OVERHEAD the sky was palest blue. As you looked towards the horizon, and therefore through a thicker slice of the atmosphere, it appeared strangely yellowish. In every direction.
And then there was that thin layer of slightly sticky grey dust all over the car in the morning.
Seems the impending General Election isn’t the only cloud hanging over Britain.
But then you know this. Unless you’re one of that tiny handful of unaware folk who turned up at Stansted hoping to travel (and wondering where everyone was), you know the effect an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano has been having on our skyways.
But not everything you’ve read in every paper about this particular airborne, economically toxic event has been quite as informative as it might have been.
You might, for example, have read in one national paper a remark about “waiting for rain to bring the ash down”.
This tells you not about the density of the ash cloud, only the density of the reporter.
To enlighten him a little: Rain falls from clouds. Aeroplanes mostly fly above the clouds. Nearly all the ash is above the clouds too. Rain almost never falls upwards.
Well, that was easy. Trying to inject some reality into most of what you may have seen or read isn’t quite that simple.
Because mostly it’s not so much about what has been reported as what hasn’t – or at least, not widely.
Nearly all the coverage of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption so far has concentrated on the stoppage of air travel. On the effect that’s had on airlines and passengers. And based on the apparent assumption that it’ll all be sorted out in a day or two – a week or two at worst.
Well, OK, air travel is quite big and important in our lives. Most of us have some experience of it. We can grasp what it’s about.
We can imagine what it’s like to be “stuck” somewhere we’ve been on holiday. And right now, most of us probably know someone who’s stuck right now.
(One person I know is holed up in a place called Normal, Illinois – how delightful an irony is that?)
But this temporary local difficulty may be the least of it. Or maybe only the beginning.
Every report that pushes the re-opening of flightpaths back another 12 or 24 hours overlooks a couple of things.
Like the fact that the last time this particular volcano erupted, it went on spewing on and off for months.
That didn’t have much impact on air traffic in 1821-23, but it could make the Stansted expansion plans look pretty pointless if it happened again now.
And Eyjafjallajokull is only a fairly small volcano. What will happen to air traffic when (it’s really not a question of ‘if’) a bigger one blows its top?
Like Katla, for example.
You probably haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t until this week), but it’s a near neighbour of the one now erupting, a whole lot bigger – and followed its smaller chum into action on two previous known occasions.
All of this is another reminder that we are not as big, or as clever, as we like to think we are.
In geological time, the timescale on which things like volcanoes operate, human beings are a pretty recent phenomenon. The history of air travel is the briefest blip.
A blip that could wink out again just as quickly as it turned on.
What will that do to globalisation? To the holiday business? To international diplomacy? To international sport?
Maybe those Kenyan growers of roses and sugarsnap peas who have been so hard-hit this week will have to learn a new life independent of Tesco. And maybe, in the long run, it will do them good to start growing their own food again instead of ours.
Maybe we’ll see a great new age of sail as the age of flight touches down earlier than expected.
Maybe the whole global warming debate will have to be revisited, balancing our (maybe reduced) emissions against the (much smaller) volcanic ones.
And, in passing, perhaps we should note that the reduced weight of polar ice may be a factor in kicking Iceland’s volcanoes back into life. Now or in the future.
Not that unstable Earth has ever needed help from us in deciding when or where to bubble over.
The Eyjafjallajokull eruption is not – as I’ve heard some people suggest – nature’s way of showing us who’s boss.
The fact is, nature doesn’t care about us that much. Or, indeed, at all.
Saturday, 24 April 2010
Saturday, 17 April 2010
Intelligent life in the skies
ISAAC ASIMOV, the great science fiction writer, once wrote a story about a group of intrepid space explorers landing on a strange planet.
It was a very short story which came to an abrupt, rather sticky end.
The planet was Earth. The explorers and their craft were minute. And the moment they ventured outside they were idly splatted on a wall by a small boy who saw them only as nasty creepy-crawlies.
Which brings me to the point I never got to in my column last week about extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Even if it’s there, and even if it attempts to make contact, can we be sure we’ll recognise it?
We’ve not been terribly good so far at recognising the alien intelligence all around us on our own planet.
Take octopuses. Strange things; spineless; alien indeed to us. But not, as it turns out, stupid.
In fact, they’re clever enough to recognise TV pictures of other sea creatures, including other octopuses, and react to them as if they were real.
At least they do if they’re shown HD pictures on liquid crystal screens. Conventional TVs, which display images at a rate of 24 frames per second, are too slow to fool the octopus’s sophisticated eyes.
The researchers who made this discovery found that a creature which behaves aggressively towards the images one day might cower away shyly the next.
This inconsistency in behaviour is described as “a lack of personality”.
Which seems to me one of those curious cases of scientific jargon meaning the opposite of what it suggests.
In fact, I’d say it’s evidence that the octopus is a sentient and complex individual.
But you’d needn’t search under the sea to find creatures which give the lie to the ridiculous idea that humans are unique in having rational consciousness.
Octopuses have large brains. Birds don’t – yet some, such as parrots, are rather better at interpreting human language than we are at understanding theirs.
I wrote last month about the intelligence shown by some crows. And that prompted a few readers’ observations providing more evidence of corvine intellect.
Ralph Eldridge, a Canadian naturalist, told me about another revealing experiment.
He wrote: “Crows, without training or practice or observing others, were confronted with a food reward.
“To obtain the food the crows had to select, obtain and use a stick of a specific length. To obtain the correct stick, the crow had to select, obtain and use another stick of different but specific length.
“Success required multi-stage thinking and sequenced execution, not just straight cause-and-effect pseudo-tool use.
“Do I need to tell you that the crows ate well and quickly?”
It’s not so long since humans were said to be the only creatures to use tools. In fact, an enormous variety of species do.
Crows don’t just use what’s lying around – they invent and make their own tools. And they make use of their advantages over less skilled or intelligent species, too.
Crows are supposed to be carrion-eaters, not hunters or killers. But consider this observation by my brother, Clive, on the A10 in Cambridgeshire.
“I’ve seen it on three separate occasions in the same place,” he said. “Whether it’s the same two crows, or something all the crows round there have learned from each other, I don’t know.
“You know how crows swoop around in the bow-waves of big trucks? Pigeons can’t do it like crows can.
“Two crows, harassing a pigeon, drive it into the path of a big truck. Crows swoop out of the way, pigeon goes splat. Instant carrion. Crows have dinner.”
Clive adds that his chickens can count chicks or eggs up to nine. And he tells of a crow which played a counting game with him, after listening to him making animal noises for the children in an Indian village.
“When I cawed like a crow, it replied. So I cawed twice, to which the crow cawed three times – and so on, right up to 17, at which point my voice was giving out.
“The crow probably thinks humans are too stupid to count beyond 17. Except I think the crow is probably not stupid enough to think that.”
Quite.
To that, let me just add one more observation – my own, this time – that demonstrates the ability of rooks to communicate with each other.
I was out walking in the fields near Marlesford when I noticed two rooks engaged in aerial battle with a sparrowhawk. (I’ve often seen other birds mobbing sparrowhawks, and no wonder.)
When a third rook arrived, it didn’t join in but quickly took stock of the situation and flew away, purposefully and straight towards a distant wood.
A minute or two later it was back (I presume) – with about 20 other rooks. At which point the hawk gave up and fled.
There’s intelligent life in the skies, all right. And well within sight, too, if we’re prepared to look.
It was a very short story which came to an abrupt, rather sticky end.
The planet was Earth. The explorers and their craft were minute. And the moment they ventured outside they were idly splatted on a wall by a small boy who saw them only as nasty creepy-crawlies.
Which brings me to the point I never got to in my column last week about extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Even if it’s there, and even if it attempts to make contact, can we be sure we’ll recognise it?
We’ve not been terribly good so far at recognising the alien intelligence all around us on our own planet.
Take octopuses. Strange things; spineless; alien indeed to us. But not, as it turns out, stupid.
In fact, they’re clever enough to recognise TV pictures of other sea creatures, including other octopuses, and react to them as if they were real.
At least they do if they’re shown HD pictures on liquid crystal screens. Conventional TVs, which display images at a rate of 24 frames per second, are too slow to fool the octopus’s sophisticated eyes.
The researchers who made this discovery found that a creature which behaves aggressively towards the images one day might cower away shyly the next.
This inconsistency in behaviour is described as “a lack of personality”.
Which seems to me one of those curious cases of scientific jargon meaning the opposite of what it suggests.
In fact, I’d say it’s evidence that the octopus is a sentient and complex individual.
But you’d needn’t search under the sea to find creatures which give the lie to the ridiculous idea that humans are unique in having rational consciousness.
Octopuses have large brains. Birds don’t – yet some, such as parrots, are rather better at interpreting human language than we are at understanding theirs.
I wrote last month about the intelligence shown by some crows. And that prompted a few readers’ observations providing more evidence of corvine intellect.
Ralph Eldridge, a Canadian naturalist, told me about another revealing experiment.
He wrote: “Crows, without training or practice or observing others, were confronted with a food reward.
“To obtain the food the crows had to select, obtain and use a stick of a specific length. To obtain the correct stick, the crow had to select, obtain and use another stick of different but specific length.
“Success required multi-stage thinking and sequenced execution, not just straight cause-and-effect pseudo-tool use.
“Do I need to tell you that the crows ate well and quickly?”
It’s not so long since humans were said to be the only creatures to use tools. In fact, an enormous variety of species do.
Crows don’t just use what’s lying around – they invent and make their own tools. And they make use of their advantages over less skilled or intelligent species, too.
Crows are supposed to be carrion-eaters, not hunters or killers. But consider this observation by my brother, Clive, on the A10 in Cambridgeshire.
“I’ve seen it on three separate occasions in the same place,” he said. “Whether it’s the same two crows, or something all the crows round there have learned from each other, I don’t know.
“You know how crows swoop around in the bow-waves of big trucks? Pigeons can’t do it like crows can.
“Two crows, harassing a pigeon, drive it into the path of a big truck. Crows swoop out of the way, pigeon goes splat. Instant carrion. Crows have dinner.”
Clive adds that his chickens can count chicks or eggs up to nine. And he tells of a crow which played a counting game with him, after listening to him making animal noises for the children in an Indian village.
“When I cawed like a crow, it replied. So I cawed twice, to which the crow cawed three times – and so on, right up to 17, at which point my voice was giving out.
“The crow probably thinks humans are too stupid to count beyond 17. Except I think the crow is probably not stupid enough to think that.”
Quite.
To that, let me just add one more observation – my own, this time – that demonstrates the ability of rooks to communicate with each other.
I was out walking in the fields near Marlesford when I noticed two rooks engaged in aerial battle with a sparrowhawk. (I’ve often seen other birds mobbing sparrowhawks, and no wonder.)
When a third rook arrived, it didn’t join in but quickly took stock of the situation and flew away, purposefully and straight towards a distant wood.
A minute or two later it was back (I presume) – with about 20 other rooks. At which point the hawk gave up and fled.
There’s intelligent life in the skies, all right. And well within sight, too, if we’re prepared to look.
Sunday, 11 April 2010
The truth that may be out there
SPACE is big. You can see that just by looking up on a clear night. And the more we look, and the more sophisticated the tools we look with, the bigger it seems.
Or perhaps the smaller we seem. It just depends, I suppose, on which end of the telescope you look through.
Anyway, it’s so big we surely can’t be the only beings capable of looking up and noticing. Can we?
This is the thought that led, 50 years ago this month, to the creation of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
HG Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898 but the obsession with UFOs and space aliens really took off in the 1950s.
It was essentially a Cold War phenomenon, fuelled by paranoia and a deep sense that post-Hiroshima the world was no longer quite as we had always thought it.
In a strange way, little green men may have seemed easier to imagine – and cope with – than the new but real threats that stalked our lives.
Books, films and comics all rushed to fuel the fantasy.
And where science fiction leads, actual science is sure to be there on some related path.
Stephen Hawking, everyone’s favourite thinker about the truth that might be out there, thinks waving hello to the unknown is foolish.
He points out man’s own lousy record in dealing with less-developed civilisations. Despite this warning, SETI continues to flourish and grow.
You might think scientific minds and resources could be employed on more important tasks, with more prospect of success.
But the whole point about science is that you can’t stop minds inquiring.
And few of us, surely, have never stood gazing up into the infinity of the night sky and wondering.
The particular conditions that allowed life to evolve here were extremely specific and incredibly unlikely to occur in any particular place.
But the number of places in the universe appears to be infinite. And the idea that this is the only planet to sustain life we’d call intelligent is even more unthinkable than the opposite.
Whether intelligence has evolved anywhere close enough to notice us or care is another question entirely.
Of all the possible explanations for all the thousands of UFO “sightings” it seems very much the least likely.
For what it’s worth, my personal estimate of the likeliest causes is: 1 Pure imagination; 2 Natural phenomena; 3 Unfamiliar, but entirely explicable and benign, man-made objects; 4 Things the authorities (probably military) would like to keep secret.
I have some experience of all these types.
My most recent, and perhaps eeriest, UFO encounter was in Rendlesham Forest, of all places.
It turned out to be a collection of balloons that someone had sent up with candles in baskets tied under them. The effect was very pretty despite – maybe partly because of – the initial puzzlement.
More sinister was the red light I, and many other people, saw travelling fast through the sky along the Humber river in late 1978.
It was suggested to me later that it was the afterburn from the testing of a Trident or similar missile. Whatever it may have been, I am certain it was of mundanely terrestrial origin.
If it was indeed military – and, let’s face it, the great UFO mysteries, such as the Rendlesham and Roswell incidents, all seem to take place at or near military sites – then it throws light on another aspect of the search for life in the sky.
Even if ET is out there, he’d have to be highly technologically advanced to notice us, or for us to notice him.
Cosmologist and SETI researcher Paul Davies puts it neatly in a new book, The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? He says: “It could be that life is common, but intelligence is rare.”
And what might make it rarer still is the awful possibility that intelligence of the kind that can build civilisations and advanced technology actually contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Humanity, after all, occupies a mere blip of time in the history of life on earth. And we are so clever we’ve found any number of ways of making sure that blip doesn’t last much longer.
Global warming? Super-virus? Pollution? Nuclear catastrophe, either by war or accident? Economic collapse leading to world famine? Simply running out of materials and fuel before we’ve properly engaged the alternatives?
We may be back in the area where science fiction melds into fact.
We may also be about to bomb or otherwise blast ourselves back into the stone age, where we could neither see nor be seen by any possible beings from beyond.
And – here’s a thought – it may not be the first time the human species will have done that, either.
****
SPOTTED on Twitter (not by me), a 12-year-old says: “They should make a phone that attaches to the wall so you always know where it is.”
What a cracking idea. And here’s one from me.
Why doesn’t someone invent a phone that lets you actually talk to another person? You know, using your voice and listening to their reply, like a real conversation.
None of this laborious mis-spelling out of words with your thumb, then waiting for the response to ping back. Actual real-time conversation.
Revolutionary, I know, but it could just catch on.
Or perhaps the smaller we seem. It just depends, I suppose, on which end of the telescope you look through.
Anyway, it’s so big we surely can’t be the only beings capable of looking up and noticing. Can we?
This is the thought that led, 50 years ago this month, to the creation of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
HG Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898 but the obsession with UFOs and space aliens really took off in the 1950s.
It was essentially a Cold War phenomenon, fuelled by paranoia and a deep sense that post-Hiroshima the world was no longer quite as we had always thought it.
In a strange way, little green men may have seemed easier to imagine – and cope with – than the new but real threats that stalked our lives.
Books, films and comics all rushed to fuel the fantasy.
And where science fiction leads, actual science is sure to be there on some related path.
Stephen Hawking, everyone’s favourite thinker about the truth that might be out there, thinks waving hello to the unknown is foolish.
He points out man’s own lousy record in dealing with less-developed civilisations. Despite this warning, SETI continues to flourish and grow.
You might think scientific minds and resources could be employed on more important tasks, with more prospect of success.
But the whole point about science is that you can’t stop minds inquiring.
And few of us, surely, have never stood gazing up into the infinity of the night sky and wondering.
The particular conditions that allowed life to evolve here were extremely specific and incredibly unlikely to occur in any particular place.
But the number of places in the universe appears to be infinite. And the idea that this is the only planet to sustain life we’d call intelligent is even more unthinkable than the opposite.
Whether intelligence has evolved anywhere close enough to notice us or care is another question entirely.
Of all the possible explanations for all the thousands of UFO “sightings” it seems very much the least likely.
For what it’s worth, my personal estimate of the likeliest causes is: 1 Pure imagination; 2 Natural phenomena; 3 Unfamiliar, but entirely explicable and benign, man-made objects; 4 Things the authorities (probably military) would like to keep secret.
I have some experience of all these types.
My most recent, and perhaps eeriest, UFO encounter was in Rendlesham Forest, of all places.
It turned out to be a collection of balloons that someone had sent up with candles in baskets tied under them. The effect was very pretty despite – maybe partly because of – the initial puzzlement.
More sinister was the red light I, and many other people, saw travelling fast through the sky along the Humber river in late 1978.
It was suggested to me later that it was the afterburn from the testing of a Trident or similar missile. Whatever it may have been, I am certain it was of mundanely terrestrial origin.
If it was indeed military – and, let’s face it, the great UFO mysteries, such as the Rendlesham and Roswell incidents, all seem to take place at or near military sites – then it throws light on another aspect of the search for life in the sky.
Even if ET is out there, he’d have to be highly technologically advanced to notice us, or for us to notice him.
Cosmologist and SETI researcher Paul Davies puts it neatly in a new book, The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? He says: “It could be that life is common, but intelligence is rare.”
And what might make it rarer still is the awful possibility that intelligence of the kind that can build civilisations and advanced technology actually contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Humanity, after all, occupies a mere blip of time in the history of life on earth. And we are so clever we’ve found any number of ways of making sure that blip doesn’t last much longer.
Global warming? Super-virus? Pollution? Nuclear catastrophe, either by war or accident? Economic collapse leading to world famine? Simply running out of materials and fuel before we’ve properly engaged the alternatives?
We may be back in the area where science fiction melds into fact.
We may also be about to bomb or otherwise blast ourselves back into the stone age, where we could neither see nor be seen by any possible beings from beyond.
And – here’s a thought – it may not be the first time the human species will have done that, either.
****
SPOTTED on Twitter (not by me), a 12-year-old says: “They should make a phone that attaches to the wall so you always know where it is.”
What a cracking idea. And here’s one from me.
Why doesn’t someone invent a phone that lets you actually talk to another person? You know, using your voice and listening to their reply, like a real conversation.
None of this laborious mis-spelling out of words with your thumb, then waiting for the response to ping back. Actual real-time conversation.
Revolutionary, I know, but it could just catch on.
Sunday, 4 April 2010
Cities in fear and trembling
ON the day of the Chile earthquake I was in internet communication with a friend I’ve never met in Hawaii.
From the vantage point of her clifftop home she was able to watch out for the promised tsunami and follow the evacuation of those living by the shore below.
As it turned out, the tidal wave was a bit of a washout by the time it got there, a surge less than a metre high. But the sense of anticipation was palpable even halfway around the world.
Perhaps this, along with the boom in worldwide news media, is why major earthquakes seem to be growing more common.
The Chile quake and its numerous aftershocks following so soon upon the disaster in Haiti have lent an air of doom to the start of 2010.
In fact, according to the US Geological Survey, which monitors quake activity worldwide, the last few years have been fairly quiet. Though this, they say, is just part of normal variation, not a downward trend.
Since 1900 there has been a fairly stable average of 18 major earthquakes (magnitude 7.0 to 7.9) and one great quake (magnitude 8.0 or above) per year.
The recent quake in Chile was magnitude 8.8 – around 500 times the force that hit Haiti and the seventh strongest recorded. The strongest, at magnitude 9.5, was in 1960, also in Chile.
In fact, Chile suffers more earthquakes than any other country in the world. But then it is a very long country, well inside the tropics at its northern tip, the nearest mainland to Antarctica at its southern.
And every bit of it lies on the Pacific rim known as the Ring of Fire – the great line on which 90 per cent of all earthquakes occur.
The magnitude 7.0 Haiti quake was scarcely a major event geologically. What made it catastrophic was that it struck a city full of poor buildings and poorer people.
All only three quakes have killed more, all of them in China, and for similar reasons.
The rise in population, and the rise of cities, explain why six of the deadliest quakes ever have occurred in the last 90 years, two of them in the last six.
And this is why we should be worried.
Some of the world’s biggest cities, including Tokyo (population 35million), Mexico City (21m) and Tehran (8.5m) lie in areas of high earthquake risk.
California lies, like Chile, right along the Ring of Fire. In the most populous and prosperous state in the US, 37m people live with their heads in the sand while the quake-watchers await “the big one”.
But a greater risk may lie to its north.
Peter Yanev is a structural engineer and quake consultant. And his study of recent events has led him to some disturbing conclusions.
He says: “Based on the kind of damage that buildings suffered in Chile, tall structures in the earthquake zones of the United States appear to be at much higher risk than we thought.
“This lesson should be of obvious concern to San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the Pacific Northwest is most vulnerable.
“Just off Oregon, Washington and British Columbia sits the 600-mile-long Cascadia fault, which can produce tremors more powerful than anything we’ve experienced or expect from California’s famous San Andreas fault.”
Not good news for my nephew Matt, who moved to Oregon from New Orleans after surviving the horrors visited on his home by Hurricane Katrina.
****
IT’S been a long time coming, but I can finally call myself an exhibited photographer.
England were still a few weeks away from winning the World Cup when I went on what I could call my first photographic expedition.
I was eight years old. And I could feasibly trace my love of wild places, mountains, birds and photography to that day on Skye.
Just as I, in common with so many, could trace my fascination with football back to what happened at Wembley the ensuing June.
It was actually on Christmas Day 1965 that I was given my first camera, a simple point-and-click Kodak Instamatic. I took my first photo that day and I’ve been taking them ever since.
In those years I have wielded a lens, mostly for pleasure and occasionally for pay, in 27 countries on three continents.
My first published pictures accompanied a travel feature on India which appeared in the Sunderland Echo in 1983.
More recently I’ve had photos published with my articles in Suffolk and Let’s Talk magazines and of course occasionally accompanying my Evening Star column.
But I’ve never had framed photos on show – until now.
You can now see a few of my pics at Snape Maltings Gallery and in the Pavilion Café in Woodbridge.
A couple were taken in France, but mostly they are from Suffolk, including this one of a wave breaking on Dunwich beach, which is on display at Snape.
I wanted to capture the cave-like shape and structure of the wave as it turned over – a complexity impossible to see clearly with the naked eye.
And that day on Skye?
We’d taken a boat trip from our campsite at Elgol to Loch Curuisk, almost into the heart of the Cuillin mountains. The boatman told us we had half an hour before he’d take us back.
The alternative was a ten-mile trek back over the hills. My parents gave me the choice.
“We’ll walk,” I said.
From the vantage point of her clifftop home she was able to watch out for the promised tsunami and follow the evacuation of those living by the shore below.
As it turned out, the tidal wave was a bit of a washout by the time it got there, a surge less than a metre high. But the sense of anticipation was palpable even halfway around the world.
Perhaps this, along with the boom in worldwide news media, is why major earthquakes seem to be growing more common.
The Chile quake and its numerous aftershocks following so soon upon the disaster in Haiti have lent an air of doom to the start of 2010.
In fact, according to the US Geological Survey, which monitors quake activity worldwide, the last few years have been fairly quiet. Though this, they say, is just part of normal variation, not a downward trend.
Since 1900 there has been a fairly stable average of 18 major earthquakes (magnitude 7.0 to 7.9) and one great quake (magnitude 8.0 or above) per year.
The recent quake in Chile was magnitude 8.8 – around 500 times the force that hit Haiti and the seventh strongest recorded. The strongest, at magnitude 9.5, was in 1960, also in Chile.
In fact, Chile suffers more earthquakes than any other country in the world. But then it is a very long country, well inside the tropics at its northern tip, the nearest mainland to Antarctica at its southern.
And every bit of it lies on the Pacific rim known as the Ring of Fire – the great line on which 90 per cent of all earthquakes occur.
The magnitude 7.0 Haiti quake was scarcely a major event geologically. What made it catastrophic was that it struck a city full of poor buildings and poorer people.
All only three quakes have killed more, all of them in China, and for similar reasons.
The rise in population, and the rise of cities, explain why six of the deadliest quakes ever have occurred in the last 90 years, two of them in the last six.
And this is why we should be worried.
Some of the world’s biggest cities, including Tokyo (population 35million), Mexico City (21m) and Tehran (8.5m) lie in areas of high earthquake risk.
California lies, like Chile, right along the Ring of Fire. In the most populous and prosperous state in the US, 37m people live with their heads in the sand while the quake-watchers await “the big one”.
But a greater risk may lie to its north.
Peter Yanev is a structural engineer and quake consultant. And his study of recent events has led him to some disturbing conclusions.
He says: “Based on the kind of damage that buildings suffered in Chile, tall structures in the earthquake zones of the United States appear to be at much higher risk than we thought.
“This lesson should be of obvious concern to San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the Pacific Northwest is most vulnerable.
“Just off Oregon, Washington and British Columbia sits the 600-mile-long Cascadia fault, which can produce tremors more powerful than anything we’ve experienced or expect from California’s famous San Andreas fault.”
Not good news for my nephew Matt, who moved to Oregon from New Orleans after surviving the horrors visited on his home by Hurricane Katrina.
****
IT’S been a long time coming, but I can finally call myself an exhibited photographer.
England were still a few weeks away from winning the World Cup when I went on what I could call my first photographic expedition.
I was eight years old. And I could feasibly trace my love of wild places, mountains, birds and photography to that day on Skye.
Just as I, in common with so many, could trace my fascination with football back to what happened at Wembley the ensuing June.
It was actually on Christmas Day 1965 that I was given my first camera, a simple point-and-click Kodak Instamatic. I took my first photo that day and I’ve been taking them ever since.
In those years I have wielded a lens, mostly for pleasure and occasionally for pay, in 27 countries on three continents.
My first published pictures accompanied a travel feature on India which appeared in the Sunderland Echo in 1983.
More recently I’ve had photos published with my articles in Suffolk and Let’s Talk magazines and of course occasionally accompanying my Evening Star column.
But I’ve never had framed photos on show – until now.
You can now see a few of my pics at Snape Maltings Gallery and in the Pavilion Café in Woodbridge.
A couple were taken in France, but mostly they are from Suffolk, including this one of a wave breaking on Dunwich beach, which is on display at Snape.I wanted to capture the cave-like shape and structure of the wave as it turned over – a complexity impossible to see clearly with the naked eye.
And that day on Skye?
We’d taken a boat trip from our campsite at Elgol to Loch Curuisk, almost into the heart of the Cuillin mountains. The boatman told us we had half an hour before he’d take us back.
The alternative was a ten-mile trek back over the hills. My parents gave me the choice.
“We’ll walk,” I said.
Saturday, 27 March 2010
Catching up at last on netball
THIRTY years in sports journalism, and I’ve just witnessed my first game of netball.
I went because my daughter was making her debut for her school team.
And I was impressed, not just by her side’s runaway win over their nearest neighbours. Not just by the enthusiasm – and in some cases the skill – of the girls.
I was impressed too by the excellence of the game.
So far from being the poorer, weaker relation of basketball, I think netball has potentially more going for it as a spectator sport. There’s no less scope for personal or team creativity and it’s easier to see what’s going on.
Which leaves the question why it is so unloved, so overlooked except in our schools. And why, even in school, it gets so much less attention than football, cricket or rugby.
At one level, the answer is obvious. It’s a game for girls.
(I was the only dad watching the netball. There were both mums and dads around the corner watching the same two schools in football combat.)
What’s not quite so obvious is why we don’t take girls’ sports seriously in this country.
Back in 1995 I happened to meet a couple of Australian women who for some reason had washed up in a laundrette in Ipswich.
They were fans on their way from Oz to Birmingham for the netball World Championship. And they were stunned by the total ignorance of everyone they met in England of the fact that the tournament was even taking place.
Even though England were among the favourites for the title, no British newspaper, radio or TV channel gave a whisper. Back home in Australia, they told me, every game was a live TV event.
OK, Australia are the world’s best at netball. They have taken the world title nine times out of 12 and finished second to New Zealand on two other occasions.
But without anyone really noticing, the England netball team are ranked fourth in the world.
That is, higher than our footballers (eighth), rugby union players (seventh) or cricketers (fifth).
Did you know that? I certainly didn’t. And I reckon we should all be ashamed of our ignorance.
****
THE closer we get to the General Election, the more fearful I become at the prospect of a Tory victory.
David Cameron may have spent the last few years trying to appear cuddly, caring, safe and different – but how different is he really?
As Gordon Brown’s government looks like ending its days in a welter of strikes, Cameron eagerly plays the Thatcher card.
So much for different. And so much for caring, too.
According to Cameron: “Margaret Thatcher’s government was defined by taking the side of the people against the powerful, the vested interest.”
You what? Were you actually there, Dave? Or were you still trotting about the playing fields of Eton playing soldiers?
Thatcher’s government was on the people’s side like a fox is on the chickens’ side.
What Thatcher the shopkeeper and Cameron the toff have both forgotten is that trade union members ARE the people. While their employers, such as the privatised British Airways, are the rich.
People don’t go on strike for the fun of it. It’s miserable being on strike. They do it because they feel collective action is the only way to be taken seriously.
But Cameron and his like don’t take ordinary working people seriously. Possibly because they don’t know any.
The people they take seriously, the people they’ve always taken seriously, the people whose interests they look after, are those people who own land and companies. People like them. Not people like you and me.
I’ve never voted Tory before – and I’m sure as heck not going to start now.
****
I WAS 11 when my parents started taking me to the theatre. Serious stuff, too – Shakespeare, Chekhov, that sort of thing.
Looking back, I suppose they figured it was the only way they could get to go themselves. But I enjoyed it (mostly) and it certainly stood me in good stead when I came to study literature later.
It was with all this in mind that we took ten-year-old Lotte to the Colchester Mercury Theatre to see Huck, having missed it when it was at the Wolsey recently.
It probably helped that she already knew Huckleberry Finn, the great book by Mark Twain that James Graham’s play is based on.
Like me, she was intrigued to know how a rambling tale set on the Mississippi river would be adapted for the stage. And like me she was very impressed with the efficiency and panache with which it was done.
She noted the clever use of a set in which Huck’s raft also served as setting for a variety of flashbacks and other adventures.
And she was delighted at how well seven actors managed to portray dozens of characters – and provide all their own music too.
She laughed at many of the funny moments and felt the pathos in the character of Jim, the runaway slave.
In fact, she thoroughly enjoyed the whole show. Which is good news for her theatre-loving parents.
****
Four of my Distressed Sonnets are in the new issue of American online magazine Free Verse. Very pleased to be following Peter Riley and in company with Ian Seed in an excellent collection: LINK
I went because my daughter was making her debut for her school team.
And I was impressed, not just by her side’s runaway win over their nearest neighbours. Not just by the enthusiasm – and in some cases the skill – of the girls.
I was impressed too by the excellence of the game.
So far from being the poorer, weaker relation of basketball, I think netball has potentially more going for it as a spectator sport. There’s no less scope for personal or team creativity and it’s easier to see what’s going on.
Which leaves the question why it is so unloved, so overlooked except in our schools. And why, even in school, it gets so much less attention than football, cricket or rugby.
At one level, the answer is obvious. It’s a game for girls.
(I was the only dad watching the netball. There were both mums and dads around the corner watching the same two schools in football combat.)
What’s not quite so obvious is why we don’t take girls’ sports seriously in this country.
Back in 1995 I happened to meet a couple of Australian women who for some reason had washed up in a laundrette in Ipswich.
They were fans on their way from Oz to Birmingham for the netball World Championship. And they were stunned by the total ignorance of everyone they met in England of the fact that the tournament was even taking place.
Even though England were among the favourites for the title, no British newspaper, radio or TV channel gave a whisper. Back home in Australia, they told me, every game was a live TV event.
OK, Australia are the world’s best at netball. They have taken the world title nine times out of 12 and finished second to New Zealand on two other occasions.
But without anyone really noticing, the England netball team are ranked fourth in the world.
That is, higher than our footballers (eighth), rugby union players (seventh) or cricketers (fifth).
Did you know that? I certainly didn’t. And I reckon we should all be ashamed of our ignorance.
****
THE closer we get to the General Election, the more fearful I become at the prospect of a Tory victory.
David Cameron may have spent the last few years trying to appear cuddly, caring, safe and different – but how different is he really?
As Gordon Brown’s government looks like ending its days in a welter of strikes, Cameron eagerly plays the Thatcher card.
So much for different. And so much for caring, too.
According to Cameron: “Margaret Thatcher’s government was defined by taking the side of the people against the powerful, the vested interest.”
You what? Were you actually there, Dave? Or were you still trotting about the playing fields of Eton playing soldiers?
Thatcher’s government was on the people’s side like a fox is on the chickens’ side.
What Thatcher the shopkeeper and Cameron the toff have both forgotten is that trade union members ARE the people. While their employers, such as the privatised British Airways, are the rich.
People don’t go on strike for the fun of it. It’s miserable being on strike. They do it because they feel collective action is the only way to be taken seriously.
But Cameron and his like don’t take ordinary working people seriously. Possibly because they don’t know any.
The people they take seriously, the people they’ve always taken seriously, the people whose interests they look after, are those people who own land and companies. People like them. Not people like you and me.
I’ve never voted Tory before – and I’m sure as heck not going to start now.
****
I WAS 11 when my parents started taking me to the theatre. Serious stuff, too – Shakespeare, Chekhov, that sort of thing.
Looking back, I suppose they figured it was the only way they could get to go themselves. But I enjoyed it (mostly) and it certainly stood me in good stead when I came to study literature later.
It was with all this in mind that we took ten-year-old Lotte to the Colchester Mercury Theatre to see Huck, having missed it when it was at the Wolsey recently.
It probably helped that she already knew Huckleberry Finn, the great book by Mark Twain that James Graham’s play is based on.
Like me, she was intrigued to know how a rambling tale set on the Mississippi river would be adapted for the stage. And like me she was very impressed with the efficiency and panache with which it was done.
She noted the clever use of a set in which Huck’s raft also served as setting for a variety of flashbacks and other adventures.
And she was delighted at how well seven actors managed to portray dozens of characters – and provide all their own music too.
She laughed at many of the funny moments and felt the pathos in the character of Jim, the runaway slave.
In fact, she thoroughly enjoyed the whole show. Which is good news for her theatre-loving parents.
****
Four of my Distressed Sonnets are in the new issue of American online magazine Free Verse. Very pleased to be following Peter Riley and in company with Ian Seed in an excellent collection: LINK
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Bird-brained? Not exactly
HAVE you ever noticed what a great habitat dual-carriageway roads provide for certain species of bird? And what a great extra service is provided for them in the form of lighting poles?
For the crow, the seagull, the hawk or buzzard, here is a perfect perch from which to survey a place where other creatures come to be killed or maimed.
Of course there’s a risk to the carrion-hunters themselves, but they’re mostly pretty good at swooping out of the way of traffic.
And where there are no poles to perch on, the kestrel – that supreme hoverer on the air currents – is king of the central reservation.
The other day I had a close encounter of the bird kind. I was driving, not on a dual carriageway but in a typical Suffolk lane, sunk between fields.
Suddenly, just ahead of me, a kestrel flew out of a hedgerow and straight across the road.
Fortunately, I was not travelling very fast. I barely had time to touch the brakes. And in that moment, the kestrel turned its head and for the briefest instant we had eye contact through the windscreen.
The bird got safely away, but was startled enough to drop the small mammal it had in its talons. And close enough that the mouse, or whatever little creature it was, hit the car bonnet.
A few days later I was heading past Colchester on the A12 when I witnessed an even more remarkable event.
I’d just caught sight of a kestrel hovering over the verge when a magpie flew across the road and straight at it.
I’ve seen hawks attacked by other birds before, but this was the first time I’d seen one literally brought down in flight. Last I saw as I sped by, the kestrel had been brought to earth on its back with the magpie fiercely on top of it.
I find such glimpses of the wild in our midst both fascinating and compelling.
And if we really look with open eyes and minds, we should find them a little humbling too.
There are still people – even scientists – who will claim with straight faces that humans are the only species to have evolved consciousness, to use tools, or to make discoveries and inventions.
So what do you make of this?
Rooks at Membury services on the M4 have found a way of getting at the appetising titbits thrown by wasteful humans into lined bins.
A lone rook can’t do it. But with one on either side of the bin, two can lift the liner bit by bit, securing it with their claws as they go. Once they’ve raised the contents high enough to grab, they throw it with their beaks to a third rook standing by.
The level of creativity – and communication – this shows would excite a researcher watching chimps in Africa.
But this is in Berkshire. And it’s a creature vastly more different from us, with a brain very different, and much smaller.
We like apes to be clever, because we know they’re like us. That we are apes too.
Meanwhile, some birds are a lot cleverer than we like to think.
Which ought to make us a bit more open-minded. And a bit less arrogant.
Evolution of an atheist thinker
AN INTERESTING theory of evolution is proposed in the current issue of National Geographic magazine. Interesting – and rather attractive to people like me.
The author of a new study suggests that atheists, pacifists and those of liberal inclination are more highly evolved than other people.
According to this view, blind aggression and blind adherence to tribe or faith were useful in an earlier stage of human development. But now it is the thinkers, the questioners, the fair and open minded, who are in the natural ascendant.
Great. Except for one thing. That little weasel word “highly”.
It implies progress towards something better. An idea which the great theorists of evolution, from Charles Darwin onwards, would reject as a misunderstanding.
It’s unscientific. But it’s worse than that.
It contains in it the idea that one type of human being is better than another.
And that’s the idea that was used to justify slavery. The genocidal obliteration of native peoples in America and Australia. The oppression everywhere of the working poor by the property-owning rich.
It’s the perversion of evolutionary science that led HG Wells and others to suggest selectively breeding out what he regarded as “lesser” human strains.
And which the Nazis took to extremes.
However tempting, it’s a road which no one of liberal inclination should even consider starting down.
And there is another problem with the study, by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics.
He bases his ideas on the discovery that children with higher IQs were more likely than others to reject religion when they grow up, and to be less conservative.
Which is all very well and not very surprising (to me, at least). But it assumes that IQ is a fair and proper measurement of intelligence. Which it isn’t.
Do I, incidentally, suppose Dr Kanazawa regards himself (as I do) as liberal and atheist? What do you think?
For the crow, the seagull, the hawk or buzzard, here is a perfect perch from which to survey a place where other creatures come to be killed or maimed.
Of course there’s a risk to the carrion-hunters themselves, but they’re mostly pretty good at swooping out of the way of traffic.
And where there are no poles to perch on, the kestrel – that supreme hoverer on the air currents – is king of the central reservation.
The other day I had a close encounter of the bird kind. I was driving, not on a dual carriageway but in a typical Suffolk lane, sunk between fields.
Suddenly, just ahead of me, a kestrel flew out of a hedgerow and straight across the road.
Fortunately, I was not travelling very fast. I barely had time to touch the brakes. And in that moment, the kestrel turned its head and for the briefest instant we had eye contact through the windscreen.
The bird got safely away, but was startled enough to drop the small mammal it had in its talons. And close enough that the mouse, or whatever little creature it was, hit the car bonnet.
A few days later I was heading past Colchester on the A12 when I witnessed an even more remarkable event.
I’d just caught sight of a kestrel hovering over the verge when a magpie flew across the road and straight at it.
I’ve seen hawks attacked by other birds before, but this was the first time I’d seen one literally brought down in flight. Last I saw as I sped by, the kestrel had been brought to earth on its back with the magpie fiercely on top of it.
I find such glimpses of the wild in our midst both fascinating and compelling.
And if we really look with open eyes and minds, we should find them a little humbling too.
There are still people – even scientists – who will claim with straight faces that humans are the only species to have evolved consciousness, to use tools, or to make discoveries and inventions.
So what do you make of this?
Rooks at Membury services on the M4 have found a way of getting at the appetising titbits thrown by wasteful humans into lined bins.
A lone rook can’t do it. But with one on either side of the bin, two can lift the liner bit by bit, securing it with their claws as they go. Once they’ve raised the contents high enough to grab, they throw it with their beaks to a third rook standing by.
The level of creativity – and communication – this shows would excite a researcher watching chimps in Africa.
But this is in Berkshire. And it’s a creature vastly more different from us, with a brain very different, and much smaller.
We like apes to be clever, because we know they’re like us. That we are apes too.
Meanwhile, some birds are a lot cleverer than we like to think.
Which ought to make us a bit more open-minded. And a bit less arrogant.
Evolution of an atheist thinker
AN INTERESTING theory of evolution is proposed in the current issue of National Geographic magazine. Interesting – and rather attractive to people like me.
The author of a new study suggests that atheists, pacifists and those of liberal inclination are more highly evolved than other people.
According to this view, blind aggression and blind adherence to tribe or faith were useful in an earlier stage of human development. But now it is the thinkers, the questioners, the fair and open minded, who are in the natural ascendant.
Great. Except for one thing. That little weasel word “highly”.
It implies progress towards something better. An idea which the great theorists of evolution, from Charles Darwin onwards, would reject as a misunderstanding.
It’s unscientific. But it’s worse than that.
It contains in it the idea that one type of human being is better than another.
And that’s the idea that was used to justify slavery. The genocidal obliteration of native peoples in America and Australia. The oppression everywhere of the working poor by the property-owning rich.
It’s the perversion of evolutionary science that led HG Wells and others to suggest selectively breeding out what he regarded as “lesser” human strains.
And which the Nazis took to extremes.
However tempting, it’s a road which no one of liberal inclination should even consider starting down.
And there is another problem with the study, by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics.
He bases his ideas on the discovery that children with higher IQs were more likely than others to reject religion when they grow up, and to be less conservative.
Which is all very well and not very surprising (to me, at least). But it assumes that IQ is a fair and proper measurement of intelligence. Which it isn’t.
Do I, incidentally, suppose Dr Kanazawa regards himself (as I do) as liberal and atheist? What do you think?
Friday, 5 March 2010
Islam and the modern girl
HOW many ironies do you see in this photo?
The girl who cannot be seen but who is eager to capture the spirit – and the detail – of the world around her in photo form.
The concentration on the eyes, because that is all her Muslim dress allows on show. The eagerness of those eyes to see – and, who knows, perhaps to be seen as well?
Given the Qur’an’s ban on figurative art, both could be seen as contradictory to her dress code.
Mohamed objected not just to representations of the human body, but to pictures of any kind.
Or that, at least, is a long-held interpretation. Just as the code that causes this girl to cover up in public is an interpretation of his medieval views.
But she doesn’t seem to object to being caught on film herself by my friend Christos. A Greek holidaying in Turkey, which may almost seem to be some sort of irony in itself.
The shot was taken in Istanbul, where both Chris and the unknown girl were apparently tourists, both wielding their respective lenses.
But a mobile phone and the modest hijab? Isn’t the greatest irony here the clash of ancient and modern?
Not really. Because both are in fact modern fads – at least away from the Arab world, where covering the face with a scarf is a time-honoured custom. Surely as much to keep out a dusty wind as to follow Mohamed’s instruction for women to dress demurely in public.
Away from parts of north Africa and the Middle East, this mode of dress is a recent development. An invented tradition.
While it’s become fairly commonplace on the streets of London and some other British cities, it hasn’t caused the furore here that it has in France.
The French government has banned the wearing of veils in school, causing an outcry among those who see the move as racist or anti-Muslim.
I don’t think it’s really either of those things. In fact, it’s one of the few things the present French regime has done that I support.
Another contact of mine, Suzanne, is an Englishwoman in France, where she married in the 1960s. Both her sons have Muslim wives, so she has more personal insight than I have.
She says: “The present veils of the hijab type are not traditional veils to most Muslims in France, even less so the full veils.
“Most Arab women here do not approve of this tradition. They see it as an insult to their human rights.
“Fundamentalist Muslim groups have gained in importance in France as elsewhere, although they are still only a minority.
“They have influenced young Arab men here who are frustrated by lack of work and the lack of consideration they perceive. These young men are obliging the women in their families and in their neighbourhoods to cover their hair.
“We see the veil as an instrument of oppression rather than a ‘custom’ or a religious prerogative.”
Like Suzanne, I worry that a rise in religious fanaticism is hampering efforts in many countries to break down barriers between people.
But is the girl in Chris Lamprianidis’s excellent photo a victim of oppression? She looks (as far as one can see) fairly happy and free.
But if dressing as she does is her choice, is she inadvertently guilty of assisting in the repression of other women?
In a similar way, perhaps, to that in which some women choose to engage in pornography or take part in suggestive pop videos.
They might not consider themselves to be exploited. But are they contributing to a general exploitative attitude towards women?
To liken a girl with everything covered but her eyes and hands to a Lady Gaga or a top-shelf model might seem far-fetched.
But they are really more alike than you or they might suppose.
Now, isn’t that ironic?
****
FIRST the good news. Proposed massive changes in BBC budgeting include a £25million boost to BBC Two, which will be allowed to move back upmarket.
And even more good news. This will be funded by a 25 per cent reduction in the Beeb’s £100m budget for buying in foreign (i.e. American) shows.
The justification for paying out our licence money to commercial US corporations has always been weak. With plenty of commercial channels in that market, I’d be happy with a 100pc cut in that part of the BBC budget.
Especially if it meant more investment here.
Not in paying celebrity wages to a handful of supposed “talents”. But in reversing the trend for dumbing down documentaries to suit an audience with the attention span of a goldfish and the intellect of a Big Brother contestant.
And in giving proper promotion and a non-digital wavelength to 6 Music – an important outlet for new and innovative bands and almost the only ad-free station where you can hear non-classical music for grown-ups.
Ah, there’s the bad news. Along with the Asian Network, BBC Switch and Blast!, 6 Music is facing the axe.
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