innocent at all in this - they have candidates and councillors that have said awful t hings, though they tend to lose their positions (of course the media could be covering stuff up and running a smear campaign but actually they seem to have been mostly supporting UKIP and so on. We have been astonished that there have not been any balanced pieces with the upcoming elections.).

Politics, like everything else, depends on your own story as to what you see - people can see the same interview and get different things out of it. One side sees a victory, the other evidence of bullying and so on. It is a mine field - I just wish people would actually think for themselves - go and research and think and look at their own biases - and we all have our own.

A hundred years ago women were still dying to allow me the vote - something which at least one UKIP member would have taken away.

Personally I want to stay in Europe, for human rights reasons - ie maternity leave, holiday pay etc... and I believe it can work for economics too - happy workers are hard workers (some tweaking is often needed depending on job type etc... but it pretty much holds.) And even with the risk of those I urge to vote, even voting UKIP. I will still do it as I believe voting is important (even if voting methods and politics in general have huge flaws).

At the same time I am actually sick of political canvassing - I think it kind of shouldn't be allowed - that there be one website that contains the policies (in accessible ways so explained in videos etc...) of ALL the parties. One day I had the BNP, UKIP and British Democrats in a row - this then caused me to snap at the little old man who was with TUSC who's policies I quiet like - canvasing fatigue I'm calling it!

Of cause there is the apathy issue in the UK were politics is concerned as well and therefore how you would get people to actually go and look.

I actually don't really have much of a point in this post other than - go and vote, think about who you are voting for though especially with Europe stuff as it is proportional representation and so there is no protest vote - you get what you vote for. Also though UKIP in general scare me, I feel sorry for the minority who seem to actually be trying to discuss political points and get derailed both within and without and those drawn to the party inside and outside of London seem to vastly differ.

ie political representation in this country sucks as does the actual voting system, but please still vote.

The scariest thing I've seen so far was the BNP youth video - truly scary - I kind of don't want to put it on here - even if it turns out I agreed with one policy :/

This is me looking at everything with the coolest, rationalist head I have - emotionally I want to just rage about Nazi attitudes and scapegoats.

Other good articles on voting:

Go Vote Dammit

Voting For Tomorrow

Thoughts on Programming and Tracing (by alaric)

I was recently pointed at this interesting article: Learnable Programming.

It's a good read, overturning many assumptions the software industry has picked up over the years, and propagated without thought since.

The first part suggests allowing a programmer to trace the flow of execution of a program graphically, using an interactive timeline. My first thought was that this was all well and good, but would rely on every library in the language annotating every operation with information about how to present it - producing the little thumbnails to go in the timeline, or exposing numeric values that can be plotted onto charts. Also, highlighting the "current" drawing operation in red on the canvas relies on those operations being things that affect a canvas; more abstract operations, such as writing to a database (or even generating images to be encoded directly into a file rather than onto the screen) would require a more explicit "object preview".

However, those are not insurmountable goals. And, perhaps, things that can be built on top of my ideas about logging and tracing, making it possible to use such an interface to go through traces of execution captured from production servers, rather than just within a cute live-coding IDE; the trace entries generated by operations in your libraries could, with the help of a meta-library of trace visualisation rules, generate those little thumbnails. However, it would need to be augmented with dynamic scope information provided by the programming environment itself to know which line of code caused the trace event; the kind of thing one finds in a stack trace.

He asks "Another example. Most programs today manipulate abstract data structures and opaque objects, not pictures. How can we visualize the state of these programs?"; so I suggest that the abstract data structures and opaque objects be annotated with code that summarises their state. Many languages have a notion of "return a string representation of this object", generally aimed at debug logging - Python's repr() versus str(), for instance. Perhaps if we moved to expecting objects to return HTML representations of themselves, we could take a step in that direction.

The second part (and I'm taking some temporal liberties here, as some concepts I've included in the first part are touched upon in the second and vice versa) is also inspiring; it looks at the bigger picture, considering how libraries and code-editing environments can be designed to make it much easier for programmers to identify what operations their libraries are making available to them, rather than requiring the first step to be the reading of documentation. It touches on topics such as the dangers of mutable state (preaching to the converted here!), and the choice of library function names to make code using them clear (I'm also a big fan of smalltalk / Cocoa-style function call syntax, and how it might be brought into the Lisp family of languages...)

I've written before that I think modifying software should be a much more widely-practiced activity; and I think that should be achieved through removing unnecessary obstacles, rather than forcing everyone through complicated programming classes. I'm always interested in more thoughts on how to make that happen!

Identifying, Identity and stuff (by sarah)

(found amongst "drafts" and backblogged to the date last edited)

Due to stuff I have been studying, to help with inclusion and the broader reach of say Science Communication, I have been thinking. Who do I identify with?

This is interesting for me as during a debate with a poetry friend I discovered that other people have these groups they feel part of and those groups give them a sense of identity. I do not have this; there are groups I dip in and out of, that if I really tried I suppose I could become properly a part of. But often that seems to be a trade off, i.e. losing the other parts or ignoring them or pretending they don't exist.

I am a mishmash, there is no culture or identity for me, other than that that I make my own. I can pass for white middle class but, in honesty, not very well. I have the resources of the middle class and am sort of shell shocked to find myself in such a position, but attitude and behaviour can be vastly different.

When I left school I thought I'd left pettiness behind, such as people cutting your clothes with scissors as they are 'pikey' cloths, or setting your hair on fire as you've obviously stolen it from someone with darker skin, or having stones thrown at you for being a witch and a bible basher, or having your school bag nicked repeatedly so people could copy your homework and get better marks than you because they can spell and on and on. But it doesn't actually go away, as an adult I have had comments about my diction, my clothing, my hair, my childrens' hair (one incident 'do you not brush that child's hair? She looks like a ghost golliwog' (Jean's toddler curls are now gone - something she is sad about)).

I am 'white' for those who don't read the blog lots, I am in fact PALE as a pallid thing, I do however increasingly have a problem with my skin pigment trying to change and patches of skin are dark, they are mostly hidden and are the reason that I stopped wearing bikinis as a teen. It would be fine if all of me was that colour but I am not, so they look like dirty patches or like I haven't washed - I remember this being a real issue with my neck which is a slightly darker pigment, people would scrub it for me but it would never get 'clean'. Just to confuse things further I also have a skin condition/infection that acts up when I'm stressed that leaves red/brown/white brown patches on my skin and some of them are more visible especially on my arms - the difference is marked as they go scaly and itchy.

Of course if I had the figure I had as a teenager I so would wear a bikini, I don't now as I am Miss Mummy Tummy and that is a whole new identity crisis for me (or not that new as it's pretty much been the case since I had Jeany at the age of 24 and am now 33).

Interestingly I realised the reason I wasn't getting the anger over micro-aggression and stuff was because I myself had filtered it out. It just is the way things are... I still think that the correction/adaption/change is being gone about in the wrong way and being aggressive back rather than leading by example or reasonable debate and talking (What I call opening the dialogue) - obviously open aggression is another issue. There is also the thing of people getting offended on other people's behalf, there is standing up for people and then there is a patronising them in assuming they can't deal with it themselves but on the other hand calling insidious stuff out is important too. It is a huge minefield and, my policy is to treat every one like human beings.

I am in danger of derailing the post into other matters!

What I am really wondering is if other people feel this way, I have always got the impression that other people seem to feel like they're part of one group or another.

As a child people would always comment and play with my hair, even within my own family it is unusual though it is on both sides - the genetics of curly hair is still a bit confused, it is supposed to be dominant with straight hair as the recessive but people with wavy hair can have a child with full blown curls etc...and they haven't actually isolated the genes that cause it yet! Also populations with curly hair range from 'celts' to 'afro' to 'hawaiian' etc... I remember my mum's friend having to show her how to sort my hair out as brushing it was becoming a nightmare, mainly the solution was me nicking my Nan's special comb and getting leave in conditioner and not actually 'brushing' the hair except with the conditioner in etc. It is not the tight tight curl/frizz though bits of it are and if put in micro braids/dreads it stays there with now hair bands etc...

I brush it out most of the time and still get comments on my curly hair 🙂 I love my hair by the way even if it is a pain. I get called pre-raphaelite, get asked if I'm from Hawaii, get people approach me and on one occasion shouting at me for denying my heritage (what ever that is supposed to be), I had an old man in Bruge cry and say (via his curly haired daughter) that the Nazi's took all the curly haired people away when he was young. Is curly hair actually that unusual?

I find the reception differs drastically on the colour I dye it as well, so:

red = celtic
black = gypsy, Italian, Jewish and in one case arab
blonde = assumed perm? or celtic or Hawaiian (though I was asked why I had bleached my hair)
brown (natural colour though it has obvious other colours in it (all of the above) - I don't like the mash up hence the dying) = South African, Hawaiian, Australian, celtic, pre-raphaelite
Multi coloured pink, blue, purple = hippy, artist, druggy, scrounger

I have used the words that were used to me.

Do other curly haired people suffer from this? I know my accent gets confused too - it is ESSEX! Ok so I am social chameleon and accidentaly pick up inflections so there is a bit of South Ken (BBC English) and some words apparently now have a Gloucestershire twang to them especially if they are directed to the children, I also say some things with an Australian accent - blame my Dad, he was always saying stuff he'd picked up there in an accent. Also my spine is a dynamic spine (afro-carribean) and not the European (static) spine so maybe I just look odd?

I spent a lot of last night thinking about this which is stupid as it doesn't really matter, or rather shouldn't matter, mainly due to comments yesterday as I hadn't bothered to straighten my hair. They were complimentary and lovely, it just struck me as a thing after some of the accessibility lectures and debates I've seen going on recently.

There are silly things as well, like I never realised I wasn't a 'typical English Beauty' until several of the girls where marked as such on our undergraduate course. I remember feeling left out as everyone else was classified as various types (including dusky and pale etc...). And that is really stupid! But this post is about identity and indentifying and really a matter of belonging. I didn't belong to any of those groups - not that I really wanted to, but we are back to the school playground exclusion and being picked last for PE, aren't we? (To be fair I was later classified as 'natural, wild and classical' but sort when it was realised I'd been left out - this was girls talking about girls by the way.

So then I got on to thinking - well who do I identify with then?

Being a story writer and performer myself I of course turn to fiction and it has been a long time coming but of course there is Merida from Brave with her lovely curly red hair (I have waited so long for a curly haired animation!) and her tomboyish nature, then there is Diana Troy from Star Trek the Next Generation who is empathic and gentle, there is Saffy from Ab Fab who is the geeky science girl (and my nick name/twitter handle) and then there is Kaylee from Firefly - she is the only one without curly hair I note.

The others are male characters - mainly Sherlock and Sheldon (from The Big Bang Theory). I like Hermione but more in the books, her hair just was not frizzy enough in the films 😉

A lot of this stuff does come down to respecting people and not assuming stuff about them due to their looks etc...

Still wondering how rare curly hair is and what reactions others get. I asked Al and a couple of others if they had people randomly ask them in the street about their origin or ancestry and for Al it is only ever an issue if he is introduced as Alaric.

The Writing Saga (by sarah)

Today is all about the writing and the art, I have until 3 o'clock by myself, there are currently no deadlines looming and I don't have a headache. I have a new candle - ancient Egyptian Mummy type thing that I hope is going to inspire.

I have so far spent one hour planning my writing projects, prioritising and the like and finishing the flash fiction I started last night. Then I have spent another half an hour editing and on social media reading and researching and interacting.

One of the things I have discovered on my Science Communication course is that I really do prefer long form writing. I do the flash fiction to get ideas down and as a writing exercise, a form of literary discipline if you will. But I really love my epic stories and as I worked on the science articles and features I got the drip drip in the back of my head that I wanted to investigate more and write a book. To draw graphs and tables and do endless bullet points that I join up (this is how I write essays/factual stuff and is how I wrote my UG dissertation in one night (got a really high mark for it too - of course I had done lab stuff and background research for months).

But you see here's the thing, I took the course for two reasons - one I need both science and art in my life, I am not someone who can exist with just one and I love learning new things. The second was financial, I love the creative industries but they don't tend to pay very well, for most books the royalties are pathetic and if you are not careful it is easy to go into negative money just going to events to promote your book.

The art world is not much better and due to the charity sector can in fact be a lot worse as people sell their paintings for less than material costs! I do a lot of charity work so I am not moaning about that nor charity shops selling second hand things as I feel that is a double bonus for the environment, pocket and charity. But it is disheartening to see something being sold for £5 new and knowing that that doesn't even cover the framing - it's a being priced out of the market thing and really they could be getting a lot more for the charity if they upped the price.

The craft situation is even more dire so lets not even go there. So I looked around and I thought hmmm I could write about science - I always wanted to write and draw science, if I am truthful that is why I wanted a PhD so I could write popular science books. And it's science right? So it wont be all wishy washy with contradicting guidelines and feuds over commas.... WRONG!

So very very wrong.

As I have said myself so many times Science and Art are really similar and the expectations are pretty much the same. You have to do loads of free/volunteer stuff to get known - now I don't mind this when it is a little charity or a community project but when it is a business turning a profit I get hacked off. Also the whole set up is one that means if you do not have a family with enough money to support you whilst you build your experience, you are screwed. It is the glass ceiling of the working class.

All that aside, things are slightly better in science writing than in fiction but not much better than standard copy-writing. You are looking at more mid level earnings for your writing. Having found out how much midlist fiction authors who I thought where doing really well get paid and seeing artists including the top paleo-artists struggling and crunching the numbers - it is not a good picture at all.

In fact what I discovered is that I am actually doing well compared to most people who are attempting this sort of career. Unless you are lucky it is not going to be producing a living wage .

Having said this I am actually really happy with my career or haze of careers, I now know that the sci comms stuff is going to suffer the same sort of issues my fiction and copy writing does and the art and craft for that matter - I don't have one thing to focus on. I can't, it isn't going to happen so I will probably float along being the one people can call when others let them down. The sensible thing would be to pick one thing within either sci or art or craft or writing but I can even narrow it down to which field.

On the other hand I am still selling copies of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry, not many that is true, but I still don't actually have it up on Amazon or anything and it is a seasonal book - I wasn't expecting to sell anymore until October! I am also being booked for tones of events - a mix of performances and events management and coverage and workshops (both craft and writing and science).

I am fusing stuff together, I am having fun, I am finding I am being paid for things which is always good.

There are going to be ebook releases this year, I'm applying for various schemes, there is audio stuff waiting to go out, I am being invited to judge competitions and running creative communities. To up the game I have used the last of my current money to get my old laptop looked at, the data appears to be fine but is ouch to retrieve. This means the novel that was lost will hopefully no longer be lost and I can try my hand at getting it published. And I've joined The Poetry Society, The British Science Fiction Association and just to be confusing the British Science Writers Association, which is already proving useful.