The End Of The Pier Show

Same Pier, Different Blog

2010-12-09T23:03:00.000Z

The problem with getting to the End of the Pier is that you can't go any further without throwing yourself into the sea.

In fact, I have given strict instructions to Mrs Crox that were I to predecease her, she should strap me into a Bad Mobo Scooter, attach a rocket motor to it, point me at the end of the pier, and let rip. Should, after this maneouvre, I have a hard time sinking, she should get any handy bowmen she finds around the place to pierce my corpse with fiery arrows, or, failing that, notify the Sea Mammal Research Unit.

But I digress. Yes, it's farewell - but not good-bye. For, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, this blog will be moving here, or, for the hard-of-linking:

http://occamstypewriter.org/cromercrox/

Please put this link in your favourite reader/blogroll/pipe, and ... er ... smoke it. I shall be there from .... well, now, actually... and will be blogging at that location henceforth, or, if you are reading this later, hencefifth.

But don't worry. The blog will appear very similar, and contain the same blend of serious ruminations, sage cogitations, perpicacious prestidigitations and comedic notices. This blog - the one you're reading - won't be purged, merged, splurged or otherwise deleted. Copies have been moved to the new site, but the original will just sit here, rather, one might imagine, as does the Parthenon - imposing from a distance, but rather shabby close up and missing its marbles. So I'd strongly recommend you switch your attention to

http://occamstypewriter.org/cromercrox/

Yes! Yes! Yes! That's

http://occamstypewriter.org/cromercrox/

just as soon as your moving digits are able.

I can imagine that you'll have all sorts of questions. Who is this Occam? Wherefore his Typewriter? How Do I Work This? What Becomes Of The Broken-Hearted? and so on and so forth in like fashion. Answers to many of these questions can be found here - Occam's Typewriter is an independent, self-supporting blogging collective, founded by small but nonetheless erumpent band of current and erstwhile scientists, who like to write. Some of us write about science, and the tzores of the scientific life. Others prefer riding off into the sunset accompanied by a unicycling girrafe.

Much as I have enjoyed being on Blogger, doing my own thing just the way I like it, it does get a bit lonely out here, perhaps even rather windswept. Sometimes it's nice to schmooze up with a bunch of fellow bloggers, kinda cosy, like a gang, you know, just us, hangin' with the 'hood [that's enough trying to get down with the kids - Ed].

Well, anyway, as the man said, you might say I'm a ~~palaeontologist~~ dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Perhaps someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.

By The Sea - The Interview!

2010-12-04T14:51:00.003Z

My readers (both of them) will be aware that I've written a gothick schlock horror farrago called By The Sea (the festive gift for all the family, provided their name is Addams).
Well, back in the mists of time I was privileged to have been hosted by Jennifer Rohn's Fiction Lab at the Royal Institution where I could ~~be thrown to the lions~~ discuss the book with readers. After the ~~mauling~~ soirée, Dr Rohn, herself now a successful author of fiction, interviewed me about the book, LabLit, the craft of writing and lots of other stuff, and you can find the interview here. (NB: this clip crashed my Firefox browser, so I opened it in Chrome). The book is still available, and is a self-published effort. If there are any real publishers out there, please do pick it up and do a proper job! Why should the few people who've read and enjoyed the book have all the fun?

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #135

2010-12-03T22:54:00.000Z

Mrs Crox's friend Mrs D. S. of Essex posted a picture on Facebook - a joint of ham advertised as perfect for Chanukah. I couldn't get hold of that particular photo, but similar things have happened before. Here's one from this site:

Chag Chanukah Sameach, everyone!

Lunchtime In The Snow

2010-12-03T13:32:00.001Z

This lunchtime, my coauthor Crox Minima and I took Canis Croxorum and the sledge through the woods and on to the clifftops, near the lighthouse

Canis Croxorum had a great time playing snow-angels

While Crox Minima attempted the notorious black run from the highest point of the cliffs...

This run starts at the point where, in my gothic horror schlockfest By The Sea, (the ideal festive gift for all the family) the creepy Lowdley-Purring Institute stands. The lighthouse is just as it is in the book.

and the view from the top, westwards over Cromer, is terrific.

On The Internet, No-One Knows You're A Chook

2010-12-02T16:07:00.000Z

What do you get if you mix social media and chickens? Egg on Facebook? Tweets? Oh Noes! You'll get Musings of a Techno Chook, a new up-to-the-minute ~~tzores~~ ~~sauce~~ source about iGadgetry, social media, volunteering and - well, there's no avoiding it - chickens. And teh kittehs. Mrs Crox, for it is she, swears it's all her own work, but I expect she has help.

Anyway, do take a ~~chook~~ look.

On the Internet, No-One Knows You're A Chicken.

But You May Call Me 'Pongo'

2010-11-30T11:32:00.004Z

The great satirist, musician and all-round egghead Tom Lehrer once noted having received a letter which read

Darling, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me or I will kill myself.

Disturbed, naturally, by this effusion, Mr Lehrer looked once again at the envelope and found that it was addressed

To Occupant

Turning, however, to my favourite topic (myself) I have this morning been deluged with a letter which, when casually opened by myself on arrival at the ~~office~~ orifice, started thusly

You have been nominated to appear in Great Minds of the 21st Century, a major reference directory including just 1,000 of the world's top thinkers and intellectuals.

I could go one better than Mr Lehrer, however - the letter was actually addressed to me. And, well, false modesty being in my not-so-humble opinion an overrated virtue, I am one of the world's top thinkers and intellectuals. There's no argument about it. What's important is who's doing the nominating.

It was then that I began to get a little suspicious.

The letter came from a body called the American Biographical Institute, Inc., of Raleigh, North Carolina. Naturally, I looked them up in that unbiased source of all knowledge and wisdom founded by ~~Professor Trellis of North Wales~~ The Outlaw Josey Wales, and this is what I found. The casual reader will note that the American Biographical Institute is hardly the Royal Society, the House of Lords or even the production department for Desert Island Discs.

So, much as one would wish for one's genius to be recognized, there is only so far that I'm prepared to push people into its recognition. True genius shouldn't have to work that hard. What do they think I am, a schnorrer? So, in the meantime, I have consigned the invitation to the Circular File.

I am, however, left with an afterthought - who was it who nominated me? Was it done as a kind of jolly jape? Hang on, it might even have been one of you. Now, look, if whoever it was who nominated me for inclusion in this farrago is reading this, please would they do me a favour and nominate me for I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here instead?

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #22

2010-11-30T09:51:00.000Z

This ~~misprint~~ muspront kindly sent in by Dr M. C. of Kingston-upon-Thames, who becomes elgible to join the ranks of the GOOFTUG.

So, Instead, I'm Going To Talk About Sex

2010-11-29T17:30:00.001Z

I haven't got much to say right now. Well, actually, there are lots of things I'd like to say, but they concern things which, are, as it were, in a state of flux. Imagine, if you will, ~~children roasting on an open fire~~ a lot of plates set whirling on the tops of poles. Only without the poles. And, oh yes, there's a guinea pig. So, unable to say anything much, at least about the things I'd like to chat with you about, I shall, instead, talk about sex.

Well, not quite. In thinking up this blog, I was reminded of a book in my parents' library called Kindly Sit Down, a collection of after-dinner stories, and to get meta, stories about after-dinner stories. One of these concerns a celebrity who had been invited to give the after-dinner speech at his local yacht club.

The dinner was, as these things are, a well lubricated affair, all three fingers being well over the yard arm, to coin a nautical phrase, and so on and so forth. The speaker rose to enthusiastic applause, and started his speech in this manner - "I don't know anything about yachting, so, instead, I'm going to talk about sex".

Really, I should remember this line for myself when next invited to talk at a research institute or university whose palette of research topics strays from my comfort zone. "I don't know anything about the release of calcium from intracellular stores," I might start, "so, instead, I'm going to talk about sex."

But I digress.

The speech was a resounding success, and the speaker was justifiably the toast of every capstan and spinnaker. The dinner went on very late, and when the celebrity got home, he crept quietly into bed so as not to wake his wife.

The next day, the celebrity's wife met the wife of the President of the yacht club in the supermarket. "Your husband gave an excellent speech at the yacht club!" said Mrs President of yacht club.

"Really?" said Mrs Celeb, "He's had a go at it so many times, but every time he tries he just gets tangled up in the sheets."

Ba-Boom Tish.

I'm here all week, folks.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #57

2010-11-24T09:01:00.001Z

There is clearly more to King's Cross Station than meets the eye. Readers will no doubt be familiar with Platform 9 ³/4, a feature of the Main Line station, visible only to the egregious boy wizard and his pals.

King's Cross Underground station has, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, risen (or perhaps sunken) to the challenge posed by its Overground partner. Passengers on the Metropolitan Line platforms are required to exhibit wave/particle duality and behave like quanta in the famous two-slit experiment, gaining access to the platform by both entrances simultaneously.

Given that the diffraction experienced by passengers on the other side might occasion inconvenience, or even, dare I say it, embarrassment, staff are under standing orders to avert their gaze during the process. After all, one wouldn't want one's wave-function to collapse just as one was expecting to board a semi-fast to Uxbridge, would one?

Crox Minor's Internet Meme Of The Week: All Your Base Are Belong To Us

2010-11-21T20:23:00.000Z

This is a Guest Post from Crox Minor, you know, she of the Unicycling Girrafes. We might be hearing more from her as the weeks progress.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us is one of the more popular memes you may have heard of while browsing the net. It originated from the very poor Japanese-to-English translation of the 1989 Japanese video game Zero Wing. The game features a (terrifying?) cybernetic half human err... thing called 'Cats',
who says this:

Hello gentlemen. All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction!

Or something like that.

In 1998, an animated gif of the game's introduction was posted onto the Rage Games website, and was soon reposted onto the Zany Video Game Quotes website.

In 2000, a remix of the Zero Wing soundtrack called Invasion of the (Gabba?) Robots was released by The Laziest Men on Mars.
(Check it out, it's pretty cool.)

In 2001, All your Base spread into mainstream culture, getting coverage from cNET.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Mirror and The Register.

Soon, the meme's popularity went through the roof, with graffiti being scrawled on university walls and other important buildings claiming all their base belonged to another, unspecified party. Police described it as a terrorist threat. Thousands upon thousands of parodies and remixes were uploaded to Youtube and other sites, science bloggers claiming All Your Base Pair Are Belong To Us. (According to Cromercrox, anyway.)

So, what makes this meme so insanely popular?

Is it the laughably funny Engrish? Is it the pounding techno beat in the background? Is it Cats' 8-bit, green, cybernetic face?

Anyhow, it is, and always will be, a jewel in internet meme history!

Look out for next week's meme: LOLcats!

Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3

2010-11-20T10:40:00.000Z

For reasons that (which?) now escape me, I've rediscovered 'Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3', a hit in 1979 for Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Maybe it was the chant underlying the funk workout that did it, the one that underpins the whole song, in which the Blockheads ask 'Why don't you GET back into bed?', which I've adapted as an exhoration to Croxi Minor and Minima of an evening - 'Why don't you GET upstairs to bed?' Or maybe it wasn't. Anyway, it's now on my iPod, and I'm enjoying every sublime nuance. My favourite part now, as then, is the part when, after austere drums, the sax solo comes in over a Hammond organ backing - the contrast is just like stepping off a cold floor and into a warm bath.

Front and centre is Ian Dury listing a miscellany of things that give one reason to be cheerful, everything from the geopolitical (Steve Biko, equal votes) to the everyday (porridge oats, yellow socks, phoning up a buddy) to the childishly indulgent (being rather silly, being in my nuddy, sitting on the potty, days when I ain't spotty).

The message of the song (more of a proto-rap, really) is not lost on the Maison Des Girrafes lately. The weather is getting colder, and the spectre of unemployment is visiting doors not entirely unadjacent to ours and our friends'. Last week I attended a funeral of a neighbour who died of prostate cancer, and, well, times are tough. But on the bright side, we're looking forward to major building works here at the M des Gs in which we'll be trawling reclamation yards for distressed doors and antique rolltop baths. I have a new book, maybe two, to write. and this weekend me and Crox Minor are very much looking forward to seeing Norwich City play Leeds United, and the whole family is agog with anticipation at the new Harry Potter movie which we're going to see at the Cromer Enormoplex tomorrow. Other reasons to be cheerful are prosaic and implicit in Dury's song. The love of one's family. Being amused at the destructive antics of teh kittehs. Hugging a warm dog. Health, happiness and being alive. Reasons to be cheerful indeed.

I do have one question, though. Wherefore Reasons To Be Cheerful parts 1 and 2?

Guinea Pigs for a Guinea Pig?

2010-11-14T19:36:00.006Z

As regular readers (both of them) will have noticed, I've been elsewhere lately. Among other things I've been finishing a story for children entitled Defiant the Guinea-Pig: Firefighter! with my younger daughter, Crox Minima, aged 10 (though with vital contributions from Crox Minor, 12, related to novel camelopardaline transport solutions and other matters).

A defiant guinea pig, recently.

Defiant has been packed off to my our agent, but in the meantime I'd welcome feedback from readers, especially if they have children. I'm really unsure of the appropriate age range, if any, but as Crox Minima is 10, I guess it might appeal to children from 7 or 8 upwards. If you like, I can send you a file over teh interwebz - or even, for £10, a copy of the book in draft form to save you the cost of printing out 18,000 words. Enquiries to the usual address (Third Park Bench On The Left, The Esplanade, Cromer, Norfolk).

Here is what passes for a blurb.

Defiant the Guinea Pig is a Lazy Lump who spends all day in bed reading his Captain Extraordinary comic and eating carrot pies.

But when his Mum tells him to go out and get a job, Defiant becomes one of the smallest and unlikeliest firefighters in the city's fire service.

His recruitment coincides with a wave of fires sweeping the city.

Can Defiant and his firefighting friend Vermifuge the Armadillo find the firestarter before the city goes up in smoke?

And will he make his Mum proud?

Well, we like it.

Writing this story has taught me a great deal about authorship, plot and indeed the process of writing.

Crox Minima actually wrote very little of the actual words. However, she did come up with the title, the concept and invented many of the situations in which the small furry hero finds himself, from broad-brush to small slapstick moments. I'd write, maybe, a thousand words on a commute home (on my iPad, naturally) and read them to Crox Minima at bedtime. We'd then discuss the way the story was going and think about ways to move it along. Crox Minima's job was to come up with the big ideas. My job was to take her ideas and run them down to small details. In the process I'd draw in lots of references from books and films that would probably mean more to a grown-up reader than to a child.

Sometimes Crox Minima's ideas (or mine) wouldn't work. At other times they'd set off all kinds of associations that would flower into a major plot element that could be used to tie up loose ends. Although we had a good idea from the beginning about what Defiant would do, and what would happen in the end, the plot developed and ramified as it went, as new ideas came along and were woven into the story.

I've had lots of problems with plot before, both in fiction and nonfiction, but as Defiant was conceived on a smallish scale (despite its eventual epic and elegiac mood, if I say so myself), I could see the plot elements grow without any extraneous literary clutter. In movie terms (and, oh boy, have we already cast the movie...) it's got all three acts. The first sets up the character; the second takes him on a journey, and the final one sees a dramatic confrontation in which our hero grows in stature (at least metaphorically), foils the villain and gets the girl (again, metaphorically, just in case you were worried about reading this to the under-8s). The story got into its shape without too much effort on our part. It just happened.

As Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings, it's a tale that grew in the telling. I'm not comparing Defiant with the Lord of the Rings. Of course not. It's much shorter, for a start, and it hasn't got any elves in it. Or hobbits. It does, however, have an armadillo and a rhinoceros. And a zebra. Those who seek to have more scientists in fiction will be pleased to learn that there's a scientist, too. He's a bush-baby, trying to extract sunshine from cucumbers on an industrial scale. And there's also a chameleon who has her own custard factory.

We did, actually, have two explicit points of reference. One is a fabulous story called The Great Escape from City Zoo by Tohby Riddle, sent to us long ago by my agent, which combines an animal tale with classic Americana in way that enthralls children and amuses adults. It's one of Crox Minima's favourites - and one of mine too, though probably for quite different reasons. The other was The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, a book sent to us by my friend Professor D. L. of Boston - a fabulous adventure story drenched in complexity (and Americana), and (with its two sequelae) possibly Crox Minima's favourites apart from those featuring the egregious schoolboy wizard.

Crox Minima and I are rather deflated, now, having sent our opus off to my our agent. To keep ourselves amused in the meantime we (notwithstanding inasmuch as which the term 'we' encompasses Crox Minor) have been thinking of more stories to challenge the rodent mettle of our diminutive adventurer. Defiant the Guinea Pig: Astronaut! was an early suggestion from Crox Minima - a science fiction epic that could well turn into Defiant the Guinea Pig: Starship Trooper! if it's not careful.

Crox Minima perhaps wisely turned down my idea of Defiant the Guinea Pig: Accountant! Crox Minor's idea of Defiant the Guinea Pig: Secret Agent! could have legs, and we've put some thought into Defiant the Guinea Pig: Conductor! - Crox Minima likes the idea of a tail-coated guinea pig waving a baton while teetering unsteadily on the podium, while I am strangely attracted by the image of a zebra as soloist in Elgar's cello concerto.

After watching another triumphant Norwich City game, my friend M. P. of Cromer and I came up with Defiant the Guinea Pig: Championship Manager! in which Defiant is a washed-up former Bolivian international managing a no-hoper soccer team while trying to face down a serious carrot pie habit.

My latest idea (and I rather like this) is Defiant the Guinea Pig: Gladiator! in which our hero confronts the evil emperor Geraldus Camelopardalis, who (noblesse oblige) rides around in a one-wheeled chariot, and in which our hero can say things like 'Unleash Hell!' and 'Commander of the Nibblers of the North; Owner of a Squashed Carrot Pie!'

One can dream.

That Monday Morning Feeling

2010-11-08T09:40:00.000Z

Hi Boss
Normally I catch the 0620 from Norwich which gets to London 0820. Today however, the 0620 was cancelled due to 'overrunning weekend engineering works' (someone should tell Network Rail that Monday doesn't fall on a weekend) so I got the 0635. This has crawled along with all the speed and enthusiasm of an arthritic snail with brakes on. It's now 0925 - three hours on a train and almost an hour late - and we're stuck near Stratford waiting for an ambulance to collect someone who's collapsed on the train, which isn't surprising as it's been standing room only since Ipswich (aside: when I try to type 'only' it comes out as 'oy'). The upshot is that I'll be in the office very late. Had I been working at home I'd have done a day's work by now (National Express East Anglia have yet to discover wifi) Welcome to Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #103

2010-11-04T11:14:00.000Z

This one kindly sent in by Ms. C. R. of South Wales. Please be aware that light houses should be avoided by Cardiac Persons at all times, especially if they are old, drunk, asthmatic and there are more than 19 of them. The End Of The Pier Show shall not be responsible for the consequences of any failure to adhere to these sensible proscriptions.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #42

2010-11-03T18:09:00.000Z

The admissions policy at a local seat of secondary education has broadened to include tagliatelle, farfalle, penne, macaroni and consigliere.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #29

2010-11-03T10:15:00.000Z

Observed recently up the back passage of University College, London.

Pulled from Right and Left

2010-11-02T13:49:00.000Z

I'd draw your attention to this video posted on FB from a friend of mine, whose political views are probably antithetical to mine, depending on which way you look and whether you are travelling from left to right, right to left, or vice-versa. Speaking for myself personally, as I am, at the end of the day, someone who in the U. of K. is unashamedly a right-wing fiscal conservative, to the extent that Mrs Crox refers to me in company as 'Genghis', but who in the U. S. and A. would be regarded as a middling Democrat, and therefore on the far left, such that I find the Tea Party to be dribblingly insane nutcases who probably ought to be decanted into their own teapots and left to stew, I find myself, being, as I have said, on the right and left simultaneously, at once, together and at the same time, and experiencing two states, namely amused, bemused and confused. Oh heck, that's three. Er... God Bless America! That's all. I'll go away now.

Going Woho

2010-10-24T22:48:00.000+01:00

For those who are interested in such things (and I grant that their appeal is somewhat selective) I am keeping a blog about my musical exploits at WohoMusic, a social networking site for musicians, started by my good friends Mr and Mrs J. W. of Trimingham, and which is beginning to attract significant interest among the banging and plucking fraternity. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which that in the past week I have played three gigs - a density of musical activity hitherto unforeseen since May Week, 1986 - I have commemorated the occasion in the accustomed fashion.

A Famous Victory

2010-10-19T22:19:00.002+01:00

It all started with a blog post.

This one, to be precise, posted on 8 September, in which a postdoctoral researcher in London decided that whereas and notwithstanding inasmuch as which it was all good and fine to grumble about proposed cuts to the science budget, Someone Should Do Something About It.

So was born the ScienceIsVital pressure group which attracted - in short order - many of those whom any hostess would surely rank among the Great, the Good, and the Both At Once. A rally outside the Treasury on 9 October attracted around 2,000 people and media coverage; on 12 October the campaign lobbied Parliament; and on 14 October a petition bearing 33804 signatures and weighing ~~several tons~~ ~~thirteen billion squillion gazillion electronvolts~~ a policeman's lot was handed in to the address which the Guardian might have rendered as 1 7/8 Dowling Strune. Some people even wrote inflammatory blog posts and - whisper it soft - went as far as writing letters to their MPs and other notable political figures.

Somewhat coming up to rather less than two months later, or fewer, news has reached mes oreilles that the cuts to the UK science budget will be less than 10%, not the 25% or so that scientists had feared. The story is significant in its wording:

Normally, science spending does not have such a high profile when the Chancellor sets out the government's plans

it says. But wait, there's more.

This year however it's high on the political radar because strong representations have been made by the scientific community about what they have described as "long term and irreversible" damage to the UK economy if there are deep cuts to research funding.

It's pretty certain where at least some of those 'strong representations' came from, and, whereas and so on and so forth the cuts to science will be deep, there will be many, many scientists in this country who will owe their jobs to that postdoctoral researcher who, one day, put down her tiny Gilson pipette, stamped her tiny feet, and said 'No More Dr Nice Guy!'

I'd hate to close this blog without a moral or three, and here are at least ~~six~~ four. First, that whereas science is hardly regarded as terribly important by voters in Britain, the number of scientists ~~illegible~~ able to vote being, as it were, countable on the fingers of one thumb, science is usually treated as neither here nor there. What moved the wheels of power, I deem, was not that the scientists mounted such an effective action, so quickly - although there is no doubt that they did - but that they did it at all.

Politicians are used to ~~dinosaurs~~ trade union leaders sounding off that at the end of the day, speaking for themselves personally, the derisory offers of the management do not meet the aspirations of their members. Bo-RING.

Politicians are used to brainless bewoaded louts clad in home-spun flax accompanied by lurchers called Spliff on pieces of string, gurning directionlessly about the evils of capitalism before trashing MacDonalds. Yawn.

But what politicians are not used to is scientists saying anything at all except perhaps making the occasional rude retort (OOFTUGs to the first person to spot that particular allusion). I think that the campaign scored because it was articulate and respectful; polite, and persuasive. The grammar was employed by people who knew how to use it, and nobody befouled the Golden Arches or was accompanied by a lurcher called Spliff. Above all, it was surprising. If scientists rarely say ~~anything comprehensible~~ anything, it is usually because they only ever say things that need saying.

Now, regular readers of these emissions will realize that I am Tory to the core, True Blue, Through and Through, with views sufficiently dextral that Mrs Crox regularly refers to me in company as 'Genghis'. So what pleases me - which will no doubt escape the notice of others whose politics take, shall we say, a more sinistral hue - is here we have a government that is prepared to listen to a well-made argument, and which is prepared to be persuaded by it. In other words, to look again at the evidence, and, with due humility, to take more notice of that evidence than of their pre-existing beliefs, despite all political pressures to do otherwise. And that has to be an encouraging thought.

Jennifer L Rohn talks about 'The Honest Look'

2010-10-15T18:38:00.000+01:00

Yesterday my camcorder and I were privileged to have been invited to the launch of The Honest Look, the new novel from my friend Dr Jennifer L. Rohn. Here is Dr Rohn talking about the book, plus some never-before-seen exclusive footage of the author talking about her writing secrets - and what her next novel has in store.

The Honest Look follows Claire Cyrus, a young English scientist who moves from England to take up a job in a biotech startup in the Netherlands. An outcast in her strange new environment [it sez 'ere], shunned by her jealous colleagues, she moves on the fringes of the expatriate community. But when she makes an accidental discovery in the lab, her life will never be the same again. The Honest Look is a classic tale of a stranger in a strange land who stumbles on a secret that could bring her world and that of her colleagues crashing down. Will she? Won't she? Or will she do something else instead? The Honest Look isn't available in the proverbial All Good Bookshops until the end of November, but why wait? You can pre-order it here.

Up To A Point, Prime Minister

2010-10-11T12:33:00.003+01:00

The Rt Hon David Cameron MP
The Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London SW1A 2AA

12 October 2010

Dear Sir

re: Proposed cuts in science funding

I should like to offer belated congratulations on winning the General Election. I am a member of the Conservative Party and a keen campaigner, and I read your emails and those of Baroness Warsi and your other colleagues with enthusiasm. Although our candidate in North Norfolk, Mr Trevor Ivory, didn’t win (the incumbent, Mr Norman Lamb, being both established and popular) I have no regrets for the shoe leather I expended while leafleting, nor the evenings and weekends spent stuffing envelopes for our local HQ, given that we now have a government that can at least start to repair the damage inflicted by the previous administration’s many years of fiscal mismanagement.

I write, however, on another matter, and perhaps with another hat on, and that is to urge you and your government to accord science and technology a high priority as you seek to make cuts to our public expenditure.

I understand that the public purse is thin, and that we have an immense and unsustainable burden of debt, incurred by the feckless policies of the previous administration. We should, however, be doing more than just cutting, but seeking to invest in our long-term future as a competitive nation. This is why I was distressed to hear the recent speech by your colleague Mr Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to the effect that our scientists should do ‘more with less’ and that we could only afford to fund areas that looked as if they might yield dividends in the short term.

At this stage I should perhaps declare an interest. I read Zoology and Genetics at the University of Leeds and hold a Ph. D. in Zoology from the University of Cambridge. On completion of my doctorate I joined the editorial staff of Nature, the world’s leading professional journal of science. This December I shall have been there for 23 years, and I am now a Senior Editor in the Biological Sciences department. From my position I get to see a lot of science, and a lot of scientists both from Britain and elsewhere, so I am in a fairly good position to judge the state of play.

Our scientists already do ‘more with less’ - far more than any other country on Earth. We spend less on science as a proportion of GDP than any other developed nation except Italy. It is a startling fact that the sum UK bankers wish to award themselves in bonuses this year (£7bn) is more than double the entire UK science budget (£3.2bn). I am not sure whether this says more about bankers’ bonuses or about the science budget, but it is perhaps a useful perspective. Scientists get by on so little, that the ‘points’ system for immigration discriminates against those who wish to come to Britain to study for a doctorate, the doctorate stipend being very low.

Why do people wish to come to study science in Britain? Because our science is first rate, as it has been for more than 150 years. It is no accident that Nature, established in 1869 and still owned by the MacMillan family, still has a head office in London, despite its global reach. You will be aware that two of the three science Nobels this year were won by scientists who were either British, or who did their work in Britain. Given the size of our population, our contribution to science has been disproportionately high. Names of famous British scientists resonate down the ages - Maxwell, Faraday, Darwin, Huxley, Newton, Crick, Hawking. If British footballers or British athletes performed as well as British scientists, we’d win the World Cup, the Ashes and Wimbledon year after year, and our Olympians would be crushed by the weight of their own medals - and yet scientists achieve this worldbeating performance for a fraction the investment devoted to some of these activities. Perhaps more seriously, Britain is a world centre of excellence for science as much as it is a world centre of excellence for financial services.

There is something about Britain that is conducive to science. I like to think that this ‘something’ is that same quiet determination of thought; that native, good-humoured scepticism; that spirit of indomitable independence; that resistance to the domination of ideology - that characterizes Britons generally and which lies at the heart of Conservative values.

The second theme of Mr Cable’s vision - that the government should only fund those aspects of science that look like producing a fairly immediate dividend - is also, if I might say so, mistaken. If there is one thing that I have learned in all my years at Nature, during which I have scrutinized many thousands of pieces of scientific research, it is this: that scientific advances almost always come from unexpected directions. Scientists know that research directed to specific ends will, like all plans of mice and men, gang aft agley. Fundamental discoveries almost always come from byways, digressions, accidents - the discovery of penicillin is perhaps the most famous example, but it is one of thousands. Science progresses by fairly untrammeled freedom of inquiry. Much of this will go nowhere, of course, but the few discoveries that work will repay this investment a thousandfold.

I close by saying once again that I support the policies of this government, and that I understand that painful cuts will need to be made, and quickly. But I urge you to tread carefully in your approach to the science that is as much a part of this nation’s heritage as our countryside, our great cathedrals, our British spirit. It is science, perhaps more than any other sphere of human activity, that has made Britain great. Science is the key to our long-term prosperity as a society and as a nation.

I remain,

Yours faithfully,

Move Over Nigella, I AM A Domestic Goddess

2010-10-10T23:31:00.001+01:00

At a tea party recently thrown by fellow Domestic God Mr N. C. of Norwich, the Croxii enjoyed his supremely fluffy scones topped with a home-made preserve called Apple Butter. Mr N. C. gave me a recipe he'd modified himself (listen up, Ladies, we Domestic Gods love to trade culinary tips as much as anyone) and I decided to give it a try. So, come with me, friends, on a voyage of discovery.

Apple Butter is really a kind of sieved jam, and the recipe is disarmingly simple - but also somewhat vague. Even despite the clarifications added by Mr N. C., it's nowhere as clear as my Good Housekeeping recipe for marrow-and-apple chutney. The beginning seems clear enough. You start with six pounds of apples.

Six pounds of apples. Earlier today.

The recipe calls for crab apples but you can use any old apples. These are cooking apples - almost all windfalls - from the apple tree in the Jardin Des Girrafes, the ~~sauce~~ ~~tzores~~ source of the apples in my marrow-and-apple chutney. You chop the apples roughly and place in your jam kettle.

The recipe doesn't say if you need to core or peel the apples - so I did neither. This makes sense in terms of what comes later. The recipe says you need to add quite a lot of water, and some cider, and then simmer until all the apples have turned to pulp. Mr N. C. counseled leaving out the cider, and only adding a tiny amount of water. Ignoring that advice was my first mistake - I added far too much water. The apples pulped easily enough...

... but the mixture seemed far too watery. I was not to be ~~disinterred~~ ~~disestablished~~ discouraged. The next step is to force the pulp through a fine sieve...

... this is the key stage, for apple butter is not like a jam or preserve that has all the bits in. It also explains why you don't need to peel or core the apples beforehand. I gave the discarded solids to the chickens, who loved them.

You then weigh the sieved pulp (it came to 4lbs) and then add 3/4lbs sugar for every pound of pulp. This is where the recipe is once again vague - it doesn't specify what kind of sugar you should add. I suspect that Mr N. C. used white sugar, ensuring that his result stayed apple green. I, however, used soft brown sugar, which has a stronger flavor, and makes the result much darker. You also add a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and a teaspoon of ground cloves. As I had bought whole cloves, this gave me a rare chance to use my mortar and pestle!

The next part is simply to reduce the mixture and keep stirring until it thickens up into a gloopy paste with no liquid remaining. However, the mixture I had was very watery and didn't seem to want to thicken, no matter how much I tried. I should have listened to Mr N. C.'s caution about the water.

At that point I had to leave matters as I was called away for a couple of hours to see a girrafe about a unicycle. I turned off the hob and thought I'd have to throw the whole lot away and start again on my return. When I got back to the kitchen, however, the mixture, while still liquid, had turned viscid round the edges. Perhaps there was hope! I fired up the hob and started to boil and stir as furiously as anything out of the Scottish Play.

It wasn't long before the mixture had reached the volcanic stage, almost identical to the same stage in chutney-making. This appears to be the culinary equivalent of the phylotypic stage (this is meant to be a science blog, at least occasionally). The beginnings and ends of the process might look different, but they all pass through a stage where they look much the same.

The end point was extremely sticky, but I managed to get it into jars. I made just short of 4lbs of the stuff.

It's the sugar that makes it look so dark. The first report is that it tastes fantastic, even though it looks more like something you'd use for resurfacing roads.

For my next trick I'm going to do something involving sweet chestnuts - it's been a very good year for these, and I know some woods where they're raining down like cluster bombs. Watch this space.

The World's Gone Mad

2010-10-09T18:08:00.003+01:00

I've just learned that in the current financial year, bankers plan to award themselves bonuses of £7bn - more than twice the entire UK science budget (£3.2bn, before planned cuts). I thank my correspondent S. F. Of Stockholm for this link.

Now, far be it from me to decry the bonuses of bankers. I am sure they do a jolly good job, and are worth every zuz, sou and farthing. My point is that scientists also contribute a great deal to the UK economy. Science has given us medicines without which many of us, or those close to us, would have died long ago. Science has given us computers and phones and other means of communication that draw us all together. Bankers have given us credit swap derivatives and other arcana the understanding of which has been vouchsafed to only three people, one of whom is dead, another is mad, and a third who's been locked up in a bank vault in Geneva.

We are often told that if we penalise bankers they'll leave the country. Scientists, however, are being penalised, and are also leaving the country. Those who'd like to come into the country cannot do so, because the PhD stipend is apparently too low to get the number of 'points' immigrants now require (information broadcast by Mr Ben Goldacre at the Science Is Vital demo in London today).

So, do you feel lucky? Would you rather have a load of bankers whose misdeeds we are obliged to fund in our taxes? Or scientists whose labours make life worth living, and, ultimately, much cheaper and easier for everyone?

Your call.

Why Are You Reading This? Support Science Is Vital Instead.

2010-10-08T16:03:00.000+01:00

Science is vital to our health and wealth. Our government wants to cut science funding - when countries such as the US are hoping to beat the recession by funding science more. Even India is increasing science funds by %150. So, please would all my readers in the UK who haven't done so support the Science is Vital campaign and sign the petition? Please, do it now. Stop reading this post, this instant, and add your voice to the >22,100 people who have decided that science is something we really cannot afford to live without.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #343

2010-10-07T20:57:00.000+01:00

This one spotted by my correspondent Professor Trellis of North Wales, while holidaying in Turkey, illustrates a brutally honest attitude to commerce:

Kittylitterosaurus erectus

2010-10-07T10:42:00.001+01:00

CAT: Wow, Heidi! Did you see this story about dinosaur bones?
DOG: I like bones. Yummy. Where's it from?
CAT: It's from a place called British Columbia, which is in Canada.
DOG: That's where LeaderOfPack's friend Dr C. E. of Vancouver lives. Is it anywhere near Cromer?
CAT: I think so. Just go into the garden, past the chicken run and keep going, and it's somewhere round there. Anyway, she sent CatButler the story, and here it is.
DOG: It's about Bones!
CAT: It's about Kitty Litter!
DOG: Are we talking about the same thing?
CAT: It's about Kitty Litter. What's not to like? Apparently people in British Columbia ...
DOG: That's the place behind the chicken run, yes?
CAT: That's it. These people in British Columbia like digging holes...
DOG: Wow! I love digging holes!!!
CAT: Will you let me finish?
DOG: Sorry.
CAT: Anyway, these people like digging holes to find rocks called shales. They grind up the shales to make kitty litter, so I have something to piddle on, and scatter around the house when I've done a poo.
DOG: Cat poo. Mmmm. Yummy. I love a hot snack.
CAT: You're disgusting, you know that?
DOG: A dog's gotta do. Doo-doo. So that's where kitty litter comes from. Ground-up shales. Are there, you know ... bones ... in the rocks?
CAT: That's the point. You saw the story. These rocks have dinosaur bones in them. Very big. Very crunchy.
DOG: Not much taste though.
CAT: Well, anyway, a lot of people called palaeontologists are upset because the bones are part of Our Precious Fossil Heritage, and shouldn't be ground up into kitty litter, and someone should do something to stop this.
DOG: I thought you liked kitty litter?
CAT: I do. But you can make kitty litter out of practically anything, as long as I can scatter it all over the floor. It doesn't have to be rocks. Especially not with bones in.
DOG: Did I mention that I like bones?
CAT: [wearily] Yes. All the meowling time.
DOG: Sorry. Anyway, seems a pity to grind up perfectly good bones, even if they are made into kitty litter.
CAT: That's kind of the point. But wait, there's more.
DOG: There is?
CAT: Yes, it says that every other part of Canada has laws to stop Our Precious Fossil Heritage being ground up into kitty litter - every part except British Columbia.
DOG: But wait - it says here that the Government in British Columbia is taking steps to protect Our Precious Fossil Heritage.
CAT: Yes, but it doesn't have teeth.
DOG: I can haz teeth!
CAT: So have I. Big deal. I was speaking metaphorically.
DOG: Oh.
CAT: Metaphorically, as in the Province of Alberta, which is next to British Columbia ...
DOG: I once met a very nice poodle called Alberta.
CAT: [cattily] As I was saying, Alberta has lots of dinosaur bones, and laws to protect them so they get put in museums where people can admire them, rather than getting ground up into kitty litter.
DOG: Hang on, I've just remembered something. About British Columbia. And Our Precious Fossil Heritage.
CAT: What's that, then?
DOG: You won't remember this - you were only a tiny kitteh at the time, but earlier this year LeaderOfPack went to Canada to look at fossils. He saw them in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. These fossils came from British Columbia. Something called the Burgess Shales. LeaderOf Pack says that they are among the most important fossils in the world.
CAT: Shales? In British Columbia?
DOG: Yes.
CAT: So, theoretically, there's nothing to stop someone grinding them up into kitty litter?
DOG: Dunno. I think the Burgess Shales are in a National Park or something. You know, where I have to be on a lead and LeaderOfPack has to collect up my poos and put them in a special bin.
CAT: Yup. You really are disgusting.
DOG: I don't have to have kitty litter, though.
CAT: Fair point.
DOG: Makes you think, though, doesn't it?

Another Mystery Lump of Gunge For You To Identify

2010-10-05T14:14:00.000+01:00

This lunchtime, to celebrate Canis croxorum's third birthday, we went to the beach. Actually, we'd have gone to the beach whether it was Canis croxorum's birthday or not, but that's not important right now. While we were there I picked up this Interesting Lump of Gunge.

An Interesting Lump of Gunge, earlier today.
It looks like an earthworm threaded through a tough, collagenous outer casing. It could be some sort of tube worm. On the other hand, it could be a piece of weed. I don't know. OOFTUGs to anyone who can come up with a more positive ID. I do, however, have a good fix on the ID of the interesting pattern covering the casing. Here is a close-up.

A Close-Up.
I reckon that this is a colony of the tunicate Botryllus schlosseri. It's amazing to think that such simple squirty things are much more closely related to us - all of us, including Dr R. P. G. of Rotherhithe - than the seemingly more complex worms and shellfish and other stuff one finds on the beach. From humble beginnings, indeed. Makes you think, innit.

Gruaniad Guestblog

2010-10-05T11:03:00.000+01:00

You are invited to direct your gaze here to a guest blog wot I wrote for Teh Grauniad, with thanks to GrrlScientist, who invited me.

It Has Not Escaped Our Notice #493

2010-10-04T21:02:00.001+01:00

A debt of gratitute, the approbation of readers, and an OOFTUG to Ms. M. P. of Cromer for spotting this slice of life like wot she is lived here in Norfolk. Whether the cockerels made someone's day is not recorded.

Chutney Apocalypse Regained

2010-10-03T23:59:00.001+01:00

The clamour to know about my adventures in chutney making has ~~retched~~ reached such a pitch that I can now do no more than accede to the wishes of my readers (sit up there, at the back. Yes, you). My recipe comes from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book which despite being flanked on our shelves by trendier volumes such as Delia Does Devizes and Nigella's Trifles gets a lot more use here at the Maison Des Girrafes, I can tell you.

Having a surfeit of home-grown cooking apples as big as babies' heads that rain down on the just and the unjust alike as small warheads so that the bunnies have to wear crash helmets, apples are always in the frame. Marrows, well, let's say I have a reliable supplier. Put the two together and you have marrow and apple chutney, and here is the recipe from the GHCB, more or less from memory, except that the quantities here are double what they are in the book. Please note that my memory might be faulty. Restrictions may apply. (Closed Wednesdays).

8lbs marrow, peeled and chopped;
6oz salt;
4lbs cooking apples, peeled, cored, and finely chopped;
A bicycle pedal;
2lbs ~~ladies of~~ shallots, hung, drawn and quartered;
2lbs soft brown sugar, just like a young girl should, yeah;
4pts tickling vinegar;
One of those ordinary Northumbrian spokeshaver's coracles;
two pinches of ground ginger;
1 oz tickling spice.

This is what it looks like.

The process begins the night before the morning after. Once the crepuscular shades of evening had descended over the cerulean welkin, I chopped the marrows and placed them in layers in the ordinary Northumbrian spokeshaver's coracle, alternated with layers of salt. The theory is that the somewhat bitter juices of the native marrow are sucked out, by ~~enosis~~ osmosis, as it were. This can take all night. Here is a time-lapse photograph of this process in action. Watch carefully.

The next morning I rinsed and drained the marrow pieces and plonked them into my jam kettle, along with all the other ingredients. At first they looked like this.

But wait, there's more. I brought the cauldron to the boil...

... and then left it to simmer for some hours while I mucked out the chickens and the guinea pigs, cleared the cat litter and did sundry other chores. But you don't want to know any of that, so here is a cute pet picture while you're waiting.

Some hours later the cauldron has reached what cordon-bleu chefs and farmers' wives alike describe as the 'volcanic' stage.

Beneath the noxious medieval reek you can see that the volume has reduced quite a lot. At this point approaching the cauldron is extremely dangerous, as red-hot gobbets of glop fly out in all directions without warning, scaring teh kittehs. Things settle down, however, allowing even the fair hand of Crox Minima to spoon the hot chutney into jars ...

...which have previously been washed, dried and heated for 300 years in the ancestral ovens to make sure that they are bone dry. And here is the finished product,

approximately 9lbs of Chutney Des Girrafes.

What of the taste? Well, new-made chutney tastes mostly of vinegar. It takes a while for the full flavour to develop. However, experimental tastings did record that the full apple-marrow-shallot experience did penetrate the over-riding acidity even before bottling. There was, however, a rather worrying note of caramel, which meant only one thing - the chutney got a bit burned, which might account for its somewhat darker-than-expected colour. And the bottom of my jam kettle looks like that part of Star Wars in which Han Solo is encased in carbonite. I am hoping that soaking it in Bar-Keepers' Friend overnight will cure it.

Science is Vital - Wot I wrote to Stormin' Norman

2010-10-01T12:03:00.001+01:00

Dear Mr Lamb

I write as one of your constituents concerned with the impact of coalition cuts on science in Britain. I also write as a long-serving (23 years) Senior Editor of Nature, the world's leading professional science journal, and so in a position to assess the effects of cuts on science in Britain and elsewhere in the world. (I should stress that my writing of this letter is in a personal capacity).

You will have been aware of the comments made by your colleague Mr Vince Cable, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, concerning funding prospects for scientific research in Britain in the current period of economic hardship. These comments have caused consternation in the science community and led directly to the formation of the pressure group 'Science is Vital'; the tabling of an Early Day Motion (EDM 767 Science is Vital); a petition that now carries more than 7,000 signatures; and a lobby in Parliament (12 October, 15.30, Committee Room 10).

I understand that cuts - severe ones - will have to be made in many areas. However, cutting science is, and always will be, a counter-productive measure. Many other countries, such as the United States, are taking steps to increase public support for science, rather than decreasing it, because the dividends that science accrues over the long term far outweigh the investments, however high these might seem in the short term. Over the past few centuries, it is to science, more than to anything else, that we owe our current prosperity, longevity and health. Science touches every aspect of all our lives in fundamental ways. You might say that such a long-term outlook is hardly relevant to the current constraints on the public purse. I'd counter this, however, by saying that attitudes in government over the short term have effects that last for generations (I have seen this in my term at Nature), and that science requires long-term, sustained support from government for it to make a positive impact on our national life. The term 'sustained' might not appeal to parliamentarians - except for the fact that the costs of science are outweighed by the benefits as is a walnut to a whale.

One of Mr Cable's comments that has caused especial alarm is the one in which he suggests that funding in science should be concentrated on those aspects that seem of immediate benefit. The problem is that many scientific innovations come from the chance observations by scientists working on other things. Penicillin and X-rays are two obvious examples, but as an editor of Nature who sees around 700 new reserch papers each year, I am aware that most, if not all important scientific discoveries come from research programmes directed, ostensibly, elsewhere. Who could have predicted that the somewhat esoteric discovery of the structure of DNA, reported in Nature in a brief note in 1953, would have had such far reaching consequences in all aspects of basic science, medicine and technology? One could say the same for the discovery of the laser and the transistor and many other things. The point is that 'blue skies' research has as much chance of yielding enormous economic benefits as science that is ostensibly goal-directed.

As an MP in Norfolk with special interests in health you will of course not need reminding of the immense investments made in and economic importance of world-class research facilities close to home - in the University of East Anglia, the John Innes Institute, the Institute of Food Research and their several associated institutes. Cuts threaten the investments already made (including the training of researchers) and the future prosperity of Norfolk, Britain and the world.

I hope that you will sign the EDM, the petition and come to the rally. I regret that I cannot attend, but I am known personally by several of the instigators of the Science is Vital campaign.

How Broad Is Your Band?

2010-09-23T13:59:00.002+01:00

I have this great app on my iPad called 'speedtest' or some such, which allows me to measure the speed of my broadband connection. Even in the wilds of Cromer, I'm happy to report download speeds of more than 5 Mb/sec and upload speeds of 300 kb/sec. This difference in download and upload speeds was news to me - but bear it in mind for what comes later.

The surprise was pleasant given that, whereas in the Grand Metrope one has fibre-optic cable, and in the 'burbs one must put up with old copper wire, up in Norfolk we have to make do with small pieces of wet bailer twine loosely tied together. It's no comfort when some of the bailer twine becomes unhitched, as it does from time to time, but, well, there it is, and it's quite sufficient to support the connectual needs all the Croxii, such as they are.

It is claimed that everyone in Britain now has access to broadband - yes, even Professor Trellis of North Wales - the only known exceptions being a few ~~draughty~~ doughty crofters in South Uist and a small dog in Upper Teesdale. However, access to broadband doesn't mean that broadband speed is any good - and speed declines sharply with distance from one's telephonic exchange, especially if one is reliant on copper wire and/or bailer twine. The signal leaks out on the way, you see, so that every point between the exchange and one's own computer is lightly showered with stray bits from one's emails, Facebook conversations, iTunes purchases, YouTube videos and so on, such that whereas the signal might very well surge with tumescent puissance from its ~~sauce~~ ~~tzores~~ source, by the time it gets to one's abode it can barely get to the end of the wire and fall off.

Therefore I am grateful to Mrs S. S. of Burley-in-Wharfedale, West Yorkshire, who ought to know, for telling me of a new report showing that in some areas, broadband can literally be outflown by carrier pigeon. In the test, ten pigeons carrying USB memory sticks were released from a Yorkshire farm, bound for Skegness, 120 km away. At the same time, a five-minute (300Mb) video was uploaded. By the time the pigeons arrived, an hour and a quarter later, only 24% of the video file had uploaded.

This is pretty amazing. Even considering the under-advertised fact that upload speeds are much less than download speeds, this translates as an upload speed of only around 16 kb/sec - slower than the most antiquated dial-up modems of yore. As broadband goes, that's fairly narrow, one might even say etiolated - and very much narrower than a pigeon.

Here's my working in appropriately small print. 24% of a 300Mb file is 72Mb, or about 72,000 kb. One and a quarter hours is 75 minutes or 4,500 sec, and dividing 72,000 kb by 4,500 sec gives 16 kb/sec.

A Date For Your Diary

2010-09-22T11:34:00.000+01:00

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which the well-attested fact that my ~~nemesis~~ friend Dr R. P. G. of Rotherhithe is the controlling intelligence behind the science blogosphere, (this startling discovery having been made by my friend Dr A. C. R. of Santiago de Chile), I suspect that he has no familial or professional connection with the Grant Museum of Zoology, a venerable collection attached to University College, London.

It so happens that the Grant Museum (and other Institutions associated with UCL) puts on evening lectures, and in a fit of ~~utter madness~~ wisdom and percipience invited me to give of myself, as it were, holding forth, or, with a following wind, fifth, about the life of an editor at your favourite weekly professional science magazine beginning with N.

So, if you have nothing better to do at 6.30 p.m. in the afternoon on Tuesday 26 October, do come along and find out such arcana as what I think about when I think about manuscripts; the previously unsuspected link between Nature's Physics Team and the Lord of the Rings; the obscure connection between Nature's Biology Editors and the cast of Kill Bill, and so on and so forth in like fashion.

Signs O' The Times #126

2010-09-21T23:38:00.000+01:00

This one kindly sent in by Dr R. W. of Toronto, who I'm sure deserves our gratitude.

A Present from Liverpool

2010-09-21T20:56:00.000+01:00

Mrs Crox is a journalist. She's just back from covering the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool. Here's something she brought back for the kids.

The Maison Des Girrafes Caption Competition #62

2010-09-20T20:28:00.000+01:00

One day I'll write a proper blog post again. One day.

Signs of the Times #431

2010-09-20T18:02:00.002+01:00

This one spotted by Cath@VWXYnot...

a business model we'd all do well to adopt in these straitened times. I can think of several businesses in Cromer that run like this - they seem to be the ones that go on forever, whereas the more go-ahead, seemingly dynamic businesses round about go to the wall.

The second exhibit for today comes from Mr J. McQ. of Hackney, following a visit to China. The translations are quite charming.

OOFTUGs all round, I say.

Signs of the Times #31

2010-09-19T21:00:00.000+01:00

This sign kindly sent in by my old friend Professor Trellis of North Wales. Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of a Portaloo.

Orders of the Unicycling Girrafe liberally libated on all contributors whose signs get published in this salon. Please send them to the usual address, Third Park Bench on the Left, The Esplanade, Cromer (in the Town Hall if Wet. Restrictions May Apply).

Chutney Apocalypse Postponed

2010-09-18T22:36:00.000+01:00

Almost exactly a year ago I described my adventures into chutney making. Well, it's that time of year again, only this time I thought I'd be more prepared. No cop outs this year with strange gourds that look like engorged genitalia.

The apple tree is shedding another mammoth harvest of cooking apples.

I'm in the market for marrows.

The jam kettle is locked and loaded.

I have consulted the recipe. I have clocked the correct amount of ~~tickling~~ pickling spice, ginger, ground carpet tacks and vinegar.

Mötörhead (my chutney-making accompaniment of choice) is cued up on the iPod.

The ~~sauces~~ ~~tzores~~ sources of shallots are squared. The middle class is quite prepared. But - oh woe! - when I looked in the shed for my secret stash of jars - they had gone, like the collapsing stack of genitive constructions that is Old Mother Hubbard's Dog's Bone.

D'Oh.

That's when I put in my order with Lakeland, the only choice for the organized ~~homemaker~~ housewife (my mother wasn't the local WI President for nothing, and yes, I picked up more than how to accompany a lot of old ladies by playing Jerusalem on the village-hall piano, and no, since you ask, they all had their clothes on, as far as I remember).

I ordered a dozen one-pound ~~bombs~~ jars, with all the trimmings.

Chutney Apocalypse will have to happen next week, after the Canaries have ~~slaughtered~~ played Hull City at Carrow Road. It's no accident that marrows are yellow and green. On The Ball, Chutney!

Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM c.2000-2010

2010-09-18T17:10:00.002+01:00

It is my sad duty to report the demise of Rebecca Rabbit, alias Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM. One of the Maison Des Girrafe's more colourful characters, she arrived in the Jardin Des Girrafes at a relatively advanced age, having ~~burrowed out of~~ been pre-owned, first by the Vicarage at Cromer, and then by some other friends who could no longer accommodate her wild, headstrong ways (for many years she was known as Roger, having believed to have been a buck). Refusing to be trammeled by a hutch, she lived free-range disguised as a chicken, scooping out what might still be a foundation-threatening refuge under the garden shed. Utterly fearless, she saw off cats, ~~other~~ chickens and Mr G. S. of Glasgow without discrimination.

She must have been at least ten years old when she died. In her last months she went blind from cataracts, and this might have contributed to her last escapade in the pond. She will be missed by Buttons the rabbit, Naughty Pants (Not His Real Name) the cat, and her fitness instructor, Canis croxorum.

No More Dr Nice Guy

2010-09-18T12:38:00.002+01:00

What would we have to do without, if we had to do without science? iPads. iPods. Computers. Well, I could live without those, maybe. Mobile phones. Maybe those, too. Phones of any kind? Well, it would be quieter round here.

Food in plenty at all times of year? Hmmmm. Sure, I could start bottling and growing and storing, if I had the time. Or the space. Which I don't.

Electricity? Sure, I could use candles. Gas? Maybe, I could get the minor Croxii to fart in a bottle. Oil? Perhaps. If I could do without a car, and work at home, because there wouldn't be any trains. But - hang on a sec - I wouldn't have a computer. Or even a pen and paper. Memo to self: should start growing my own papyrus and grinding my own ink.

Medicine? Antibiotics? Well, if you want to play roulette with the reaper. Me? I'd have died without them, in childhood, from measles, pneumonia, any number of things.

What else?

Pretty much everything, actually.

Without science, we'd go back five or six hundred years, to a time before the Enlightenment, when the much smaller number of people who then existed lived a subsistence lifestyle, and were plagued by famine, pestilence and war. Quite a lot of people live like that today - in countries that do not have science. (Aside - I think the Catholic Church wishes we were still there).

The government is proposing to cut science drastically. Now, I'm a Tory, bluer than blue, through and through. I think the country has to endure cuts, and drastic ones, to make up for the profligacy of the last one - which supported science, but on borrowed money. Science, too, could probably absorb its share. When Mrs Thatcher cut science in the early 1980s, she did the right thing - there was a lot of dead wood to remove. That dead wood has now long gone, and British science is a lean mean machine that punches well above its weight in the world.

If science is to be cut, it must be cut with extreme care, for one never knows whence the next discovery will come, from whom, or how. You can be sure, though, that it will come from a research program designed to look for something completely different. Expect the unexpected. And, as someone once said, prediction is very difficult - especially about the future.

What, then, is to be done? For a start you can do more than read my ramblings. A lot more. At the very least, join the Science is Vital Facebook Group. Take to the streets, lobby your MP. Scientists are not prepared to take this lying down. As my colleague Dr J. R. of Canada Water puts it, No More Dr Nice Guy.

Ancestral Furniture

2010-09-17T20:57:00.002+01:00

Two things have inspired this post. The first was a beautiful post from Cath. The second is the night - it's Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish liturgical calendar, when we reflect on the misdeeds of the past year and how we can become better. Yom Kippur is always a bit of a slog for the unobservant me; but the Kol Nidre service is very beautiful, and I'm a little sad not to be going to a service tonight.

Instead, I'm going to tell you all about furniture.

But wait, there's more. It's not just any old furniture - for furniture marks my own ancestry, my own Jewish past, which, therefore, allows for a certain amount of reflection, and also a style of confessional similar to that of the well-known televisual emission Who Do You Think You Are? in which slebs trace their genealogies.

I can trace my ancestry back to my great-great-grandfather, one Aaron Israel Ginsberg, who lived somewhere in Russia, and died, I believe, in 1924. I knew nothing whatsoever about him except his name, until I was given a plastic bag of stuff from the effects of my late great-uncle Monté, one of the sage's grandsons. They included a silk tallit, which was so fragile that it ripped with every movement I made when I tried to wear it in the synagogue; together with some decayed leather tefillin.

There was also a siddur - a service book - written in Russian and Hebrew, with an inscription in cursive Yiddish, which proved all but impenetrable even to an expert reader (my good friend and co-conspirator Mr A. K. of Barkingside), though we did manage to work out the year of Aaron's death, and that the siddur had been printed in 1909 in Vilna, once a great centre of Jewish learning. I know nothing whatsoever of Aaron or his life, but I suspect Fiddler On The Roof is a much-romanticized version of some of it. Aaron was not the village milkman, like Tevye - he was almost certainly the village furniture maker. It seems that cabinet-making was the family trade.

It was Aaron's son Wolf who came to England, bringing his skills with him. For a long time all I knew of Wolf was an old photo of a severe-looking Russian in a flat hat, and a mahogany sideboard in my parent's house. My back still aches at the memory of its weight, as my father and I moved it from one end of the hall to the other. However, I was recently given six mahogany dining chairs, made by Wolf. These are probably the nearest things I have to heirlooms, for all that Canis croxorum gnawed the legs of one of them. Here is one of them.

Wolf had three children, Bea, Ernie and the baby Monté, all of whom possessed a great gift for arts and crafts, especially woodwork. Bea married a man called Lionel, a skilled craftsman who walked from Swansea to London in the Depression in search of work. He worked for Wolf - and married his daughter. Lionel and Bea were a veritable hothouse of activity. I still remember the house they built in Hampshire, with Lionel's 300-foot-long garden full of greenhouses and orchards, his astonishingly skilfully made furniture (he panelled their living room with linenfold panels, each one carved by hand from oak) and Bea's ceaseless activity with the needle and the pickle-jar. Their three children inherited the volcanic talents of both.

Monté was also an excellent craftsman, but for him music was in the ascendant. He learned to play the saxophone and the violin, and spent many years in orchestras on cruise ships. His son went on to be a recording engineer (he assisted on a couple of early Queen albums).

It was Ernie who was my grandfather. He changed the family name from Ginsberg to Gee, but I never got to meet him - he died young, just before I was born. However, I have seen a few of his tools and artefacts, including a 'masterpiece' of a box and lid carved out of a single block of lignum vitae. Ernie was a cabinet-maker for Rolls Royce, and in the war used his skills to build Spitfires.

My father trained as a lawyer. But when I was young he had a workshop in which he produced all sorts of beautiful things. When he was the age I am now, he made this dresser

which as you can see gets a lot of use in the Salon Des Girrafes.

Which brings me to ... er ... me. Now, I don't have the patience or the skill of my forebears, or even my threebears. On the other hand, when I put up a shelf, it stays up. When I hang a door, it stays hung. And I have found that when the elder male of the clan reaches his mid-forties, he is seized by an implacable urge to make pine dressers. The Cuisine Des Girrafes is largely furnished by my own efforts, which Mrs Crox charitably describes as 'rustic'.

So, when I look at the handmade furniture in the Maison Des Girrafes, whose degree of finesse correlates with its age, and whose manufacture goes back four generations, I am minded of my own heritage. And so, dear readers, I'm signing off, in the hope that you will all be inscribed in the Book of Life.

RPG Rules

2010-09-17T20:03:00.001+01:00

I have borrowed this picture, taken by Dr. E. A. of Cambridge, as it encapsulates a universal truth, and wins another OOFTUG for Alejandro.

I Hereby Give Notice

2010-09-15T09:58:00.000+01:00

Meanwhile, Crox Minima and I are almost 3,000 words into Defiant The Guinea Pig: Firefighter! and poor Defiant has still to fight a fire. He has, however, been given careers advice by a rabbit; been befriended by an armadillo and a penguin; fallen through a hole in the floor; and has had to plunder his secret stash of carrot pies. This could turn into an epic.

While you are waiting, here are some more signs and portents from my collection.

Nihilism 101, from Cromer East Beach.

The bye-laws of Islington collide with those of Dubai.

I daren't comment on this.

Die Recyclanschauung.

This one kindly sent in by my friend Professor Trellis of North Wales.

This sent, possibly, by Mr G. S. of Glasgow.

I toook this one many years ago, just after it changed its name from New Amsterdam.

And finally, OOFTUGS to anyone who knows what this means...

Signs O' The Times

2010-09-14T22:29:00.000+01:00

Here is a picture taken by an entity who wishes to be known as Rufus T. Firefly, communicated to me (with permission) by my friend Mr D. M. of Leeds."I thought you might like this sign for your collection," said Mr. D. M., to whom I'm sure we owe our gratitude.

I'm rather fond of odd signs. I suspect that the fondness comes from a certain literal-mindedness borne out of paddling in the shallow end of the autism spectrum along with many other geeks and nerds. This sets my imagination sparking off in all sorts of unexpected directions. Here, for example, is an advertisement for a roofless house, seen in a chip shop in Roughton, Norfolk:

whereas this notice, observed in a garden centre, gives me hope that Ents still walk the Earth.

Some remind one of golden ages that perhaps never were ...

... perhaps in mysterious realms, far away ...

whereas others warn of clear and present dangers, closer to home ...

... and some serve as salutary reminders of one's fleshly, corporeal estate.

Introducing GOOFTUGS

2010-09-14T09:24:00.001+01:00

Regular readers to this blog deserve, I deem, some recognition of the efforts they make to ~~dig into my inner psyche~~ contribute to its output. So, as a ~~rip off~~ hommage to Cath's 'Bragging Rights Central' on VWXYnot? I have introduced a new column (on the left. Down a bit. Down a little more. No, too far. Go up a bit. There. Perfect) in which such contributors will be ~~exhibited~~ awarded the Order of the Unicycling Girrafe, the highest honour that this blog can bestow, and be inducted into the Grand Order of the Unicycling Girrafe (GOOFTUG). They will therefore be entitled to style themself GOOFTUG and receive the approbation of their friends, family and colleagues.

A Late Summer CroxSection

2010-09-13T09:58:00.005+01:00

I've been busier than a very busy thing, so rather than ~~bore~~ trouble you with lots of long blogs, I thought I would, with your permission, or even without your permission, present this ~~smorgasbord~~ ~~potpourri~~ croxsortment of items for your general gelifluxion and genuflection.

Autumn Beckons

The first sign of autumn was that the younger Croxii embarked on their annual migration back to school. Here is a common hazard met while driving Crox Minima to her school, the Mrs Joyful Academy for Young Ladies.

'Crikey - look at this, Inspector ~~Morse~~ Moos!'
[choking back vomit] 'Best throw a cordon around it, Lewis, until the Scene-of-Crime boys get here'

The beach, however, seems - as it sometimes does at the end of summer - to present long, lazy afternoons, with almost no wind, and apparently endless vistas basking in sunshine. Here is a picture of Cromer East Beach yesterday afternoon, about teatime, got up as a backdrop for a surrealist landscape. Imagine, if you will, a decomposing girrafe in the foreground, with a set of drawers falling out of its chest, and its head on fire. (And, yes, OK, I did enhance the colour. A bit.)

SALVADOR DALÍ - Le corps d'une Girrafe de Cromer qu'on utilise a un Unicycle.

The Greening

A little while ago I learned (from my friend Mrs C. C. of Hellesdon) of a fine local craftsman who builds very large wooden planters, suitable for growing vegetables in. His name is Paul Todd and his rates are very reasonable: he built us two two-metre troughs. Here is one of them in our front yard, planted out with herbs and some carrot and lettuce seedlings. The sheet of glass, used to protect the seedlings [planting seedlings out in September? You must be barmy - Ed] came from our old back door - I had saved it after cannibalizing the wood to make the piece of furniture (I use the word advisedly) on which our fish tank now resides.

But I digress.

Paul told me that I could get free compost from the Green Build Event to be held imminently at Felbrigg Hall, just down the road. We had indeed been to the same event last year but hadn't made any definite plans for this one - however, I am sufficiently cheap that the thought of free compost was enough for me to drag the entire Croxii along.

It was a great morning out.

- Crox Minor built a kind of capsule hotel for bees;

- Mrs Crox bought two more chickens (we now realize that the absence of eggs issuing from the hindquarters of the Choox croxorum is due to advanced age);

- I found a nice man who makes rustic doors;

- I picked up all sorts of interesting information about solar thermal water heating;

- Crox Minima and I went to a fascinating lecture about how to build a house out of straw bales. The lecturer reassured me that such houses are proof against wolves blowing them down;

- And I could enthuse about compost to the comely lass from the North Norfolk District Council, who let me look inside her wormery at her specially bred, exhibition-grade compost worms. I love compost.

- And I bagged my three bags of compost - made from the Council from recycled garden waste collected from citizens such as myself - and filled the trough above with it, as you see.

Stephen and Me

It has been put about by my friend Dr R. P. G. of Rotherhithe that I am, in fact, an avatar of the actor, comedian, author, raconteur, novelist, gadget-wrangler, and wit Stephen Fry. I am not sure what led to this scurrility. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which that I am of imposing build; have Mitteleuropean Jewish ancestry; went to Cambridge University (though as a graduate, not an undergraduate); have adopted Norfolk as my home; am fond of lexical panegyrics rich in classical allusion and a species of literary bathos that tends to a predilection for Anglo-Saxon rudery; enthuse about the products of St Steve of Jobs; went to China recently; have featured as a celebrity gadget guru (turn to page 31 of the latest BBC Focus Ultimate Gadget Guide); and am a keen supporter of Norwich City Football Club (I acquired a season ticket not long after Mr Fry became a Director); there is nothing - nothing whatsoever - to connect me with Mr Fry. For example, I am neither gay, nor do I drive a London taxi (though I did, once, investigate the possibility). Neither am I a convicted felon (though I was once arrested for busking), nor have I featured on intellectual TV game-shows (though I was on the University Challenge team from Leeds University that got to the quarter finals in 1983 or thereabouts). And nobody could accuse me of being a national treasure. Any resemblance between me and Mr Fry is entirely coincidental and any contention to the contrary is just so much feculent arse-dribble.

The Beautiful Game

While on the subject of football (this, for readers in the U. S. and A., is the game you call 'soccer', and has very little resemblance with the game you call football, which is really more like wizard's chess), I have as previously mentioned acquired a season ticket for Norwich City, as has Crox Minor. Although Crox Minor now has a suitable vocabulary for the terraces, acquired at the seat of secondary education she attends, her utterances are characteristically unique, and yelled at stentorian volume in the cut-glass tones of Dame Edith Evans doing Lady Bracknell. 'Suck it up, you pansies!' was one such, on the hearing of which other supporters at the River End within a five-metre radius gave amused pause.

As Mr Stephen Fry is now a Director of the Canaries, however, I feel bound to improve the quality of football insults, so instead of yelling 'Ref - Are You Blind?' I am more inclined to utter such things as 'Ref, you are the Very Antithesis of Argus!'

Music News

Music has been more witnessed than created in recent months. On 4 September the Croxii went to Holkham Hall for an outdoor concert featuring the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again. The rain stayed away and the concert was fantastic.

Bjorn Again seen from a very long way off. Recently.

Concerts at Holkham are very informal - you bring your picnic and disport yourself over the gazon, in a style that's probably Glyndebourne-lite. The concertgoers make for a varied bunch. For example, here is one with two heads.

Bjorn Again were totally convincing, right down to the pretendy-Swedey accents. They were supported by the 'Original' Bucks Fizz - a pop group which had a few hits more than twenty years ago - who were very, very sad. They looked OK from a distance but up close they would have been mutton dressed up as ~~lamb~~ mutton. This thought engendered in me a train of thought about music and its presentation. Clearly, it is better to go on tour as a band pretending to be someone else, than to go on tour as yourself, but long past your sell-by date. ABBA (the genuine one) clearly decided on the former, perhaps wisely. To a degree, then, music is a conceit, if not a deceit, reliant on the willing suspension of disbelief.

Stomping somewhere into this morass was a band I saw on Saturday night. Seeking any excuse to flee from Ritual Humiliation of Talentless and Deluded Obese Proles with Ant and Dec, or whatever the Saturday-Night Special is that currently enamours the goggle-eyed hordes at the Maison Des Girrafes, I was only too relieved to have received a summons from my guitar-totin' pal Mr N. H. of Trunch to see the Honeydripper Blues Band at the ~~Unicycling Girrafe~~ White Horse in Cromer.

The Honeydripper Blues Band, on Saturday.

The band was sharp, tight and most entertaining. The repertoire is one you can hear any night of the week in pubs up and down the land - electric Chicago blues, which is a genre I happen to like (well, I knew every one of the tunes, though I still get Messing With The Kid mixed up with Walking The Dog). The HDB clearly nod to Dr Feelgood, who themselves owe a nod to Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Yellowbelly Axolotl of DOOM and any number of blues originals. I've played and jammed with bands like this for the past three decades - but to what extend are they originals? Are they simply blues 'tribute' bands, somewhat like the Blues Brothers? Well, yes, no, and, arguably, spoons. To be a tribute act to ABBA you have to look and act the part -- but to be a blues band, you are promulgating a more diffuse entity, a tradition, leaving yourself free to take what you want from the masters and put your own stamp on them. Well, that's what I think.

The Maison Des Girrafes Caption Competition #37

2010-09-10T09:39:00.000+01:00

Captions invited for this shot of imminent CATastrophe. Orders of the Unicycling Girrafe liberally largessed for captions that drag me out of my customary torpor. Here's one to start you off (HT Mrs Crox) "I'm going down with the ship, Captain".

An Open Letter to Mr Barack H. Obama, President of the U. S. and A.

2010-09-09T20:36:00.001+01:00

SIR - first, my apologies for breaking in on you like this, at what must be a difficult time. I hope therefore that my humble suggestion, offered below, might engender amusement, if not a change in foreign policy. However, it could be that my offering might find favour with you and your advisers, as it does, to coin a phrase, kill two ~~girrafes~~ birds with one ~~unicycle~~ ~~Sharon~~ stone.

As every schoolboy knows, no invader from Alexander the Great onwards has ever succeeded in conquering Afghanistan. Heavens, I'm a Brit, so I should know, tales of the turbulent North-West Frontier and what the fierce Pathans got up to behind the Khyber Pass come down to us with milk and crumpets in our earliest nursery years. The fundamental problem, I deem, is that the invaders are much less committed to invading than the inhabitants are to resisting. The inhabitants know every crook and granny and will fight to the death to defend them, whereas all the invaders want to do is get out of that blasted desert as soon as possible and enjoy a salami. In short, it's all about commitment. The short answer is to pull Our Boys out of there as soon as possible. But, I hear you cry, isn't that just running away, before the job is done?

Well, not quite. I hear that no little anxiety, fuss and brouhaha has been occasioned in your Great Nation by some mad hatters having a tea party in which they plan to ~~shove a dormouse into a teapot~~ burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of 9/11, or as I would say, 11/9. To me, the word 'Quran' is no more than a rather good move in Scrabble. However, I am given to understand that it is a text in squiggly writing that's sacred to many people in Afghanistan and some other countries in a similar way, I believe, to the way the News Of The World is sacred to certain elements of the political classes in Britain, or, as you would say, England, if not more so.

But I digress.

If, as you have stated yourself with statesmanlike eloquence, the act of burning the Quran will endanger Our Boys and others of the salami-eating classes, an obvious solution presents itself. It appears to me that the mad hatters are as committed to defending their incendiary intentions as the residents of Afghanistan are committed to resisting invasion - both, in their own ways, to a degree approximating unreasoning lunacy.

I expect you can see where this is going.

All you need to do, once you have reunited Our Boys with their salamis, is to ship the mad hatters and their tea party over to some suitable location in Afghanistan, introduce them to the residents, and leave them to get on with it. I think you will find that the problem will soon sort itself out, one way or another.

In the hope that this idea will find a favourable reception,

Yours very sincerely

Introducing - the iPet

2010-09-06T13:43:00.004+01:00

Now, I like my iPad so much that at the weekend I bought ~~the company~~ one for Mrs Crox. With that, the entire human contingent of the Maison Des Girrafes has been Appled Up. There we were, sitting around in the Salon Des Girrafes, each involved in our separate apps, deaf to the mournful kvetching of Canis Croxorum. The answer to this, of course, is not to put away our electronic devices and interact meaningfully with our pets - but to bring the pets into Apple's ever-more-inclusive orbit.

So how about it, Apple? You've enslaved every person from the trendiest trendy to the geekiest geek. You have led away our children like the Pied Piper you are. Nu? How about an iPad for pets?

But St Steve of Jobs didn't get to where he is today by failing to see a market that most people assumed didn't exist until he tapped it. Here, for example, is a clip of a dog interacting meaningfully with its owner through the magic of the iPad (with thanks to Mr S. K. of London for sending me this link). But why should dogs have all the fun? Teh Kittehs can join in too. It won't belong before there are apps for bunnies, guinea pigs, chickens, and, who knows, maybe even axolotls.

But seriously, if cats and dogs can see moving images on an iPad, and the device is so user-friendly that even babies can use them (iPads are already being used in hospitals to educate and calm patients, especially children, about procedures they might have to endure) it won't be long before they come into the lab as an essential piece of kit for testing cognitive performance in everything from monkeys to crows. The iPad has already been used to interact with dolphins (my thanks to Dr. E. A. of Cambridge for that information). In the not too distant future, iPads will be able to calm animals in veterinary surgeries; play soothing music and images to cows and sheep; come up with psychedelic patterns for loved-up octopodi and mantis shrimps; and even show pictures of lady guppies to entertain gentleman guppies (Ideas To Make My Fortune #151 - pornographic apps for fish). There'll be iPad apps to stimulate reluctant pandas into frenzied reproduction, and iPad apps that broadcast the songs of whales and the calls of seabirds, leading them away from potential stranding or oil spills. The iPad will save threatened species from extinction.

You see? The iPet is already here. All it needs now is to be made waterproof, and shock resistant, to protect it from the multiple threats offered by the animal world, from the high-impact punches of mantis shrimps and the pecks of bird beaks, to the scratches of teh kittehs and the gutinous ichor that is doggie dribble.

Beachcombing

2010-09-05T22:47:00.001+01:00

Beachcombing is one of my favourite things. I like the loneliness of it; the primordial white noise of the surf; and the possibility that I might stumble across something interesting to add to my collection. Beachcombing is extra special at the season's end, when the wind gets up and all the summer visitors have been blown away, and an atmosphere settles on the shore that is at once bracing, elegiac and melancholy (Drat. You can tell I have been reading Stephen Fry lately, can't you?)

But beachcombing is also a lot of fun with the kids, who find more things, because they have sharper eyes than ~~eye~~ I do, and their eyes are generally much closer to the ground. The minor Croxii accompanied me on a beach walk just last week, as the summer holidays were drawing to a close, and we found three interesting things within a space of about ten minutes. I can't remember who found this:

though I think it was probably me. Jellyfish do get stranded on the beach now and then, and it's always great to see one, if only so that one isn't disappointed that it's a plastic bag. I strongly suspect that this one is a compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella) - I have seen its friends and relations at Cromer before, though probably no more than about once a year.

It was definitely Crox Minor who found this:

This is a fossil sea urchin, of which we have quite a collection. Cromer is built on Upper Cretaceous chalk. The chalk is where all the flint comes from, used to build Norfolk's lovely brick and flint vernacular architecture. You can find great clods of chalk on the beach here, especially at low tide, and some are actually the infilled moulds of fossil sea urchins. Less infrequent - because more durable - are sea urchins preserved as flint. The heart-shaped Micraster urchins are found regularly, but one can also find the tall Conulus urchins, such as the one here. Crox Minor's Museum of Geology curates twenty or so of both genera, found on the beach over the three and a bit (almost four) years we've lived here. Months can pass between findings. And yet on one miraculous occasion Crox Minor and Crox Minima found a fossil sea urchin each within a few minutes of each other. (Belemnites, though - they're common as muck.)

Crox Minima has the sharpest eyes, and is also closest to the ground. It was she who picked up this exquisite common top shell (Calliostoma zizyphinum), about a couple of centimetres tall.

This species might seem unremarkable enough - but as I mentioned before, shells of any kind are rare on Cromer beach, and top shells are among the rarer ones.

At the very end of this walk, which had been punctuated by some decidedly mixed weather (the sea urchin and the top shell were photographed in the convenient refuge of the ~~beach hut~~ Maison Des Girrafes Marine Biology Field Station) the minor Croxii noticed this lovely rainbow -

If there were a pot of gold appended, it would be buried on the beach pretty much outside the Maison Des Girrafes Marine Biology Field Station.

Fast forward to earlier today, when Crox Minor and I decided to go to the beach once more, on the last day of the summer holidays. The wind was up, blowing sand along the beach in long streamers -

Looking closely, you can see that any and every pebble, no matter how small, builds up a sand dune on its leeward face -

This field of view is perhaps no more than ten or twenty centimetres across, and yet I could probably pass it off as an aerial photograph of the Sahara Desert or even Mars. It struck me that in this quality lies much of the romance of the beach: that is, the self-similarity whereby every rock pool becomes a lake or sheltered cove full of mystery; each braided stream draining into the sea as the tide recedes is a great river or gulf, cutting off island nations; and one can indeed build empires in grains of sand. The beach is a vast tablet on which one can build one's fantasies, leaving the ordinary world behind. No wonder sandcastles are so popular.

Yet More on the iPad in Field Conditions

2010-09-01T13:17:00.008+01:00

Regular readers (both of them) will have noted my fondness for the iPad, and its testing under field conditions, first on acquisition and then after a busy summer at conferences. Whan that septembre with his shoures soote/ the droghte of sumer hath perced to the roote, to coin a phrase, I sense the start of the autumn writing season, and I shall certainly have a lot with which to occupy myself.

As an appetizer, as it were, I am working on Defiant The Guinea Pig - Firefighter! - a kids' story I'm coauthoring under the editorial direction of Crox Minima (aged 10). At home, Crox Minima and I cluster round the iPad where we both chip in to the writing, and she comments on and changes things I've previously written. Crox Minor is doing some illustrations. (No tittering at the back! This is important!)

Most of my writing, however, is done, on the iPad, on the train.

Now, here's a problem. How do you back up files you've written using the iPad's word processing application, Pages? Because the iPad has no fathomable directory structure, you can't simply drag and drop a file onto an ftp site, or back it up onto a memory ~~dingle~~ ~~dangle~~ ~~dongle~~ stick. The only way to get a file out of an iPad is ~~with a crowbar~~ to email it to yourself. Which is great, but these days one demands something rather more elegant. Eyebrowraisingly, Pages on the iPad doesn't even allow you to dump stuff on iDisk (that is, into the cloud) using Apple's optional pay-extra MobileMe facility. Given the other export options - and the fact that iDisk and MobileMe are handy gadgets invented by Apple itself - this seems a curious ~~emission~~ omission.

Sounds like a job for iGuru, in the form of my colleague Mr J. McQ. of Hackney, who introduced me to Dropbox. This is a free file sharing facility notwithstanding inasmuch as which you can park files and work-in-progress (and music, and photos and so on) in the cloud, very much more handily, yea, even than iDisk. You can make files accessible to friends and family, or keep them to yourself, so they won't be interrupted. If you mark a file as a 'favourite' it becomes visible offline. Which is wonderful. I now can haz Dropbox on my iMac, my iPhone and my iPad, and they all synchronize with one another in no time at all, or even less. Lovely!

You get 2Gb for free on Dropbox - after that you have to pay a rental. But 2Gb should be more than adequate for personal use, unless you want to use it to store your entire music collection and the contents of the National Gallery in HD. I have uploaded quite a few files of works in progress and have used all of 0.3% of my allocation. For anyone paranoid about losing vital files through hardware or software error, Dropbox is a useful solution (I wish I'd had it when I was writing my doctorate thesis, when I would be forever fosseting away diskettes at home and in the lab, and foisting yet more copies on my girlfriend, my parents, and as many of my friends who'd succumb ... honestly, young people these days have it easy).

But soft - there is still a problem, which I guess you have seen. You upload a file to Dropbox. Easy. You can pull out a file from Dropbox to edit on your iPad. Peasy. But how, I hear you cry, can you save the edited version to Dropbox, on the iPad, without all the tedious hoopla of emailing the file to yourself so you do can the drag-and-drop thing later, on a Proper Computer? Dang it all. You can't. Or, at least, you could, if it hadn't been for those pesky meddling kids.

Enter, once again ~~Daphne~~ ~~Velma~~ ~~Shaggy~~ Mr J. McQ. of Hackney, who has discovered a snappy utility called 'GetHabilis', whereby you can email files straight outta Pages on the iPad and directly into your Dropbox. Just like that. Now, how cool is that, eh?

Disclaimer: The End Of The Pier Show feels itself obliged to say that there are undoubtedly other file-sharing gizmos out there, some arguably even more whizzy than Dropbox or GetHabilis, neither of which has paid me to say any of this. These are just the ones of which news has reached Cromer. The interwebz is no doubt jumping with similar products for you to go out and explorify for yourselves. I should also say that all the Apple gadgetry which now clutters up the Maison Des Girrafes has been bought, by me, with real money (except for Crox Minor's iPod Touch, which she bought with her own money, after many months of dog-walking and sundry other chores). However, were St Steve of Jobs inclined to bestow upon his grateful customers any benisons in gratitude for this writer's unflagging advocacy of his products, etcetera etcetera, and so on and so forth in like fashion...

Three Books

2010-08-29T21:02:00.002+01:00

There's a programme on BBC Radio 4, the station which proverbially over-fortifies the over-forties, called A Good Read. In it, the presenter and two guests each introduce a book they've read recently, and discuss them. The books are usually fiction, but they do manage an eclectic mix, and I find it a great way to learn about books and authors of whom rumour has yet to reach mes oreilles. The following post is rather like that, except that I get to introduce all three books. Hah! The eclecticism is, however, maintained - indeed, I decided to write this post having just read three books, each one excellent, but each very different from the other.

My copy of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a novel by Marina Lewycka, had been on our shelves for a long while, Mrs Crox having bought it ages ago as part of bookstore three-for-two offer. I had been persuaded to read it for want of something to while away the hours on the train, and by my colleague Dr R. D. of Hertfordshire, who had found it amusing.

It is indeed billed as a comedy, and perhaps it is - I found it much darker than the blurb promised. The protagonist is a sociology lecturer (and prototypical Guardian reader) whose mother has just died, leaving bereft their 86-year-old father who is on the point of senility. She (the Guardian reader, that is) is immediately locked in battle with her hard-as-nails, Thatcherite sister, ten years her senior, over what to do with their mother's legacy. But there's a more immediate threat - the father is courting and seems to be about to marry Valentina, a 36-year-old immigrant from the Ukraine, whose hair and embonpoint are as fake as her reasons for being in the UK. Why the Ukraine? The entire family, you see, is a postwar immigrant from that country. The protagonist had been born in the UK, but her elder sister grew up in the dregs of war-torn Europe - explaining their political differences. I won't tell you what happens, but glimpsed between the comedic elements are disturbing panoramas of a family trying to keep itself together amid the wrenching social upheavals of the twentieth century. When you leave the book, it is the upheaval that remains. Bittersweet and thought-provoking.

I had been sent Timeswitch by John Gribbin by the author himself, and devoured it in a few large gulps. Gribbin is best known for his prodigious output of popular science books (his book In Search of Schrödinger's Cat finally put me straight about the Double-Slit Experiment), but he has written SF in the past. Timeswitch is a return to the genre. It's good old-fashioned, straight-down-the-line, Hard SF in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke or Gregory Benford. It concerns scientists and science, time travel and time paradoxes, and the hardcore physics is front and centre. The schtick is this - British boffinry in the twentieth century is involved in a secret time-travel experiment in which one of their number goes back in time in an effort the derail the Industrial Revolution. The idea is to slow or prevent greenhouse warming. It soon becomes clear that we're not talking about any twentieth century we know - this is an alternate Universe in which Harold won the Battle of Hastings, the British Empire rules, and science is far in advance of ours.

Alternative History is a respectable subgenre in SF, and one of which I am rather fond. One of my favourites is The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, an adventure that takes place in 1976 in an England in which the Reformation never happened. As you might expect, Amis scores in literary allusion where Gribbin rules in solid physics - and although you can see the endings of both books a mile off, the plotting is excellent. Particularly so in Gribbin's book, where it's tighter than a Liverpudlian Z-lister on daytime TV. The plotting has to be tight - loose ends in time-travel heists are liable to come back and bite you like a bull-terrier named Möbius. Alternative history has begun to leak through into real history - historians no longer see history in terms of single and therefore inevitable outcomes, but study what might-have-been. A useful compendium of this kind of history is Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson, and I'd also recommend The Shaping Of America in which A. L. Meinig presents a detailed view of the growth of the United States that gets away from the old Manifest Destiny view.

Now, I am rather keen on Scrabble^TM, and this is the subject of my final selection, Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. The author writes about the business of sport for the Wall Street Journal, and this is his drama-documentary, if you like, of two years spent in the wacky world of competitive Scrabble^TM in the U. S. and A., where they do things differently from what they do here. As Fatsis tells us about the variously obsessive and dysfunctional experts in the game - when interviews progress to living and traveling with them and sharing their highs and lows - he gives us a detailed breakdown of the game's history, and the tortured relationship between the geekery of scrabbledom and the toy-company executives for whom Scrabble^TM is just another product line.

But as Fatsis is sucked into the obsession himself, the book becomes less a documentary and more a personal odyssey. This is very much the confessional-style of American journalistic writing, in which the supposedly neutral journalistic observer becomes part of the story. This can work very well indeed (a recent success was Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I enjoyed immensely) but one can understand how some readers might find this uncomfortable, as documentary drifts into drama. What, then, is one supposed to be reading? What messages should one take away from such treatments? In my view, the way a story is told matters less than whether the story itself is good. Skloot's was, indeed, a great story that needed to be told. Fatsis' is less so, not because the book is less well-written (it's superb), but because the topic is less likely to have the same broad appeal. If you aren't a scrabbler, I wonder how much you'd take away from this book, with its knife-edge play-by-play commentaries and detailed discussions of such arcana as rack management and anagramming. If, however, you are a devotee of Scrabble^TM, you're bound to like it. It's certainly improved my game.

The Razorshell Heroes

2010-08-28T18:49:00.002+01:00

We have a problem with our chickens. The problem is that they aren't laying any eggs, and haven't been for quite some time. Actually, that's not quite true - they are laying eggs, sometimes, but the eggs come out without shells on. Instant unpoached eggs. Yuck.

There might be all sorts of reasons for this. One of the most obvious (so obvious that we didn't think of it at all, it having been suggested by a scientifically minded cousin) is calcium deficiency. Looking back, this seems likely. The grit we used to give the chickens used to have quite a lot of ground seashells in it - these days it looks more like gravel.

What's a boy to do? Or a girl, for that matter?

If you want a job done, you do it yourself. It was time for some serious seashell gathering. Cromer beach, for all its charms, was out, because it has very few shells. Crabs are king - the most common (or least infrequent) mollusc is the slipper limpet (Crepidula), although you can find a few whelks (Buccinum), dog whelks (Nucella), winkles (Littorina) and very rare top shells (Calliostoma), chitons (Lepidochitona) and other stuff. But it would take a lot of hunting to get the volume of shells we needed.

Along the coast, though, we knew that Holkham Beach would provide rich pickings. And so, earlier today, off we went, pausing only at Picnic Fayre in Cley to get posh picnic grub.

Holkham beach is among the most spectacular beaches in Norfolk, if not Britain. The scale of it is staggering, and hard to appreciate in mere photographs. Here's a view from our picnic perch atop the dunes, themselves quite some distance seaward of the beach car park.

Crox Minima is sitting beneath the hat (bottom left). The three tiny brown blobs you can see on the horizon are horses - Holkham's enormous expanse of sand is a Mecca for riders.

This is the beach when you finally reach it.

Everywhere on this endless, endless expanse of sand are razor shells (Ensis) interspersed with oysters (Ostraea) and cockles (Cerastoderma). The razors, in particular, are found in enormous drifts, where you can scoop them up by the handful.

Where razors come to die. Mrs Crox and Canis croxorum on the horizon (right), for scale.

Having got a bagful of shells

we hoofed it back to the car park. We'd set off in fine weather. However, we were plagued by insistent scattered showers, which chased us up the beach...

... and settled in to a rather sharp and autumnal downpour. Once home, I set up my sophisticated, high-tech shell-grinding operation.

Razor shells are easy to break - you can crumble them between your fingers. Cockles are much harder, and oysters are merry hell. It takes a lot of pounding to break those thick, laminated shells. After ten or fifteen minutes of hard pounding I got to this semi-ground shell meal,

which aroused interest in the target audience.

Let's hope they start laying eggs again! Honestly, the things we do for our livestock.

Ecce Cromo

2010-08-27T18:00:00.002+01:00

I'm going to have to renew my passport soon. The big problem with this exercise is finding a suitable self-portrait, one that conforms to the strict regulations on pose, size, background colour, number of heads and so on, but which won't get immigration officials twitchy, calling security and reaching over for their list of terrorist suspects. Here's a rather fetching one from my collection,

though I have a feeling that the passports agency might not find it acceptable. I think they might like the inadvertent antlers, though.

But I digress.

I've always had trouble with my passport photo, owing to my swarthy levantine complexion and my rather doom-laden resting expression. There I'd be, prinking along quite happily, thinking of bright spring mornings and fluffy chicks, and I'd say something quite innocuous to colleagues such as 'Good morning,' and they'd run sobbing to the lavatory. On a time I walked across the commuter-clogged morning concourse at King's Cross Station, clad in my then-customary attire of designer suit (Yves Saint Laurent, if you must know), Aloha shirt, cowboy boots and dark shades, and the crowds would melt away in my path with the unspoken exhibition of the Red Sea parting for Moses. When I got to the ~~orifice~~ office, a colleague said no wonder, I looked like an Enforcer for the Yakuza.

My current passport photo certainly does me no favours. It makes me look like Abu Nidal's deranged younger brother. My mother once told me that when she sees mugshots of suspected Islamist militants on TV, she always remarks on how much they look like me. Now, when your own mother tells you that you look like an Islamic terrorist, you've got to worry. A former girlfriend remarked that I looked either like the actor, Alfred Molina (I had more hair in those days) or the celebrated ~~freedom fighter~~ ~~terrorist~~ handsome devil Carlos The Jackal, at least in his younger days.

But the following takes the biscuit. It comes from my colleague Mr. K. Z. of Finchley, as a poster for a forthcoming concert of his ecclesiastically cross-dressing beat combo Frankadelic at which Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman will feature as a special guest. I think it's meant to resemble Ali G crossed with a moose. I learn that the band rejected the sketch, not because it was too dark and sinister, but because it looks like me.

I wonder how the passports people would see it? It's certainly a decent likeness, even down to the antlers.

Boogie Wonderland

2010-08-27T11:14:00.000+01:00

Turned on iPod. It played 'Lady Marmalade' by my alter ego, Patti Labelle.
Turned on 'genius' function. Now grooving to Cameo, Earth Wind and Fire, Prince, Booker T, Funkadelic and more. Great way to brighten a grey morning. Rock on y'all, ya don't stop, Cromercrox is takin' it' to the top, and so on and so forth in like fashion.

Today's Mystery Lump of Anamniotic Goo For You To Identify

2010-08-26T10:48:00.000+01:00

Our axolotl, Squirty Benson Wilberforce III is, according to Crox Minor, who knows these things, ~~almost certainly~~ ~~very likely to be~~ ~~possibly~~ has a 1-in-2 chance of being female.

Squirty Benson Wilberforce III, yesterday.
This might, or, then again, might not, have something to do with this mysterious lump of goo that has appeared in her tank. For scale, the whole mass is about the size of a thumbnail.

I'm sorry it's a bit blurry - it was the best I could do with my iPhone, taking a picture of a rather small mass through glass and several inches of water. Does anyone have a clue what this might be? Squirty appears to be in rude health and possesses all the appendages she did before. At first I thought it was axolotl vomit ... but then, thought I, could it be axolotl spawn?

Any ideas?

Please send to the usual address, third park bench on the left, the Esplanade, Cromer, Norfolk, in the Town Hall if wet, send no flowers, you know the drill.

Barking Mad

2010-08-25T22:38:00.003+01:00

How many dogs does it take to change a light bulb?

The answers, which (with variations) are all over teh interwebz in the same way that pet hair congregates in great fibrous drifts beneath the furniture in the Salon Des Girrafes, are diverse, and, more pertinently for what follows, breed-specific. [ahem, clears throat].

Golden Retriever: Who cares about a silly old light bulb? Let's go to the beach!!!
Border Collie: Just one. And then I’ll replace any wiring that’s not up to spec.
Dachshund: You know I can’t reach that high!
Rottweiler: Make me.
Boxer: Not bothered. I can still play with my squeaky toys in the dark.
Labrador: Oh, me, me!!!!! Pleeeeeeeeeze let me change the light bulb! Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh? Huh?
German Shepherd: I’ll change it as soon as I’ve led these people from the dark, checked to make sure I haven’t missed any, and made just one more perimeter patrol to see that no one has tried to take advantage of the situation.
Jack Russell Terrier: I’ll just pop it in while I’m bouncing off the walls and furniture.
Old English Sheep Dog: Light bulb? What light bulb?
Cocker Spaniel: Why change it? I can still pee on the carpet in the dark.
Greyhound: It isn’t moving. Who cares?
Poodle: I’ll just blow in the Border Collie’s ear and he’ll do it. By the time he finishes rewiring the house, my nails will be dry.

The joke (don't you just hate it when people try to analyze humour?) ... as I was saying, the joke takes the well-known and very definite temperamental characteristics of breeds, and exaggerates them. For dogs differ not only in their physical attributes, but in their behavioural traits - they are bred that way. On the downside, everyone knows that persistent inbreeding in dogs leads to a range of potential physical problems - and not only that, mental ones. For example, the sensitive, intelligent, conscientious border collie - the one who would not only change the light bulb but rewire your whole house while he was about it - can suffer from anxiety attacks brought on by loud noises. Dogs of various breeds suffer from a version of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and others are prone to outbreaks of sudden, uncharacteristic aggression.

Intriguingly, these episodes of barking insanity could be the latest contribution that Man's Best Friend is making to human health, as my colleague Dr. D. C. of Tokyo reports in this intriguing article in this week's number of your favourite professional science magazine beginning with N.

It's like this. Clinicians suspect that many psychiatric disorders or personality traits in humans run in families - conditions such as manic depression, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, the conviction that the world is made of spoons, and so on. So much is clear. What is much, much harder is tracing the genetic roots of such disorders more specifically. Part of the problem is that diagnosing some of these disorders can be difficult, and the possibility remains that what we think of as a single disorder could have many different, distinct causes. What, then, is to be done?

Some headway can be made by breeding mice to isolate genes of interest, and so create mouse 'models' of various disorders. Mouse models for psychiatric conditions, however, are hard to compare directly with the real thing in humans. After all, how does one know if a mouse is showing aberrant behaviour in a way that can be compared directly with human psychiatric disorders, let alone isolating a strain in which we can be sure that the mice are convinced they are Napoleon?

Dogs offer a halfway house, being more complex, cognitively, than mice, and much more similar to humans in terms of cognitive ability. They have the distinct advantage over humans, however, in that they are highly inbred. I am convinced, for example, that all golden retrievers are made in the same factory. Why, on the beach the other day, Canis croxorum and I met two other golden retrievers that matched her precisely in colour, even down to the collars. When we parted company, me and the other owners had to make doubly sure we were accompanied by the right dogs.

But I digress.

The highly inbred nature of dogs means that it is much simpler to isolate mutations of clinical interest than in us mongrel, outbred humans - fewer dogs are needed in any particular program, and fewer genetic screens are required. It is therefore (relatively) easy to link a particular disorder with a particular genetic mutation, and once that is done, one can compare the data with the cognate genetic region in humans to see if anything shows up. Of course, there need be no direct match between dog and human genes, but there tends to be one far more often than not. In this way, scientists hope to discover what genetic lesion makes some dogs (say) suffer from anxiety attacks, or chase their tails obsessively, and test whether the cognate genetic region in humans is associated with panic disorders or OCD.

Such is the progress of science. However, scientists will have to go much further before they can do the same things with cats. I deliberately omitted the punchline in the light-bulb joke above, which I can now reveal.

Cat: how ridiculous. Dogs don't change light bulbs. Humans change light bulbs. So how long will it be before we get some light around here? And a meal? And my tummy tickled?

Moral: Whereas dogs have masters, cats have staff.

Note: my colleague Dr M.-T. H. of London came up with the title of this post, one so obvious that everyone else missed it.

The Road to Fray Bentos

2010-08-24T13:49:00.001+01:00

When I was a lad, and perhaps even today, you could get these tinned meat pies under the distinctive rubric of Fray Bentos. I had always thought this was a brand name, like Hoover or Marmite, so I was pleased to note that the town of Fray Bentos really exists - it's in Uruguay, and is (or was) famous for its meat-packing industry. (I should have realized this, of course - the existence of the town, not of its industry - it is the home town of Irineo Funes, the eponymous subject of Funes the Memorious, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favourite authors).

But I digress.

Regular readers will recall that I had occasion to visit Uruguay recently, as a delegate of the 9th International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology. I didn't get the chance to pay homage, either literary or carniphilous, to Fray Bentos. However, my colleagues Dr J. H. and Dr D. E. of Toronto planned to go up country after the conference to prospect for fossils, and send me any relevant pictures. And this, friends, is what arrived in my inbox yesterday.

The Road To Fray Bentos, yesterday - Image courtesy of Dr J. H. and Dr. D. E. of Toronto

As you can see, they didn't actually get to Fray Bentos. All we see is this sign (with its teasing suggestion, in the sign for the gyratory, of a meat pie) indicating how to get there.

This sign raises more questions than it answers, which we should explore in a Borgesian manner. Had Dr J. H. and Dr D. E. followed the sign to Fray Bentos, what, then, would have happened? The existence of the sign doesn't actually say anything about the existence of Fray Bentos as a real place, any more than it signals a talisman, an aspiration, a goal perhaps never reached. It could simply stand for some kind of lost city that one ever sees on the horizon but can never approach or enter - a metaphor, perhaps, for ambitions unfulfilled. Alternatively it could be twinned with Toutes Directions, that mythical French city, copiously signposted but never attained.

Oddly, this only serves to heighten the reality of Fray Bentos, not diminish it. For were one actually to reach Fray Bentos, would one not be disappointed? Once inside a city, you might find it hard, on contact with the grimy reality of people and shops and cars and so on, to distinguish it from any other place: and yet, in its tantalizing state almost of quantum superposition, it remains, in our hearts, that lost land of childhood nostalgia where beef is king, where unknown yet assuredly happy people pack meat pies in a state of bovine elysium, and as a result of their assiduity there will always be a comforting Fray Bentos meat pie in the pantry.

When Engineers Have Dogs

2010-08-21T23:41:00.001+01:00

I spend quite a lot of time throwing tennis balls for Canis Croxorum to chase.I'm not sure what it is about dogs and balls - perhaps it's a vestige of that old lupine hunting instinct - but most dogs will jump (literally) at the chance of chasing a ball. Or a stick. Or a policeman's leg. Whatever.

The thrill is in the chase, but dogs never tire of it. For dogs, there is no concept equivalent to the novelty wearing off. Which explains the charm of dogs, I guess.

As for me, I never tire of throwing balls for Canis Croxorum to chase, but to make it more fun I use a ball-thrower - a cup on the end of a springy plastic lever - which increases the effective length of my arm and allows me to throw the ball much further than I would have been able to unaided. Our ancestors, or some of them, called this device an 'atlatl'. The combination of hunting dog and atlatl was, I surmise, a winner in the palaeolithic: the hunter would use an atlatl to lob a spear or a stone with great force at an antelope, and the huntsman's dog would chase down the game. In that way, me and Canis Croxorum are re-enacting a story that's as old as humanity.

Except that modern humans of an engineering bent have found ways of bringing the atlatl up to date. I refer you to this excellent video, sent to me by my friend Mr C. D. Of Leeds, to whom I am sure we all offer our grateful thanks.

Oh no, it's Back Again

2010-08-21T21:06:00.003+01:00

Tonight, while the rest of the Croxii are glued to the feculent trailer-trash chav rubbish that is the Xcreta Factor, I have decided to something creative. I missed the first part of the show by taking Canis Croxorum for a refreshing evening walk along Cromer East Beach.

Cromer East Beach, refreshingly, about an hour ago.
I am now taking refuge in my WearableOffice^TM, listening to Deep Purple at full volume through my noise-cancelling headphones, bracing myself against the orcs without, and trying to think of other ways of being creative.

Happily I have plenty with which to occupy myself. There's still copy for the next issue of Mallorn that needs editing, and I need to get my head around my next column for BBC Focus. As the summer disintegrates into autumn, I expect I shall have some books to start writing, too.

What is the appeal of the Xcrement Factor? I guess it panders to the dreams of millions of the tattooed, obese, chain-smoking, attack-dog-owning, shell-suited lower orders, who have no prospect of doing anything in their whole lives except consuming, producing nothing except dribbling spawn to be nurtured by the state, even from their nursery years when they arrive at school unable to use a lavatory or a knife and fork.

It panders to the idea that one can achieve fame and ... what was it? .... ah, yes, 'celebrity' ... in an instant, overnight, with little in the way of application. There are people not a hundred yards from where I sit who live their entire lives supported by the state, and say things like 'The Council is coming tomorrow to give me a New Kitchen', as if such things fell from heaven, rather than being funded by people like me, who, if they want a new kitchen, have to make it themselves out of scrap wood and castoffs. Phooey.

It also panders to the idea that the only way out of one's existence in Liverpool, say, is by singing. As if worthwhile careers such as plumbing, or, perish the thought, science, were out of the question, demanding abilities such as being able to read and ~~right~~ write. In such a way do the Morlocks play at being the Eloi. But they'll always be Morlocks underneath.

On The Origin of Science Writers

2010-08-18T15:19:00.000+01:00

Now and again some dewy-eyed student intent on a career in science journalism asks me How I Got To Where I Am Today. My problem is that my career path was probably not typical. However, now I can direct all such neophytes to this excellent resource by Ed Yong in which the recollections of a large number of science writers is archived in the comments section. The totality shows, if anything, that the typical career path of science journalists is ... er ... not typical. (Thanks to my friend Dr R. P. G. of Rotherhithe for pointing me towards Ed's blog post).

What I Did In My Summer Holidays

2010-08-16T23:30:00.002+01:00

My temporary estrangement from technology wasn't quite as complete as that which towards one had had aspirations, to coin a phrase, but was perfectly in tune with the expectations of ~~Mrs Crox~~ others. I think I managed ~~five~~ ~~four~~ almost three days without looking at Facebook. I did saunter through a few blogs, but I did manage to resist blogging myself, although it was a sore trial. But, I thought, one has to at least to make a show of having some backbone. More on that subject anon.

So, what did I do in my two weeks away? After I had recovered from the very, very long journey back from Uruguay, Mrs Crox felt that we'd fritter away our fortnight and end up forlorn and despondent unless we had a ~~plan~~ Plan. A family meeting was convened, and we scheduled a number of outings interspersed with days datively or, more to the point, ablatively related to beachside activities.

Whenever I holiday at home more or less the first thing I do is hire a skip and attempt a vast clearance of house and garden. This holiday was no exception, and the builder's vessel was soon filled with garden refuse and assorted junk, until, after a week, news had progressed round the neighbourhood, and we felt we needed to assure the hire company on collection that the revolting mattress carelessly tossed onto the skip (I use the word 'tossed' advisedly) was none of our ~~doings~~ doing. I also managed to do a few repairs around the house, during which I discovered that the three most useful consumer products ever invented are

1. Electrician's Cable Ties (great for tying ~~chickens~~ chicken wire to fenceposts, repairing chicken houses etc);

2. Gaffer Tape (great for practically everything else);

3. Trellis's Technical Tincture (essential for de-rusting padlocks at the ~~beach hut~~ Maison Des Girrafes Marine Biology Field Station).

When we tore ourselves away from hearth and home the highlights of our vacation included a visit to Holkham Hall to see an open-air stage production of Alice Through The Looking Glass. Rain had been threatening all day, yea, even unto our journey to Holkham. Crox Minor's teenage mood was almost as threatening. "Oh look!" I ventured as we drove along the coast road, "some of the cows are standing up, and yet others are lying down. I wonder what that portends?" "We're all going to DIE" was Crox Minor's pithy rejoinder. We did, however, manage to dodge the raindrops and a large yellow ball appeared fleetingly in the cerulean welkin. Another morning was spent at the Nature Reserve at Pensthorpe on a guided dragonfly-spotting walk

At Pensthorpe, where I learned that these creatures are not, in fact, dragonflies.

...where once again we defied the forecasts and enjoyed a rain-free day with the presence of the celestial yellow thing once again noted. We also visited Norwich Castle Museum, where Crox Minor and I had the great pleasure of visiting the Twinings Gallery of Teapots; we sold some stuff at a boot sale (again defying forecasts of rain); and at the behest of the younger Croxii visited a theme park with the oxymoronic name of Pleasurewood Hills (at which the skies finally opened - there's a moral in there, somewhere).

But the apotheosis of our excursive zenith was Norfolk Dog Day. This event was dreamed up last year by Brigadier General Sir Oblong FitzOblong (not his real name), a very senior soldier and caninophile, and his dog, as a way of raising money for Help The Heroes, and this was the second such event. It's basically a kind of funfair for dogs - which is great. Usually, when we go somewhere, Canis Croxorum is only allowed on sufferance or has to mope alone at home

This, however, was different, as Canis Croxorum could take us out. She enjoyed putting herself through her paces at a dog agility obstacle course (showing that she really is, well, blonde) and dressing up for a novelty dogs-in-fancy-dress event

Hairy Potter, a Student at Dogwarts

... and yet despite stiff competition ...

A Hot Dog, complete with mustard.

... she made it through to the second round. Although 20,000 people and several thousand dogs promenaded in complete amity, there were signs of inter-species strain:

Very little family activity happened at the beach. It is true that Crox Minor now goes surfing with her friends of a Friday evening (I have never witnessed this spectacle myself). However, Canis Croxorum and I spent a lot of time on the beach, chasing balls and trying out the terrific camera

and rather good HD-video capabilities of my new iPhone 4 [so much for a technology free holiday - Ed]

Now then, what about this 'backbone' business? Well, it seems that there is interest in my doing a new edition of my 1996 tome Before The Backbone, for which I am preparing a new synopsis and answering a very long marketing questionnaire from my publishers; and my agent reports a sniff of interest - well, more a large and enthusiastic inhalation - in my next semi-popular book The Myth Of Progression. Space. Watch. This. Looks as though I could be spending the autumn scribbling.

Au Revoir ...?

2010-08-01T08:00:00.003+01:00

It's been all the rage, I believe, among our cousins in the colonies to compose heartfelt odes of valediction. Being British, I find this all somewhat unseemly. I mean, I stopped blogging at Nature Network back in March, but haven't felt the need to make a public song and dance about it (what I do in private is nobody's business but mine). It would be nice to follow the trend, I suppose - being British, I'm fond of amateur theatrics, so I do have a taste for ~~Marmite~~ melodrama - except that as I am on Blogger and therefore very much below the salt in blog terms, I have nothing to leave.

Except, dear readers, I am going to cease all interbloggery for a couple of weeks, while we Croxii take a much-needed vacation. I shall be on the beach in Cromer, hopefully, pretty much for a fortnight.

A report in the Daily Torygraph shows that many workers find vacations more stressful than work, a sensation exacerbated by the armour-plated umbilical that is electronic communication - the apparent ease of communicating with ~~one's orifice~~ the office makes it all too easy for vacationing workers to check in remotely when they are meant to be relaxing.

Not here. For me, it's cold turkey.

The computers and iPad will be locked away for the duration.

The iPhone will be used as a phone, and to take pictures - data roaming will be switched off.

I shall trade Facebook and Twitter for Bucket and Spade.

I shall be doing nothing more strenuous than allowing the younger Croxii to bury me in sand, followed by a refreshing dip in the sea. Mrs Crox and I feel we've had an iBasinful of teh interwebz, and need a good fortnight to refocus.

Actually, I have wondered whether I shall return to blogging at all, after this break. When Bilbo Baggins left Bag End for the last time, he said he needed a holiday. A long holiday. One from which he meant never to return.

We'll see.

The thought of cold turkey is somewhat intimidating. Will I go through with it? I might find, though, that once I've gotten over the shock, the water will be lovely. Not unlike, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, swimming in the sea at Cromer.

Nah. Silly me. Joke! Of course I´ll be back, blogging nineteen to the dozen about science, music, life in Norfolk and anything else that stirs me from my customary torpor. I´m a blogaholic and I couldn´t recover if I wanted to.

I once asked an extravagantly Italian friend of mine why he insisted in exploding every minor matter into crisis, living every step of his life as if it were Grand Opera. His reply, fortissimo, acompanied by much waving of arms, was "I´m ITALIAN! I cannot HELP it!!!"

How Not To Get Your Paper Published, No. 161

2010-07-31T15:00:00.001+01:00

On receiving the politely worded note of rejection from an editor, designed to let you down gently, respond acidly that you can see through all that claptrap, and didn't expect any better from a publication that published that rubbish from Professors X and Y in last week's issue anyway.

Book News

2010-07-30T18:11:00.001+01:00

I´m amazed and pleased to learn that people are still buying and enjoying my gothick museum based detective schlockfest, By The Sea. I suspect that a pussycat of my acquaintance is largely responsible for disseminating news of my scribblings, for which thanks. By The Sea was originally published as a serial on LabLit but you can buy it or download it from Amazon or from Lulu.com. Enjoy!

But enough of such japery. Back in 1996 I published a book called Before The Backbone, a graduate level text on the problem of working out the ancestry of the vertebrates. It´s still in print, but prompted by the enthusiasm of colleagues notably Professor M. L. of California, I am thinking of writing a new edition. We´ve passed a lot of water since 1996. Many new and exciting fossils have come to light, many genomes sequenced, and much has been learned even of the basic anatomy and development of vertebrates. Clearly, a new edition could be a good idea and Springer, my publisher, seems interested.

So, if you are a scientist, you might be able to help me out, either yourself or by passing this post to those who might. Springer wants ~~your children~~ feedback, through a long form they´d like me to complete, from those out there in the world of science who use my book, especially those who use it in graduate level classes. Would you like to see a new edition, would you buy it, would you recommend it to your students, and so on and so forth in like fashion. Answers to the usual address, third park bench on the left, The Esplanade, Cromer. In the Town Hall if wet.

Why Don´t Scientists Teach Their Children How To Speak?

2010-07-29T21:49:00.003+01:00

You have worked, and after that, you have worked some more. You have worked through hours which before you became a graduate student/postdoc/professor/combinations of the foregoing you didn´t know existed except at parties.

You have honed your results, and more than that, you have refined, distilled, cossetted, chivvied and wrenched those results from the darkness of diffuse contradiction and into the light of coherence. From a morass of gels, measurements, heiroglyphs, lowerglyphs, radiographs, micrographs and just plain old-fashioned graphs, you have forged a Story.

You work some more, and after yet more ages of the world, firkins of coffee, relationship break-ups and moves across countries and continents, you get a paper in press in a suitable journal.

Et finalement, as the Apotheosis of your Zenith, you go to a conference to present your results - wrought as they have been over years from your sinews and lifeblood and your very heart - to an audience of your peers.

You prepare for this big occasion as you have never prepared before. You create a presentation in your favourite presentation software, making sure you have summary slides to set out your stall and pull it all together, incorporating snazzy animations, the requisite acknowledgements and a few jokes as counterpoint to the sere data.

You rehearse, and after that, you rehearse some more, until you have it word perfect, and no longer stumble over difficult words such as 1,4-delta tetrahydrocannabinol, Paracyclotosaurus or buttered-toast.

You check the presentation in the conference ready-room. Everything works. Everything is as it should be.

The session moderator introduces you, and you step up on to the podium. The first slide comes up, and you start to speak.

Only nobody can hear you, because you are not speaking into the microphone.

Why Oh Why Oh Why? Why go to all that effort simply to fall at the final hurdle?

Perhaps I have been to too many conferences lately - yet I am forever shocked at how little preparation scientists giving presentations seem to devote to projecting their voices, or if their voices are too weak or the rooms too big, learning how to use a microphone with the same care that they would learn to use the scientific equipment they´ve used to gather their data in the first place.

When presented with a microphone, many scientists seem to react as if they´ve been propositioned by a flasher, and do all they can to stay away from the offending phallic object.

Other scientists will be quite happy using the microphone, but will move towards it and away from it, unaware that microphones, even if switched on, have very specific response characteristics.

Others will tote the microphone quite handily, unaware that it´s not been switched on at all.

Yet others will overcompensate by speaking far too closely to the microphone, almost swallowing it, making noises such as might be made by a cormorant trying to regurgitate a bicycle pedal.

Others will stoop painfully to reach the microphone, or contort themselves into other awkward angles, unaware that microphone stands are fully adjustable.

The audience will get bored. Will fidget. Will walk out. Yours was the Kingdom - but you lost it, all because you forgot to nail the horsehoe properly to the horse, or some other medieval metaphor of like fashion.
What, then, is to be done? The obvious solution is to use tie-clip radio mics and belt packs, but these aren´t always available.

In the end, it all comes down to training. If you are a professor with graduate students and postdocs, make sure that your charges get training in proper microphone technique. Like anything else, there is an art to it, and it takes practice. If you are a graduate student or a postdoc, demand such training.

Me? I was lucky. I got some training during a stint I spent working for the BBC. But most of the training I acquired by accident, in my mis-spent youth (and middle-age), playing in rock bands. Because of that, I now have a good appreciation of platform presentations as performance, and I know how to use a microphone. Perhaps my youth (and middle-age) weren´t so misspent after all.

Perhaps my greatest contribution to the effective dissemination of science will not, in the end, be my books, nor my innumerable articles and blog posts, nor even my long service at your favourite professional science magazine beginning with N, but in teaching people how to use a microphone properly. My rates will be reasonable. though commensurate to the importance you attach to such training, given that you´ll have asked me to help you in the first place.

If you want me. I´ll be in the lobby, waiting for the limo.

The Maison Des Girrafes Caption Competition #99

2010-07-29T20:53:00.001+01:00

Pictured today at the wet fish stall on the quayside at Punta Del Este, Uruguay. OOFTUGs (Orders of the Unicycling Girrafe) awarded generously for amusing or insightful captions.

Cromerc Rox

2010-07-28T20:58:00.000+01:00

There I was, innocently listening to my iPod while on the long ride home, when up popped Child In Time from Deep Purple's album In Rock. Instantly - instantly - I was transported back to the very room in which I first heard this in 1975, as an impressionable thirteen-year-old, when played this by a knowing classmate.

Back in 2010, I scrubbed out of shuffle mode to hear the whole album, from the insane explosive bombast of Speed King to the final meltdown at the end of Hard Lovin' Man.

This was the sound of a band who, after three years footling around with an ill-matched line-up and cover versions of Neil Diamond songs, had finally got their act together, and, for me, invented heavy rock. Ritchie Blackmore's tremelo dives fused with the brutal assault of Jon Lord's Hammond (played very loudly through a Marshall stack) to create a sonic monolith - a sound often imitated, never mastered. The bands inspired by DP made the mistake of copying the guitar, thinking that it was overdriven and distorted, but it's not. Blackmore's guitar was, mostly, squeaky clean, as guitars usually were in the mid-60s. The distortion comes from a Hammond organ blasting through guitar amplifiers plainly not built for the purpose - and Roger Glover's earthshakingly, outrageously overdriven bass.

I realized that this record had been made in 1970 - forty years ago - yet it still sounded as fresh as a daisy. I opined on Facebook that Deep Purple In Rock was and is the finest rock album ever made. Naturally, one rose to challenge this claim, and it was my friend and occasional bandmate Mr. A. G. of King's Lynn, ace guitarist and prime mover behind Stone Pony - who asserted that far from the mighty Purple, the best rock album ever made was Strictly Personal by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, a record of whose existence I had been unaware. Mr A. G. emailed me a couple of tracks and ... well, they didn't do anything for me.

So, what is it that shapes our opinions in this most crucial theatre of human experience? Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

Early experience appears to be the key. Mr A. G. recalls that he heard Strictly Personal at the age of ten. The record belonged to the older brother of a friend, and he heard it on his friend's radiogram. After that first exposure, he saved his pocket money furiously until he could buy his own copy. Perhaps, had he not been so exposed, he'd have fallen for some other combo. He recalls that 'he'd never heard anything like it' - and that was precisely my own feeling on first hearing Deep Purple in Rock.

Mr. A. G. became a professional guitarist. In due course I took up keyboards, specializing in ... rock organ. How these chance experiences of youth so shape our entire lives.

There Were Giants On The Earth In Those Days

2010-07-28T17:12:00.005+01:00

Why did sauropod dinosaurs get so big? And not just big, but exceptionally big? Sauropod dinosaurs - the biggest ones, weighing more than 30 tonnes and measuring more than 30 metres long - were very much bigger than any other kind of land animal that has ever existed.

This topic - the subject of a symposium yesterday at ICVM9, might remind those of more cynical and jadied mien than I of the famous Monty Python sketch featuring Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory of the Brontosaurus, which you´ll recall was thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin at the other end. Things have moved on since then, and we know a great deal more than we did in Miss Elk´s time of the biology of large dinosaurs. The histology of the bones of sauropods is now known in such detail that we can get a good idea of how these creatures grew (very rapidly), and the realization of the close relationships between dinosaurs and birds has allowed us to get a refreshingly different view of dinosaurs as gigantic and birdlike, rather than gigantic mammals such as elephants, only made more ... well, gigantic.

Much of the work in this area has been done by Prof. M. S. of Bonn and his group, who made a strong showing here in Uruguay, and a very recent paper by Prof. M. S. and his colleagues (available free here) summarizes much of the proceedings. Basically, the researchers looked at all the physiological needs and organ systems of large dinosaurs (feeding, locomotion, respiration and so on), linking them all together in a network whose almost inevitable result was that large size - for some animals - is terrifically advantageous.

It all starts with the mouth. Anne Elk was quite right in her breakthrough realization that brontosauruses are thin at one end - for sauropod dinosaurs did indeed have very tiny heads, at the end of very long necks. The teeth were small and weak, so the dinosaurs didn´t do any chewing. Browse was nipped off in tiny pieces and swallowed immediately. Having a long neck is an advantage for an animal that wants to stay more or less in one place and crop from a wide area - but for this to happen, the head must be small and light, to minimize load. Certainly, the skulls and vertebrae of sauropods are full of air sacs, and are very much less dense than any bones we know from large mammals, say.

Why didn´t sauropods chew their food? There´s the mechanical constraint on small head size just mentioned, but there´s another disadvantage - chewing takes an immense amount of energy, and also time. Time that might be spent cramming yet more food into one´s gob. Some animals replace mastication in the mouth with a crop in which food is stored and macerated by stones, and one might imagine that this would be true of sauropods. Much to my surprise I learned that the evidence for gizzard stones in large sauropods is extremely scanty and ambiguous. Instead, sauropods swallowed enormous amounts of low-quality food that simply composted in their enormous bodies. The food wasn´t processed in the complex ways seen in ruminants or rabbits - it just went in the thin end, down to the thick middle, and took a long time to digest. As every gardener knows, the best and most efficient compost heaps are also the largest, so large gut volume combined with an active microflora and long retention times means an emphasis on size. Sauropods were gigantic walking compost heaps. (And I bet they farted like anything).

But wait, there´s more.

What happened to all that heat? Wouldn´t having an enormous gut, deep inside a large, voluminous creature, impose limits on size, or at least, shape? But small sauropods had much the same shape as larger ones, so there seems to have been no constraint on size imposed by internal heat generation. Why? The key is to think of sauropods not as large mammals but as large birds. Unlike mammals, which have a simple set of lungs that pulls air in and expels carbon dioxide, birds have a complex series of air sacs, accessory to the lungs, which penetrate many parts of the body, including the bones. At least some dinosaurs are known to have similar arrangements. The apposition of air sacs to the surfaces of the gut in sauropod dinosaurs would have allowed for the transfer of terrific amounts of excess heat, dumped through to the wet surfaces of air-sac membranes and converted into water vapour. Another constraint on size, lifted.

Something we don´t often factor in to the evolution of size is the mode of reproduction of the creatures concerned. It´s a well known fact that larger animals are rarer than smaller ones. As a rule, large animals do not shed their gametes into the ~~desert air~~ water column, but go in for internal fertilization and internal gestation, committing the animal to a great deal of investment, best apportioned into a small number of large young rather than a large number of small ones.

But is this universally true? It´s true enough for the large animals we know about nowadays, such as elephants and rhinos. Such large animals reproduce rarely, and are thus more vulnerable to extinction because of it. However, just because all the large animals we know about go about their business like that doesn´t mean that it´s axiomatic. Consider: the same can´t have been true for sauropods - because they laid eggs. Sauropods were hard to kill not just because they were big, but because replacing them was relatively easy - just lay a pile more eggs and bury them, the work of a moment, rather than incurring the energetic and temporal costs and life-historical limitations of gestation. Another constraint lifted - sauropods could grow bigger in a given environment, because making more of them was easier; they fed full-time on low-quality browse which they took time to digest (another incentive to grow larger) without having to chew it (ditto) and because of their bird-like structure, they were good at dissipating excess heat (the same) and were relatively lightly constructed (the same again, with a bag of crisps, please).

That, my friends, is why sauropods grew so huge - not for any one reason, but an interconnected interplay of many things connected with every part of their life and structure, from their phylogenetic heritage to the kind of food they ate, the way they collected and digested it, how they respired and handled heat, and how they reproduced, all of which taken together put the accent on large size. Now, if elephants laid eggs...

Stop Following Me!

2010-07-27T18:42:00.001+01:00

While on the bus between Montevideo and Punta Del Este yesterday, on my way to the 9th International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology, I ran into my old friend and colleague Professor ~~Trellis of North Wales~~ J. H. of Royston, who was attired in a T-shirt emblazoned with the following legend:

T-shirt modelled by Prof. J. H. of Royston, yesterday.

Like all memorable designs, this T-shirt says in a small space a great deal that´s profound. All by itself, it encapsulates everything I´ve been trying to express in draft after draft of the proposal for my next book, tentatively entitled The Myth of Progression: On The Tangled Bank of Darwin´s Imagination, currently doing the rounds of prospective publishers. The point is this: that species do not exist as staging posts between one ancestral species and another descendant species. Each species - or, rather, each individual - exists solely in the here and now, trying to gather resources and reproduce before it gets eaten, as part of an ecosystem - Darwin´s tangled bank - that changes, second by second, in innumerable subtle yet interconnected ways. The entire concept of ancestry and descent is a human construct, invented by us to make sense of the fossil record.

Now, I am perfectly aware that creationists, who seem to be my most assiduous admirers (to judge from the occasional ego-surfing sessions with which I indulge myself when I am feeling particularly lonely and unloved) will take sentences such as the foregoing and use it as an argument that even ´prominent evolutionary biologists´such as me don´t ´believe´ in evolution.

Pish, and, moreover, tosh. (Perhaps if I turn my charisma down a notch they´ll just drift away). To say that we cannot in principle spot ancestors retrospectively is not the same thing as saying that we do not have ancestors, and all the evidence is consistent with our sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzees that lived a few million years ago. There exist fossils whose morphology is consistent with the view that their living owners were more closely related to us than to chimps or other extant forms. The evidence for evolution is unarguable, and I refer any remaining doubters to the book The Greatest Show on Earth by Professor R. D. of Oxford. Both my regular readers will be aware that I am not Professor R. D.´s most uncritical fan, but that shouldn´t detract from the excellence of this book and many others from that distinguished author´s fecund pen (Climbing Mister Incredible, The Blonde Witchfinder, The Selfish Gnu, and many others, if memory serves).

Moreover and notwithstanding inasmuch as which, creationism fails because it works by cherry-picking the evidence it likes and disregarding inconvenient truths, in order to boster a pre-existing conclusion. That´s just not ~~cricket~~ scientific. Whereas one could legitimately accuse some methods that purport to be scientific to err into such misuse, these aren´t science either. Science has method - creationism, only advocacy.

But I digress.

Irrespective of one´s notions of ancestry and descent, the history of the study of human evolution exposes the canonical parade of simian erection as mythological. Each time a new species of hominin is found, it exposes just how misguided many of our cherished notions really are. When Neanderthal Man was found in 1856, it was dismissed as a pathological human - the discovery of Homo floresiensis, reported in 2004, was followed by very similar arguments. In both cases, the detractors were reacting against the discoveries because they were at such odds with what they thought ought to have happened, according to their preconceived notions. Of course, such notions do not come out of the air - they are conditioned by the evidence. The point is that the evidence is so weak and scanty that one could drive many hypotheses through the canon, each one equally plausible. It shouldn´t be forgotten that the creature that can see with equal clarity from either end is a blind horse.

My favourite critique of such evolutionary stories is not scientific, but literary, and was couched as a cod-literary essay - Kafka And His Precursors - by Jorge Luis Borges, an author whose home town was Buenos Aires, just across the River Plate from where I now sit. I have recently discussed this elsewhere in another context, but it could be raised just as legitimately here.

In his essay, Borges examines how Kafka´s works might have been influenced by a motley selection of sources from Zeno and Kierkegaard to Lord Dunsany, beforer delivering his disarming conlcusion (here translated by J. E. Irby).

‘If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist ... The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.’ [my emphasis].

To be sure, each species has its precursors, as do writers, but to pick them in particular, after the fact, is a dangerous game that might say more about the prejudices of those doing the selection as it might about objective reality. Creationism is spectacularly at fault, here - but those of us who consider ourselves scientists should also be on guard against falling into the same error. We humans like to place ourselves at the head of a parade of ever more puissant erection, when we in fact have little idea about the progress of human evolution - or, at least, not enough to tell such a story in anything more than the most general way. Zeno and Kierkegaard and Lord Dunsany toiled each separately for their own ends in complete ignorance of the Kafka who was to come - just as individuals we´d now assign to Australopithecus or Paranthropus were too busy engaged in the business of eating and sex to prognosticate on any golden evolutionary future that might or might not come to pass.

When iTunes Cannot Help

2010-07-27T14:58:00.000+01:00

Many years ago when the world was young I was at a ball in Cambridge, at which my date and I enjoyed a 1940s revival band called the Valentinos, who performed an hilarious number called 'Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs Murphy's Ovaltine?', the title of which must rank among those great Questions Of The Age alongside 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love?', 'Who Put The Bop in the Bop Shoowop Shoowop?' and 'Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear Every Time You Are Near?'

But I digress.

'Benzedrine' was, I assume, a cover version, but I simply couldn't trace the original. This was pre-interwebz, and certainly pre-iTunes. Inquiries at specialist record shops drew a blank. Nobody seemed to know. I was stuck.

Until, one day in 1992. In the summer of that year I was doing a sabbatical stint at the ~~Royal Naval Air Service Armoured Car Division~~ BBC World Service (Science Unit) in Bush House, in the centre of London. The cafeteria at lunch was crowded with broadcasters and journalists, and I remember being crammed in with my colleagues and telling them the story I've just told you, about my search for the original recording of 'Benzedrine'. Well, I might have known that the BBC would be the place where those with an encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure records might lurk. At our table a hand appeared through the crush of souls, bearing a scrawled note that read

Harry 'The Hipster' Gibson

That didn't get me any nearer to finding the record, but at least I had something to go on. And when iTunes eventually came to Cromer, I could download the track.

But iTunes can't solve everything. It cannot, for example, fix leaky oil wells or come up with an exit strategy for Afghanistan. My needs, however, are more humble. For there is a record - a much more recent record than 'Benzedrine' - that I seek, and on iTunes it cannot be found.

Earlier than the BBC incident, but after the Cambridge ball, I was listening to The Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio 2. The DJ, the late Tommy Vance (it was after 10 pm), would occasionally leaven the diet of heavy metal with more adventurous tunes, and one was so fantastic I went out and bought the record. I can't remember which track triggered it, but the year was 1990 and the album was Nomad by jazz-fusion guitarist Scott Henderson and his band Tribal Tech. I bought the album on a cassette (remember them?) Well, I listened to it, but cassettes were replaced by CDs, and then downloads, and the album made its way into the loft with lots of old pirate recordings, my elephant's-foot umbrella stand, ~~my collection of tapes of kittens being impaled on red hot skewers~~ and other stuff.

Well, roll on to the present, and I was given a load of jazz-fusion CDs by my friend and fellow commuter Mr N. C. of North Walsham, which featured some more recent Tribal Tech Albums, and other work by Scott Henderson. These are all fantastic and are now firmly lodged in my iPod. That was when I retrieved Nomad from the loft and am enjoying it a second time (it features in heavy rotation in the car alongside Rapture Of The Deep by Deep Purple and Ghost by my friend, singer-songwriter Dana Kerstein). I'd like to get Nomad into my iPod too, but it existeth not on iTunes. I cannot track down a CD anywhere, and wonder if it ever appeared in that format. Sure, I could lash up my aged and not often used cassette deck to a computer and do it the hard way, and it might come to that... but in the meantime, if anyone can get hold of a CD of Nomad by Tribal Tech, or knows whence one might be found, a middle-aged old git in Cromer wants to hear from you.

Flying Down to Rio. Nearly.

2010-07-25T11:43:00.002+01:00

Another week, another conference. Having been in the past month to the International Palaeontological Congress in London, and Euro Evo Devo in Paris, I'm off - in a couple of hours - to the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, whose pleasing logo is an armadillo.

I believe the weather will be chilly - South America is experiencing its coldest winter in ages, a matter that's exercising the climate-change denializers, so I shall pack a sweater. My journey will be somewhat convoluted: I shall start from my local halt, Roughton Road station (shown here at its rush-hour peak - it's normally a lot quieter than this) and travel via Norwich, London, Sao Paulo and Montivideo. It's one of those journeys for which a direct through train would have been nice, but simply to have no maintenance works or (reported) hold-ups on the London-Norwich stretch on a Sunday is something for which one should be grateful. And I can go one better than Phileas Fogg. He didn't have an iPad.

Ray, Remembered

2010-07-23T23:56:00.000+01:00

You'd never know it to look at it, but the strip of land east of London and north of the Thames, out as far as Southend, is the home of British blues. Here in the Essex Delta, practically every night of the week, you can go to a session stiff with the sound of brooms being dusted and mojos worked. I lived in Ilford for five years and was part of that scene (it's one of the few things I really miss since I moved to Cromer), and central to that scene was organist, studio owner and all round A1 Nice Guy Ray "Chigwell Fats" Bartrip, who died a couple of days ago after a long fight with cancer.

I got to know Ray after a friend, a Mr. L. M. Of Basildon, introduced me to a weekly blues jam session at a pub in Brentwood, where Ray was the keyboard player in the house band. His instrument of choice was a T-series Hammond organ. The routine at jam sessions is that the house band will play a few numbers, then members of the audience who've signed up will be called up to play. Guitarists are two-a-penny, so they'd usually only get a couple of numbers each. Old-skool blues and rock keyboard players ... well, you can count them on the fingers of one thumb, and as I was almost always the only one there, apart from Ray, I'd often get to play most of the night, backing a revolving door of musicians from raw beginners to peerless professionals (my claim to fame- I once backed Brian Robertson, a true guitar hero, who'd been in Thin Lizzy in their 'Live and Dangerous' days). I'd be pitched into number after number, sometimes being told only the key it was in, and occasionally not even that. Live and dangerous indeed - I learned more about playing live music at those jam sessions than at any other time in my life.

Because I was often the only other player, I got to know Ray's Hammond quite well - and I got to know Ray, a seasoned player who'd been treading the boards since the beat-group days of the 1960s. I remember visiting his house, where keyboards were propped up in every corner, and his garage was a workshop with Hammond organs in every state of repair and dismemberment. I remember his gentle words of encouragement, his words of praise, and now that he's gone, that behind the fearsome riffs was one of the gentlest, kindest, sweetest souls you'd be lucky enough to meet.

I remember how, when he was otherwise committed - and as the years rolled by, often ill - I'd be invited to take his place in the house band, or in its touring version, led by ace guitarist Richard Dobney. Filling Ray's shoes was a responsibility - and an honour.

But one of my abiding memories was watching him, after a gig, squat-thrusting a Hammond into the back of a Volvo.

It seems a cliche to say it, but cliches are only cliches because they are true- but we won't see his like again.

More On The iPad in Field Conditions

2010-07-21T11:41:00.002+01:00

A while ago I wrote about the iPad and my first impressions on using this device. Since then it's been with me pretty much everywhere. I've used it on the train, at home, and at a couple of international conferences. On Sunday I'm off to another one, iPad in hand.

Now I've given the machine a thorough workout, it seems a good time to report on the good things - and the bad things (yes, the iPad isn't perfect, believe it or not) of this device.

Overall, it's become an indispensible part of my life. I think of it as the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) I always wanted, but with a specification my Psion Series 3 or HP iPaq Pocket PC of yore could never quite live up to. It does all the things those devices did, but much, much more easily - keeps my diary and contacts book, notes, a selection of documents, photos and a games compendium; plays music, allows me to surf and send emails, and so on. As I wrote before, it's not a laptop replacement, and not really a netbook replacement, either. It's different from these in that it is smaller, lighter, easier to use, has negligible boot-up time, and has a longer battery life. But the nature of the operating system means that for some things, a netbook or laptop are more effective.

At home, it scores as a diary management system. Mrs Crox and I both work full time, and what with having a family, diary management is an important part of our lives. Having the iPad on the coffee table at home means we can see who's doing what, where and with whom - easily and simply. Because the iPad is linked by MobileMe to the cloud and thence to the iMac in my Wearable Office^TM , nothing ever gets lost - this means that one can keep adding things to one's diary and contacts list without necessarily having to sync the machine to the iMac each time you want to back things up.

Many people have wondered what the iPad is really for. This has never been a problem for me: as soon as I saw it advertised, I just knew that it would be the perfect companion to have at conferences. Now, most conferences these days will offer free wi-fi access, and tapping into a wi-fi network using the iPad's 'settings' menu is simplicity itself. From there, you can be on Facebook, you can Tweet, you can send and receive emails, you even tap into one's office system. Even without wi-fi, you can edit documents (in the Pages app) on the go. I did all these things with ease. Propping up an iPad in a lecture is much less obtrusive than opening up the clamshell of a laptop.

Where it really scores as a device for scientific meetings is the wonderful Papers app. You will of course remember the old days when you had boxes of dusty photocopies and reprints under your desk or cluttering up your attic. No more! Papers does away with all that. Next time someone emails you a reprint, you can store it in Papers. You can access PubMed, arXiv and many other online archives direct from the program and import pdfs or weblinks directly into one's personal library. You can hard-sync your Papers collection made on your iPad or iPhone directly with the collection on your Mac.

Papers is great for assembling a small collection of papers on a defined theme or for a specific purpose, such as writing your own paper or review article. For example. I've been thinking of writing a new edition of my book Before The Backbone, a specialist tome on the origin of vertebrates. A lot has happened since the book was published in 1996 - lots of fossils have been found that bear on the subject, and there has been an amazing amount of work done on genomes and so on. So I am assembling a collection in Papers of material I could draw on for the projected ... er ... project. While I was at Euro Evo Devo in Paris, I attended a lecture about a paper in press on gene expression in the amphioxus - obviously of interest to me. By force of habit I started to scribble down the reference on a piece of paper, but stopped: instead, I opened up Papers (no boot-up time, remember), keyed in the author's name into PubMed, found the paper and downloaded the pdf, all while the author was still speaking about it. This took less than a minute. Sure, you could do the same on your laptop, but it wouldn't be as quick. The iPad is much, much faster than any laptop I've seen, and has no boot-up time. Tap on a program's icon and you're there, with no hanging around. This speed is essential while following a lecture, and the iPad leaves the competition standing.

An unsung but essential part of the iPad's utility - mine, anyway - is the form-fitting case. I'm a heavy-handed, clumsy and rather scruffy individual who puts a great deal of physical demands on my gadgets. The naked iPad is beautful ... but it's as slippery as a fish, and I'd be very likely to drop it, scratch it and generally render it uninhabitable and unfit for human consumption. The case has proven itself extremely tough. It's been shoved into drawers and bags, generally yanked about, sat on by teh kittez, and has survived without any tears, rips or other signs of traumatic violation.

Last time I wrote that I couldn't blog on Blogger using the iPad - a deficiency I'd expected, as I'd had trouble doing this on the iPhone. That problem has been largely rectified as a result of improvements to Blogger. I wrote this post on the iPad and this one on my iPhone (though I added the picture later). However, it's only practical to write short blogs without pictures or ~~conversation~~ links. This is because cutting and pasting between applications, while possible, is very fiddly - and because it's very hard to navigate inside a text window. Once you've written text that's bigger than the window, it's impossible to scroll upwards to the text at the beginning. This is a problem of the operating system - I have encountered similar problems in other applications in which you enter text in a window which, on a computer, you'd be able to scroll about in.

This brings me to the iPad's main limitation, which is the virtual keyboard. I have learned to type at speed on this, but unless I am very careful, text jumps around the page. I'm not sure why this is, but it's probably something to do with the sensitivity of the keyboard and my heavy-handedness - I had the same problem with an old AST laptop I once had. But the main thing is that to reach all the characters, you have to toggle between three different keyboards - one with the letters, one containing numbers and some useful symbols, and a third with more symbols. This is what we tech heads call a Pain In The Bum, and, I think, exposes the iPad's heritage as a big iPod Touch - it's a keyboard for writing short emails or texts, not for composing anything at length. Sure, one can buy the iPod Dock or a remote keyboard to get round this, but given that you can buy the Pages wordprocessor as an app (and very good it is too) you'd have thought that the good folk at Apple would have done something about this.

My verdict? Sure, it has its limitations, but if viewed as a PDA rather than a fully specified computer, it's been a winner for me. The niggles about the keyboard and OS are more than outweighed by its lightness, utility, battery life, the fact that it takes no time at all to boot up, and its blazing speed. It won't be for everyone, but for me, it's probably the best piece of equipment I've ever bought.

UPDATE: I've just bought an Apple Remote keyboard and paired it to the iPad by bluetooth. This turns the iPad from a hunt-and-peck texting device into a fully fledged writing machine. There is no reason, now, why one shouldn't be able to write as much text as one likes on an iPad without the virtual keyboard driving you barmy. Problem is, once the external keyboard is paired to the device, the virtual keyboard is disabled, unless you turn the bluetooth off again. Just a little niggle, but I had to find something irritating.

Skinsides Insides

2010-07-20T09:58:00.000+01:00

On Thursday I am going to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital to have a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan, to see if they can get to the (spinal) root of my sciatica. I have never undergone this procedure before, but they tell me that they post me in a slot, insert a ten-shilling note and wind the handle, and if all goes well I'll come out more or less the same as I went in. I hope I won't be transformed instead into a watermelon or a cucumber, but if that were to happen I'd probably look something like these remarkable MRI images of fruit (thanks to Mr. A. R. of London for the link).

The More Things Change ...

2010-07-20T00:26:00.003+01:00

Here at the Maison Des Girrafes we have a game called 'Waiting for Crox Minor'. Crox Minor, you see, takes an age and three quarters to get ready for anything, much of which time is occupied lacing up Converse trainers/ getting randomly distracted by cats (more on these later)/ daydreaming about broccoli/ combinations of the above.

The rest of us are already huffing and puffing and in the car, saying things like 'dynasties will rise and fall; mountains will be thrust up from the ocean floor and be ground away to silt [we do love our orogenies at the M des Gs], even the continents are starting to drift apart, and still Crox Minor is lacing up her trainers' and so on and so forth in that vein. Some things change, you see, but others are eternal, and even though the face of the Earth will be changed utterly were one to hang around long enough, it will still take an age and a half for Crox Minor to get her shoes on.

All of which brings me, if in a somewhat elliptical manner, to a minor spat in a far country of which one knows little, a high-profile blogging collective in which some fifteen of the eighty-odd bloggistas have left through feelings of moral outrage, when the proprietor of that network wished to host a paid-for blog by employees of a company that manufactures carbonated drinks. It is not for me to go into details: a wealth of information - a veritable cornucopia - can be yours simply by typing 'Pepsigate' into a search engine near you. However, I'd recommend this post as a one-stop ~~sauce~~ ~~tzores~~ source. This post is significant because the author, one Sir Bora de Zivkovic, is the author of one of the best-respected blogs on this particular network - and he himself has decided to leave. His parting shot is this magisterial post on the changing face of the blogging ecosystem.

Bora, like Rabbit in Winnie-The-Pooh, is a busy person. His blog is a never-ending carnival, link-fest, news aggregator and source of wisdom, and if that isn't enough, he (with some help from his friends and relations) has set up the enormo-phenomenon that is the ScienceOnline meatspace meetings, and the Open Laboratory best-of-science-blogging annuals. Unlike Rabbit, who is rather bossy, Bora is the nicest, kindest person you could ever meet, and, it seems, an inspiration to many. I first met him at SciFoo back in 2007, and the following year had the great pleasure of welcoming him to the Maison Des Girrafes, where he was a hit with all the Croxii, especially Heidi, who flirted with him something rotten.

Now, this is not a wake, and I'm sure the never-ending circus that is Bora's blog will roll on to even greater success somewhere else. Taking the long view, all things must pass - even dynasties, mountains and continents - and it could be that the blogging collective to which I refer has passed the noontide of its success, and will be succeeded by other things, as Bora describes eloquently in his post. Such seems to be the natural order of things.

Blogging collectives, are, possibly, inherently unstable entities, given the outspoken and often wayward natures of the participants. The aforementioned enterprise hosts (or did until recently) many bloggers whose work and personalities I like a great deal - and many others, it is fair to say, whose work and personalities I like rather less. That's probably as it should be - but it implies that such entities are not built to last. John Wilkins, the wry ol' silverback of the science blogosphere, likens such an enterprise to herding cats.

Cats, not being herded, recently.
At first I imagined he was talking about me and my editorial colleagues, or the members of my synagogue, collectives of intelligent, articulate and opinionated people who all like to talk at once, but the metaphor works just as well for science bloggers. The blogging platforms may change, and change again. But the bloggers, bless 'em, will stay the same. At least until they get a dog.

Cat, successfully herded by Dog. Yesterday.

Apple Store, Apple Store

2010-07-18T22:06:00.000+01:00

I had to post this - it's from Crox Minor, currently saving up for an iPod Touch, and obsessed with the soundtrack of Fiddler On The Roof. Hum the following to the tune of 'Matchmaker, Matchmaker'.

Apple Store, Apple Store, Get me a Mac
Find me an iPhone, send me a pack
Of beautiful gadgets for I long to be
The envy of all I see.

Apple Store, Apple Store, an 8-gig will do
Shiny and black, an iPod so new
So bring me it now because I am a nerd
And happy cries will be heard.

For Papa, see that it's cheap
For Mama, see that it's quiet
With it all day long I will sit on my arse
So I may have to go on a diet.

Apple Store, Apple Store, get me a Mac
Find me an iPhone, send me a pack
Of wondrous widgets so shiny and cool
The thought of them makes me drool!

Bring On The Starving Lions

2010-07-18T10:47:00.002+01:00

On Saturday night I had the grave misfortune to have watched most of a nocturnal emission entitled 101 Ways To Leave A Game Show in which the idiot contestants were asked idiot questions and the one who answered incorrectly had to endure some hideous fate usually involving being catapulted into water from a great height. This is the sort of low-grade chav TV fodder with which Saturday evening schedules are customarily disfigured (the other Croxii lap up this tripe) but the wonder is that it was put on by the BBC, which is forever being castigated for its profligacy with the license-fee payers' money (the production costs for this show must have cost £££).

Let's push this thing a bit further. I think this format would turn from unwatchable to unmissable if contestants who erred would suffer significant risk of death, by increasingly bizarre and exotic ways as the show progressed. The first contestants to leave might do so by hanging, with subsequent victims being dispatched by firing squad, being pulled to bits by maddened horses, squished by steamrollers, eaten alive by rabid mutant hagfishes, nibbled to death by Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM and so on.

Beelzebun Demon Bunny of DOOM. Quite some time ago.

The Romans had the right idea when they threw atheists to the lions. As Tom Lehrer said in the context of bullfighting, 'the crowd held its breath/ hoping that death/ would brighten an otherwise dull afternoon'. And why not? Chav entertainments of an earlier age included bear-baiting and cock fighting, and given that no self-respecting chav is seen out these days without an attack dog as a fashion accessory, dog-fighting, too. If this is the audience the BBC is trying to cultivate, it should at least be honest about it. It would be better value for money, too. All you'd need is a pub car park and a couple of camcorders. What's not to like?

Building Bodies, By Instalments

2010-07-18T01:00:00.000+01:00

Perhaps the most interesting session at Euro Evo Devo was, for me, the one on the origin of segmentation - that is, the propensity for the body of an organism to be divided up into a series of more or less repeating parts. When William Bateson was studying the anatomy and development of acorn worms in the mid-1880s, he supposed that segmentation originated as a kind of oscillation, as of a train of waves. I wish I could pin down, now, precisely where he said this, but the point was made amply in his 1894 ~~polemic~~ book Materials for the Study of Variation, in which he classed segmentation as the basis for a kind of variation in repetitive parts he termed 'meristic'. Looking at the tree of life as it is conventionally viewed today, jut three among the thirty-something recorded phyla are regarded as segmented - annelid worms, arthropods and chordates. Now, in the Old Days, when Cromercrox was taught zoology, it was thought that arthropods evolved from an annelid-like ancestor, in which case the segmentation seen in earthworm and earwig were homologous - that is, evolutionarily related.

That all changed following a meeting I had in 1996 in the Wyndham Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, with Professor James A. Lake of UCLA, who proposed a new molecular-based phylogeny of metazoa in which annelids and arthropods were fundamentally separated. Arthropods would be united with the determinedly ~~unsentimental~~ unsegmental nematodes and some other stuff in the Ecdysozoa, a clade of 'molting animals'. Lake and colleagues had already published (in Science) a molecular phylogeny linking annelids with molluscs and brachiopods into a clade called the Lophotrochozoa - the revelation of the Ecdysozoa paper was that the arthropods and the annelids were fundamentally separate. (The chordates, of course, were and still do belong to a quite separate group, the deuterostomes). At first, many people, including me, thought that the whole idea was loopy. But hey, what do I know? I am a mere hack. The molecules say different; the Ecdysozoa was published in my esteemed organ, and the Deuterostome/Ecdysozoa/Lophotrochozoa split of the animal kingdom has been borne out by much subsequent work.

What this means for segmentation is this: that each major animal group has one phylum within it that is habitually segmented. In the Lophotrochozoa, it is the annelids, standing amid a squishy morass of unsegmented molluscs and brachiopods. In the Ecdysozoa, it is the arthropods, rising above the unsegmented nematodes and a load of other stuff you've probably never heard of, and even if you did, you'd probably want to forget about it immediately afterwards. And among the Deuterostomes, it is the chordates - including we vertebrates - with our mesoderm divided into somites, each with its own vertebra, innervation and muscle block. If you don't believe me, just ask a salmon steak.

Now, this poses a nice conundrum - which my father says is different from two elephants sitting on a bagel, who have a bunundrum - and this conundrum is this: did the habit of segmentation originate in each phylum independently, in which case the common ancestor of all these animals was unsegmented, or was it a more general feature of animals that most creatures have lost, all except for the annelids, arthropods and chordates? This, I discovered, is a matter still ripe for debate, and what made the symposium at Euro Evo Devo so exciting.

To posit an independent origin for all three instances of segmentation would be by far the easiest option, given that the three phyla concerned are widely sundered by evolution, and the alternative is to suppose a wholesale loss of segmentation in virtually every other kind of animal. The ugly fact that spoils this easy idea, though, is that in all three cases, the process of segmentation utilizes pretty much the same network of genes - cognates of genes isolated long ago in the fruit fly and bearing names such as engrailed and wingless. These days it is fashionable to invoke the concept of deep homology in which structures in widely separated animal groups, although they look very different from each other and might have indeed appeared independently, are based for their engenderment on a similar cassette or module of interacting genes. This idea allows the invocation of segmentation in each of the three phyla to appear separate, even though it is based on fundamentally the same genetic substructure.

This, however, raises the question of why segmentation has not happened in all the other phyla, given that they all must share the same module or cassette of genes, and, to follow this line of thinking, why the ancestor of all three major animal groups - which would have also shared this cassette or modeule of genes - might not also have been segmented.

Truly, a question that would cross a rabbi's eyes, noch?

The solution, it seems, is to loosen what we think of as segmentation. For it is not the case that all animals other than annelids, arthropods and chordates are utterly without any sign of segmentation. True, their bodies might not be so rigidly divided into compartments in accordance with our usual requirements for segmentation - but they do, very often, show a repetition of parts along the body axis. Primitive molluscs, such as chitons and some other forms, show repetitive arrangements of shells, gills and so on, even though they are not usually thought of as segmented. Non-chordate deuterostomes such as acorn-worms show repeated gill slits. Even humble flatworms show repeated arrangements of gonads, gut diverticulae and so on. In the widest sense, therefore, there is a tendency for creatures to divide their bodies, to a greater or lesser extent, into a series of repeated structures, forming a continuum from the completely unsegmented to the fully segmented.

Perhaps Bateson had it right all along, if only figuratively. Perhaps there is a tendency within animal bodies to create distinct domains by means of wavelike morphogenetic gradients, whose results are not distinguished by a simple division into those animals that are segmented against those that are not - but simply by those animals in which the wave crests of such oscillators are higher or lower, more distinct or less. The common ancestor of Ecdysozoa, Lophotrochozoa and Deterostomes might not have been strictly segmented, or strictly unsegmented - it is probably impossible to know - but it would have had an oscillatory system of body partitioning that would have fallen out naturally from the interaction of cassettes or modules of genes. Like many revelations in science, it is not the data that change - but the way you look at them in the light of new evidence.

Two Cheers for Sisyphus

2010-07-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

I'm working harder than a very hard thing, trying to clear my desk before I jet off to Uruguay on the 25th for the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology, after which I shall be on holiday (which I badly need - by then I shall be down to my last elbows). I have to get another issue of Mallorn (the Journal of the Tolkien Society) pretty much laid out before I go. I should also like to finish my end-of-year accounts. I am painfully aware that I owe you some blogs from Euro Evo Devo. And there's some other stuff I'd like to write about if time allows.

I have managed, though, to put a big self-satisfied-looking tick against one task on my list. Many years ago (or so it seems) the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza asked me to write something for their Scholars' Forum. I was very honoured to have been asked, as other invitees include the cream of modern Tolkien scholarship, and it does a fellow good to be counted among such mighty company.

Well, eventually, and after much prevaricating around the bush, I delivered. It's an essay about the sources that might have inspired Tolkien in the creation of the Ents, his distinctive Shepherds of the Trees - together with a cautionary note on such source-spotting fishing expeditions. Anyway, it's up now. I hope you like it.

As for everything else, here is something else for you to look at, while you are waiting.

How Not To Get Your Paper Published, No. 43

2010-07-15T16:51:00.003+01:00

Format your manuscript in a way that makes it entirely obvious that you've never read the journal before, let alone its carefully crafted guidance notes for intending authors.

We Are Not Men, We Are Euro Evo Devo

2010-07-10T00:16:00.000+01:00

I'm just back from the third biennial meeting of the European Evo Devo society, which was held at the Université Paris 7, parts of which were seemingly designed by Le Corbusier when he was in his SF Dystopian Municipal Car Parks phase. The auditoria were concrete bunkers with no aircon, so anybody who'd borne more than four lectures in a row (the weather was scorchio) came out looking like a decaying lamprey. The meeting for me was made more difficult by my continued sciatica and a persistent head cold which meant that at night I never got more than two or three hours sleep together without waking up amid the sensation of drowning in my own mucus.

But I digress.

What, I hear you cry, is 'Evo Devo'? The term is short for 'Evolutionary Developmental Biology' and it's a science that's waited, ooh, since the early nineteenth century to come into it own.

People of cleverness (the term 'scientist' hadn't been invented) have long wondered about the relationship between development - the course an individual organism takes between egg and embryo and adult - and the grander over-arching evolutionary history of the species to which it belongs. The people who really went to town with this idea were the 'Nature Philosophers', a group of romantics mainly from Germany, and at the turn of the nineteenth century, largely associated with that great polymath Goethe. Now, Goethe's literary effusions are such that he has been referred to as 'The German Shakespeare' but the comparison is hardly fair - after all, the Bard didn't invent the idea of morphology; come up with a theory of colour which, in the importance attached to the observer, presages quantum mechanics, if only poetically; and lay the groundwork for the evo-devo we see today.

The Nature Philosophers felt that the course an embryo follows represents the history of the group to which it belonged, a a kind of record whereby that species would engage in its own striving towards perfection. Yes, it's a lot of waffle, but if the Nature Philosophers had their heads in the clouds (nuages still inhabited by that Goethean offshoot, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophists), they had their feet firmly ~~planted in mid air~~ on the ground. Goethe had an immense on Haeckel, and through him, early embryologists such as Wilhelm Roux and from him, a line of experimental embryology that extends right up to the present day.

Despite the noöspheric phooey, the Nature Philosophers were keen observers, and their intellectual descendants pioneered many techniques in dissection, staining and microscopy - all good, solid, investigative stuff. The Nature Philosophers looked at the big questions of the study of form, and tried to devise experiments to answer them.

The impact of Darwinism on this movement was, for a long time, little more than that of a damp lettuce leaf on the hide of a charging rhino. All evolutionary biologists could do was make rather vague and vacuous statements about how various embryological (and thus evolutionary) transformations might or might not have been influenced by selection. This vagueness so infuriated two young biologists, William Bateson and Thomas Hunt Morgan, to such a pitch that they threw over Darwinism in favour of designing experiments to get at the sources of the genetic variation that Darwin could not address. It was Bateson who coined the term 'genetics'. Morgan, on the other hand, with his students, pioneered the use of the fruit fly as a model organism and, through a series of careful experiments, discovered that the units of heredity had physical form, as loci that existed on chromosomes. Bateson went to his grave a pronounced anti-Darwinist; Morgan was only dragged into Darwinism by his students, notably Theodosius Dobzhansky, who managed to fuse the variation he saw in the lab with that he knew as a field naturalist, and has as good a claim as any as being a founder of the 'neo-Darwinian synthesis' we know today.

From the embryologists, rooted in Goethean nature philosophy, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the embryologies of many organisms and how these relate to evolution.

From the geneticists, we got - eventually - techniques to sequence whole genomes and manipulate genes to study the effects of their loss.

The two together have given us evo-devo - a science that uses new techniques of genetics and genomics to answer age-old questions of shape and form in organisms.

Well, that's enough for now, cos I is crackered... I might write more about this in a day or two when I feel better.

The only photo I took in Paris, by way of digressive amusement, was this.

Busy Doing Nothing

2010-07-05T17:52:00.003+01:00

Time was when I'd fill each minute with sixty seconds' distance run, but increasing age and infirmity have forced me to reconsider the virtues of doing nothing. This weekend past has been an ideal opportunity to put that into practice. Still sweltering from a week in London at the International Palaeontological Congress, a couple of whose many highlights I have already discussed, and before I ~~jet~~ train off to Paris tomorrow to the European Evolutionary Developmental Biology Meeting, I felt an urgent need to take a good long look at this...

This. Yesterday. About tea time.

... which both my regular readers will instantly recognize as Cromer East Beach, the Heart of Cromercroxness on Earth. So it was that on Saturday evening at about 4 o'clock, Mrs Crox had the altogether splendid idea of packing a picnic and heading down to the ~~Maison Des Girrafes Marine Biology Field Station~~ beach hut. And so we went, with our picnic basket, containing sandwiches, fresh local strawberries and the last drop of Export Strength Old Scrotum bottled ale that Mr F. N. of London had left in our fridge after Cromer Is So Bracing 2010, and enjoyed the evening.

For those who don't know, the ~~Maison Des Girrafes Marine Biology Field Station~~ beach hut is here...

... it's the fourth one in from the right of the picture. Yes, that one. The blue one, with the doors open.

The younger Croxii gambolled in the surf. Heidi got to play with her good friend Oscar, who just happened to be passing.

Oscar is the Dog on the Left, rampant.

And we all appreciated the fact that even on a fine Saturday evening in summer, Cromer East Beach is practically deserted, in either ...

... direction ...

and the noisiest thing you'll hear is this.

A sea anemone. Shhhh.

Now, I have earlier opined on the efforts of travel companies to disparage Cromer to part fools from their money and have them fly off to beaches elsewhere, notwithstanding inasmuch as which the general ~~obamarama~~ brouhaha and inconvenience of airports, strikes, terrorist outrages, crowds and truly gargantuan expense that such reckless courses of action necessarily engender. Now, were there people who'd endure such torment to get to a beautiful, deserted beach on the other side of the world when one has beautiful deserted beaches right here, I salute them. They leave so much more for the rest of us to enjoy, almost free. Yes, one can assuredly get more reliable weather elsewhere, but that makes the days we do have all the more precious.

And then there's the Englishness of it all, dammit. On Sunday, the Friends of Crox Minima's Primary School somehow acquired the grounds of a fine Georgian house overlooking a cricket ground and put on a Dads-vs-Dads cricket match, and so it was that I was forced to tolerate sitting beneath an oak tree being fed scones with strawberries and cream and libated with cups of tea and glasses of Pimms, and compelled to listen, whether I wanted to or not, to the proverbial thwack of ~~girrafe on unicycle~~ leather on willow, for the kind of long, seemingly endless, effortlessly golden afternoon that only England can manage. It's a tough life.

Three Ways to Split a Fish

2010-07-02T13:48:00.075+01:00

Here's another squirt from the Third International Palaeontological Congress in London, where yesterday I attended a workshop on early vertebrates - the early evolution of backboned animals such as ourselves. Being as I am, particularly at the moment, a martyr to bipedality, this is something with which I can sympathise.

But I digress.

At the proper scale, all vertebrates are fishes, and what a varied bunch they are. There are the jawless fishes or ~~Agnetha~~ Agnatha - lampreys and hagfishes, the last remnants of a very varied and ancient assemblage of armoured fishes or ostracoderms, all of which are extinct. Then there are the Chondrichthyes - sharks and rays. And finally there are the Osteichthyes - the bony fishes, by far the most successful group of vertebrates, which happen to include as an offshoot all the land vertebrates, a small and bizarre group of fishes specialized for living in water of negative depth.

A bony fish specialized for living in water of negative depth. Recently.

There are, however, two other major groups of fishes that are now completely extinct, but in whose understanding might allow the unlocking of many enigmas - many, indeed, conundramatic riddles. These are the Acanthodians, or 'spiny sharks', mainly small, scaly, spiny fishes whose internal skeletons are rarely preserved, but are known mainly from smears of scales and spiny bits that look like the parts of a fish that the cat would have thrown up as indigestible. Acanthodians are known from the Silurian right up to the end of the Permian. Acanthodes, one of the best known acanthodians, is a Permian form, one of the last of its kind, and not necessarily representative of the group's much earlier heyday. The wider relationships of acanthodians has been a matter of controversy, with opinion shifting between allegiances with sharks or bony fishes.

Then there are the Placoderms, another large and very diverse group that emerged in the Silurian but disappeared at the end of the Devonian. These were often heavily armoured, with robust head- and trunk armour, and look superficially like some of the various jawless ostracoderms, for all that they have jaws. But the pattern and styling of the armour of placoderms is so unique that it has been hard to relate them to either bony fishes or sharks. Some placoderms were tiddlers. Others were, as we scientists say, mean meat-eatin' muthas.

Underlying all this is the vast morphological gulf that separates jawless vertebrates from the various kinds with jaws, or Gnathostomes. It's not just a question of the evolution of jaws (not a trivial restructuring in any case). The evolution of jaws was accompanied by wholesale changes in many other parts of the anatomy, from the wiring of the brain to the appearance of paired limbs. What one should like to do is get some idea of how the various features that make up a gnathostome were acquired, and which order. Without that, we are left with a vast evolutionary jump, from ~~Agnetha to Frida~~ Agnathans to Gnathostomes, without any further clue as to evolution's likely course. Did paired fins evolve before jaws? Did jaws evolve all at once, or by a series of various modifications? In order to help us answer such questions it would help if we had transitional forms, way stations between the jawless and jawed state. It turns out, however, that these forms have been with us all the
time, only we'd failed to recognise them. They are -- ba boom, tish -- the acanthodians and the placoderms.

Most people have become accustomed to thinking of placoderms and acanthodians as 'natural' groups. This is why there has been so much debate about whether acanthodians are closer to sharks or bony fishes. The question is unanswerable, unless one makes an intellectual leap and challenges the assumption that acanthodians are all one, natural group, like - say - sharks, or bananas. However, there is an alternative, in which acanthodians are less a natural group than a grade of evolution in which some acanthodians are closer to sharks, others are closer to bony fishes, and still others are offshoots from a time when these two lineages were as yet indistinct. This revelation has come about thanks to recent work on new and extremely rare material of acanthodian braincases. This insight is crucial as for the first time we can get an idea of what the latest common ancestor of sharks and bony fishes looked like - and it would have looked very much like an acanthodian.

But what of placoderms? Once one breaks this group up into its many constituent parts, the group starts to arrange itself as a series of grades between agnathans and gnathostomes. Of the two major placoderm groups, for example, the antiarchs look much more primitive and ostracoderm-like, whereas the arthrodires seem much more gnathostome-like.

This is, however, only the beginning of what promises to be an exciting if somewhat tricky path of research. For once one breaks up the monophyly (natural-group-ness) of acanthodians and placoderms, many things become possible - and many new problems surface. Crucially, placoderms of any kind look very different from acanthodians, so which group of placoderm is most closely related to which group of acanthodian? Did placoderms evolve into acanthodians? At present this seems as likely as girrafes evolving from unicycles. This is a circle whose squaring will come in the next few years of research into an old problem dramatically renewed, simply by breaking down a couple of cherished assumptions.

More News About Olds

2010-07-01T11:28:00.000+01:00

Just a quick squirt, this, from the Third International Palaeonological Congress I'm currently attending in London, which notwithstanding inasmuch as which is reputed to be the biggest meeting of palaeontologists in the world, ever - the noosphere round South Kensingtion is in imminent danger of going critical and disappearing in a welter of brachiopods. Being as it's so huge, with many parallel sessions, I have managed to attend only a fraction of the events, gatherings, panels, discussions and symposia.

It is a truism, perhaps, to say that you can't have a fossil unless you can have a rock to put it in, so one symposium I was keen not to miss was the Lyell Symposium, whose subject was working out how best to appreciate the tally of past diversity, given that the record of the rocks itself is not constant. Sedimentary rocks are forming all the time, but they are constantly being worn away. Rocks that were once formed on the ocean floor are thrust up as mountains which, by virtue of their high estate, experience greater weathering. But even those rocks that lie peacefully on the seafloor will, eventually, be subducted beneath continental margins. As we say at the Maison Des Girrafes, dynasties will rise and fall, mountains will be thrust from the ocean floor and ground away to dust, and even continents will be seen to drift measurably apart, all in the time we're waiting for Crox Minor to tie her shoelaces. No strangers are we to the grand cycles of Earth History.

Interpreting, therefore, the known ranges of fossil organisms is fraught with complexity, if what you are doing is using those data to make bald statements about the history of life. The baseline for such grand macroevolutionary vistas was and is the database on marine invertebrates compiled by the late Jack Sepkoski and now maintained by Shanan Peters of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Peters was among the first to realize that the record of the rocks might have a substantial modulating effect on apparent signals of changing diversity. In other words, many of the events that raw biodiversity data seemed to describe would be blurred or even disappear entirely once that biodiversity had been corrected for the availability of rocks in which fossils might be preserved. Many of the supposed crises in Earth history - the mass extinctions, the originations - were in fact artefacts caused by the fact that the record of the rocks themselves, as well as the fossils they contained, is inconstant.

Things have moved on a little since then, and Peters and many others have been looking at the possibility that some of these factors are in fact connected. Is there a relationship between the amount of sedimentary rock deposited and the activities of life? Perhaps the abundance of life is not just correlated with available sediment, but has a causal relationship. In one sense this must be true. The chalk that makes up the famous White Cliffs of Dover, for example, is almost entirely biogenic. And when you start to plug in the effects of life into the Earth System, you see connections everywhere. The presence of life substantially affects the hydrological cycle, the rate at which rocks are weathered, the constitution of the atmosphere - and, one even make so bold - the wetness of rocks in subduction zones and thus the course of plate tectonics. Life, the fluid earth, and the solid earth, are all connected. From this it seems obvious that the record of life on earth cannot be read independently from the record of the rocks themselves. But teasing apart causes from effects is a project that imposes new challenges, creating exciting new statistical methodologies, and showing the history of the Earth and the life upon it are intimately, indissolubly linked.

You might think palaeontology is just a lot of old bones and shells.

We, however, know that fossils are the signs of a planet shaped by that remarkable nonequilibrium phenomenon we call 'life'.

The Maison Des Girrafes Caption Competition #216

2010-06-26T17:22:00.000+01:00

As ever, blah blah blah, notwithstanding Professor Trellis of North Wales, and so on and etcetera. In the town hall if wet. (Restrictions may apply).

'The serpent having not turned up, Laocoon and his sons nodded off'

Two From The Future

2010-06-25T17:56:00.000+01:00

One of the best things about being the editor of the Futures science-fiction page in Nature is that I get to see a lot of stories from writers who are just starting out, or might even have never tried writing fiction before. So, notwithstanding inasmuch as which I've had the immense privilege of publishing stories by ~~Professor Trellis of North Wales~~ colossi of the field (you can read a decent selection in the Futures anthology), I've had the even immenser privilege of being able to nurture new talent, if only so that, one day, when one of these writers steps up to receive a Nebula or Hugo, they can say warming things like 'you know, it might never happened had that nice man at Nature not accepted my first every story all those years ago'. This post takes just two such rising stars of many - partly because they've got books out (or nearly so), and you should know about them.

The name Gareth Owens first crossed my transom when he sent Futures a disturbing little tale called 'Tick-Tock Curley-Wurley'. If someone came up to you and said this, you'd probably go 'I beg your pardon?' But as Owens' rather splendid character Professor Michelle Tartuffe advises the President, when a message like that arrives from space, you'd really better .... but I'm telling you the plot. So, just out, folks, is Fun With Rainbows, a delightful anthology of Owen's recent stories - several of which I've published, in Nature, Nature Physics or Mallorn (the Journal of the Tolkien Society, which I also edit) - though many more are, of course, new to me. The book is a showcase for Owens' extraordinary versatility in style and tone. You can read a review of Fun With Rainbows here. And, yes, 'Tick-Tock Curley-Wurley' is in it.

A couple of years ago I started receiving stories from Shelly Li. I can't remember if it was the fifth - or the seventh - that hit the spot, but I do remember that the first story of hers I took was 'Replacement', which I took in October, 2008 and which appeared in Nature in January, 2009 - it was Li's first ever sale, anywhere. It was a fine start for any author, but it turned out that Li was only fifteen when she submitted the story - a regular high-schooler from Omaha, NE, who enjoys a round of golf and submitting fully professional SF and Fantasy, you know, like American teens do. I've had the pleasure of publishing several more of hers in Nature, and a couple of very nice, longer fantasy tales in Mallorn. I can reveal, though, that Li has just sold her first novel, The Royal Hunter, a work of young-adult SF-Fantasy. I am more proud than I can say to have published Li's literary début. Her works have astonishing power, depth and philosophical force, the kinds of tales that hang around and say 'boo!' at you in the small hours when you think everyone else is in bed.

Closing-Time Rant

2010-06-20T23:47:00.001+01:00

A great temptation of having a blog is to use it to air the kinds of ideas one used to propound in pubs, just before closing time. In the days, of course, when there were still proper pubs. And closing time.

I almost always resist this temptation, but tonight I feel I cannot - the U. of K. is just about to be witness to an emergency budget, as the new coalition government aims to clear up the legacy of mess and waste left by the last lot. There is of course a great deal of talk about how heavily the cuts will have to fall, especially in the pampered public sector (not that the public sector workforce will see it like that), and the interesting thing is not that the last lot would disagree with the scale of the cuts, only about their timing.

Cuts, cuts, cuts. That's what everyone's talking about, and cuts will go hand in hand with rises in taxation, in the same way that Jason goes with Kylie, or, perhaps more appositely, Fannie goes with Freddie. Now, I am doubtless to an economist as is a lentil is to a whale, but I think people are missing something. Yes, cuts need to be made in spending, but also in taxation. If we want to trim spending and get the economy out of the drabs, we should cut taxation, not raise it. This would inject more money into the real economy straight away, which the government would more than recoup through income tax as the economy surges into growth.

But first, let's identify a couple of cuts that could and should be made immediately.

We should secede from the European Union. Much, if not most, of our legislation is decreed from the EU. There is nothing wrong with that in principle. The reality is, however, that the EU is far from a representative body. Perhaps more serious, however, is its long-standing financial incompetence. Things have gotten a bit better recently, but one wonders why, in such straitened times, we should be throwing good money after bad. A counter-argument is that the EU is our major trading partner. That's a red herring - China isn't a member of the EU, either, and does very well, thank you, regulating itself. (Interesting aside - the recent decision by the People's Bank of China to let the yuan float free from the dollar - at least a little - could be the most welcome news for western economies for a long time).

We should stop fighting other peoples' wars. Any historian will tell you that wars in Afghanistan are unwinnable. That was as true in the Good Old Days of Empire as it is now. We should pull out now.

Now to the main theme - taxation. If one is (as one should) to restrict welfare payments to the genuinely needy rather than using them to subsidize entire families on council estates who will never, ever do any work, one has to nurture an economy in which there are jobs to go to. The best way to do this, I think, is to make it as attractive as possible for people to go to work and stay there, and for businesses to keep employing them, to thrive, and be competitive. Here, then, are a few modest measures that could be introduced to this end.

A Flat Rate of Income Tax, around 25%. This would apply to all people, rich or poor. Some might think this is unfair, but it's not - most people fail to understand percentages, not realizing that 25% of a million pounds is a lot more than 25% of ten thousand pounds. Rich people will pay more than poor ones, though not disproportionately more (I regard the current disprorportion as a disincentive to aspiration and success). A flat tax would greatly simplify the currently very complicated system in which there are several tax bands, and in which many people pay tax and then claim money back in various forms of tax credit. It would be simpler to pay less tax to start with, dispense with the unnecessary bureaucracy, and let people keep more of the money they earn to spend on what they like - stimulating the economy with real money rather than increased indebtedness.

Slashing taxation and regulation for business. Many years ago when the world was young I had a small limited company. It was only worth the extra administrative hassle because company directors on a higher tax band could claim dividends at a lower one. Mr Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor, plugged that loophole, presumably as a sop to his socialist colleagues whose addled minds were filled with champagne-swilling, frock-coated mill-owners out of Dickens. But for a bottom-feeder like me, it made all the difference between having a company and not having a company, so I wound it up.

I could go on - there are so many taxes and regulations that could and should be scrapped entirely. Death duties (kept, again, only as a sop to those whose minds haven't gotten into the twentieth century. let alone the twenty-first). Stamp duty (introduced in the Napoleonic Wars, I think, as a temporary measure). Large swathes of capital gains tax and corporation tax. And, of course, National Insurance, which is another income tax in all but name, except that it hits employers as well as those they employ.

The general effect of all this might be be massive and palpable leading to a marked upturn in our economy, freeing up businesses to do what they do best; attracting inward investment; creating jobs; injecting real money (rather than more debt) into the economy, and creating wealth for everyone.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

The Maison Des Girrafes Caption Competition #107

2010-06-19T20:50:00.000+01:00

OOFTUGs award liberally for the best caption to this photograph, captured earlier today. As usual I have one to start you off.
'England vs San Marino? Wake me up when something happens.'

Winston

2010-06-19T11:34:00.002+01:00

This post is by way of work-avoidance behaviour. That is, I have quite a few things I should be doing, but I'm avoiding them by displacement activities such as blogging, taking Crox Minor to her weekly crumhorn lesson, and sleeping. It's time, perhaps, to take a leaf out of the book - or, rather, the six-volume tome - left by Winston Churchill, whose splendid biography by the late Roy Jenkins I have just read.

Jenkins takes a very balanced view of his subject, exploring his flaws as well as his greatness. That Churchill was a great orator, great author (the only British Prime Minister to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and great politician is recognized universally. However, were it not for the Second World War, Churchill might have rated at best a footnote (albeit substantial) in early twentieth-century politics. When Churchill took the helm in 1940 he was sixty-five years old, an age when most people are content to hang up their dispatch boxes and retire. And yet 1940 was, in his own words, albeit in another context, his 'Finest Hour' - when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany and seemed on the brink of defeat. In later life, Churchill said that if he'd had to live any year of his life again, it would have been 1940. The tension and anxiety satisfied his lust for danger (he always had to be close to the action), as well as the impression that he was the hub around which the world revolved.

He was, therefore, vain to a degree and restlessly hungry for power and the exercise of it such that he would always be the centre of attention. Wherever he went, in his later years at least, he was accompanied by an entourage of staff, including a valet, a detective, research assistants and dictation secretaries who had to keep Churchill's notoriously long hours (bedtime was rarely before 2 or 3 in the morning). The only person who could outlast Churchill was Stalin.

Even when Churchill was frail and ill - increasingly so in his later years, when he was plagued by heart trouble and strokes, no doubt exacerbated by obesity, stress and a diet of rich food, brandy and cigars - he still managed to produce a barrage of memoes, letters, orders, papers and books.

Perhaps there is hope for me yet. I am also overweight, but as yet only 48. Perhaps I have yet to see my Finest Hour. I have also been rather unwell lately and as a consequence deathly tired, so have not yet managed to address a lengthening list of pressing engagements and commissions. In the next couple of weeks I am due to deliver, in addition to my regular employment...

* A foreword to a Festschrift for a famous scientist;

* A book review;

* My regular column for BBC Focus;

* A first cut of the next issue of Mallorn, and;

* A long-overdue essay for a Tolkien fan website;

* A scope of a lecture I'm scheduled to deliver in October.

Matters will not be helped by the fact that at times during the next six weeks I shall be at conferences in London, Paris and Punta Del Este, Uruguay.

Such a schedule wouldn't have worried Churchill a whit. Even into his seventies and eighties he was a relentless traveller and writer.

I think that my only excuse is that Churchill had people to do things for him, whereas I'm substantially on my own. Churchill, however, didn't have an iPad, though I have a feeling that this is hardly sufficient compensation.

In other news, the proposal for my forthcoming enormotome on evolution has been turned down by a likely publisher. Still, onwards and upwards. Such a setback wouldn't have deterred Churchill a bit.

World Cup Fantasy Football

2010-06-13T13:22:00.003+01:00

Fantasy football is a ~~time waster~~ pastime in which one is encouraged to invent teams and leagues comprising one's own choice of teams, players and so on. I'm minded however, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, that the 'fantasy' element isn't pushed nearly hard enough. To fulfill this gaping lacuna I have constructed the following leagues of finalists in my own World Fantasy Football Cup, 2010. I'm laying odds that Mordor will draw Hogwarts in the Final.

Group A
Ruritania, Oz, Mordor, The Hundred Aker Wood.

Group B
Neverland, Narnia, Lilliput, Hogwarts.

Group C
Atlantis, Forks WA, Ishmaelia, Mr McGregor's Garden.

Group D
Innsmouth, The Shire, Treasure Island, The Accursed Plateau of Leng.

Group E
Lothlorien, Celephais, Archenland, The Garden of Forking Paths.

Group F
Heorot, Shangri-La, Kor, Taprobane.

Group G
Houyhnhms Land, The Country Of The Blind, The Library of Babel, Moominland.

Group H
12 Grimmauld Place, 221b Baker Street, 62 West Wallaby Street, Springfield.

Cromercrox in China: Many Banquets

2010-06-12T23:45:00.000+01:00

Food. We all need it. It's all made of basically the same stuff. But oh, in how many different ways can it be prepared. Speaking as a man for whom food is very important, it played a big part in my visit to China last month. I resolved, as soon as I landed, that as I am allergic to nothing, I would try everything that was offered. I went as native as I could, eating Chinese even at breakfast (noodles, chopsticks). I ate all sorts of wonderful things, from sea cucumbers to chickens' feet, donkey to pork tripe. I do not regret any of it for a second; I suffered no ill-health - in fact, I have rarely felt so well - and I'm beginning to believe that Chinese food has materially changed my life and my health.

More on that later.

Let's start simply. I'd been out of Beijing for a couple of days with my hosts from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP), exploring the fossil-rich beds of Liaoning Province, a day's drive to the North-East. On our way back to Beijing we pulled off the freeway in search of lunch, stopping at this family restaurant

... by the side of the road.

I learned that the lanterns and gay decorations were there for a reason - the restaurant had opened for business that very day. The forecourt was strewn with spent firecrackers (the bright red litter). Some were not quite so spent - footfalls could produce an occasional loud crack. The restaurant was packed with the friends and relations of the patron. People flowed in, carrying large, ornately framed calligraphic mottoes- traditional offerings to bestow good fortune.

Our arrival was treated as an omen of similar ~~auspiciousitudeness~~ portent. The restaurant lay close to a reservoir, a source of water for Beijing: fish, therefore, was on the menu. The patron went to a large outdoor tank and pulled out what we'd be eating for lunch.

This is what it looked like when it arrived at our table. Somewhat later.

Not that our mouths would be kept idle while the fish was gently stewed.

I apologize if what follows seems like old hat for some - to me, it was a new experience, even to one who has dined sporadically at the best establishments that Chinatowns in London and Los Angeles can offer. Chinese food eaten in China is nothing like that.

Chinese meals are not structured into courses, on the western fashion. Whether the meal is modest or magnificent, one is always offered a few small, cold dishes to start with, and while one is picking at these, more and more dishes arrive, until the table is crammed with a fair bestiary of benisons, each one more splendentious than the one before. Sometimes the dishes are recycled - the carcass of a fish you might have picked at earlier in the proceedings might reappear later, as soup. A Chinese meal is less a set meal and more of a buffet in which the food comes to your table (rather than your having to take your plate to a buffet) and dances enticingly before you.

As for taste - well, nothing I tasted had very much of a strong flavor, at least by my English, curry-scarred palate (except for a strong liquor that tasted like petrol with a hint of jasmine). What I learned was that texture and presentation are at least as important. Wherever I went, in down-home dives or posh hotels, the food always looked so beautiful it seemed a shame to eat it, and when you finally did eat it, each morsel provided a fine balance of taste and texture.

Take tofu, for instance.

Some tofu, recently.

The tofu above was rather chewy and came in flat sheets and resembled, in texture, a cross between lasagne and old carpet underlay. But tofu in China is like pasta in Italy - it comes in a large variety of shapes, sizes, colours and textures, from white tofu that's so soft it melts even before it meets your mouth - to tofu cooked until brown, chewy and meaty. It is served in large heaps, like pasta, or in soup, or as unassuming support to some more spectacular ingredient. Here, for example, is an amuse-bouche from a hotel restaurant in Shanghai.

An amused bouche (not pictured).

It's a dish of baby abalones, served with lotus seeds and small, meaty tofu squares. My colleague and I thought they might have been pieces of mushrooms - another ingredient whose spectacular variety finds myriad outlets in Chinese cooking.

This ingenuity as regards tofu, mushrooms (and noodles, and fish, and just about everything else) might compensate for something that will seem surprising to anyone whose experience of Chinese food runs to the local take-away. In my entire time in China I saw almost no rice at all. This was northern China, you see - rice is a staple of southern China. So, next time you have a meal of Peking duck with a side-order of rice, this is as inauthentic as asking for a side-order of pancakes and maple syrup with your oyster po'boy. The only rice I saw as a distinct dish was in Shanghai.

But back to what was served before the fish stew turned up. Here is Dr Zhonghe Zhou and me, tucking into the first of the fare.

Zhonghe is attending to the 'hundred-year-old-eggs'

while I'm enjoying a slice of cold roast donkey. In the middle is a heap of noodles. The cafetiere at the back contains green tea (I drank a lot of this and brought quite a bit home with me).

But wait, there's more.

I went to quite a lot of rather spectacular banquets, of which this is but one example.

The variety and splendour of the dishes here is beyond staggerment.At a meal of more than four people, Chinese diners sit at round tables, the center of each is dominated by a glass turntable on which the dishes are placed. This enables each diner to get to have a pick at everything. The most exciting dish at this banquet was crustaceous:

Many of the restaurants I visited, especially in Liaoning Province, specialized in seafood. In two places I visited you could choose the seafood beforehand...

except that some of it wasn't strictly marine. Here for the benefit of Keeper of the Snails, are some silkworms. Sadly, I didn't get to eat any of these (at least, not knowingly).

Here is a restauranteur catching some of our supper...

Again, to anyone whose knowledge of Chinese food extends no further than the local take-away, it takes a visit to China to appreciate regional variation in cooking. In Liaoning there was seafood - but in Beijing my hosts were keen to show me what appeared (to me) to be the latest trend - 'Muslim' restaurants. That is, restaurants featuring the cuisine of Xinjiang, the westernmost region of China, what older atlases call 'Chinese Turkestan'. Xinjiang meals have no pork, of course - they have a lot of lamb, and also - something rare elsewhere - bread. However, as an outsider, had you not been told that the meal you were about to consume came from this far-flung desert region with its own ethnic and culinary tradition, you'd have probably thought of it as an authentically Chinese meal. There is so much to learn!

Well, I could go on and on, and probably will, but I should close with an observation I started to make at the head of this post - about my health. For many years I have suffered from psoriasis. Now, I thought this was either an early twentieth-century radical movement for self-determination in Crete, or at least an obscure Pharaoh of the 94th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, but it turns out to be a chronic skin complaint, whose causes are obscure (suggestions have ranged from autoimmunity to genetics to diet to stress) and for which there is absolutely no consensus on effective treatment. At times I have suffered very badly: much of the skin on my arms and legs has erupted into plaques, and I've needed serious UV therapy to clear it up. Psoriasis can't kill you - but it doesn't go away, either. Perhaps these factors in combination have resulted in the fact that serious research into this complaint is, to say the least, exiguous.

On the ninth day of my ten days in China - it was at breakfast, in Shanghai - I looked down at my usually freakishly scaly forearms and found that although the patches hadn't receded, they looked a lot less angry than usual. The patches of dead skin cells clinging onto barely formed dermis had settled down into proper skin. A bit pink and raw, but skin it was, and not something from Dr Who's makeup department. I set to thinking what it might have been about China that could have set this in train - and after eliminating many things, came up with one hypothesis, and it was all to do with food.

For all the variety in Chinese food, there is - from a Western perspective - one, major omission, and that's dairy products. Except for one lapse (an iced latte in Starbucks in Beijing airport while on my way to Xian) I had consumed not a smidgeon of anything from the underneath of a cow, in my entire trip. No milk. No yoghurt. No cheese. No dairy produce at all. I learn from a friend (a Miss S. L. of Omaha, NE) that many Chinese people are lactose-intolerant, and I have also heard, though I can't remember where, that many Chinese people view the consumption of cheese with the horror with which we regard, say, the ingestion of chickens' feet or 'hundred-year-old' eggs.

The problem with psoriasis, as I have said, is that medical science in this area has not advanced much beyond alchemy, leeches and bloodletting. As far as I can tell from a search on PubMed, there are no papers reporting any link between psoriasis and dairy products. That's right, folks, none. Not that there isn't quite a lot of anecdote on teh interwebz of the my-husband-gave-up-cheese-and-his-psoriasis-vanished-overnight variety, but that's not really what I am looking for.

Until such time, therefore, as such a study is forthcoming, I shall persevere with my research with a subjectivity and sample size (N=1) that might even alarm Dr Andrew Wakefield. Since my return to Britain I have managed to remove all dairy products (well, nearly all) from my diet, pouring soya milk on my breakfast cereal and so on, and after a month, my psoriasis seems to be in abeyance. though it hasn't disappeared. Watch, as they say, this space.

Photo credits: All the pictures were taken by me, except the ones in which I feature, which were taken by Dr X.-J. Ni.

Someone To Watch Over Me

2010-06-09T11:05:00.000+01:00

Continuing, as I am, in my supine estate, I am receiving most excellent medical care. I believe that pets do have therapeutic value, and mine take their duties especially seriously. Here is a candid shot of a CAT scan of the affected part:

This shot wasn't posed, honest.
... with 24-hour one-to-one nursing support from Man's Best Friend.

News from the Lumbar Region

2010-06-09T03:21:00.003+01:00

Many years ago when the world was young (OK, it was 1985) I suffered a rock'n'roll injury. I was hefting an electric piano into the back of my car at the time. Tech heads may or may not be interested to learn that the machine in question was a Hohner Pianet/Clavinet Duo, a beast so chockfull of copper wire that sound engineers hated it - get it under the lights and it would start to hum of its own accord.

It also weighed a lot: around 0.7 Hernias on the Hammond scale. To cut a long story short (I'm sure you both have many other things with which you might be occupying yourselves) I ruptured a disc In my lower back, causing sciatica and necessitating surgery and much physiotherapy. The latter was especially memorable (the former being completely unmemorable, at least to me, by virtue of the miracle of anaesthesia). Frustrated by the necessity of much post-operative lying about doing nothing, I arose from my convalescent bed far too soon after the op, the result being that all the ~~diodes~~ muscles down my right side seized up, squashing the intervening connective tissue together like so much congealed lasagne.

Eventually I was referred to the University sports physio, an enormous Yorkshireman with arms like thighs who must in his youth have played prop forward for Hull Kingston Rovers. As were I a burger, he flipped me on my front, and pummelled my back with his steam-hammer fists until I was black and blue. "Don't worry about t' bruising son," quoth he, "that's just me". I went into his consulting room a misshapen cripple - I came out walking tall, and didn't have another moment's worry about my back injury.

Until last Saturday.

That morning saw me walking along, carrying nothing more than the clothes I was stood up in, and between one step and the next - click - something went in my back, pains shot up and down my right leg, and all of a sudden Wham! Was in the charts with I'm Your Man. Four days later I am supine and in some discomfort, waiting for some physio or an MRI or something. I have already had several CAT scans...

One inconvenience of this setback is that sitting down in a chair is particularly painful. Computer work is almost impossible ( as is driving for more than about half a mile). I must either lie down or stand up. This is where having an iPad has been a lifesaver. Despite my trauma I have been able to carry on with my work more or less unimpeded.

A couple of posts ago, in my first impressions of the iPad, I wrote that I couldn't compose posts in Google Blogger on the iPad, thus ~~relieving~~ depriving my public of my occasional marginalia.

Au contraire, squire, au contraire.

This post - composed in the wee small hours of the morning, as Ol' Blue Eyes put it - has been conceived and executed entirely on the iPad. Sure, the functionality is a little limited - you can write only in HTML mode, and cannot see how things look in 'compose' mode - but at least one can do something, and my few remaining quibbles with the iPad are disappearing like the pain in my leg isn't, which is why I'm up at this hour to begin with. At least I now have something to do.

The Feline Adventures at the Maison Des Girrafes

2010-06-02T11:10:00.000+01:00

I'm sad to report the recent demise of out cat Fred, who was not quite 14 when we had to have him put down. He'd lost a third of his body weight in two months, was doubly incontinent, had lost what few marbles he'd ever had, and clearly wanted to visit his old friend Marmite at the court of Ceiling Cat.

Fred (left) and Marmite (right), in more corporeal times.

We decided (or, rather, Crox Minima 'persuaded' us) that we needed a new feline companion for our fairly recent arrival, Naughtypants (Not His Real Name).

Naughtypants (Not His Real Name), recently.

And so we followed an advert for kittehs to a house ~~in New Orleans~~ the Other Side of Somewhere Else, with the stated aim of getting a cat - and, explicitly, a female cat, less likely to be a piddler. Fred, for all that we loved him, was the Phantom Piddler of Old London Town, and we were looking forward to having bedding and soft furnishings that didn't smell like a tramp's trousers.

Well, you can imagine what happened next. We didn't get one girl cat - but two. Here they are. We called them Tabitha Spong (the tabby) and Electra Z (the black-and-white one).

When I took them to the vet, however, I found that these adorable bundles had fleas, worms, ear-mites, eye infections - and testicles. I came home with a bag full of medicines and a nice surprise for the other Croxii. The kittehs are now called Tabby Ted and Elvis. The various infestations are now on the wane (as is my bank account - I sometimes think I should get my salary paid directly to the vet), and the kittehs - known as the 'Li'l Guys' - are as adorable as when we first saw them.

First Use Of iPad In Field Conditions

2010-06-01T11:20:00.007+01:00

It will come as no surprise to my readers (either of them) that I've bought an iPad. Indeed, I ~~rushed in fanboyish haste~~ happened to be sauntering in a nonchalant fashion past the Apple Store in Norwich on the day the iPad was released on Albion's fair shores, which will now be called Day One of the Year Zero, and bought the basic model - 16Gb with WiFi but not 3G. It cost £429, with the iPad case an extra £30. The very nice salesgirl tried to flog me a much posher after-market case, but I chose Apple's own - it fits very snugly round the machine and protects the iPad completely (except for the screen), leaving canny holes for the charger/sync cable, the headphone socket and so on and so forth, though £30 does seem a little pricey. When in use, the lid of the case folds back and behind to tilt the machine forwards about ten degrees - as if it were on a shallow lectern.

What follows is strictly a set of first impressions. You should be aware (hey, Alejandro! No falling asleep at the back!) that first, I'm a user, not a techie; and, second, that my impressions will be colored by my own expectations and uses of this device, which might be different from yours.

Anyway, here it is, as described, on the 06:10 London-Norwich train on Monday, 1 June. I've added my glasses for scale.

As a device to take with you on a train, it's a joy, and everything I've been looking for in a replacement for my very basic Asus Eee road-warrior. The screen is big and bright; it's easy to edit documents (using the Pages app from the App Store, a snip at £5.99 - and Keynote and ~~Deuteronomy~~ ~~Leviticus~~ Numbers, the other components of the iWork triumvirate, are also available); you can listen to music on it; you can ~~bore people to death~~ enthrall your family and friends with your photo collection; it boots up instantly without any tedious hanging about; and the battery life is long enough for you not to worry about it. Even after a long morning's commute, editing and listening to music, the charge has gone from 100% down to 92%. After the return trip, it was down to 59%. My Asus Eee would have been gasping by elevenses, even with a dimmed screen and WiFi switched off.

The first thing that strikes you about the iPad is that it's smaller than you expect, and also heavier. It's about the same size as my mouse mat at work ...

My mouse mat at work, recently.

... but has a pleasing heft to it. One's immediate impression is Quality with a Capital Q. Yes, it looks like a big iPod Touch, but one immediately feels in the presence of something qualitatively more.

The controls are refreshingly few. There is one socket (I counted it very carefully) for Apple's proprietary enormo-plug, and one button (ditto) on the front. Close inspection reveals a headphone socket; the on/off switch; a small switch to lock the inbuilt screen in either portrait or landscape mode (for those moments when the onboard accelerometer induces nausea); a small rocker switch to control the volume; and ... er, well, that's it.

Almost everything is done through the touch screen. For applications that demand a keyboard, an on-screen virtual keyboard pops up when you want it. It's rather like the one on the iPhone, but the bigger size makes it, unsurprisingly, easier to use, especially for those, who, like me, use the AHAP (Advanced Hunt and Peck) technique.

Such things are invariably matters of taste - if you don't like the virtual keyboard, you can get the iPad dock with attached keyboard, and news has reached mes oreilles that the iPad responds well to Apple's own remote keyboard, and even third-party bluetooth remotes, though I can't vouch for such things myself. I happen to like the virtual keyboard, but after I've tried using the iPad for a long writing session, I might change my mind - so watch this space.

The iPad is not - repeat not - a laptop replacement. If you need to categorize it, think of it more as a rather good PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), like the Psions and Palm Pilots we used to have before smartphones were invented (except that the iPad is to a Palm Pilot as angels are to apes). The bottom line is that if you already have a decent laptop, you probably won't immediately want or need an iPad. The iPad is not a stand-alone machine, and shouldn't be treated as one. If proof were needed of this simple statement (which seems to have confused some reviewers), you need to have a computer running the latest iTunes to activate the iPad. Without that, the iPad can do nothing. The computer can be a PC or a Mac (I have a 24" iMac running ~~Ocelot~~ ~~Mongoose~~ Leopard), but it has to be a computer, whose relationship to the iPad will be exactly the same as with your iPod or iPhone.

Apart from activating the iPad, you need iTunes to manage content on the iPad (audio, video, photographs, applications) and to load any new software. In other words, just like an iPhone or iPod. Apart from that, managing settings such as WiFi, bluetooth, mail accounts, buying applications or content and so on in the iPad is exactly the same as with an iPhone, only easier, because the screen is bigger.

And what a screen it is. Virtually the whole of the front surface is a touch screen, and it is truly a thing of loveliness. Tactile, broad, flawless, firm, yet somehow silkily soft, it puts one in mind of ~~voluptuous sexpot~~ celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, and ... and ... [that's quite enough celebrity chefs: Ed].

Several commentators have noted that while you are looking at ~~Nigella Lawson~~ the iPad screen, the sense of having a physical gatekeeper between you and what you're looking at simply disappears - in other words, it's as near perfect a user interface as you could want. Surfing the net is what the iPad was made for. Facebook and Twitter are a breeze. Crox Minima (aged almost 10) enjoys playing with it and watching films on YouTube, and Crox Minor (12) revels in the fabulous iPad Scrabble^TM app. Most of your iPhone apps can be ported over to the iPad and will work, at either their original size, or toggled to fill the screen. Sometimes the extra graininess doesn't matter - but if it does, there'll probably be an iPad app optimized for the iPad's lusciously Nigellaesque screen.

Mrs Crox, who had been hostile to the very idea of the iPad, spent a very happy couple of hours with it while I took Canis Croxorum to the beach.

Canis Croxorum on the beach. More recently than the previous picture.

Mrs Crox is no stranger to the online world - she's a web journalist for a living. She is, however, a confirmed PC user and totes a Blackberry rather than an iPhone, so she came to the iPad without preconceptions. Her verdict was that the iPad was very 'intuitive' to use - better than a laptop, as one doesn't have the additional clutter of a keyboard and mouse, and you can just dive straight in.

That's another advantage - almost no boot-up time. Some apps resume, immediately, just where you left off. When you've switched off (or changed apps) in the middle of a Pages document, and want to pick it up later, the iPad drops you straight in. If, like me, you've spent irreplaceable minutes and hours waiting for laptops to go through the motions (as if they were sewage workers on a work-to-rule), booting up, footling about and generally scratching their own nether regions, this is the answer to a prayer.

The sound quality is also very good - the tiny inbuilt speaker delivers sufficient punch for a small group of people to watch a movie or a YouTube clip, without the soundtrack sounding shrill or tinny - and the experience through headphones is excellent. Even with a fairly basic set of in-ear phones, the audio seems rich and full (my test was Deep Purple's 1999 re-staging of Jon Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra - am I a reactionary old fart? Guilty as charged Your Honour, and my client should like you to take 3,457,099 other Deep Purple albums into consideration).

The main thing, though, is that it's fast. Blazingly fast. As fast as Jeremy Clarkson in a Bugatti Veyron with a phalanx of vegetarian cyclists in front of him and his foot stuck to the accelerator. As fast as a very fast thing. Not quite as fast, admittedly, as a hot buttered ferret with chili powder up its bottom hurling itself headlong down a Teflon^TM drainpipe, but as near as might require a Steward's Inquiry. This speed only adds to the involving user experience.

I said above that the iPad was like the iPod touch, only more so. What is this 'more' of which I speak? It is, of course, the iBook facility, in which the iPad becomes a reader, and you can buy eBooks from Apple's own eBook store. My iPad came loaded with Winnie-The-Pooh, and reading it on the iPad screen is very pleasant. I can't compare the experience with a Kindle, but I have used the Stanza app on the iPhone. This is good - very good, in fact - but it's that iPad screen, again, that makes all the difference. As a test I bought some Tolkien, and I look forward to reading this in my copious free time. Needless to say, reading anything on this super screen - magazines, newspapers, blogs, pdfs, neckties, samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything (more, more, I'm still not satisfied) is pure pleasure.

An aside for those with Macs who subscribe to the MobileMe^TM facility - you can hoof this machine into your plans for world domination. The native Contacts and Calendar apps in the iPad are gorgeous, and if you note things like 'Tigger Tea Wednesday' in one of your linked devices, they should turn up in all of them.

But just in case you think that Apple has paid me to write this, there are irritations. I can't write my blog on Blogger with this, because the software can't handle content in windows within windows.

And you can't add attachments to emails. You can't just go into an email and attach any file willy-nilly, as you would on a computer. This is because the iPad, like the iPhone, has no clear directory structure, so finding anything to attach to an email might be fiddly in any event. However, you can attach files from within those apps where export might be useful.

Importing documents to Pages is a doddle. I have a few bits and pieces in Pages on my iMac which I wanted to take with me to edit on the move. I sent them to one of my email accounts, opening the attachments with ease in the iPad and - what do you know - the iPad invited me to open the documents directly in Pages (even the one which happened to have been saved as a doc file). This is brilliant.

But what about getting one's edits back to the iMac? Well, you can export a Pages file in Pages, PDF or Word formats, and send it by email. When you opt for that, the document formats itself appropriately and an email window opens with the document already attached, ready to send. The Keynote and Numbers apps have similar functionality. Neat!

Now, I believe that there are ways of printing out Pages documents, and there is a VGA cable accessory, available extra, which can in theory be used to attach an iPad to a projector or TV for Keynote presentations. There is also a dongle that allows you to connect the iPad directly to a digital camera, which might, I surmise, be useful for sneaking in other kinds of file apart from photos. But of these I cannot speak, so I shall thereof be silent.

And then there's the old bugbear about multitasking. On the iPad, just as on the iPhone, you can use only one app at a time. First, this is not strictly true - you can almost always listen to music while doing something else, like browsing, or editing a document. Second, this is not as big a disadvantage as you might think - because of the machine's speed and lack of boot-up time, toggling between applications is not as big a bore as the nay-sayers might have you believe. Moreover, I quite like devoting myself to one task at a time without being forever tempted to tap into another.

My verdict? This is just the thing I've been looking for. I can write and do edits on the move. I shall be able to update Facebook and Twitter and take notes at conferences without having to find a power outlet every two or three hours. I can send and receive emails, and update my calendar and contacts. I can - gasp - even log in to work, and do 90% of what I'd normally do in the office, whether I'm in London or working at home in my Wearable Office^TM. However:

-- IF you already have a laptop or a netbook, you'll probably have no need for an iPad - a decent laptop can do everything an iPad does, and more. But:

-- IF your main machine at home is a desktop;

-- IF you can't justify (and don't really need) a separate, second, fully-featured computer, with all the weight and dangly bits that such things entail; and/or

-- IF you tend to be a watcher or a listener as much as a creator:

-- THEN you should check out the iPad and all that's in it, and, what's more, you'll be a Geek, my son.

A Mystery Bird For You To Identify

2010-06-01T08:55:00.000+01:00

If Grrlscientist can do it, then so can I - except that (1) she knows what her birds are before she posts pictures of them, and (2) hers are in better condition than this one. Anyway, here it is, a carcass I almost fell over on Cromer East Beach yesterday.

The tail is at the top of the picture, the beak is at the bottom. My first thougtht was that it might have been a gannet, but I've never seen one of those ~~round my parts~~ in the neighbourhood. I suspect, therefore, that it's a cormorant, a familiar sight on the East Beach. Cormorants always remind me of these lines from Christopher Isherwood, which run (if memory serves):

The common cormorant, or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag.
The reason you will see, no doubt
Is to keep the lightning out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come, with buns
And steal the bags to keep the crumbs.

Cromer for the Continent ...

2010-05-28T20:14:00.002+01:00

We've decided - finally - where we're going for our summer vacation. After much argument, deliberation, cogitation, mastication and prestidigitation, we've decided we'll go to ...

... wait for it, wait for it ...

CROMER.

If the past couple of weeks are any guide, Cromer will be basking in sunshine. Here is Cromer, yesterday afternoon. Blue(ish) skies, warm golden sand, and nary a living soul within half a mile. You could hardly ask more from, say, Jamaica.

Cromer has the distinct advantage for us in that we already live there, so we'll be paying £0 for holiday accommodation, transport, pet-sitting services and so on and so forth (notwithstanding inasmuch as which, three days in Paris during the Easter Holidays has fair cleaned us out).

But wait, there's more.

We'll also be doing without airline cabin-crew disputes, volcanic outfall, terrorist outrages and all the tzores to which modern travel is heir. And even when you arrive in Thailand, say, or, as it may be, Jamaica, you might be walking into a political dispute, a drug-fuelled war zone or get eaten by sharks.

But soft: political strife is virtually unknown in Cromer; machine-gun toting drug lords have never holed themselves up on the Pier, nor, yea, in Mary Jane's Fish and Chip shop. Cromer is hardly ever witness to typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Cromer has as yet been unbesmirched by international jihadist outrages. The wildlife, such as it is, is generally unthreatening,

Given this background, purveyors of Luxury Holidays to Exotic Places clearly see Cromer as competition, as well they might. Here, for example, is a picture from the latest brochure from Messrs Hayes and Jarvis.

The choice, Ladies and Gentlemen, is yours. Spend a fortune and overcome all kinds of trials and hassle to get to a beautiful, deserted beach in the Caribbean, and possibly endure a lot more trials and hassle when you finally get there.

Or not.

If your choice is the first, well, you're welcome to it - there'll be even more space here in Cromer for the rest of us.