Poetry-Craft etc… (by sarah)

Saturday ie tomorrow I will be doing a quick poetry reading in the Waterstones in Cheltenham with some fantastic other poets (it's a quick one as I'm running away to a family wedding!). This event is organised by the Cheltenham Poetry Festival who have been putting on some fantastic events through out the year. The readings in the Waterstones are going to be the first Saturday of each month 11-2pm.

Another event that they are running is Poetree in the Park - the last one got in the news paper along with a cute picture of Jean holding up a poetry dragon 🙂

I'm going to be running an number of workshops and courses mainly for kids for the Festival and the new Center Arts in Cheltenham on top of the craft workshops I do for festivals anyway 🙂 They are also holding an Exhibition in Braille in September which I hope to have a textural art piece in (made of papier mache of course!).

On top of that I hope to have the poetry book sorted soon and also take the Monster Writing Game to the next level. I do however need more outlets for my art work - I may get an exhibition soon but I need to be in shops and stuff more than doing craft fairs each Sunday. The trouble with that I've been finding is that you have to spend money out in the first place to buy shelf space very few places do it on commission. I would also love as I think I mentioned about three years ago now :/ to become a member of the Gloucester Guild of Craftsmen but again it takes money and I am still only braking even as I am still building up my equipement and stocks at the moment.

I will confess to having gotten carried away with making educational games and designing crafts to help the kids engage in writing workshops but I finially feel I am heading in the right direction here 🙂

Oh and also some of my local kids poetry is going to be on display at the village Flower Festival this weekend which is well just lovely 🙂

Mum and her Scooter (by sarah)

As some of you know Mum had an accident where her mobility scooter went backwards down a slope and crashed into a kirb. She fell scooter and all - I saw the horror on her face and got dad to hand me the baby so he could go to her. Jeany run up too her and was informing everyone that it was her Nanny etc...

This was Friday in Gloucester Docks - the dock security and the ambulance team where fantastic and between the four of them got mum up onto the stretcher and loaded into the ambulance - I spent most of the time in the car with the two girls as I couldn't really do much else. Once Jeany came back to the car I left her momentarily holding Mary whilst I told the security etc... that mum has brittle bone disease as Dad was in a bit of a flap. I then took mum's handbag and shopping back to the car.

People must have thought I was really strange but I knew mum would be panicking about her material and stuff and sure enough all she said was sorry and 'I think I've lost my buttons!'

They thought she had broken her hip but fortunatly she hadn't - it's all "just" soft tissue damage but she is pretty beaten up and the bruises and grazes look bad. She is having to use a zima frame to walk at the moment 🙁

Again the post code lottery was evident with the nhs - as mum was informed that if she lived here a stair lift and stuff would have already been put in her home - something the nhs back in Essex wont do.

The x-rays they did did show however that her heart and lungs have been badly damaged by the radiotherapy for the cancer treatment which sucks but I suppose is better than the alternative.

Sunday as the craft fayre I was supposed to be doing was canceled I took mum, dad and the girls to the local carvery were was spent about 4 hours watching the classic, vintage and kit cars going past on the round about - we sat outside and I took blankets and games for the girls.

Poor dad still ended up carrying all the food as though I am trying to use one crutch instead of two I found I simply didn't have the hand strength to carry the plates! But mum enjoyed her outing. She is in more pain today though than she was when she came home from the hospital and bruising is still appearing on her.

Of course because fundimentally she is ok and will just take time to mend it is funny to say she crushed her mobility scooter but it wasn't at the time :/

August New (by sarah)

You may or may not have noticed a dirth of posts and onlineness from me - this is due to a slight no computer issue 🙁 But I've got a temporary solution currently!

So what shall I be upto in August? Well like the rest of the summer so far it will be full of craft and writing workshops - mainly for kids 🙂

I am also back on the papier mache thing and having made a giant sheep last month am working on a piece of textural art work for the visually impaired which I hope will be exhibated in September.

If I can extract stuff of my broken laptop there will be the long awaited for poetry book and of course there is a family wedding for which bunting is being made 🙂 There is the village feast, boundary walk, and Jean's birthday which is going to be in Essex this year hosted by my aunt 🙂 as there is a Christening on the Sunday we are going to!

Alaric's family are visiting too which is exciting as they haven't met Mary yet!

I do of course have lots of other things to share and write about which will be coming soon 🙂

What if my child is gay? (by alaric)

It's widely held that it's a scary experience for somebody to tell their parents that they are gay. As a parent, therefore, I began to wonder how I could arrange it so that, if any of my children turn out to be gay, they could be spared any distress in telling us about it.

I surmised that the distress arose because of this pattern:

1. Child is raised by parents with the assumption that they will be straight. This might be a stated assumption - the parents actually talking about "when you start to bring [girl/boy]friends home" or "when you get married and have kids", or simply be signs of homophobia in the parent. Perhaps it could even be that the parents show no signs of expecting their child to be heterosexual, but the child (through other social conditioning) nonetheless assume (correctly or not) that's what their parents expect.

2. Child, at some point, realises they have desires they feel their parents would disapprove of or be shocked by, as well as or instead of "normal" heterosexual desires.

3. Child eventually announces this to the parents.

4. Parents reaction ranges from "Oh, that's nice dear" to "Oh my god! What a shock... but now I think about it it's no big deal" to "YOU ARE NO CHILD OF MINE".

I presume it's either the fear of not knowing how the parent will respond, or suspecting they'll respond negatively, that makes it stressful for people to tell their parents that they're gay, bisexual, transgender, or whatever.

So I started wondering if it'd be best to, at some point, outright say "You know, your mother and I are totally fine with whatever sexual orientation you choose". Maybe that'd be a bit awkward; perhaps it'd be better to just to leave it implicit-but-hinted-at by openly introducing our gay/poly/etc friends to the children as such, and other such ways of showing that we're OK with it all.

But I began to realise that it would be much better if our children never actually had to "come out" to us about anything. Rather than trying to make step 4 of the above list less traumatic, how about if we just make it unnecessary by stopping the process at step 1?

I mean, ideally, our children should be able to bring home same-sex partners or whatever without feeling they have to gain our permission and acceptance first.

For a start, I think people are too enthusiastic about putting themselves (and, worse, each other) into boxes. I mean, I am attracted to women, and have never fancied a man, so I guess I count as straight, but I can find no reason to assume I might never fall in love with a man (I might just be really really picky and have not met Mr Right yet). And what about a bisexual person who has the occasional gay crush, but never really acts on it, and (quite happily) only ever goes out with members of the opposite sex, eventually marries one, and lives happily ever after? There's no problem with that, and their actual sexual label becomes a matter of perspective.

So, sod that. As my children are human beings, I am aware that they might acquire any combination of sexual tastes that humans are capable of; and those tastes are their own affair - which they may or may not choose to discuss with their parents, as they see fit. And what kinds (and numbers; don't forget polyamory) of people they actually bring home to meet us is their choice. And I don't require them to declare a classification up front. I want my children to feel free to bring home whatever partners take their fancy.

Of course, I don't want to deny them the right to stand up and say "Father! I wish to declare that I BAT FOR THE OTHER TEAM!" if they want to. I think that labeling yourself can be an important thing for a young person, learning to establish their own identity. If they want to do that, that's fine, and I'll support them in doing so and treat the event with the gravity they seem to want from it; if they come to me looking like they're after a rite of passage, I'll try to provide one. But I don't want them to think they have to.

But what I really want in the end, I guess, is for my children to feel free to be themselves (at least at home; I can't be responsible for the reactions of the rest of society, sadly), and for them to know that they have my support in whatever they do, as long as they do it ethically.

Scientists (by alaric)

I've been reading a book lately called "The Brain that Changes Itself", which discusses a once-controversial theory that the adult brain can rewire itself in the same manner as the developing brain, with the main difference being that it just requires more effort to focus the attention. It used to be believed that once the brain had finished developing, its structure and function was fixed. However, it turns out that, with the right approach, the victims of strokes and the like can retrain their brain to perform the lost functions with different bits of neural tissue.

But that's not what I'm writing about today.

One of the things that has struck me in the book's account of how the neurbiologists rejected this controversial idea, along with previous impressions I had obtained from other sources, is that the academic community is riddled with idiots who reject evidence that contradicts their beliefs about their field.

To see why this is crazy, look at it like this. Science is, largely, about finding the underlying truths of the Universe. The problem is that these underlying truths can rarely be directly observed (and we've figured most of the ones that can out by now). One cannot directly percieve an electron, but one can deduce its existance by perceiving the effect of an electron gun in an evacuated chamber pointed at a phosphorescent screen. But there are multiple interpretations of that experiment - perhaps there are tiny charged particles being released which stimulate the screen into producing light... or perhaps the electron gun actually causes the metal of the negative electrode to ablate and the resulting ion cloud then condenses into an invisibly thin thread which coils out across the vacuum until it touches the screen, whereupon electricity flows directly down the wire and causes the spot of light. Perhaps the vacuum is required, not because air inhibits the free motion of electrons, but because the air disrupts the formation of the thread.

Yet we can rule out the thread theory in a number of ways, and there are other experiments that show that electrons are discrete charged particles. It's the weight of a whole heap of evidence that all reinforce the correct theory and disprove all the alternative theories. However, one can never be entirely sure that another theory has yet to be discovered, which all the existing experiments fail to disprove - but which leads to the development of an experiment which disproves the electron theory, and reinforces the new theory. Perhaps there are no electrons; but the "electron theory" has provided us with useful predictions, and nobody has yet found fault with it. So we stick with it. Even if it's wrong, it's useful - and if we ever find it's wrong, that will give us the clues required to find a better theory.

But there are levels of deduction involved here. We directly observe the construction of electron guns and the appearance of spots of light with our eyes. We apply previously reinforced beliefs that the electrical power supply we connect the electron gun to will provide a voltage, and that the electron gun will therefore emit electrons. We observe the appearance of a spot of light, and therefore conclude that the electrons flew through the chamber and caused the spot of light. And from that, combined with existing knowledge about the nature of light and matter, we construct a theory that electrons can travel through a vacuum then cause phosphorescent screens to glow. Each level of further deduction is less certain then those that it builds upon, since its truth depends on their truth, plus a further step of deduction - which might be wrong in itself.

So what do we do when new evidence comes and appears to disprove our theory? Say somebody publishes the results of an experiment that show that, if a kitten is within one metre of the chamber, the spot of light on the screen grows into the kanjii for "potato". The electron theory does not predict this. Have we disproved the theory of electrons? Or have we merely discovered that kittens emit complicated high-frequency magnetic fields that disturb the paths of nearby electron beams? Well, I'm sure further experiments would be performed, surrounding kittens with Hall sensors and SQUIDs and the like, but for now, let's imagine we only have that one data point to look at.

Electron theorists would probably question the validity of the experiment at all. For a start, it is a leap of faith that the experiment was set up correctly. Perhaps the electron gun itself is defective and projects the kanjii symbol directly, and the kitten has nothing to do with it. Perhaps there are coils under the bench generating magnetic fields that steer the beam to draw the symbol, either accidentally or as part of a deliberate academic prank. In this case, with seemingly unrelated objects (kittens) having suspiciously unexpected consequences (kanjii characters), that is a distinct possibility, so the kitten theorists would be under additional burden of proof to recreate the experiment - and to ask electron theorists to defend their theory by recreating the experiment themselves to show that it does not occur with "trusted" equipment. For sure, the academic community does need some level of protection from a "denial of service" attack from charlatans assaulting it with fraudulent claims that have to be tediously experimentally dismissed. There is scope to accidentally perform flawed experiments due to overlooking some factor or failing to test all the equipment used for defects, leading to honest results that turn out to be misleading. This gives some credibility to the concept that some data can be rejected out-of-hand for contradicting widely-held theories, but it is all too easy to take conformist censorship at this level too far and reject evidence that actually shows flaws in currently-sacred theories.

But what if the conflicting evidence is less silly, or it is independently and widely confirmed in other experiments, showing there is definitely some effect at work? Perhaps kittens do emit mysterious high-frequency magnetic fields - in which case, our theory of electrons is still valid; it's just our theory of kittens which was wrong. As physicists are often more familiar with electrons than kittens, it's easy for them to defend their electron theory and question the researcher's grasp of kitten theory, thereby making it somebody else's problem. Meanwhile, biologists asked to defend the theory that mammal tissue can't generate intense, high frequency, magnetic fields might point to excellent arguments about the maximum rates of charge movements in various tissues, and tell the physicsts that their electron theory must be all wrong. At least we now have some kind of debate, rather than outright censorship, but - particularly in cross-specialisation problems like this one - it's all too easy for both sides to just ignore the evidence and blame it on the other.

But what makes scientists so defensive? Good scientists realise that the data is all we can be sure about (and, even then, we must be careful of experimental errors, or failing to control for unknown influences). They treat theories as temporary affairs, which suffice until they are found wanting, or something better is found. Where does this academic Nazism emerge, where academics will often jump immediately to questioning the motives and competence of people who hold views that contradict the mainstream, leading to the mainstream remaining mainstream long after the weight of contradicting evidence becomes overpowering?

I think a part of the problem is the fact that scientists with new ideas have to fight so hard to get them heard over the mainstream in the first place - they find it hard to give up the fighting mentality once they've been accepted.

Another part of the problem might be human nature - scientists are taught the existing lore of their field in lectures where they soak it all up, and probably record it in their minds as unassailable truth. I suspect they are much more open to reconsider theories they encounter as "new" after having lived, for a while, in an academic world in which no theory explaining the behaviour in question had yet emerged. Theories considered "complete" when they were learnt are probably rarely questioned.