Three weeks ago was (give or take a few weeks because we’ve never bothered with accuracy) the end of Ruth and I’s 8th year together, and
we marked the occasion with a mini-break away for a few nights. We spent the first two nights in a ‘showman’-style gypsy caravan in Herefordshire, and it was amazing enough that I
wanted to share it with you:
It wasn’t quite dusk yet, but we couldn’t resist the urge to light the fire (and the dozens of tiny lanterns).
The place we went was Wriggles Brook, a ‘glamping’-style site in the shadow of the Forest of Dean. In a long field that twists its way
alongside a babbling brook, the owners have set up a trio of traditional horse-drawn caravans, each in a wooded clearing that isolates it from the others. Two of the caravans are
smaller, designed just for couples (who are clearly the target market for this romantic getaway spot), but we took the third, larger, (centenarian!) one, which sported a separate living
room and bedroom.
Between our caravan and the others the owners grew a varied orchard, which Annabel found particularly interesting. By which I mean delicious.
The bedroom was set up so that children could be accommodated in a bunk under the adults (with their own string of fairy lights and teeny-tiny windows, but after she bumped her head on
the underside of the beams Annabel decided that she didn’t want to sleep there, so we set up her travel cot in the living room.
Annabel and I swinging on the hammock near the
So yeah: a beautiful setting, imaginative and ecologically-friendly accommodation, and about a billion activities on your doorstep. Even the almost-complete lack of phone signal into
the valley was pretty delightful, although it did make consulting Google Maps difficult when we got lost about 20 minutes out from the place! But if there’s one thing that really does
deserve extra-special mention, it’s the food!
Nearby activities include steam trains. That’s all I needed to hear, really.
Our hosts were able to put on a spectacular breakfast and evening meal for us each night, including a variety of freshly-grown produce from their own land. We generally ate in their
mini dining room – itself a greenhouse for their grapevines – but it was equally-nice to have pancakes delivered to the picnic table right outside our caravan. And speaking as somebody
who’s had their fair share of second-rate veggie breakfasts over the last… what, four and a half
years?… it was a great relief to enjoy a quite-brilliant variety of vegetarian cuisine from a clearly-talented chef.
I’m not sure why the Wriggles Brook site has ocassional signs like this sticking out of the undergrowth, but they sort-of fit the eccentricity of the place.
So yeah – five stars for Wriggles Brook in Herefordshire if you’re looking for an awesome romantic getaway, with or without an accompanying toddler. Ruth and I later palmed the little
one off on JTA so that we could have a night away without her, too, which – while fun (even if we didn’t get to try all 280+ gins at the restaurant we ate at) – wasn’t quite so worthy of mention as the unusual gypsy-caravan-escape that
had preceded it. I’m hoping that we’ll get out to Wriggles Brook again.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been ill. For those who wanted the grisly details, well: here you go.
Warning: this blog post contains frank subjective descriptions of the symptoms of slightly-icky medical conditions including photographs. It’s probably safe for all
audiences, but you might not want to be drinking anything while you read it.
The trouble began, I suppose, about a month and a half ago, when a contracted what seemed to be a minor urinary tract
infection. If you’re a woman then, statistically-speaking, I probably don’t need to tell you what that is, but for the benefit of the men: it’s what happens when bacteria (or,
sometimes, a fungus or virus) infects the renal system: the kidneys, bladder, ureters, and especially the urethra. It’s not pleasant: it gives you the feeling of needing to pee the
whole time, makes it harder to pee, and – when you do – it feels a little bit like you’re piss is made of lava.
This urine contains white blood cells (the big circles) and bacteria (the tiny ‘wormlike’ things). Healthy urine contains little to none of these. Anybody else feel like they’re
playing Spore?
Despite it not being common for men (more on that later), I’ve had mild UTIs on a couple of occasions in my life, and I’d always found
that ensuring that I got plenty of water and a full RDA of vitamin C was more than enough to make it clear up all by itself
within a couple of days. So that’s what I started doing. But then things took a turn for the worse: I started getting a stabbing pain in my left kidney. Recognising this as being
pyelonephritis, I went to the doctor who prescribed me a course of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. Within a couple of days I was
feeling right as rain (of course I continued to finish the course of drugs, although I was interested to see that that advice is
starting to become controversial).
Happy, healthy, and out for a picnic.
Naturally I was a little disappointed when, the week before last, I started getting UTI-like pain again, followed very swiftly
this time by pain in my bladder that constantly felt a little like I was recovering from being punched. Back to the doctor I went, where (after the usual tests to work out what the
most-likely best-antibiotic to use was) I was prescribed a course of nitrofurantoin. I’d never had this particular drug
before, and it wasn’t initially clear which of the escalating ill-effects I was experiencing were symptoms of the infection and which were side-effects of the medication: it started
with joint pain, then nausea, then diarrhoea, then a full-on fever. It was at the point that I was fully-clothed in bed, running a temperature and soaked in sweat but still feeling cold
and shivering that Ruth called 111, who told her to take me to A&E.
(Which, like her care for me in general, she did fabulously well, except for a little bit where she sort-of ran me over in the car park of the hospital: thankfully some
friendly paramedics were standing around and were able to drag me into the building. Anyway, I don’t have much memory of that bit and I certainly don’t have any amusing photos, so I’ll
skip over it.)
Feverish to the point of delirium, I don’t have much recollection of the first few hours(?) in the hospital. But I was alert enough to request that a photo was taken for the
inevitable blog post. Ruth, however, insisted upon waiting until I apparently looked a lot less like I was about to die: so here it is!
A few tests later, the medical staff seemed confident that what I was experiencing was not an allergic reaction to the antibiotic (however, I see that they still made a note of it as a
risk on my notes!) but was a progression of the infection, which seemed to have crossed over from the tissues of my renal system and into my bloodstream and was now generally causing
havoc by attacking the rest of my body. They hooked me up to a drip of an intravenous antibiotic and kept me stocked with painkillers, then sent me up to the urology ward and set me up
with a “bed” (urology mostly deals with outpatients, and so my ‘bed’ was actually a trolley, but they wanted to keep me close to the urologists in case of any complications).
It was only the following morning, with the delirium passed, that I realised that I was on the sixth floor. Looking out of my window, I could just make out the spires of the Bodleian
Library in the distance, so I dropped my coworkers an email to apologise for not being on my way there.
A consultant switched me to a week’s course of yet-another different antibiotic – co-amoxiclav – and recommended
keeping me in for another night. Now, I think that co-amoxiclav is a really interesting drug, so I’m going to be a bit of a nerd and tell you about that for a bit (I promise we’ll get
back to my health in a moment: if you don’t want the science bit, just scroll past the diagrams to the next photo).
This is amoxicillin. I’ve highlighted in blue the lactam ring, which is the important bit.
Co-amoxiclav is a mixture of two drugs. The first is the antibiotic amoxicillin. Amoxicillin belongs to a class of antibiotics
(which includes penicillin) called β-lactams, which is the most-commonly used family of antibiotics. These antibiotics contain a four-point lactam ‘ring’ (highlighted in blue above),
and the way that they work is that this part of the molecule bonds with a particular protein common to all gram-positive
bacteria. Normally this protein is responsible for producing peptidoglycan, which is an essential ingredient in the cell walls
of these kinds of bacteria, but when it gets locked to a β-lactam ring it stops working. As a result, when the bacterium reproduces the new child doesn’t have a proper cell wall, and
can’t survive long in even the least-hostile environments.
Of course, we’re in a medical arms race right now because some of the bacteria which we’re targetting with antibiotics are becoming resistant. And here’s one what that they’re
doing so: some of these bacteria have evolved to produce beta-lactamase, also bonds with beta-lactam rings, adding an
OH to them and making them useless. Bummer, eh?
And this is clavulanic acid. Recognise that shape on the left-hand side of the molecule (highlighted in blue)? Yup: it’s another lactam ring.
The second drug in co-amoxiclav, then, is clavulanic acid, which was discovered in the 1970s and started being added to drugs
in the 1980s. Despite having a β-lactam ring (as you’ll see in blue above), clavulanic acid by itself it isn’t an effective antibiotic (for reasons I can’t quite get my head
around – anyone want to help me?). But what it’s great at is bonding that lactam ring to beta-lactamase, thereby deactivating the bacterial counter-offensive and allowing the
amoxicillin to carry on working, combating resistance.
So what you’ve got in co-amoxiclav is a an antibiotic and a chemical that counteracts the effects of a chemical that deactivates that antibiotic. Wow! It’s things like this
that really make me wish I had a brain for biology!
These things aren’t terribly comfortable when you’re trying to sleep.
I was eventually discharged from hospital and released to go home for lots of bed rest and water, along with a further week’s course of co-amoxiclav. Unfortunately it turns out that I’m
one of the unlucky folks for whom amoxicillin makes me dizzy, so I spent most of that week lying down in-between wobbly vertigo-filled trips to and from the bathroom. But it worked!
Within a few days I was feeling much better and by the end of last week I was able to work from home (and actually feel like I was useful again!).
Free of symptoms and off the drugs, I returned to work properly on Monday morning and everything seemed fine. Until, late in the morning, I went to the bathroom and started pissing
blood.
I took a picture, but it’s too grim even for this blog post. Here, have a kitten instead. Do an image search for ‘gross haematuria’ if you want a clue: the kitten will still be
waiting here when you need it.
Now apparently blood in your urine, while horrifying when it happens to you unexpectedly, isn’t actually a
sign of a medical emergency. I was starting to get bladder pain again, quite intensely, so I excused myself from work and called the urology ward, who decided that I wasn’t in bad
enough a condition to go and see them but sent me straight to my GP, who gave me another fortnight’s worth of co-amoxiclav. They’re monitoring my progress with urine and blood samples
and if by Friday it’s not having an impact, they’re going to want to send me back to hospital (hopefully only as an outpatient) and pump me full of the intravenous stuff again. So…
fingers crossed for a good result out of these drugs.
My co-amoxiclav tablets each come individually wrapped in a nitrogen-filled foil bag. I’ve no idea what it is that they’re concerned that they’ll react with, but I’m eating three of
them a day anyway.
I was hoping that by this point I’d be writing this blog post and telling you all about how I’d fought the bladder monster and won. But it looks like I won’t be able to claim that
victory for another week or two, yet. All I know is that I searched for “bladder monster” and found
this. Yeah: that feels about right.
So, I’ve not been well lately. And because a few days lying on my back with insufficient mental stimulation is a quick route to insanity for me, I’ve been trying to spend my
most-conscious moment doing things that keep my brain ticking over. And that’s how I ended up calculating pi.
When I say I’ve been unwell, that might be an understatement. But we’ll get to that another time.
Pi (or π) is, of course, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, for every circle. You’ll probably have learned it in school as 3.14, 3.142, or 3.14159, unless you
were one of those creepy kids who tried to memorise a lot more digits. Over the years, we’ve been able to calculate it to increasing precision, and although there’s no practical or theoretical reason that we need to know it beyond the 32 digits worked out by
Ludolph van Ceulen in the 16th Century, it’s still a fascinating topic that attracts research and debate.
Our calculation of pi has rocketed since the development of the digital computer.
Most of the computer-based systems we use today are hard to explain, but there’s a really fun computer-based
experimental method that can be used to estimate the value of pi that I’m going to share with you. As I’ve been stuck in bed (and often asleep) for the last few days, I’ve not
been able to do much productive work, but I have found myself able to implement an example of how to calculate pi. Recovery like a nerd, am I right?
Pi goes on forever. Pie, sadly, comes to an end.
Remember in school, when you’ll have learned that the formula to describe a circle (of radius 1) on a cartesian coordinate system is x2 + y2 = 1? Well you can work
this backwards, too: if you have a point on a grid, (x,y), then you can tell whether it’s inside or outside that circle. If x2 + y2 < 1, it’s inside, and if
x2 + y2 > 1, it’s outside. Meanwhile, the difference between the area of a circle and the area of a square that exactly contains it is π/4.
Think back to your school days. Ever draw a circle like this? Do the words “Cartesian coordinates” ring any bells?
Take those two facts together and you can develop an experimental way to determine pi, called a Monte Carlo
method. Take a circle of radius 1 inside a square that exactly contains it. Then randomly choose points within the square. Statistically speaking, these random points have a
π/4 chance of occurring within the circle (rather than outside it). So if we take the number of points that lie within the circle, divide that by the total number of
points, and then multiply by 4, we should get something that approaches the value of pi. You could even do it by hand!
I wrote some software to do exactly that. Here’s what it looks like – the red points are inside the circle, and the black points are outside.
The software illustration I’ve written is raw JavaScript, HTML, and SVG, and should work in any modern web browser (though it can get a little slow once it’s drawn a few thousand
points!). Give it a go, here! When you go to that page, your browser will start drawing dots at random points, colouring them red if
the sum of the squares of their coordinates is less than 1, which is the radius of the circle (and the width of the square that encompasses it). As it goes along, it uses the formula I
described above to approximate the value of pi. You’ll probably get as far as 3.14 before you get bored, but there’s no reason that this method couldn’t be used to go as far as
you like: it’s not the best tool for the job, but it’s super-easy to understand and explain.
Oh, and it’s all completely open-source, so you’re welcome to take it and do with it what you wish. Turn off the graphical output
to make it run faster, and see if you can get an accurate approximation to 5 digits of pi! Or slow it down so you can see how the appearance of each and every point affects the
calculation. Or adapt it into a teaching tool and show your maths students one way that pi can be derived experimentally. It’s all yours: have fun.
And I’ll update you on my health at some other point.
It’s been almost five years since Sainsbury’s supermarkets pioneered the “brand match” idea, which rivals Tesco and Asda later adopted into their own schemes, and I maintain that it’s
one of the cleverest pieces of marketing that I’ve ever seen. In case you’ve not come across it before, the principle is this: if your shopping would have been cheaper at one of their
major competitors, these supermarkets will give you a voucher for the difference right there at the checkout. Properly advertised (e.g. not in ways that get banned for being misleading), these schemes are an
incredibly-compelling tool: no consumer should say no to getting the best possible prices without having to shop around, right?
This voucher implies that I’d have saved 62p by shopping elsewhere. But that’s not the whole story.
But it’s nowhere near as simple as that. For a start, the terms and conditions (Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco) put
significant limitations on how the schemes work. You need to buy at least a certain number of items (8 at Asda, 10 at the other two). Those items must be directly-comparable to
competitors’ items: which basically means that only branded products count, but even among them, the competitor must stock the exact same size or else it doesn’t count, even if it would
have been cheaper to buy two half-sized products there. There are upper limits to the value of the vouchers (usually £10) and the number that you can use per transaction or per month.
“Buy X get Y free” offers are excluded. And there’s a huge list of not-compared products which may include batteries, toys, DVDs, some alcoholic drinks, cosmetics, homeware, flowers,
baby formula, light bulbs, books, and anything (even non-medicines) from the pharmacy aisle.
A whole 11p off my next shop? That’s absolutely worth me carrying this piece of paper around in my wallet and trying not to lose it for a week.
But even if it only applies to some of your shopping – the stuff that’s easy to directly compare – it’s still a good deal, right? You’re getting money back towards what you
would have saved if you’d have gone up the road? Not necessarily. Let us assume that on average the prices of these three supermarket giants are pretty much the same.
Individual products might each be a little more expensive here and a little cheaper there, but if you buy a large enough trolley-load you’re not going to notice the difference.
Following me so far? What does this mean for the voucher: it means that it no longer remotely represents what you would have saved if you’d actually been “shopping around”. Let’s take a
concrete example:
A typical basket at any one of these supermarkets will, on average, come to about the same price… even if individual items vary wildly.
Suppose that this is my somewhat-eccentric shopping list (I wanted to select a variety of comparable branded products), and I’m considering shopping at either Sainsbury’s or Tesco:
Mozzarella
Fish fingers
Clover spread
Whole milk
Crunch corner yoghurts
Fromage frais
Cadbury Mini Rolls
Frozen chips
Frozen petit pois
Goodfella’s deep pan pizza
Dough balls
Chocolate-dipped flapjacks
Dry white wine
Bagels
Multigrain wraps
Red Bull multipack
Angel Slices
Cheerios
Windolene
Cornettos
Not too unreasonable, right? I’ve made a spreadsheet showing my
working, where you’ll see today’s prices for each of these items (along with the actual brands and package sizes I’ve selected), if you’d like to check my maths, because here comes
the clever bit.
These products don’t count as comparable. And personally, I’m not sure that “basics”-range coleslaw is likely to even count as ‘food’.
Based on my calculation, taking my imaginary shopping list to Sainsbury’s will ultimately cost me £52.85. Taking it to Tesco will cost me £54.13. Pretty close, right, and I’m not likely to care about
the difference because Tesco would give me a £1.28 voucher off my next shop which makes up for the difference (note that Sainsbury’s wouldn’t reciprocate in kind if it were the other
way around, after a policy change they made late last year). But that’s not
actually a true representation of the value of ‘shopping around’. As my spreadsheet shows, if I were to buy each item on my list at the supermarket that was cheapest, it’d only cost me
a total of £43.75: that’s a saving of £9.10 (or about 17% off my entire shop) compared to the cheapest of these supermarkets. These schemes don’t give you a
real “best of all worlds”. Instead, they give you, at most, a “best of all worlds, assuming that you’re still going to be lazy enough to only shop in one place”.
When you’re buying this much shopping, you’re unlikely to want to go to two different supermarkets to do it, however much money it might save you.
If you’re particularly devious of mind, you can exploit this. For example, suppose I went to Tesco but when I reached the checkout I split my shopping into two transactions.
The first transaction contains the frozen goods, milk, wine, dough balls, flapjacks, and mini rolls. This comes out at £33.73, which is £10.38 more than Sainsbury’s would charge me for the same goods. Tesco therefore gives me a £10 voucher, which I
immediately use on the second batch of shopping: the one which contains goods that are cheaper than their Sainsbury’s equivalents. The total price of my shopping:
£44.13 – only 38p more than if I’d gone to both supermarkets and bought only the best-value
goods from each (the 38p discrepancy comes from the fact that Tesco won’t ever give you a voucher worth more than £10, no matter how much you’re losing out).
“I’d like to run these through as two transactions, please.”
It’s not even that hard to do. Obviously, somebody’s probably written an app for it, but even if you’re just doing it by guesswork you can get a better result than just piling all of
your shopping onto the conveyor belt together. Simply put the things which seem like a good deal (all of the discounted products, plus anything that feels like it’s good value) at one
end of your trolley, and unload those things last. Making sure that you’ve got at least ten items on the conveyor, ‘split’ your shopping somewhere towards the beginning of
these items. Then take any voucher you get from your first load, and apply it to the second.
It’s pretty easy, so long as you don’t mind looking like a bit of a tool at the checkout.
Well that makes it all worthwhile then, doesn’t it?
But to most people, most of the time, this is nothing more than a strong and compelling piece of marketing. Either you get reminded that you allegedly “saved money”, on a piece of paper
that probably goes into your wallet and helps to combat buyer’s remorse, or else we get told that we paid a particular
amount more than we needed to, and are offered the difference back so long as we return to the same store within the next fortnight. Either way, the supermarket wins your loyalty, which
– for a couple of pence on each transaction (assuming that the customer doesn’t lose the voucher or otherwise fail to get an opportunity to use it) – is a miniscule price to pay.
At the very end of last year, right before the subsidy rate
dropped in January, I had solar panels installed: you may remember that I blogged about it at the time. I thought you might be interested to
know how that’s working out for us.
A power plant, right on top of our house. It’s very small – like, a “13” on Power Grid – but it’s ours.
Because I’m a data nerd, I decided to monitor our energy usage, production, and total cost in order to fully understand the economic impact of our tiny power station. I appreciate that
many of you might not be able to appreciate how cool this kind of data is, but that’s because you don’t have as good an appreciation of how fun statistics can be… it is cool,
damn it!
This stacked area chart, for example, shows our energy usage in KWh of each of gas and electricity for the last 8 months.
If you look at the chart above, for example (click for a bigger version), you’ll notice a few things:
We use a lot more KWh of gas than electricity (note that’s not units of gas: our gas meter measures in cubic feet, which means we have to multiply by around… 31.5936106… to
get the KWh… yes, really – more information here), but electricity is correspondingly 3.2 times more expensive per KWh – I have a separate chart to measure our daily energy costs, and it is if
anything even more exciting (can you imagine!) than this one.
Our gas usage grows dramatically in the winter – that’s what the big pink “lump” is. That’s sort-of what you’d expect on account of our gas central heating.
Our electricity usage has trended downwards since the beginning of the year, when the solar panels were installed. It’s hard to see with the gas scale throwing it off (but again,
the “cost per day” chart makes it very clear). There’s also a bit near the end where the electricity usage seems to fall of the bottom of the chart… more on that in a moment.
Solar panels (slowly) pay for themselves in three different ways. People often find it surprising that there aren’t only one or two.
What got me sold on the idea of installing solar panels, though, was their long-term investment potential. I had the money sitting around anyway, and by my calculations we’ll get a
significantly better return-on-investment out of our little roof-mounted power station than I would out of a high-interest savings account or bond. And that’s because of the
oft-forgotten “third way” in which solar panelling pays for itself. Allow me to explain:
Powering appliances: the first and most-obvious way in which solar power makes economic sense is that it powers your appliances. Right now, we generate
almost as much electricity as we use (although because we use significantly more power in the evenings, only about a third of what which we generate goes directly into making our
plethora of computers hum away).
Selling back to the grid (export tariff): as you’re probably aware, it’s possible for a household solar array to feed power back into the National Grid: so
the daylight that we’re collecting at times when we don’t need the electricity is being sold back to our energy company (who in turn is selling it,
most-likely, to our neighbours). Because they’re of an inclination to make a profit, though (and more-importantly, because we can’t commit to making electricity for them when they
need it: only during the day, and dependent upon sunlight), they only buy units from us at about a third of the rate that they sell them to consumers. As a result, it’s worth our
while trying to use the power we generate (e.g. to charge batteries and to run things that can be run “at any point” during the day like the dishwasher, etc.)
rather than to sell it only to have to buy it back.
From a government subsidy (feed-in tariff): here’s the pleasant surprise – as part of government efforts to increase the proportion of the country’s energy that
is produced from renewable sources, they subsidise renewable microgeneration. So if you install a wind turbine in your garden or a solar array on your roof, you’ll get a kickback for
each unit of electricity that you generate. And that’s true whether you use it to power appliances or sell it back to the grid – in the latter case, you’re basically
being paid twice for it! The rate that you get paid as a subsidy gets locked-in for ~20 years after you build your array, but it’s gradually decreasing. We’re getting paid a little
over 14.5p per unit of electricity generated, per day.
Late April was bright and sunny and we were able to generate up to 19 units per day (for contrast, we use around 12 units per day), but May has so-far been rainy and grey and we’ve
made only about 13 units per day.
As the seasons have changed from Winter through Spring we’ve steadily seen our generation levels climbing. On a typical day, we now make more electricity than we use. We’re still having
to buy power from the grid, of course, because we use more electricity in the evening than we’re able to generate when the sun is low in the sky: however, if (one day) technology like
Tesla’s PowerWall becomes widely-available at reasonable prices, there’s no reason that a house like ours couldn’t be totally
independent of the grid for 6-8 months of the year.
These guys came and replaced our electricity meter, because it was… umm… running backwards.
So: what are we saving/making? Well, looking at the last week of April and the first week of May, and comparing them to the same period last year:
Powering appliances: we’re saving about 60p per day on electricity costs (down to about £1.30 per day).
Selling back to the grid: we’re earning about 50p per day in exports.
From a government subsidy: we’re earning about £2.37 per day in subsidies.
As I’m sure you can see: this isn’t peanuts. When you include the subsidy then it’s possible to consider our energy as being functionally “free”, even after you compensate for the
shorter days of the winter. Of course, there’s a significant up-front cost in installing solar panels! It’s hard to say exactly when, at this point, I expect them to have paid for
themselves (from which point I’ll be able to use the expected life of the equipment to more-accurately predict the total return-on-investment): I’m planning to monitor the situation for
at least a year, to cover the variance of the seasons, but I will of course report back when I have more data.
Our new electricity meter, which replaced the old one – one of those with a “wheel”. The red light indicates that fraud has been detected. Yeah, about that…
I mentioned that the first graph wasn’t accurate? Yeah: so it turns out that our house’s original electricity meter was of an older design that would run backwards when
electricity was being exported to the grid. Which was great to see, but not something that our electricity company approved of, on account of the fact that they were then paying us for
the electricity we sold back to the grid, twice: for a couple of days of April sunshine, our electricity meter consistently ran backwards throughout the day. So they sent a couple of
engineers out to replace it with a more-modern one, pictured above (which has a different problem: its “fraud light” comes on whenever we’re sending power back to the grid, but
apparently that’s “to be expected”).
In any case, this quirk of our old meter has made some of my numbers from earlier this year more-optimistic than they might otherwise be, and while I’ve tried to compensate
for this it’s hard to be certain that my estimates prior to its replacement are accurate. So it’s probably going to take me a little longer than I’d planned to have an accurate
baseline of exactly how much money solar is making for us.
Last month I got the opportunity to attend the EEBO-TCP Hackfest,
hosted in the (then still very-much under construction) Weston Library at my workplace. I’ve
done a couple of hackathons and similar get-togethers before, but this one was somewhat different in that it was unmistakably geared towards a different kind of geek than the
technology-minded folks that I usually see at these things. People like me, with a computer science background, were remarkably in the minority.
Me in the Weston Library (still under construction, as evidenced by the scaffolding in the background).
Instead, this particular hack event attracted a great number of folks from the humanities end of the spectrum. Which is understandable, given its theme: the Early English Books Online
Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) is an effort to digitise and make available in marked-up, machine-readable text formats a huge corpus of English-language books printed between 1475
and 1700. So: a little over three centuries of work including both household names (like Shakespeare, Galileo, Chaucer, Newton, Locke, and Hobbes) and an enormous number of others that
you’ll never have heard of.
After an introduction to the concept and the material, attendees engaged in a speed-networking event to share their thoughts prior to pitching their ideas.
The hackday event was scheduled to coincide with and celebrate the release of the first 25,000 texts into the public domain, and attendees were challenged to come up with ways to use
the newly-available data in any way they liked. As is common with any kind of hackathon, many of the attendees had come with their own ideas half-baked already, but as for me: I had no
idea what I’d end up doing! I’m not particularly familiar with the books of the 15th through 17th centuries and I’d never looked at the way in which the digitised texts had been
encoded. In short: I knew nothing.
The ideas pitch session quickly showed some overlap between different project ideas, and teams were split and reformed a few times as people found the best places for themselves.
Instead, I’d thought: there’ll be people here who need a geek. A major part of a lot of the freelance work I end up doing (and a lesser part of my work at the Bodleian, from
time to time) involves manipulating and mining data from disparate sources, and it seemed to me that these kinds of skills would be useful for a variety of different conceivable
projects.
XML may have been our interchange format, but everything fell into Excel in the end for speedy management even by less-technical team members.
I paired up with a chap called Stephen Gregg, a lecturer in 18th century literature from Bath Spa University. His idea
was to use this newly-open data to explore the frequency (and the change in frequency over the centuries) of particular structural features in early printed fiction: features like
chapters, illustrations, dedications, notes to the reader, encomia, and so on). This proved to be a perfect task for us to pair-up on, because he had the domain knowledge to ask
meaningful questions, and I had the the technical knowledge to write software that could extract the answers from the data. We shared our table with another pair, who had
technically-similar goals – looking at the change in the use of features like lists and tables (spoiler: lists were going out of fashion, tables were coming in, during the 17th century)
in alchemical textbooks – and ultimately I was able to pass on the software tools I’d written to them to adapt for their purposes, too.
A quick meeting on the relative importance of ‘chapters’ as a concept in 16th century literature. Half of the words that the academics are saying go over my head, but I’m formulating
XPath queries in my head while I wait.
And here’s where I made a discovery: the folks I was working with (and presumably academics of the humanities in general) have no idea quite how powerful data mining tools could be in
giving them new opportunities for research and analysis. Within two hours we were getting real results from our queries and were making amendments and refinements in our questions and
trying again. Within a further two hours we’d exhausted our original questions and, while the others were writing-up their findings in an attractive way, I was beginning to look at how
the structural differences between fiction and non-fiction might be usable as a training data set for an artificial intelligence that could learn to differentiate between the two,
providing yet more value from the dataset. And all the while, my teammates – who’d been used to looking at a single book at a time – were amazed by the possibilities we’d uncovered for
training computers to do simple tasks while reading thousands at once.
The area around Old St. Paul’s Cathedral was the place to be if you were a 16th century hipster looking for a new book.
Elsewhere at the hackathon, one group was trying to simulate the view of the shelves of booksellers around the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, another looked at the change in the popularity
of colour and fashion-related words over the period (especially challenging towards the beginning of the timeline, where spelling of colours was less-standardised than towards the end),
and a third came up with ways to make old playscripts accessible to modern performers.
Aside from an increase in the relative frequency of the use of colour words to describe yellow things, there’s not much to say about this graph.
At the end of the session we presented our findings – by which I mean, Stephen explained what they meant – and talked about the technology and its potential future impact – by which I
mean, I said what we’d like to allow others to do with it, if they’re so-inclined. And I explained how I’d come to learn over the course of the day what the word encomium meant.
Presenting our findings in amazing technicolour Excel.
My personal favourite contribution from the event was by Sarah Cole, who adapted the text of a story about a witch
trial into a piece of interactive fiction, powered by Twine/Twee, and then
allowed us as an audience to collectively “play” her game. I love the idea of making old artefacts more-accessible to modern audiences through new media, and this was a fun and
innovative way to achieve this. You can even play her game
online!
(by the way: for those of you who enjoy my IF recommendations: have a
look at Detritus; it’s a delightful little experimental/experiential game)
Things are about to go very badly for Joan Buts.
But while that was clearly my favourite, the judges were far more impressed by the work of my teammate and I, as well as the team who’d adapted my software and used it to investigate
different features of the corpus, and decided to divide the cash price between the four of us. Which was especially awesome, because I hadn’t even realised that there was a
prize to be had, and I made the most of it at the Drinking About Museums event
I attended later in the day.
Cold hard cash! This’ll be useful at the bar, later!
If there’s a moral to take from all of this, it’s that you shouldn’t let your background limit your involvement in “hackathon”-like events. This event was geared towards literature,
history, linguistics, and the study of the book… but clearly there was value in me – a computer geek, first and foremost – being there. Similarly, a hack event I attended last year, while clearly tech-focussed, wouldn’t have
been as good as it was were it not for the diversity of the attendees, who included a good number of artists and entrepreneurs as well as the obligatory hackers.
“Nice work, Stephen.” “Nice work, Dan.”
But for me, I think the greatest lesson is that humanities researchers can benefit from thinking a little bit like computer scientists, once in a while. The code I wrote (which uses Ruby and Nokogiri) is freely available for use and adaptation, and while I’ve no idea whether or not it’ll ever be useful to anybody again, what
it represents is the research benefits of inter-disciplinary collaboration. It pleases me to see things like the “Library Carpentry” (software for research, with a
library slant) seeming to take off.
Anybody who has, like me, come into contact with the Squiz Matrix CMS for any length of time will
have come across the reasonably easy-to-read but remarkably long CAPTCHA that it
shows. These are especially-noticeable in its administrative interface, where it uses them as an exaggerated and somewhat painful “are you sure?” – restarting the CMS’s internal
crontab manager, for example, requires that the administrator types a massive 25-letter CAPTCHA.
Four long CAPTCHA from the Squiz Matrix CMS.
But there’s another interesting phenomenon that one begins to notice after seeing enough of the back-end CAPTCHA that appear. Strange patterns of letters that appear in sequence
more-often than would be expected by chance. If you’re a fan of wordsearches, take a look at the composite screenshot above: can you find a person’s name in each of the four lines?
Four long CAPTCHA from the Squiz Matrix CMS, with the names Greg, Dom, Blair and Marc highlighted.
There are four names – Greg, Dom, Blair and Marc – which routinely appear in these CAPTCHA.
Blair, being the longest name, was the first that I noticed, and at first I thought that it might represent a fault in the pseudorandom number generation being used that was resulting
in a higher-than-normal frequency of this combination of letters. Another idea I toyed with was that the CAPTCHA text might be being entirely generated from a set of pronounceable
syllables (which is a reasonable way to generate one-time passwords that resist entry errors resulting from reading difficulties: in fact, we do this at Three Rings), in which these four names also appear, but by now I’d have
thought that I’d have noticed this in other patterns, and I hadn’t.
Instead, then, I had to conclude that these names were some variety of Easter Egg.
Smiley decorated eggs. Picture courtesy Kate Ter Haar.
I was curious about where they were coming from, so I searched the source code, but while I found plenty of references to Greg Sherwood, Marc McIntyre, and Blair Robertson. I
couldn’t find Dom, but I’ve since come to discover that he must be Dominic Wong – these four were, according to Greg’s blog – developers with Squiz in the early 2000s, and seemingly saw themselves as a dynamic
foursome responsible for the majority of the CMS’s code (which, if the comment headers are to be believed, remains true).
Greg, Marc, Blair and Dom, as depicted in Greg’s 2007 blog post.
That still didn’t answer for me why searching for their names in the source didn’t find the responsible code. I started digging through the CMS’s source code, where I eventually
found fudge/general/general.inc (a lot of Squiz CMS code is buried in a folder called “fudge”, and web addresses used internally sometimes contain this word, too: I’d like to
believe that it’s being used as a noun and that the developers were just fans of the buttery sweet, but I have a horrible feeling that it was used in its popular verb form). In that file, I found
this function definition:
/**
* Generates a string to be used for a security key
*
* @param int $key_len the length of the random string to display in the image
* @param boolean $include_uppercase include uppercase characters in the generated password
* @param boolean $include_numbers include numbers in the generated password
*
* @return string
* @access public
*/
function generate_security_key($key_len, $include_uppercase = FALSE, $include_numbers = FALSE) {
$k = random_password($key_len, $include_uppercase, $include_numbers);
if ($key_len > 10) {
$gl = Array('YmxhaXI=', 'Z3JlZw==', 'bWFyYw==', 'ZG9t');
$g = base64_decode($gl[rand(0, (count($gl) - 1)) ]);
$pos = rand(1, ($key_len - strlen($g)));
$k = substr($k, 0, $pos) . $g . substr($k, ($pos + strlen($g)));
}
return $k;
} //end generate_security_key()
For the benefit of those of you who don’t speak PHP, especially PHP that’s been made deliberately hard to decipher, here’s what’s happening when “generate_security_key” is being called:
A random password is being generated.
If that password is longer than 10 characters, a random part of it is being replaced with either “blair”, “greg”, “marc”, or “dom”. The reason that you can’t see these words in the
code is that they’re trivially-encoded using a scheme called Base64 – YmxhaXI=, Z3JlZw==, bWFyYw==, and ZG9t are Base64 representations of the four
names.
This seems like a strange choice of Easter Egg: immortalising the names of your developers in CAPTCHA. It seems like a strange choice especially because this somewhat weakens the
(already-weak) CAPTCHA, because an attacking robot can quickly be configured to know that a 11+-letter codeword will always consist of letters and exactly one instance of one of these
four names: in fact, knowing that a CAPTCHA will always contain one of these four and that I can refresh until I get one that I like, I can quickly turn an
11-letter CAPTCHA into a 6-letter one by simply refreshing until I get one with the longest name – Blair – in it!
A lot has been written about how Easter Eggs undermine software security (in exchange for a
small boost to developer morale) – that’s a major part of why Microsoft has banned them from its operating systems (and, for the most part, Apple has too). Given that these
particular CAPTCHA in Squiz CMS are often nothing more than awkward-looking “are you sure?” dialogs, I’m not concerned about the direct security implications, but it does make me worry
a little about the developer culture that produced them.
I know that this Easter Egg might be harmless, but there’s no way for me to know (short of auditing the entire system) what other Easter Eggs might be hiding under the
surface and what they do, especially if the developers have, as in this case, worked to cover their tracks! It’s certainly the kind of thing I’d worry about if I were, I don’t
know, a major government who use Squiz software, especially their cloud-hosted variants which are harder to
effectively audit. Just a thought.
Somebody on /r/MegaLoungeVI1 this week asked me what my favourite magic trick (to perform) is. And because it’s far easier
to show somebody than to tell them, I turned on the webcam and did a one-take shot of this, my attempt at something akin to Derek Dingle‘s stunning interpretation of Larry Jennings‘ Ambitious Classic:
Given that it’s rare for me to film myself performing magic and be, on the whole, pleased with the result, I thought I’d share it with you all, too, in case there are those among my
friends who haven’t had the opportunity yet to see me perform (apologies for the fake-sounding monologue – the sound was dubbed on later).
Why do I like this particular effect so much? It’s certainly not the thing that gets the best reaction from my spectators. In fact, if I were to ask people I’ve performed for what trick
was their favourite, I imagine that not one of them would choose this. But for me, it represents the challenge of magic: it’s a moderately-complex series of sleights joined
together into a rhythmic dance.
I’m not sure if that translates well, or whether one of those things, like describing code as poetry, that you already need to understand before you can understand.
In any case – if you were impressed by my trick, you should now watch a master
performing it, and perhaps you’ll see how far I’ve yet got to go…
1 One of Reddit’s MegaLounges2, access to which is gained by being gilded in the prior MegaLounge (or /r/lounge itself, in the case of the first MegaLounge).
2 For the last 5 years, it’s been possible to buy “Reddit Gold”
subscriptions, and for most of that time it’s been possible to anonymously gift individual months of Reddit Gold to other users (known as “gilding”), in acknowledgement of a
contribution they’ve made on the site. Having “Reddit Gold” grants you access to the official gold subreddit /r/lounge; getting gilded
while in/r/lounge gets you access to the unofficial /r/MegaLounge, and so on.
There are several dozen ‘levels’.
I’m pretty sure that an outside observer, given the advance knowledge of this blog post, could easily tell when I’m in the process of getting over an illness just by the food I eat. I’m
pretty sure that I have a particular ‘tell’ in the foods I look for when I’m on the cusp of recovering from a cold, like now: or, I suppose, on those rare occasions that I’ll have drunk
enough to be suffering from a hangover.
Take this lunchtime, for example. I’ve been off work for the last couple of days, laid low by what seems to be the very same cold that I was sure I’d dodged when everybody else got it,
last month (I blame Annabel, the contagious little beast, who’s particularly keen on shoving her hands into people’s mouths). Today I’m back on my feet, but working from home: I skipped
breakfast, but by lunchtime I felt able to face some food, and quickly determined what it was that I really wanted:
An egg and cheese wafflestack. If you think it looks calorie-laden and disgusting, then you’re right: but you wouldn’t be saying that if you were recovering from an illness!
Egg & Cheese Wafflestack
Serves: 1 unwell-but-recovering person
Preparation: 15 minutes
Difficulty: if you can’t make this, get the hell out of the kitchen
Ingredients
4 × frozen potato waffles. I’m using Birds Eye ones, but honestly, who can tell the difference?
~ 30g mature cheddar cheese, grated or thinly sliced, brought to room temperature so it melts quickly
2 × eggs
A little vegetable oil
Tomato ketchup (alternatively, brown sauce works well)
Method
Grill the waffles in accordance with the instructions. Meanwhile, fry the two eggs (“sunny side up”: keep the yolk fluid). Assemble in stacks, with each stack consisting of cheese
sandwiched between two waffles, topped with an egg and the ketchup. Serve immediately. Eat as quickly as you dare.
So now I’m sitting here eating the taste of delicious recovery, generating 4096-bit strong probable prime numbers (like you do), and reading the feedback on a browser plugin I released
recently. And every part of that is a huge improvement upon lying ill in bed.
I spent last week in the French Alps with JTA, Ruth, Annabel, and some hangers-on. It was great to get out onto the snow again for some skiing as well as some ski-based geocaching, but perhaps the most remarkable events of the trip happened not on the pistes but on
an “afternoon off” that I decided to take after a rather jarring 42km/h (26mph) faceplant earlier in the day.
A great thing about taking a GPSr for snowsports is that you know exactly how fast you were going (my record is 101km/h!) when you crash. Thankfully my faceplant was at a mere 42km/h.
Not to be deprived of the opportunity for some outdoors, though, I decided to spend the afternoon hiking out to villaflou, a geocache only about a kilometre and a half away from our chalet. Well: a kilometre and a half as the crow flies: it was also some
distance down the steep-sided Doron de Bozel valley, through a wooded area. But there was, in theory at least, a hiking trail winding its way down the valley. The trail
was clearly designed for summer use, but it was a trail nonetheless, so I ate a hearty lunch with Ruth and then set out from La Tania to explore.
Signposts marking the trail were supposed to stand six feet tall, but barely stuck out atop the drifts… where I could find them at all!
It quickly became apparent that I was underequipped for the journey ahead. With the freshly-fallen soft snow routinely knee-deep and sometimes deeper still, I would have done well to
have taken at the very least snow shoes (and, I’d later conclude, perhaps also poles and rope). I was, however, properly dressed with thermal layers, salopettes, multiple
pairs of gloves, hat, etc., and – unlike Rory when he got caught out by snow the other year – was at
least equipped with two fully-charged GPS devices (and spare batteries), tightly-fitted boots, a first aid kit and emergency supplies. And as the only hiker foolish enough
to cut my way through this freshly-fallen snow, my tracks would be easy to follow back, should I need to.
Walking through knee-deep snow is tiring, even downhill! Beautiful, though!
Nonetheless, it’s quite an isolating feeling to be stranded from civilization… even if only by half a kilometre… surrounded by snowy mountains and silent woodland. If you’re approaching
the hike in a safe and sane way – and you should be – then it makes you especially careful about even the simplest of obstacles. Crossing a small stream whose bridge is completely
concealed beneath the snow becomes a careful operation involving probing the snow and testing the support it provides before even beginning to ford it: a turned ankle could lead to at
the very least an incredibly painful hike back!
Needless to say, my caution around snow and mountains has been expanded by not only Rory’s scary experience, linked above, but also of course by my dad’s death almost three years ago, who slipped on snow and fell off a cliff. And
he was hiking in Britain!
After my hike down from La Tania, I was pleased to pass through La Nouvaz, a small alpine village that indicated that I was over half-way to my destination.
The village of La Nouvaz, half-way as the crow flies between my accommodation and the geocache (and over half-way by my planned route), was beautiful to behold: a sign of civilization
after about an hour of hard wading through snow. Even when you’ve used satellites to know your location accurate to a metre, it’s nice to be reassured that your expedition really is
panning out as you’d planned.
The “road” into La Nouvaz had been ploughed that morning, but was already becoming treacherous.
I also now had a metric to translate the journey time estimates that I’d seen on the signs: it was taking me about three times as long as they said, presumably because they’d been
written for summer hikers. The segment that had been advertised as 20 minute walk was taking me an hour: that was useful information – I sat with a friendly dog while I
recalculated my travel time with this new data. There was a blizzard blowing across the mountaintops (which had been partially-responsible for my faceplant in the morning!) and I’d
heard that it was expected to descend into the valley in the early evening, so I wanted to make sure I wasn’t out in the open when that happened! But everything was okay, and I had time
to complete my expedition with two hours to spare (which I reasoned could be used hunting for the geocache, as well as a emergency reserve), so I pressed on.
The trail become more well-concealed as I pressed on. Here was my first sight of the hamlet of Villaflou, ahead.
After La Nouvaz, the path became even harder to navigate, and in the thinner tree cover huge drifts formed where underneath there were presumably walls and fences. At one point, I
slipped through snow that came up to my waist, and had to dig my way out. At another, I’d deviated from the path and was only able to get back on course by sliding down a snowbank on my
bum. And honestly, I can’t think of a more fun way than that to spend a Narnian hiking trip.
The hamlet at Villaflou – nothing more than a couple of buildings clustered around a chapel – is as picturesque as it is remote.
My GPS coordinates took me directly to the pump and trough in the square at Villaflou, and I spent some time (in my thinner pair of gloves) feeling around its metal edges in an
effort to find the small magnétique geocache that was allegedly there. But that’s not where it was at all, and honestly, if I hadn’t just spent two hours hiking through
deep snow I might now have had the drive to search for as long as I did! As I hunted, I thought back to my GCSE in French and tried to work out how I’d explain what I was doing to
anybody who came by, but I never saw another soul. Eventually, my efforts paid off, as I discovered a small metal plate in a cunning hiding place, disguised to make it look like it
belonged to the thing it was attached to… and behind it, a log with just four names. And now: mine was fifth!
The snow was a lot less-deep in Villaflou itself, and had clearly been stamped down by locals moving around.
I texted my revised travel times to Ruth, and then set off back. Following my footsteps made the journey less-arduous, but this was compensated for in equal measure by the fact that I
was now heading uphill instead of down.
As I passed through La Nouvaz, I noticed two strange things –
Firstly: looking back up at the route I’d come down, from La Tania, I saw that there was a signpost that indicated that the recommended route back wasn’t the route that I’d
come to begin with. The recommended route was the other way, to the left, and would only take me about 30 minutes (or, based on my recalculation, about an hour and a half).
And secondly: looking along this proposed new route, I observed that somebody had taken it since I passed this way last. There had been no tracks on that route before,
but now there were, and looking up the mountainside I could make out the heads of two hikers bobbing away over a rise.
Meanwhile, the blizzard was starting to descend into the valley, so I was certainly keen to try the “preferred” route.
I followed in the footsteps of the other hikers: it’s a great deal easier to follow than to lead, in deep snow, and I was glad to be able to save the energy. I treated myself to a swig
from my hip flask as congratulations on finding the geocache and my good fortune in being able to tail some other hikers heading my way. But my celebration was perhaps premature! About
twenty minutes later, I caught up with the two women ahead, and they clearly weren’t doing very well.
They’d come up to La Tania from Paris, accompanied by some friends, for a long weekend. Their friends had gone off skiing, but they hadn’t been able to join them because they were both
pregnant (four months and six months), and no doctor on Earth would recommend skiing after the first trimester, so instead they’d decided to go out for a walk. There was a circular walk
on a map that they’d seen, which looked like it’d take about an hour, so they’d set out (wearing little more snow protection than wellington boots, and one of them without even a hat),
following what looked to be a well-trodden footpath: in fact, it was probably the first part of my outbound journey, from La Tania to La Nouvaz, that they’d followed, “overtaking” me
when I left the route to head on to Villaflou and the geocache.
The two women had been taking turns to lead, having also discovered how much easier it is to follow in somebody else’s footsteps, but I wonder how well-equipped to ‘lead’ either of
them really were.
On the ascent back up they’d gotten lost – there are no good waypoints, the path is unclear, and the encroaching blizzard hampering the ability to pick out distance landmarks. They’d
wandered – it turned out – several hundred metres off where the path should have gone, and I’d made the mistake of assuming that they knew what they were doing and followed them the
same way. Worse yet, this ‘alternative’ path back to La Tania didn’t feature on any of my digital maps, and these two severely-underequipped mothers-to-be were struggling with
inadequate grip on the slippy ground beneath the snow. When I first encountered them, one of them had slid into and was trapped in a snowdrift, and the other called me over to help her
pull her friend free.
Between them, they had a paper map designed for casual summer use, and they’d realised their predicament. Were I not there, they confessed (once we’d established a dialogue somewhere
between their shaky English and my very shaky French), they were about to start trying to find sufficient landmarks that they could summon rescue. Instead, now, they’d put themselves
into my care. “We do not want to die,” said the one I later learned was called Vicki, after a few seconds consideration of the translation.
Is this a path? Was it?
I plotted us a new course, cross-country up an aggressive slope towards the nearest road and thus, I hoped, towards civilization. I lead the way, tamping down the snow ahead as best I
could into steps, and bemoaned my lack of a rope. I texted updates to Ruth, advising her of the situation and in each one establishing when I’d next be in contact, and as the women
began to tire, prepared for the possibility that I might need to eventually relay coordinates to a rescue team: I practised my French numbers, under my breath, as we weaved our way up
the steep mountainside.
After hours out on a mountainside, not sure exactly where you are in relation to a safe route home, this is a sight for sore eyes.
A hundred metres from the road the gradient became worse and we were unable to climb any higher, so we turned towards La Tania and tacked alongside it. There, about an hour and a half
after I first met them, we found a signpost that indicated that we were back on the footpath: the footpath that they’d originally hoped to follow but found themselves unable to spot,
and which – by following in their footsteps – I too had failed to spot.
Finally reaching the main road, Vicki and Marine were pleased to be able to get back to their hotel and not die out on a mountainside.
Following that, we got back to the road to La Tania and to safety.
I find myself wondering many things. For one: who, at six months pregnant, thinks it’s a wise idea to trek through deep snow, underequipped, from a bad map, over an Alp? But I also
wonder what might have happened if I’d have taken the same route back as I’d taken out to my geocache (and thus never bumped into them)? Or even if I’d not have faceplanted earlier in
the day and thus decided to take the afternoon off from skiing at all? They weren’t ever far from safety, of course, and while the weather was rapidly becoming hostile to
helicopters, they’d have probably been rescued so long as they’d been able to describe their position adequately (and so long as they didn’t keep wandering in the direction they’d been
wandering when I met them, which would ultimately have taken them to a sheer cliff), but still…
So yeah: on my holidays, I rescued two lost pregnant hikers from an Alpine blizzard, while returning from a geocaching expedition. I think I win today’s “badass point”.
The most recent column in Savage Love had a theme
featuring letters on the subject of gender-neutrality and genderfluidity. You’ve probably come across the term “genderqueer” conceptually even if you’re not aware of
people within your own life to whom the title might be applied: people who might consider themselves to be of no gender, or of multiple genders, or of variable gender, of a non-binary
gender, or trans (gender’s a complex subject, yo!).
If you’ve come across the purple circle symbol before and know what it signifies then you probably know far more than this article will ever tell you.
For about the last four or five years, I’ve been able to gradually managed to change my honorific title (where one is required) in many places from the traditional and assumed
“Mr.” to the gender-neutral “Mx.” Initially, it was
only possible to do this where the option was provided to enter a title of one’s choosing – you know: where there’s tickboxes and an “Other:” option – but increasingly, I’ve seen it
presented as one of the default options, alongside Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., and the like. As a title, Mx. is gaining traction.
HMRC are among the organisations to whom I’ve been known as “Mx. Dan Q” for several years.
I’m not genderqueer, mind. I’m cisgender and male: a well-understood and popular gender that’s even got a convenient and widely-used word for it: “man”. My use of “Mx.” in a variety of
places is based not upon what I consider my gender to be but upon the fact that my gender shouldn’t matter. HMRC, pictured above, is a great example: they only communicate with
me by post and by email (so there’s no identification advantage in implying a gender as which I’m likely to be presenting), and what gender I am damn well shouldn’t have any impact
on how much tax I pay or how I pay it anyway: it’s redundant information! So why demand I provide a title at all?
Despite offering no fewer than 85 different titles (and no “Other” option), not sorted alphabetically, Scottish Power don’t permit “Mx.” nor a blank option. Instead, I’m going by
“Owner/Occupier”.
I don’t object to being “Mr.”, of course. Just the other day, while placing an order for some Christmas supplies, a butcher in Oxford’s covered market referred to me as “Mr. Q”.
Which is absolutely fine, because that’s the title (and gender) by which he’ll identify me when I turn up the week after next to pick up some meat.
I’d prefer not to use an honorific title at all: I fail to see what it adds to my name or my identity to put “Mr.” in it! But where it’s (a) for some-reason required
(often because programmers have a blind spot for things like names and titles), and (b) my gender shouldn’t
matter, don’t be surprised if I put “Mx.” in your form.
And if after all of that you don’t offer me that option, know that I’m going to pick something stupid just to mess with your data. That’s Wing Commander Dan Q’s promise.
One of the great joys of owning a house is that you can do pretty much
whatever you please with it. I celebrated Ruth, JTA
and I’s purchase of Greendale last year by wall-mounting not one but
two televisions and putting shelves up everywhere. But honestly, a little bit of DIY isn’t that unusual nor special. We’ve got plans for a few other changes to the
house, but right now we’re pushing our eco-credentials: we had cavity wall insulation added to the older parts of the building the other week and an electric car charging port added not
long before that. And then… came this week’s big change.
Look at all that South-facing roof, sitting there serving no purpose except to keep the rain off our heads.
Solar photovoltaics! They’re cool, they’re (becoming) economical, and we’ve got this big roof that faces almost due-South that would otherwise be just sitting there catching rain. Why
not show off our green credentials and save ourselves some money by covering it with solar cells, we thought.
Annabel sits at the window and supervises the parking of the structural engineer, the electrician, and the solar panel specialist.
Because it’s me, I ended up speaking to five different companies and, after removing one from the running for employing a snake for a salesman, collecting seven quotes from the
remaining four, I began to do my own research. The sheer variety of panels, inverters, layouts and configurations (all of which are described in their technical sheets using terms that
in turn required a little research into electrical efficiency and dusting off formulas I’d barely used since my physics GCSE exam) are mind-boggling. Monolithic, string, or
micro-inverters? 250w or 327w panels? Where to run the cables that connect the inverter (in the attic) to the generation meter and fusebox (in the ground floor toilet)? Needless to say,
every company had a different idea about the “best way” to do it – sometimes subtly different, sometimes dramatically – and had a clear agenda to push. So – as somebody not suckered in
to a quick deal – I went and did the background reading first.
The shape of our conservatory made erecting the scaffolding (which “staddles” it) a somewhat complicated operation.
In case you’re not yet aware, let me tell you the three reasons that solar panels are a great idea, economically-speaking. Firstly, of course, they make electricity out of sunlight
which you can then use: that’s pretty cool. With good discipline and a monitoring tool either in hardware or software, you can discover the times that you’re making more power than
you’re using, and use that moment to run the dishwasher or washing machine or car charger or whatever. Or the tumble drier, I suppose, although if you’re using the tumble drier
because it’s sunny then you lose a couple of your ‘green points’ right there. So yeah: free energy is a nice selling point.
The second point is that the grid will buy the energy you make but don’t use. That’s pretty cool, too – if it’s a sunny day but there’s nobody in the house, then our
electricity meter will run backwards: we’re selling power back to the grid for consumption by our neighbours. Your energy provider pays you for that, although they only pay you
about a third of what you pay them to get the energy back again if you need it later, so it’s always more-efficient to use the power (if you’ve genuinely got something to use
it for, like ad-hoc bitcoin mining or something) than to sell it. That said, it’s still “free money”, so you needn’t complain too much.
The third way that solar panels make economic sense is still one of the most-exciting, though. In order to enhance uptake of solar power and thus improve the chance that we hit the
carbon emission reduction targets that Britain committed to at the Kyoto
Protocol (and thus avoid a multi-billion-pound fine), the government subsidises renewable microgeneration plants. If you install solar panels on your house before the end of this
year (when the subsidy is set to decrease) the government will pay you 14.38p per unit of electricity you produce… whether you use it or whether you sell it. That rate is
retail price index linked and guaranteed for 20 years, and as a result residential solar installations invariably “pay for themselves” within that period, making them a logical
investment for anybody who’s got a suitable roof and who otherwise has the money just sitting around. (If you don’t have the cash to hand, it might be worth taking out a loan
to pay for solar panels, but then the maths gets a lot more complicated.)
Look ma, no carbon emissions.
The scaffolding went up on the afternoon of day one, and I took the opportunity to climb up myself and give the gutters a good cleaning-out, because it’s a lot easier to do that from a
fixed platform than it is from our wobbly “community ladder”. On day two, a team of electricians and a solar expert appeared at breakfast time and by 3pm they were gone, leaving behind
a fully-functional solar array. On day three, we were promised that the scaffolding company would reappear and remove the climbing frame from our garden, but it’s now dark and they’ve
not been seen yet, which isn’t ideal but isn’t the end of the world either: not least because Ruth’s been unwell and thus hasn’t had the chance to get up and see the view from the top
of it, yet.
Because that’s the kind of nerd I am, I have a process in place already to monitor our energy use fluctuations: note the jump in gas usage as we turned on the central heating for the
winter!
We made about 4 units of electricity on our first day, which didn’t seem bad for an overcast afternoon about a fortnight away from the shortest day of the year. That’s about enough to
power every light bulb in the house for the duration that the sun was in the sky, plus a little extra (we didn’t opt to commemorate the occasion by leaving the fridge door open in order
to ensure that we used every scrap of the power we generated).
Because I’m a bit of a data nerd these years, I’ve been monitoring our energy usage lately anyway and as a result I’ve got an interesting baseline against which to compare the
effectiveness of this new addition. And because there’s no point in being a data nerd if you don’t get to share the data love, I will of course be telling you all about it as soon as I
know more.
For the last four years or so, Ruth, JTA and I (and
during their times living with us, Paul and Matt) have organised our finances according to a system of means-assessment. I’ve mentioned it to people on a number of ocassions, and every time
it seems to attract interest, so I thought I’d explain how we got to it and how it works, so that others might benefit from it. We think it’s particularly good for families consisting
of multiple adults sharing a single household (for example, polyamorous networks like ours, or families with grown children) but there are probably others who’d benefit from it, too –
it’s perfectly reasonable for just two adults with different salaries to use it, for example. And I’ve made a
sample spreadsheet that you’re welcome to copy and adapt, if you’d like to.
How we got here
That’s a long receipt!
After I left Aberystwyth and Ruth, JTA, Paul and I started living at “Earth”, our
house in Headington, we realised that for the first time, the four of us were financially-connected to one another. We started by dividing the rent and council tax four ways (with an
exemption for Paul while he was still looking for work), splitting the major annual expenses (insurance, TV license) between the largest earners, and taking turns to pay smaller,
more-regular expenses (shopping, bills, etc.). This didn’t work out very well, because it only takes two cycles of you being the “unlucky” one who gets lumbered with the
more-expensive-than-usual shopping trip – right before a party, for example – before it starts to feel like a bit of a lottery.
Our solution, then, was to replace the system with a fairer one. We started adding up our total expenditures over the course of each month and settling the difference between one
another at the end of each month. Because we’re clearly raging socialists, we decided that the fairest (and most “family-like”) way to distribute responsibility was by a system of
partial means-assessment: de chacun selon ses facultés.
Another enormous shopping trip.
We started out with what we called “75% means-assessment”: in other words, a quarter of our shared expenditures were split evenly, four ways, and three-quarters were split
proportionally in accordance with our gross income. We arrived at that figure after a little dissussion (and a computerised model that we could all play with on a big screen). Working
from gross income invariably introduces inequalities into the system (some of which are mirrored in our income tax system) but a bigger unfairness came – as it does in wider society –
from the fact that the difference between a very-low income and a low income is significantly more (from a disposable money perspective) than the difference between a low and a high
income. This was relevant, because ‘personal’ expenses, such as mobile phone bills, were not included in the scheme and so we may have penalised lower-earners more than we had intended.
On the other hand, 75% means-assessment was still significantly more-“communist” than 0%!
When I mentioned this system to people, sometimes they’d express surprise that I (as one of the higher earners) would agree to such an arrangement: the question was usually asked with a
tone that implied that they expected the lower earners to mooch off of the higher earners, which (coupled with the clearly false idea that there’s a linear relationship between the
amount of work involved in a job and the amount that it pays) would result in a “race to the bottom”, with each participant trying to do the smallest amount of work possible in order to
maximise the degree to which they were subsidised by the others. From a game theory perspective, the argument makes sense, I would concede. But on the other hand – what the hell would I
be doing agreeing to live with and share finances with (and then continuing to live with and share finances with) people whose ideology was so opposed to my own in the first place?
Naturally, I trusted my fellow Earthlings in this arrangement: I already trusted them – that’s why I was living with them!
Louis Blanc had the right idea, but his idealism was hampered by the selfishness inherent in any sufficiently-large group. Had he brought socialism to his house, rather than his
country, he might have felt more successful.
How it works
We’ve had a few iterations, but we eventually settled on a system at a higher rate of means-assessment: 100%! It’s not perfect, but it’s the fairest way I’ve ever been involved with of
sharing the costs of running a house. I’ve put together a spreadsheet based on the one that we use that you can adapt to your own household, if you’d like to try a fairer way of
splitting your bills – whether there are just two of you or lots of you in your home, this provides a genuinely equitable way to share your costs.
Click on the sheet to see a Google Drive document that you can save a copy of and adapt to your own household.
The sheet I’ve provided – linked above – is not quite like ours: ours has extra features to handle Ruth and I’s fluctuating income (mine because of freelance work, Ruth’s
because she’s gradually returning to work following a period
of maternity leave), an archive of each month’s finances, tools to help handle repayments to one another of money borrowed, and convenience macros to highlight who owes what to
whom. This is, then, a simplified version from which you can build a model for your own household, or that you can use as a starting point for discussions with your own tribe.
Start on the “People” sheet and tell it how many participants your household has, their names, and their relative incomes. Also add your proposed level of means-assessment: anything
from 0% to 100%… or beyond, but that does have some interesting philosophical consequences.
Then, on the “Expenses” sheet, record each thing that your household pays for over the course of each month. At the bottom, it’ll total up how much each person has paid, and how much
they would have been expected to pay, based on the level of your means-assessment: at 0%, for example, each person would be expected to pay 1/N
of the total; at the other extreme (100%), a person with no income would be expected to make no contribution, and a person with twice the income of another would be expected to pay
twice as much as them. It’ll also show the difference between the two values: so those who’ve paid less than their ‘share’ will have negative numbers and will owe money to those who’ve
paid more than their share, indicated by positive numbers. Settle the difference… and you’re ready to roll on to the next month.
Now you’re equipped to employ a (wholly or partially) means-assessed model to your household finances. If you adapt this model or have ideas for its future development, I’d love to hear
them.
More-lately, I’m also a big fan of making pizza. I’ve always enjoyed making bread, but over the last five years or so I’ve become particularly fascinated with making pizzas. I make a
pretty good one now, I think, although I’m still learning and periodically experimenting with different flour blends, cooking surfaces, kneading techniques and so on. Those of you who
know how capable I am of being a giant nerd about things should understand what I mean when I say that I’ve gotten to be a pizza nerd.
Normally, dough should be stretched into a circular shape: but today, I needed a perfect circle of an exact size, so I cut it instead.
In pizza-related circles of the Internet (yes, theseexist), there’s recently been some talk about pizza cake: a dish made by assembling several pizzas, stacked on top of one another in a cake tin –
ideally one with a removable base – and then baking them together as a unit. Personally, I think that the name “pizza cake” isn’t as accurate nor descriptive as alternative names “pizza
pie” (which unfortunately doesn’t translate so well over the Atlantic) or “pizza lasagne” (which is pretty universal). In any case, you can by now imagine what I’m talking about. What
I’m talking about is an artery-destroying monster.
Spreading sauce onto the bottom layer of the pizza cake.
Not wanting to squander my dough-making skills on something that must be cut to size (proper pizza dough should always be stretched, or in the worst case rolled, to size – did
I mention that I’d been getting picky about this kind of stuff?), I opted to go for the lazy approach and use some pre-made dough, from a chilled can. That was probably my first and
largest mistake, but a close second was that I followed through with this crazy idea at all.
This pizza cake is one-third meaty, two-thirds veggie: the fillings go all the way down across four layers of pizzas.
I didn’t have as deep a cake tin as I’d have liked, either, so my resulting pizza cake was shorter and squatter than I might have liked. Nonetheless, it came together reasonably well,
albeit with some careful repositioning of the ingredients in order to provide the necessary structural support for each layer as it was added. I eventually built four layers: that is,
from bottom to top – dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms, dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms, dough, tomato, cheese, pepperoni & mushrooms, dough, tomato, cheese,
pepperoni & mushrooms. As I went along I found myself thinking about calzone.
Regardless of anything else, though, it smelled amazing as it came out of the oven.
Using a cake tin with a removable base turned out to be an incredibly wise move, as it proved possible to separate the food from its container by simply running around the outside and
then tapping the tin from underneath. It had the weight and consistency of a cake of similar size, and smelled richly like freshly-based bread and cheese: exactly what you’d expect,
really. I sliced it into six wedges, “cake-style”, and served it with a side salad to my courageous test pilots.
At a glance, it looked like the thickest imaginable pizza. Sadly, this was the most-awesome part of the experience.
Ultimately, though, the experience wasn’t one we’re likely to repeat: the resulting dish was less-satisfying than if I’d just gone to the effort of making four regular pizzas in the
first place. It was impossible to get an adequately crispy crust over the expanded surface area without risking burning the cheese, and as a result the central bread was unsatisfyingly
stodgy, regardless of how thin I’d rolled it in anticipation of this risk. Having toppings spread through the dish was interesting, but didn’t add anything in particular that’s worthy
of note. And while we ate it all up, we wouldn’t have chosen it instad of an actual pizza unless we’d never tried it before – once was enough.
But that’s just our experience: if you give pizza cake/pie/lasagne a go, let me know how you get on. Meanwhile, I’ll stick to making my own dough and using it to make my own regular,
flat pizzas. The way that the pizza gods intended!
The BBC ran a story this week about changes to the National Curriculum that’ll introduce the concepts of computing programming to children at Key Stage 1: that is, between the
ages of five and seven. I for one think that this is a very important change, long overdue in our schools. But I don’t feel that way because I think there’ll be a huge market for
computer programmers in 13+ years, when these children leave school: rather, I think that learning these programming skills provide – as a secondary benefit – an understanding of
technology that kids today lack.
Ignoring the implied gender binary (fair enough) and the resulting inefficiency (why do you need to ask two questions), this is a great example of a simple algorithm.
Last year, teacher and geek Marc Scott wrote an excellent blog post entitled Kids Can’t Use
Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You. In it, he spoke of an argument with a colleague who subscribed to the popular belief that children who use computers are more
technically-literate than computer-literate adults. Marc refutes this, retorting that while children today make use of computers more than most adults (and far more than was
typical during the childhood of today’s adults), they typically know far less about what Marc calls “how to use a computer”. His article is well worth reading: if you don’t have the
time you should make the time, and if you can’t do that then here’s the bottom line: competency with Facebook, YouTube, Minecraft, and even Microsoft Office does not in itself
demonstrate an understanding of “how to use a computer”. (Marc has since written a follow-up post which is
also worth reading.)
If the can of Mountain Dew wasn’t clue enough, these children are coding.
An oft-used analogy is that of the automobile. A hundred years ago, very few people owned cars, but those people that did knew a lot about the maintenance and inner workings of their
cars, but today you can get by knowing very little (I’ve had car-owning friends who wouldn’t know how to change to their spare tyre after a puncture, for example). In future, the
requirements will be even less: little Annabel might be allowed to ‘drive’ without ever taking a driving test, albeit in a ‘driverless’ computerised car. A similar thing happened with computers: when I was young, few homes had a computer, but in those that
did one or more members of the family invariably knew a lot about setting up, configuring, maintaining, and often programming it. Nowadays, most of the everyday tasks that most
people do with a computer (Facebook, YouTube, Minecraft, Microsoft Office etc.) don’t need that level of knowledge. But I still think it’s important.
A future computer-literate, or just another computer “user”?
Why? Because understanding computers remains fundamental to getting the most out of them. Many of us now carry powerful general-purpose computers in our pockets (disguised as
single-purpose devices like phones) and most of us have access to extremely powerful general-purpose computers in the form of laptops and desktops (but only a handful of us use them in
a ‘general purpose’ way; for many people, they’re nothing more than a web browser and a word processor). However, we expect people to be able to understand the issues when we ask them –
via their elected officials – to make sweeping decisions that affect all of us: decisions about the censorship of the ‘net (should we do it, and to what extent, and can we expect it to
work?) or about the automation of our jobs (is it possible, is it desirable, and what role will that mean for humans?). We expect people to know how to protect themselves from threats
like malicious hackers and viruses and online scams, but we give them only a modicum of support (“be careful, and install anti-virus software”), knowing full well that most people don’t
have the foundation of understanding to follow that instruction. And increasingly, we expect people to trust that software will work in the way that it’s instructed to without
being able to observe any feedback. Unlike your car, where you may know that it’s not working when it doesn’t go (or, alarmingly, doesn’t stop) – how is the average person to know
whether their firewall is working? You can find out how fast your car can go by pressing the pedals, but how are you to know what your computer is capable of without a deeper
understanding than is commonplace?
I first started to learn to program in Locomotive BASIC. My microcomputer was ready to receive code from the second it booted: no waiting, just programming. Nowadays, there’s a huge
barrier to entry (although tools like Hackety Hack, pictured, are trying to make it easier).
A new generation of children tought to think in terms of how computers and their programs actually work – even if they don’t go on to write programs as an adult – has the
potential to usher in innovating new ways to use our technology. Just as learning a foreign language, even if you don’t go on to regularly use it, helps make you better at your native language, as well as
smarter in other ways (and personally, I think we should be teaching elementary Esperanto – or better yet, Ido – to
primary school children in order to improve their linguistic skills generally), learning the fundamentals of programming will give children a far greater awareness about
computers in general. They’ll be better-able to understand how they work, and thus why they sometimes don’t do what you expect, and better-equipped to solve problems when they see them.
They’ll have the comprehension to explain what they want their computer to be able to do, and to come up with new ideas for ways in which general-purpose computers can be used. And,
I’ve no doubt, they’ll be better at expressing logical concepts in mutually-intelligble ways, which improves human communication on the whole.
Let’s teach our kids to be able to understand computers, not just “use” them.
