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Last week I watched Valentine Warner’s What to Eat Now seasonal cookery programme. In this episode, Valentine visited a biodynamic farmer, who explained some of the principles of biodynamic farming. The farmer — whose name I forget, but who seemed a very nice, cheery sort of chap — showed Valentine how he makes his compost heap. Since I started growing my own veg, I’ve become a bit of a compost nerd¹, and I was whistling appreciatively at the sight of the lovely ingredients the farmer had on his heap. There was lots of greenery, including nettles which contain iron and other useful minerals, cow pats, straw and other goodies. It had the makings of wonderfully rich, nutrient-packed compost. And then he pulled out a box of containers and explained that he would put into a hole made in the heap a pinch of yarrow which had been stored in a stag’s bladder for a year (it may have been some other internal organ, I forget) hung up in the air, and then buried for a year. Or something like that. I’m afraid that I’m not certain of the details, because my mind was being boggled, and I was watching carefully to see what Valentine’s response would be. He was terribly polite, but said it sounded a bit “witchy”.

Quite. My favourite fictional witches — those in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels — rarely do any actual magic. Instead, a large component of their work involves what they refer to as ‘headology’. This is the practice of getting people to believe something so strongly that it becomes real for them. Headology is cousin to the placebo in modern medicine, though rather more diverse. Some witches, like Nanny Ogg, perfect a cosy, homely persona, so that women in labour are convinced that giving birth is the easiest and most straightforward thing in the world. Others, like Granny Weatherwax maintain such a terrifying demeanour that people stop being ill out of sheer fright. Some, like Eumenides Treason, construct a mythical reputation with a collection of dribbly candles, plastic skulls and stick-on facial warts bought from Boffo’s Joke Shop. All of these elaborate practices are maintained to convince their clients to believe that a particular story is true and real. It’s fictional of course, but I’m fairly sure that aspects of it would work in the real world, just as we know that the placebo effect exists.

You probably see where I’m going with this. Headology works because people have minds, and I’m certain that it would have no perceptible effect on beetroot. The compost was responsible for his great beetroot, and the “witchy” bits were entirely optional. The only person being worked on by the yarrow-in-stag’s bladder routine is the farmer. It’s a shame really, because there are lots of very sensible and scientifically robust practices in biodynamic farming, like looking after the soil well, and making great compost. But then they go and spend a lot of time and energy on something that must have no measurable effect on the quantity or quality of the crop. Of course, I’ve had limited exposure to biodynamic methods, so it could be that the farmer featured in the program was on the far fringe of the movement.

¹ I know, along with all my other domains of nerdery… I’m a nerd of all trades and a master of none. ↑

• How I Learned to Code - PaulStamatiou.com
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I really like Apple’s Remote application on the iPhone, which lets you use the phone like a remote control for iTunes, complete with library browsing and display of cover art. However, in the living room, I tend to listen to my music collection using my SliMP3 player, via SlimServer running on the iMac upstairs. So I was delighted to find a plugin for SlimServer, called iPeng which does the same job as Remote for my SliMP3.

It’s not actually a native iPhone application: you access it via MobileSafari using a special URL, and it shows you a very nice interface for your library, with full control over playlists and so forth. However, it’s easy to put an icon for the URL on the main screen, so in practice, you hardly notice that it’s not a native app.

I do have a standard remote control for the SliMP3, but it’s much easier searching and browsing my music collection from the iPhone, rather than fiddling about with the limited buttons on the physical remote. I love the way I keep finding additional uses for my iPhone — it’s certainly the most versatile gadget I own. Somehow, it manages to be a Jack and Master of All Trades.

Some of you may remember when I recounted how I tend to use other people I encounter on my cycle commute in as a kind of fuzzy human clock. Well, it seems that other people do this too. Recently, I’ve been passing another cyclist at about the same point in my journey every day. We often smile and say hello as we pass, but today, I encountered him quite a bit further on in my own journey than usual. As he cycled by, he said something, which was almost lost to the wind and the Doppler Shift. But as I mentally reconstructed it, I realised that he’d said, “Crikey! Is it that time already?”, and I laughed out loud.

I mentioned a little while back that I’m using Tinderbox as a kind of daybook to record thoughts, ideas, notes and activities throughout the day. I’m really enjoying using it, and the experience of gradually adapting the structure of my Tinderbox document has been interesting and fun. I also posted a request a while ago for suggestions for simple software that would allow me to log my time at work. People responded with some great suggestions, and I’ve since found a few more. For example, I love RedBook: it’s a commandline task logger written in Ruby, which has a simple method of storing the data (as YAML-format files) and can export and display the data in a number of formats.

However, in the end — good though they were — these applications felt like adding another layer of complexity on to something that I wanted to be transparent and effortless. Then it hit me that I was already jotting down what I was doing in Tinderbox, so if I could store start and stop times as attributes of those notes, I’d be half way to logging my time. What follows is probably only interesting for fellow Tinderbox nerds or serious geeks. You have been warned

So I created a new prototype called ‘timecard’ which has key attributes of startTime, stopTime, intDuration (calculated in seconds from the start and stop times) and duration (which is nicely formatted in text as hh:mm:ss). I create a note as usual, using the title of the note to describe the activity, then drag it to an adornment, which has some OnAdd rules to set the tag attribute to ‘timed’, and set startTime to the time now. When I’m finished with that activity, I drag the note to another adornment which sets the end time to now and calculates the duration in seconds by passing the start and end time to a little Ruby script I wrote, helped a lot by a thread on the Tinderbox forums. The notes can sit on that adornment until I’ve got time to take stock, or the end of the day, whichever comes sooner! Then I drag them to another adornment, which just shoots them back into a Timecards container. I’ve set the adornments up to be a kind of electronic version of one of those time card punch machines you see in factories, and that’s the way I think of it.

I’ve also set up a variety of ways to view the information that this system collects. In the first screenshot, you can see that I’ve set up a DisplayExpression for the agent which collects today’s timecards to show me the total amount of time I’ve worked so far today. In the second, I’ve used the spiffy new bargraph() function to set the Pattern attribute of an agent collecting the past week’s worth of timecards to show the total time for each day in a kind of sparkline graph. When I’ve accumulated enough data, I’ll probably do the same for the past few months as well. Finally, I’ve created an HTML export template for the timecards, which formats the task descriptions and times for an agent (usually today’s times) as a pretty HTML table, so I have a summary record for each day.

Since I don’t have to collect precise hours for invoicing or anything like that, the absolute values are not particularly important. I only time tasks when I’m properly focussed, not when I’m being interrupted by calls, conversations with colleagues and so on, so it’s quite a good relative measure of how much solid, productive work I’m able to accomplish. It has been really interesting to track it from day to day. I’m actually using it as a sort of game to motivate myself to devote uninterrupted time to important tasks, just so that I can watch the bars climb for each day!

Mr. Bsag managed to get one of his prints into a one-day art exhibition, sponsored by the Yorkshire Bank: FAB, or Future Art Birmingham. I went along with him for the evening, which was held on the 12th floor of the bank, with fabulous views over central Birmingham, as you can see in the photo.

There was some really good art on display, and an auction was held for a couple of pieces, with some of the proceeds going to help fund the new Children’s Hospital. It was fun chatting to all the artists there, as well as representatives of the bank and other city types. Many of the artists (or hangers-on like me) wanted to buy each others’ work, but we are all too poor to afford it! Everyone had name badges, with the artists being labelled as such, but it was hardly necessary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many sharp suits in one place at a time. The artists (and their hangers-on — particularly me) were completely scruffy by comparison.

Anyway, it was good fun, and we took full advantage of the fancy canapés and free wine on offer, as well as the wonderful views — you don’t often get a chance to see Birmingham at night from the 12th floor.

Like many other people, I was following the events surrounding the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN yesterday with great interest. The BBC has had some quite good coverage, particularly The Big Bang Machine, however I felt a bit frustrated with some of the explanations. On all of the coverage of the LHC we learned that:

• It is 27 km in circumference
• It is cooled close to absolute zero (about -271°C)
• Twin proton beams will be accelerated to speeds very near to the speed of light
• The protons will then be collided, resulting in them being “smashed apart”
• This will recreate conditions as they were very shortly after the start of the Big Bang
• Detectors will record incredibly short-lived products of the collisions, looking (among other things) for the theoretically postulated but never observed Higgs boson.

And that’s it. Everyone agrees that it’s revolutionary, exciting stuff that will answer huge questions which have puzzled physicists for decades, but we don’t get any more details other than the impressive statistics of the LHC.

Now, I know that the concepts invovled in particle physics aren’t exactly accessible for non-physicists. Every time I have to explain what I do for a living to non-biologists, I thank my lucky stars that I’m not a particle physicist. The ‘what’ of my research is pretty easy to explain to non-experts, though the ‘why’ (as in ‘why in the world would anybody be interested in that?’) is still sometimes problematic. But surely there’s some, non-patronising way to explain more details of the experiments involved? There are so many interesting questions to ask.

For example, they often showed the graphical representations of the tracks of the particles which would be recorded by ATLAS and the other experiments in LHC. They were very pretty, but I’m assuming that the physicists won’t be just gazing at the screens going, “Whoa! Look at all the pretty patterns… Far out, man…”, then going off to have their tea. They are data and they mean something important, but how are they interpreted? How will they recognise the Higgs boson if it appears, and how will they distinguish it from other particles? How will they know for sure if they don’t find it: in other words, how can they be sure that the absence of the Higgs boson is a real absence and not because their accelerator isn’t quite fast enough, for example?

And then there’s the whole ‘the LHC will create black holes which will destroy the Universe’ thing. Though the BBC and some other media organisations tried to imply that it was idiotic scare-mongering and all the physicists say it really can’t happen, they all managed to get the question in. If I was Stephen Hawking, I would add a loud claxon sound to my speech synthesiser (like the QI claxon in the General Ignorance round), and activate it (preferably with the words CREATE BLACK HOLES WHICH DESTROY UNIVERSE flashing in white text on a black background on a convenient huge screen) whenever a journalist asked me the question. Then I’d mentally deduct 30 points and just carry on.

We spent a few days last week on holiday in North Devon, staying at Lynmouth. When we actually stopped to think about it, we realised that it was the first holiday (as opposed to work travel) we’d had in 3 years, and I certainly felt like we needed it! In the last few years, we seem to have always been too busy, had too little money or to have been doing things like moving house to make even a short break practical. But getting a change of scenery every now and again is important to recharge the batteries, so I was quite excited about our little trip.

We suspected that we would have dreadful weather, but in the end we were incredibly lucky. It was very windy on the coast, and that seemed to keep most of the showers at bay, or at least move them along quickly once they had started, so we didn’t get prolonged periods of rain. This was just as well, because we wanted to spend most of the time walking some of the coastal and moorland paths. Lynton and Lynmouth are really one town divided by an almost vertical cliff. There’s a rather nice Victorian water-powered cliff railway to take you between the two, or you can walk up the zig-zag paths which connect the two towns.

All I can say is that people who live in Lynton and Lynmouth must be very fit, and have very supple knee and ankle joints. Even with the zig-zags, the paths had sections that seemed to have slopes of about 40°, and required a curious, flexed-foot shuffle to walk up or down. This also applied to the coast path and a lot of the other footpaths we used for our walks. The area isn’t known as ‘Little Switzerland’ for nothing. Mr. Bsag is like a mountain goat, and climbs hills while walking or cycling with no perceptible effort. I, on the other hand, am clearly not geared correctly for hills, and while I can walk for miles on flat or undulating terrain, I puff and pant like a steam train on inclines. Despite that, we had some wonderful walks (with Mr. Bsag gently pushing me up some of the hills).

One of my favourite walks was along the River Lyn to Watersmeet (where two rivers meet, obviously). The river flows in a deep gorge which is thickly wooded with wonderful, lush ancient woodland. One benefit of all the rain we have had this summer is that the vegetation was even greener and more lush than it might have otherwise been. Every possible shade of green — from almost black, through vivid emerald, to sharp lime — was represented. Rain drops shone and sparkled on every surface making the whole wood glitter. Every rock and tree trunk was thickly covered in many species of moss, liverwort, lichen and fern. I couldn’t resist plunging my hand into a plump pad of moss, and found that it sank finger-deep into the cool, soft fronds. Deciduous woodland is one of my favourite habitats, and with a fast-flowing river too, it was just about perfect. I could have stayed for days in that green-brown dappled light, just looking around me and sighing happily. The photo above is of a section of the woodland, high on the valley side, entirely composed of oaks. It might well be very ancient, but the soil is so thin there, with rocks close to the surface that the oaks can’t get to their full size, and grow like ancient saplings, close together and corkscrewing towards the available light. Magical.

One of the great treats of going to Brazil is a trip by boat to swim in the river. We find a nice spot with a sandy river beach, ignore the resident caiman, and pile in to the caramel coloured water. The water isn’t cold, exactly, but it feels cool after the roasting heat of the sun. I love the tropics, but don’t care for the heat very much, so I value any opportunity to get cool. The current is surprisingly strong, so you can use the river like a natural, water-treadmill. You thrash away as hard as you can, then find that you’ve made barely any progress relative to the bank, but when you’ve swum a little way, you can let yourself drift back, to start again.

The visibility under the water is very low, which is slightly unnerving. We know for sure that there are a lot of piranhas in the water, and every now and again you get a little, gentle nibble on a limb or your back, which keeps you on your toes. The reputation of piranhas is much more ferocious than they are (for a start, many species are not carnivorous), and it’s quite safe as long as you don’t have any open wounds. Similarly, the caiman just keep out of your way.

I know that it’s not an efficient stroke, but I think that breaststroke is wonderful for wild swimming. You can see where you are going and hear all the bird calls bouncing off the water. As you look ahead, your sweeping hands slice the calm, virgin water cleanly, making you feel as if you’re the first person ever to swim in the water. Even if you’re swimming with others, you can point yourself towards a bit of open water and it’s just you, your hands and the river. Bliss.

I travelled fairly light (for me, anyway) to Brazil, but one thing I was keen to take along was my iPhone. It turned out to be a very useful travel companion for entertainment (music, TV shows and books via Stanza) as well as a stopwatch, alarm¹, calculator, currency converter and various other useful widgets. We had no internet or mobile phone coverage at the site, but the connectivity was very useful during the interminable travelling. I found that with Airplane mode on, the battery life was great. I also took a Freeloader with me, which was brilliant for recharging on the go. The power supply at the place we stayed was not the most reliable, but there was certainly plenty of sun, so the solar panels of the Freeloader charged up its internal battery quickly. I could then recharge the iPhone (and my camera) up at my leisure. It works well in the UK too, though it takes longer to fully charge, but you can also charge it via USB from a laptop.

I lugged a paperback copy of War and Peace to Brazil (875g!), but if I had been a bit more alert, I would have noticed that it is available on Stanza, so I could have taken a weightless literary tome with me on my iPhone.

¹ I recommend ‘Piano Riff’ as an alarm tone. It brings a bluesy, dramatic start to the day, and you wake up composing “I woke up this morning [da-DA da-DUN]…” blues songs. It also goes well with howler monkeys. ↑

We went to the Moseley Folk Festival yesterday, and it was really fantastic. I don’t know why I haven’t been before. I love folk music, and Moseley is only a short bus ride and a walk away from me. Anyway, I’ll certainly be going again next year. The festival is held in Moseley Park, which is a fabulous, fairy grotto of a park, hidden in a valley between rows of Victorian houses. It’s surrounded by trees, and the natural slope of the site makes a good amphitheatre for live music.

All the artists I saw were wonderful, so it’s hard to single people out, but there were several artists (some new to me) who I particularly enjoyed.

Jon Redfern

Jon Redfern has a lovely, delicate style, and a great guitar technique with beautifully-crafted songs that really hold your attention.

John Smith

John Smith: surely the man with the least distinctive name in music, but a really distinctive, rich voice, and a mind-blowing guitar style. He’s one of those artists who is really hard to describe to someone else, because he doesn’t sound like anyone else, but he made my heart break a bit. Which is a good thing, in case you’re wondering. He also has an extraordinary, show-stopping guitar technique where he lays it flat on his lap and employs a kind of extreme tambour stroke to provide a percussion backing. Even though he’s there, doing it in front of you live, it’s hard to believe that he’s getting such an incredible layered sound out of one guitar and two hands. If you’re interested, you can hear it on ‘Winter (Live)’ on his MySpace page.

The Family

The Family describe their music as “swaggering, Bourbon-drenched Cosmic Country music for bow-legged women”, which is a fairly good summary. It’s good-time music that’s a little bit off its head — something like early Beefheart or Canned Heat. They also gave away free CDs, which endeared them greatly to the crowd.

The Destroyers

What can I say. I’ve never had the pleasure before, but now I’m wondering where they’ve been all my life. I’ve got a very soft spot for Klezmer music, which is the basis of The Destroyers’ sound, but they swerve joyfully between klezmer, ska, dub, punk, funk and folk, often within the same song — it’s like an explosion in a music factory. And they have a hurdy gurdy, and any music featuring hurdy gurdy is OK by me. They’ve got a great video (shot in Digbeth!) of their anthem to the joys of multicultural urban life, Out of Babel, which is definitely worth a look. But if you want to see their live style (with a much reduced band), see Rhombus of Righteousness. Little kids (of all ages) love them because you can jump around like a loon to their music — in fact, it’s impossible not to.

Sharron Kraus

Sharron Kraus has a lovely, high, clear voice which she completely subverts by singing dark, dangerous folk songs and murder ballads. Her music manages to sound ancient, like songs passed down through the generations, but she writes all her own material. Excellently creepy.

Chris Wood

I’ve raved about Chris Wood’s music before, so it won’t be a surprise that he was the reason we decided to get tickets for the festival. So it was a shame that his set was so short, and that it was plagued with sound problems. Actually several artists had problems with the sound, which with acoustic music in the open air can really mar the performance. He was also on not long after The Destroyers, so people were still a bit excitable. It must be hard for someone — whose stock-in-trade is a quiet, carefully crafted, emotionally-laden story in song — to get people to shut up and listen. Well, I was listening and hanging on to every note, and he was wonderful. Chris: if there’s a chance in a million (see what I did there?) that you happen to be reading this, some people were listening. And you made me shed a tear with ‘One in a Million’. Again. I’m a sucker for a sweet, romantic story, and it’s the way you tell it. I wish you’d had time for ‘Lord Bateman’ too.

Watching wildlife is often the outcome of random encounters, and your luck never seems proportional to the time and effort you put in. Sometimes you lie silently on your belly on a freezing moor at dawn for hours and don’t see so much as a rabbit, but at other times, you stroll along whistling and almost trip over a rare and wonderful animal. We were quite fortunate on this trip and had a lot of the latter kinds of experiences, including seeing not one, but two, whole anacondas.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: it’s not like in the film. They don’t suddenly lunge up out of the water and consume a boat and its occupants. They are fairly shy, and tend to lay low, quietly suffocating and swallowing smallish animals in private and out of the gaze of curious tourists. They also don’t need to eat very often, so catching them in the act is even less likely.

We saw anaconda 1 on a horse ride. We were gaily wandering through a shallow lake on horseback, when one of the guides jumped off his horse, and started excitedly poking about in the rushes. He’d seen an anaconda which was in the process of constricting around a caiman and eating it. You might think that jumping into the water next to a snake big enough to swallow a medium sized caiman is a bad idea, but doing so while it’s feeding on a medium sized caiman is probably as good a time as any, because the snake is actually rather busy. That was exciting.

The location of anaconda 2 was given away by some jacanas (big-footed water birds, similar to coots or moorhens). They were going crazy with alarm calls, hovering over a particular patch of water and looking very nervous indeed. When we looked through the weeds at the spot they were troubled by, we saw a lithe, yellow, spotted body slipping through the water. We were out of the water this time on a bridge, but one of the guides — in his enthusiasm to show people wildlife at as close quarters as possible (with just a touch of wanting to impress the laydees) — waded carefully in and grabbed the snake’s head, hauling all 2.5 m of it out on to the bridge for us to hold.

I really prefer it when people leave wild animals alone, even if that means you don’t get such a good view. Better a brief glimpse of a wild animal behaving naturally than a long look at one which would really like to go and hide in the water, thank you very much. However, there are times when you can’t get a real impression of the physicality of an animal without seeing it up close and touching it. The warm, dry skin of the snake was beautiful, and the incredible smooth power of its muscles as it gripped our hands and arms was something that just looking at it wouldn’t have conveyed. The guy put it back in the water gently, then backed away carefully. They may not rear up out of the water to attack you, but they do command a certain respect.

(Tuesday 19th August, 5.30am, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil)

It’s 5.30am and the sun is just beginning to colour the eastern horizon a delicate peach, shading to deep indigo at the zenith. The river is very still in the silver half light, and a veil of mist hovers just above the surface of the water. A cool, light breeze drifts shreds of mist, like smoke, towards me, as I stand on the boardwalk watching. On three sides, groups of chaco chachalacas¹ strike up their raucous song, like a drunken military tattoo performed entirely on amplified kazoos, and backed occasionally by a howler monkey chorus. In the brief breaks between chaco sets, I can hear the various whistles, purrs and mews of other birds against the earth-shaking three-note bass growls of caiman the wildlife starts its day. The dawn here is often peaceful, but seldom quiet.

In the west, the full moon is still high, and as the sun rises, the cold, silver moon-shadows are gradually erased and replaced with the deep, warm sun-shadows. Dawn happens fast here: as I watch, the sun hauls itself above the horizon, bloodily dripping and setting fire to the landscape. Another day begins.

¹ They can be heard 2 km away, so you can imagine that when you’re standing right next to them (or vice-versa), conversation is impossible, and earplugs are advisable. I once had to break off a conversation with my colleague because of noisy chacos above us. It’s no use shouting at them, either (I’ve tried) — you just have to wait until they’re finished. ↑

I’m back in the UK after three weeks in Brazil. It was a good trip: the students worked hard and enjoyed themselves, we saw a lot of interesting animals, and my colleague and I made good progress on a grant application. However, it’s a long time to be away from Mr. Bsag, and it’s very nice to be home. When I got back from the airport yesterday and sat down on the sofa with him, cup of tea in hand, I was more content and happy than I’ve been for some time.

One of the real killers with the trip is the travel. Brazil is a fantastic country, but it’s also very, very big. Our return journey took 36 hours in total, involving a 5 hour minibus journey and 4 separate flights. We also had a fair bit of hassle with the flights this time, though thankfully we didn’t miss any of them. I don’t want to get on another plane for a few months, I think!

In my absence, Mr. Bsag has been a whirlwind of productive activity. As well as making a lot of prints, he had arranged for an ugly conifer to be taken down in our garden, got the loft insulated, and even re-painted the hall, stairwell, landing, and the kitchen. It makes me think that I’m slowing him down, but I don’t think either of us could keep up the pace we set when we’re apart and trying to distract ourselves with activity.