Shining StOne

Square cornered Avebury stone

2007-04-09T11:37:00.000Z

A stone at Avebury with a very sharp corner cut, which must be a piece of modern concrete put in to stop the stone from crumbling.

As I said on an earlier post, most of the Avebiry stones have had to be dug up and repositioned or even reassembled after centuries of deliberate and accidental damage.

THe photograph was cropped from one taken by TW from Why Dont You blog

Tags: pictures, avebury, stone, megalith, wiltshire, Why dont you blog, blog

My excuses for not updating

2007-04-06T02:01:00.000Z

(Picture is out of date but not digitally messed with for once)

It's so easy to start a Blogger blog. It encourages you to approach blogging with a certain idleness that I'm happy to indulge myself with.

Blogger is brilliant the way you can just pick a theme and have a blog. You can alter the look of the blog with minimal skills as well. You don't even need a web host. You don't need a layout design or to choose a million Ajax widgets.

It's a happy amateur thing.

You are never going to be a target to be corrupted Like those people who blogged their drive across America, staying in WalMart carparks in their camper van . (Apparently, they found happy smiley WalMart employees everywhere.. Oh yes, by the way, guess who sponsored them)

The only downsides to having a blogger blog are that

you aren't likely to get into the blogristocracy easily, unles syou can remember to do all the Technorati tagging and join blogrolls and so on
Wordpress blogs have a million complex plug-ins and you can tweak them to death if you have the time and skills.
it's so easy to start that a lot of blogs have one post in 2004 and are never seen again
it's also so easy that a lot of blogs are about "I fed my cat and it scratched my sofa..." You know who you are...

Trying to avoid the latter - I know nobody is interested, it's hard enough to interest people you actually know in the minutiae of your life- I've not posted anything here for months.
Tags: idleness, update, blogger

Web hits statistics

2007-02-25T14:17:00.000Z

As soon as you hear the word statistics, your eyelids probably start to droop. This blog is Blogger-powered so I don't know if Firestats will work on it but I have been playing around with it on another Blog and I have to say I am entranced.

Once you start, you can get obssessed with where blog visitors come from, using which browser on which operating system and - most fascoinating of all- what desent them to your site.

Google hits are amazing. People have typed in phrases that you didn't even know appeared in your blog posts. They have been directed to an obscure post from a year ago that you forgot yourself.

There is a more measured discussion of how useful Firestats can be on Compuskills blog
Tags: Firestats, web design, website, traffic, Software, Web Design Software, traffic analyser, site redesign, Wordpress, Compuskills, blog

Avebury ditch

2007-02-16T21:20:00.000Z

Another photo from Avebury. This give more of an idea of what it's like to visit the site. The short concrete posts were put up as substitutes for the stones pulled down to make farm walls and buildings and/or to appease the anti-pagan mood of the late medieval church.The ditches are huge and circle a large area of the village. You can get an idea of the scale of these ditches from the few people here.
The ridges that you can see on the right side of this bit of ditch are called berms. They show the terracing that stops the sides from collapsing.
The picture comes from Whydontyou.org.uk

Tags: Avebury, megalith, English Heritage, Wiltshire, Photographs, history, prehistory

Idling

2007-02-16T03:21:00.000Z

A few weeks of idling. The stone has shone on other territories and been even more horrifically opinionated than on here, but more coherent.

Tags: Avebury, megalith, English Heritage, Wiltshire, Photographs, history, prehistory

Rare breeds farm

2007-02-03T23:05:00.000Z

Thanks to Megan's blog I know where the rare breeds farm in the post below was - Cholderton Wiltshire, which is quite close to Salisbury. This sheep (?) lives there.

Technorati Tags: Cholderton Rare Breeds Farm, Rare Breeds, Rabbits, Rabbit World, Wiltshire, Rabbitworld, Animals

More stones in a occasional stones-picture series

2007-02-03T17:36:00.000Z

Again, I will have to credit TW from Whydontyou.org.uk for yet another photograph of Stonehenge. He also has some good pictures, which are mainly of historic sites, on Flicka.
Some of the best sites aren't too photogenic, of course, but Stonehenge is a real star in any picture. You wouldn't hear Stonehenge saying "No, take it from my good side" for instance.

An unusual hen

2007-01-27T21:05:00.000Z

In fact, this hen is so unusual as to be a rare breed. The photo was taken - not by me - on a Rare Breeds Farm in Wiltshire.
This farm is paradise for toddlers. For any kids really.
There is a goat enclosure that brave kids can walk around among the goats, a rabbit building (with some enomous giant rabbits and dozens of other wierd kinds) a barn with one of those strange indoor adventure playgrounds made of scaffolding, tractor rides and huge numbers of odd animals.
I could go on but this isn't an advert because I don't even have the farm name handy.
Technorati tags:animals, Rare breeds. farm, holiday, Wiltshire, toddler

Stone from Avebury

2007-01-20T18:53:00.000Z

The pages are overdue for stones. These are from Avebury in Wiltshire, a "World Heritage Site," which seems to be saying little when you consider that Liverpool riverside is also one. However, Avebury is quite amazing - a huge megalithic landscape, which includes Silbury Hill and Old Kennet long barrow.
The little concrete posts were put there in place of missing stones, when Avebury was rebuilt, less than 100 years ago. This reconstruction was necessary because the stones were demolished or buried in the medieval period. By that time, the Church had more or less won its struggle to dissuade the villagers from paganism. The stones then came to be associated with the Devil and fell victims to a religious fervour to stamp out his works, plus farmer's desire for easily obtainable building stones.
Most of the walls in Avebury village are built from the rubble that resulted from the pious destruction.
The present historic site was more or less recreated in the early 20th century by a Keiller marmalade heir, who supported the excavation of the site. The huge surrounding ditches were uncovered. Those stones that had been buried, rather than smashed or burnt, were reset in their locations. The plan was partly based on drawings made in the 17th century.

Technorati tags: Avebury, megalith, pre-history, World Heritage, English Heritage, National Trust, Wiltshire

Thanks , Marie

2007-01-20T17:20:00.000Z

Marie Starr gave a kind comment to the Girls' toys and boys' toys rant below so I went to look at her own blogs.
Serendipitously, one of her blogs is called Serendipity3 which happens to be a word I have deformed into one of my email account names. She has some really good images if you navigate round her blogs and I like everything that I've heard of, in terms of books and music and films, in her profile. So thanks a lot Marie.
It is both welcome and really unusual for this blog to get comments that don't turn out to be adverts for obscure pharmaceutical products that you can buy online.
The "pink" and "blue" thing really exercised my rage to the point that I felt that I had to edit that blog to death so as not to sound like a lunatic. It probably still sounded like a lunatic, but a hobbled one.
However, reading through my own blogs, I realise that the concepts of "deadpan" or "sarcasm" don't translate well to the blogsphere. The typos are bad enough. (You'd imagine that the spellchecker had never been invented.) Combine the typos with deliberately silly images - such as the rendered ones below and the Christmas ones - some of which I had the sense to delete - and comments that feel wry at the time of writing but look dumb on the page..... So apologies to everyone else as well.

Technorati tags: girls, boys, sexism, blogs.

Big brother

2007-01-19T23:36:00.000Z

Well, there has been a good outcome of sorts in the Celebrity Big Brother saga. Jade Goody has been kicked off, after a being the centre of a deeply unpleasant series of racially bullying comments directed towards Shilpa Shetty.
There are some good posts about it on Whydontyou.org blog and many other blogs.
Interestingly, it looks as if most bloggers have commented on this issue without watching the programme. I should think few rational people do. Well, who can blame them? I can claim some authority here, having watched in in someone else's house (I have cable so I am luckily never faced with TV choices so limited that the selection becomes Big Brother.) Endemol must be pretty pleased with themselves to have finally managed to find a Big Brother controversy that people with working grey matter could actually care about. Although it's a little distasteful that people's concerns, as expressed in Parliament and by the media, have focused on hiding the true ugliness of British racism rather than actually addressing it.
Technorati tags: Jade Goody, Big Brother, racism

The strange insect

2007-01-14T23:29:00.000Z

I am thinking about putting the insect on Sci-tech when they finish the redesign. Maybe someone will have an idea.

What is this?

2007-01-12T21:42:00.000Z

I think it's a praying mantis but that seems unlikely. In England. In January?
Does anyone know?

Stonehenge in winter

2007-01-09T22:02:00.000Z

And here is a picture of more of Stonehenge, taken the same day, unsurprisingly at the same location.Asides. (1) I notice Technorati is a bit random again today. This is meant as constructive criticism. It really is a fantastic thing. I rely on it greatly. I just can't understand why it claims a certain number of links exist or don't almost at will. Looking at one blog, it claimed 19 links from 12 blogs, then, 17 from 11 blogs, 20 from 8 blogs, then 20 links from 12 blogs, all in the space of five minutes. The list of links was unchanged and ran to a few pages, but I accept that many were relatively old and might have been dropped to make the 12 go down. But surely there should have been new ones if it went up again?
(2) I use a direct ping form every time I update this (although that is getting rarer recently.) It always works straight away. The autoping that Technorati recommends you to add to your blog code seems to take as long as it feels it needs. If you post to a popularly tagged Technorati topic, you find you aren't listed in the posts until your post is a good few hours old and turns up on page 4 or something. The moral is: ping every time, don't wait for the autoping.
(3) Thanks to Megan's adult representative on earth for posting some newer pictures on Megan's blog

Stonehenge in frost, 2006

2007-01-09T21:44:00.000Z

This is one stone at Stonehenge in the frost, as near as dammit to the Winter Solstice.
The frost is novel enough in this year that doesn't seem to be having much of a real winter so far.
This was taken by and from whydontyou.org.uk blog so I am doing the decent thing and crediting it.

Broke the blog and fixed it

2006-12-02T03:02:00.000Z

In a doomed attempt to get heinous and gratuitous into a sentnec (having a bet with myself) I tried to upload an animated gif (gtatuitous use of an animated gif, hence heinous.
This broke the blog. It obviously has better taste than me.
I am now testing that hypothesis with an image I rendered a few years ago for the sci-fi cliches site I had a few years ago.
(I thought it was boss, No one else shared this opinion.)
So this image is also both gratuitous and heinous.

Now, I've warmed up....

2006-12-02T01:11:00.000Z

This blog has stretched its tendons and got the blood flowing, so it is about to focus. Be warned.

Girls' toys and boys' toys

2006-12-01T21:35:00.000Z

This is about the great leap backwards in gender relations over the last decade. (And if you got here expecting pr0n because you put "girls' toys" into a search engine, you might as well leave now.)
In the first ten years of the 21st century, the Western world's social model of femaleness expresses values cthat would fit in the 1950s.
Enumerating the evidence would take too long for this blog, which is a pity because there is no shortage of it. I am just going to extrapolate from a few random examples.
Most blatantly and ubiquitously, media female role models are footballers ' "wives and girlfriends," reality tv stars, models and heiresses. The interest they hold for other women lies in their relationships and their appearance. (Their own interests are supposed to be in shopping and "partying.") Said appearance is valued almost entirely in terms of weight. Whole publications consist of little but discussions of who is too fat or too thin. To stay in the public eye a celebrity has only to gain and lose two or three pounds.
Go to a toy shop. (Yes, it's Christmas, obviously) Even go to a toy shop that's USP is providing educational, non-gender-based, non-voiolent toys. (Yes, you can already hear the echoes of the late 19790s and early 1980s.) And guess what? The shops are an eye-burning riot of pink where the "girls' toys."
Even musical instruments come in two forms: get a pink toy synth with flower patterns for a girl; get the identical item in blue, without the flowers, for a boy.
The most depressing part is that if they didn't have a bright pink version of most of these things, no one would even buy them for girls. Otherwise, girls' toys revolve around childcare, housework and beauty. The only fantasy items targeted at girls are princesses. Fairy tale princesses didn't usually do much but be admired and marry the prince. The dragon-slaying and prince-rescuing count of fairy tale princesses is pretty minimal.
The domestic stuff might be fair enough, given that most infants don't see much except childcare and housework. But the vivid pinkness makes it pretty clear that little boys aren't supposed to have an interest in dolls or kitchens or baby buggies.
So the lads are being given a message: Pay no attention to the world you know - the domestic sphere - and engage with an outside fantasy world of knights and spaceships. At the same time, the girls are being told that the domestic sphere is theirs. Outside adventures aren't for them.
Now, this sits very oddly with the fact that almost all women have to work. In the 1950s, there was a reason why Betty Freidan's " female mystique" represented the social values. Men needed their jobs back when they came back from World War II. Depleted national populations needed rebuilding. To some extent, women left the workforce and bred.
However, in the 1950s, families were much bigger than those of the 21st century. Housework needed a fair level of physical and mental effort and skill. Now, housework and meal preparation don't need much effort, although our standards of comfort and cleanliness are much higher. Women rarely have more than one or two children.
They have less time to spend in caring for them, however, as most women now work when their children are small. If work was in itself enough to equalise relations between men and women, equality would be already here . Indeed, income distribution and promotion opportunityies and so on are much more fairly distributed (in the Western world, at least.)
Which makes the intensification of stereotyping even less explicable. Why train little boys and girls for a life they won't live?
(I was going to discuss the reasons and who might benefit. That's another lesson.....)

Good technorati error discussion

2006-11-28T22:41:00.000Z

Technorati suffering gives some more detail on the current errors debacle on Technorati.

Dragon fruit

2006-11-25T01:04:00.000Z

This is a dragon fruit. It looks like part of a Tibetan painting.

A few weeks ago, I started a new hobby of buying a wierd looking fruit or vegetable every Saturday, after I saw a Romanesco.

A Romanesco is the most fractal vegetable you could ever imagine. It is amazingly beautiful. I didn't have a camera handy and it was too big and non-flat to scan.

However, the dragon fruit did fit on the scanner bed. The scan doesn't do it justice because I had to squash it a bit and the colours came out slightly wrong.

I didnt dare eat the Romanesco because I couldn't bring myself to deface it. I did eat the dragon fruit. It was quite nice, it tasted a bit like a lychee.

I was reduced to buying a pomegranete last week, the shops don't have too many stunning-looking rare fruit.

Avebury

2006-11-25T01:00:00.000Z

Stones at Avebury.

This photograph was taken in early November 2006.

As the sky shows, the weather looks pretty good. The stones are always good.

The Wire official site

2006-10-29T00:00:00.000Z

There is an HBO site that spoils the plots of the Wire http://www.hbo.com/thewire/episode/.
It also tells you what Bubbles and Naimond, et al, are supposed to have as their music choices so you can buy them from I-Tunes. I kid you not.
Despite this, it is the best TV series ever. I found lots of debate on the web, mostly silly but soem quite inspired. I will post teh links here when I feel like it. There's always google or yahoo if you can't wait.

Technorati

2006-10-28T22:31:00.000Z

I have been slack in updating this blog. This is partluy idlemnness and partly because I dont believev anyone ever reads it. Despite pinging Technorati and seeing it appear sometimes, I am not convinced that anyone gets it. The writer says in http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/10/28/more-odd-software/ that Technorati isnt showing up additions for a week. So testing this with a ping.

Stone at Avebury

2006-08-09T22:07:00.000Z

I'm sorry I keep saying everything is beautiful but the huge oddly shaped stones at Avebury are just beauutiful. I am putting a picture here, although I faked the colour to look like sandstone, when the texture is obviously much harder.

In any case, it looks pretty much alive, if sandstone isn't the first thing that springs to mind.

At least it gives me some room to point you to the stuff about megalliths and Avebury on etrusia.co.uk and the blog on http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/category/megaliths/. They have some pictures of Avebury, which suffers in its level of fame by being too big to be as photogenic as Stonehenge.

Sandstone walls

2006-08-09T21:42:00.000Z

Sandstone walls are really beautiful, although some of their history is ugly.
They were usually built at the time of the enclosures. Common land was being seized for profitable sheep farming, when most of the sandstone walls around fields were put up. The impact on the rural population at the start of the industrial revolution is still being felt. The current lack of peasant farmers in the UK is one result of our ancestors' having been forced to give up their survival farming plots.
The degree of weathering of stone is an obvious clue to how old they are, although the level of exposure to the elements, to traffic and acid rain can confuse this a bit.
If you look at the craft markings on the stone, you can usually work out how old the walls are. The earliest walls that you can still see a fair number of, especially in West Lancashire, have signs that the stones were cut by hand. They have irregular marks from the tools that were used.
Walls dating from after the start of the Industrial Revolution show the impact of machine tools, often with regular shallow long ridge patterns. Recent walls tend to be smooth and lacking in character. However, any sandstone used to build walls will become mellower and more attractively uneven over time.

Stones

2006-08-09T21:17:00.000Z

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, I am going to put something about stone.
Should houses should built of it? Obviously yes. Stone is beautiful. Stone is everywhere. It lasts for ever. A demolished stone building is another building waiting to be assembled. There are very few more ecological building materials. (OK, wattle and daub, adobe and cob walls biodegrade gracefully - certainly more gracefully than web 2.0 pages degrade for the notorious older browsers, but they don't last for ever and they need lots of repair. They are great but not as useful as stone.)
Devil's advocate;-
On the minus side, there are obvious problems with destroying landscapes by quarrying. Quarrying is also a really dangerous job, carried out by people of all ages all over the world with serious effects on their life expectancy. Stone building is slow and requires skilled craftspeople, so it tends to be costly.
But:-
These are mainly problems of social organisation. The appalling conditions of quarry workers are social choices. Building in stone could be subsidised to make it a viable building material. Buildings that can be thrown up using factory- built plastic parts in a few months are liable to fall down in a couple of years or need so much maintenenace that the initial savings are wasted. Do we really care if building companies can make a fast unfeasibly large buck? (Hang your head in shame, PFI).
The siting of quarries is subject to planning laws. In any case, stone moved from one place to another is still stone. It can soon becaome the basis for new ecosystems and rearranged landscape. The quarrying skills that our ancestors developed over thousands of years are being lost.

Supernova

2006-07-23T17:30:00.000Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5204676.stm says that astronomers are about to get a picture of a star going supernova. It sounds as if there could be some spectacular images

Sci-tech's rss feed

2006-07-11T21:03:00.000Z

This is a link to sci-tech's rss feed http://www.sci-tech.co.uk/rss.xml. Visit it.

Nano Universe: Organic Batteries Included. Hippie geneware! Mind Bending...

2006-06-29T23:24:00.000Z

This is impressive, albeit incredibly difficult to understand. I was under the belief that nanotech was a pure fantasy. Nano Universe: Organic Batteries Included. Hippie geneware! Mind Bending...

Pompeii update

2006-06-28T23:24:00.000Z

The Channel 5 programme on Pompeii and Herculaneum tonight was brilliant. I have to watch it again.

Pompeii

2006-06-25T19:01:00.000Z

Channel 5 (this is England) is running a programme on Wednesday evening which looks at the archaeology of Pompeii. This looks really promising. If you have ever had the good luck to visit Pompeii, you will know that it is one of the ultimate experiences of your life. If you have any sense of identification with people of the past or an interest in Roman buildings or art, go to see Pompeii. It is possible that it will be destroyed by acid rain, as well as through the normal processes of decomposition which were halted by the covering of lava ash. This may be depressing but it gives the need to visit the site even more urgency.
There is an argument that tourists are damaging the buildings. This is probably very true. However, the sites are as likely to be damaged by many other things, and the more people visit Pompeii and are entranced by it, the more people will be supporting its survival.
There is a brief introduction to Pompeii and some links to useful resources on etrusia.co.uk

Space

2006-06-23T18:34:00.000Z

Visit Sci-tech.co.uk for pages on a wide range of science and technology topics.

More images

2006-06-17T09:14:00.000Z

This is going to replace the bigger more serious sullen-faced picture of me. That was online because I was just uploading images to test the blog software. So I picked some images at random without resizing and all that.
This is me made to look something like a heavy metal rockstar. The look went with the expression.

Google sketchup

2006-06-16T19:39:00.000Z

I sort of hate Google generally but Google sketch-up is brilliant. Comapre it to the difficulty of learning a real 3d app and there is No contest. It really does take about 5 mins to download and install it and another 15 mins to get some idea how to use it.
http://sketchup.google.com/ tells you about what it is for (putting content on Google Earth) and you can get a free download.

Another scanned object

2006-06-15T04:31:00.000Z

There's a bit of a theme developing here as I trawl through my PC for images with black backgrounds.
The image was captured on my scanner, like the feather one below.
It's an adobe figure made for tourist sale in North East Brazil. The men represent what you might call the "rhythmn section" of Brazilan candomble rituals. I had lots but I've broken most of them. This set is only chipped in the picture but is in at least two pieces in real life.

Technorati

2006-06-14T22:01:00.000Z

I managed to get onto it and add this blog, even though it lacks valid content at the moment. Large oaks and small.. Journey of a thousand miles and so on..
I am just wondering why I wasn't linked to why dont you blog which had done me the courtesy of linking to me... Odd

2006-06-14T20:01:00.000Z

The image is (not very recognisably) me. I messed about with some PhotoShop filters, having been reconverted to their value by Tas's Flickr pages. The contrast is too harsh. It makes me look really sullen, which is not really like me. Though, it's more like me than the stunningly beautiful retouched version you would have seen if my conscience had let me really have my wicked way with Photoshop.

2006-06-14T20:00:00.000Z

Just warming up

This is some feathers from a necklace.
That is, it was feathers.
And some sort of nut and it was on a plaited leather string tied in a loop for the head.
It has since decomposed/ got lost.
I scanned it in.
It is overexposed because my graphics card/monitor combo makes everything much darker than it is on other people's PCs.
Probably not ideal for editing images for putting on the web.

Recent site visit

2006-06-14T18:48:00.000Z

This was an interesting site where I found out a fair bit about Rome, mainly in the British context http://romans.etrusia.co.uk/

2006-06-14T00:07:00.000Z

Visit the whydontyou blog. Its my favourite. http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/ Next to this one obviously

2006-06-13T23:47:00.000Z

This was the first post but turned out to be a petit dejeuner du chien. This is by no means a first for my PC. Any item of software, specifically one that claims that you can blog from it or link to anything from it, or do any digging or deli.ico.us ing from it.
And dont even think about getting onto Flickr to comment on something.