Category: Cosmography

Science, philosophy, art, life.

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Cosmography Technology

Time For A New Future

Bit Blobs
No idea what this is a picture of, but it looks pleasantly technological (Photo credit: Dr. Bleep)

Almost better today. I could bend to do up my bootlaces without wincing! Also a relative had an accident this morning that was properly painful – a broken shoulder – so that gives a bit of perspective. And I had to run to help, which I think finally showed my spine who was boss. It’s just unfortunate that the job I most need to get done right now involves shifting boxes of books up a ladder, through a small awkward trapdoor, into an attic. Eh… No, I’m not going to do that.

At least the injury has left me free for the other, less physical stuff I’ve been avoiding. The new website for an obvious one. At this point I have more or less persuaded Drupal to do what I want. It wasn’t easy – but it turned out in the end to be a hell of a lot easier than it was looking just a couple of days ago.

So next up there’s my college application. I haven’t mentioned this before but I’m working towards going back to do a Master’s degree, in what I’ll loosely refer to as new media technology. The reason I haven’t mentioned it is that I almost certainly won’t qualify for the course. I was thinking I’d maybe nonchalantly try, fail, and tell no one. But it is just too interesting not to write about.

Why would I fail, when I have a more than minimal level of relevant technical knowledge and creative ability – or mad skillz as I prefer to call it? Well, the course I want to do is a prestigious one, and competition for places is fierce. I’m 47 and gnarled, racing against lovely people in their 20s. And my primary degree is not up to the minimum standard they require, so I’m basically hoping they’ll somehow just make an exception. It’s a bit depressing really when you think about it. Describing it as a long shot would be like calling William Tell a fruit picker.

And say I did get it – how will I pay? How am I going to afford to even stay alive while studying full time? I do not have the first idea.

But if somehow I do qualify, it could be life-changing. So there will be a way.

My career so far has been entirely in publishing, but publishing is transforming out of all recognition. The last decade or so has been all about adaptation to constantly-changing technologies, constantly-changing possibilities. This is not a problem, on the contrary it’s made it a fascinating time to be involved. But adaptation is not enough anymore, I want more than just to keep up. I want to do a bit of the changing.

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Cosmography Technology

A Walk In The Bog

Nesting swans

Web design with Drupal is weirdly impressionistic. Even after turning off all the parts of it I’m sure I don’t need – well, almost sure – there are still so many options and switches that I really can’t hold them all in my head. Maybe one day, but not yet.

And it’s difficult to know what consequences changing any one of them will have. It may achieve the goal of fixing an annoying behaviour, while elsewhere making half the site drop off. So progress has been a slow mix of careful testing, frantic searching to find a setting I know I saw earlier, installing several new modules in a vain attempt to gain one missing function, and just pressing buttons randomly to see what’ll happen.

All four strategies work about equally well.

So I went for a walk. Partly to take a break from this madness, but more because I’m still in mild but constant pain. To the point where I’m just annoyed with myself now. Even if I’d done nothing more than occasionally walk around a bit I wouldn’t be so prone to back injury.

My excuse all winter was that it’s just too wet outside to walk. But is it really? It doesn’t rain every day, even here. And there’s no shortage of roads worth walking, even a canal that goes right past the village. Our own canal! Built in the 19th century to drain the bog. I don’t think it works, but it teems with wildlife, and it is full of sky.

So some Desolate-West-of-Ireland pics:

One of my favourite trees
If I had a rowing boat, I wouldn’t leave it face up in the rain
Sky. For you. In the sky.
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Cosmography

Bats And Venus

The other good thing about walks

Hmm. The free range chicken we just had for dinner seemed very fatty. That’s a thought. What if a chicken is free to move around, but chooses not to? But I have no right to criticize a hen’s lassitude. It is a woeful lack of exercise that has me laid up. I wouldn’t have back pain after a kick-around if I’d been in any way even slightly not unfit. I do feel a lot better today though. When I got out of bed this morning it, well, it was the afternoon. (I was at a wedding in Canada the night before.) But I felt a lot better. The lack of pain was so pronounced it amounted to pleasure.

To what do I owe this rapid improvement? Bowen pain relief technique? A heat patch? Anti-inflammatory pills? A good walk? There’s only one way to be sure. First, I’ll need two spines… Actually though I now think it’s not a very spinal hurt. There’s some pain in the right of my lower back, but as it’s also in my hip and thigh I thought it was radiating out because of pressure on nerves from a swollen disc. I had an injury a little like that a few years ago. But I’m thinking now it might be a pulled thing, a muscle in my hip.

Anyway I’ll just keep doing what seems to be working. Especially the walking. How can I not walk, when in just a little while I can be standing surrounded by nothing much except bog and sky? The sun down and no moon or star, just the planet Venus. Venus, and bats.

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Cosmography

Long Distance Relations

Adult Supervision

I’m at a wedding reception in Canada, virtually. To be possibly a little more accurate, I’m watching some friends be drunk in Canada, via webcam over Ustream. Feels a little weird. The video is all right. A bit jerky maybe, but watchable. It sounds though like a circus. A circus on acid. In a swimming pool. On board a submarine. Between the slow video and the strange out-of-sync audio effects, it feels like trying to communicate with astronauts. But what the heck. I mean, they’re at a wedding reception. I’m probably not missing a lot of sparkling conversation.

And it’s one-way of course, so they can’t see or hear me at all. We’re communicating through the system’s “instant messaging” service. In quotes, because it’s taking even longer for the IMs to pass back and forth than it is for the video. Something wrong with that. It only adds to the Apollo mission feeling.

Weird Internet People

Moving nonetheless. A whole bunch of people, some of whom I haven’t seen in years, some of whom I’ve never actually met, all of whom I’ve gotten to know over the last decade or so purely through the Internet. People from other countries, who by other means I’d have met briefly if at all, but now are a community I belong to. A real community, despite being bound only by threads of data, with all the things that appertain. Indeed, this is how the happy couple met.

I love being alive at this time.

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Cosmography Humour

Soccer, Summer, And Fish

It’s more frightened of you than you are of it. You have a knife.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I actually liked soccer, but I hate it. I’ve always hated it. Like so much in childhood, it was something you had to do whether you liked it or not. To add a sadistic twist though, you were expected to enjoy it. It was a treat.

I hated it because I was no good at it. So no good at it. When picking sides, captains would pretend they couldn’t see me. As a child I was breathless, thin, unathletic. But that wasn’t the problem. The reason I was really bad at soccer was that it couldn’t hold my attention. You stood in part of a field. After what seemed like hours, another boy would run past you with a ball. Then your team mates would shout at you. Really, whose side was I on? That of all these angry people calling me names, or the perfectly harmless passer-by? Soccer was long periods of boredom punctuated with confusion and insults. Like school really, except in mud.

But if a nine year old boy comes up to an adult man – a middle-aged one, yet – and asks him to come play soccer, for some damn reason he agrees. Is it because I’ve finally been picked? Maybe, but I think it’s more that I was asked. Not told. Not shoved out in the rain in baggy shorts and stupid clumpy boots. Asked, by a boy who wants to play with me just because he loves playing. Now I can enjoy it.

I’m still no bloody good though.

But not being good at soccer as a child is humiliating, alienating, dispiriting. Not being good at it as an adult is no big deal. The one real danger is that I’ll break my stupid bloody neck trying. Or in this instance, my spine. All right I didn’t actually break it, just bent it a bit. I’m only a tadge debilitated. And hey, it’s a proud masculine sports injury.

I tripped over the ball.

Bruising aside, it was a great day. I was asked out to see the Kinvara Farmers’ Market before it moves from its wonderful location (next month is the last chance to see, go if you can). Got some good fresh veg there, and even fresher fish. So fresh in fact that the thing in the picture above crawled out of it.

This is by no means a sign of bad fish – in fact it proves that it hasn’t been frozen. Such parasitic worms are actually far more common, especially in cod, than most fish-eaters realise. They’re… almost completely harmless, if the fish is cooked. (One reason that cod isn’t used in sushi.) You’ve probably eaten them many times without ill effect.

Except of course for any nausea you may be feeling, now that I’ve told you you’ve been eating worms.

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Cosmography

And Now For Something Completely Different

A Horse With Three Buttocks

Our confused summer stays confused. It’s sunny today so I insist on going for a walk in shorts and sandals, despite the fact that it’s bloody cold. It felt like it was good for me, though perhaps in an overly Nietzschean way.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of pretty pictures.

The road less travelled
Something about primrose paths, even though these are mainly daisies and some buttercups
What creepy haunted woods look like on bright summer’s days
A knight lives here
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Cosmography

It’s Supermoon!

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All right, it doesn’t look particularly bigger than any other moon. But it made a nice photo.

That’s the pergola in the foreground incidentally, not some freak constellation. It has solar powered lights, which stay lit all night at this time of year.

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Cosmography

All I did Today…

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…was mow the lawn.

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Cosmography Politics

The Standards Of Our Time

It is hard not to get angry and just switch off, but what is being discussed on Liveline (Irish radio phone-in) as I write is a legitimate question: Is it unfair to judge the actions of Cardinal Brady in 1975 by the standards of our time?

Quick summary: While still a priest he had a role, though apparently little more than a secretarial one, in a church investigation of allegations against the notorious serial child rapist Father Brendan Smyth. The case is among the most infamous, because Smyth was allowed to keep raping for many years despite this and other internal investigations.

As far as Brady is concerned, his job was to take down and pass on testimony to his seniors for investigation, not to act on it personally. He feels that he discharged his duty by playing his part in the system that he trusted. The criticism rests on the fact that this evidence was never acted on by those authorities. Given his personal knowledge, should Brady have gone above and beyond what he saw as his duty to pursue the matter, perhaps even drawn it to the attention of social services or police?

It is true that things were different. Nowadays it virtually goes without question that a child’s complaints should be thoroughly investigated, and given the high likelihood of anyone who has sexually abused children doing so again, not to act on credible evidence is tantamount to reckless endangerment. Things were much less clear-cut in 1975. It was not something much spoken of publicly. The standards of the time – such as they were – did not abhor child sexual abuse any less, but they worked on the widely-held supposition that something so horrific was an almost inconceivable rarity.

In other words, these standards were based on the effective suppression – by individuals, the church, and other institutions – of the truth about the prevalence of child sexual abuse. So to judge Brady by the standards of his time would be to judge him by standards he played his part in creating. That could not be acceptable.

We must nevertheless attempt to put ourselves in his position, and needless to say it is not one any of us would like. There was no guarantee that legal authorities or social services would have taken things any further, and to speak out would have almost certainly brought down the severe disapproval of superiors and peers within the organisation to which he had dedicated his life. I do wonder how many of us can honestly say that we would have gone beyond what we saw as our duty. I hope I would, I know it would have preyed on my conscience if I had not, but I can’t be sure if I would have broken rank.

And I certainly would not have risen to the position of cardinal if I did. Which is worth contemplating. People who become cardinals are precisely the people who don’t break rank, but suppress their own consciences and follow the interests and assurances of their organisation.

So I actually care little if Brady stays or goes. Whoever takes his place as cardinal will also be a cardinal. The important lesson here is about allowing any organisation to act as a law unto itself.

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Cosmography

Tully’s Of Kinvara

The heart brings me to the almost insolently pretty coastal Galway town of Kinvara, into a recklessly cute pub called Tully’s, and out the back to the barn. But this is the best bit. A big ol’ barn, but an atmospheric venue. Load of bands playing, including my friend Niceol Blue.

And I’m in the mood. So if you’ll excuse me this evening I’ll keep the words to the minimum, and turn the pictures up to eleven.

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