January 2012 archive

Jan 29 2012

Chester Cathedral

Chester Cathedral from the North

After 7 years living in Chester I have finally gotten around to visiting the cathedral, actually it took a parental visit to get me over the threshold! It was a cold frosty morning in January when we visited.

I am an atheist, but culturally a Christian one, so in a sense I feel at home. I tend to see cathedrals as medieval moon-shots – endeavours of almost unbelievable scale for the time in which they were constructed. We approached the cathedral from the North, along the city walls. Passing along Abbey Street where we saw this rather skewed gateway:

A gate on Abbey Street

Charles Kingsley, author of “The Water Babies”, was canon at the cathedral and also founder of the Chester Natural Sciences Society. I will spare you the photo of the blue plaque from which I gleaned this information. On the way into the cathedral, the Cloisters.

The Cloisters

You’ll have to forgive me, I’m not too up on the nomenclature for ecclesiastical architectural features, here I am looking down the nave at the altar screen (probably). I’m having problems because of the large variations in light intensity within the scene. There is also some evidence for my problem of always taking photos at a tilt:

Looking East along the nave

A detail in the roof of the nave:

Detail of the roof in the Nave

Off the nave is the Consistory Court, this is the Apparitor’s Chair, or maybe it isn’t the information board hedged slightly on this point. The woodwork in the Consistory Court dates from the early 17th century.

Apparitor's Seat

This fabulous device is a Gurney Warm Air Stove, installed in the late 19th century. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, the inventor of the stove, was an interesting chap.

Radiator

Chester Cathedral was built in stages, based on a monastic Norman church built in 1093, there are some traces of this original building in the North Transept:

Detail in the North Transept

You can’t go to a cathedral without trying to photograph a stained-glass window:

Stained-glass window

The Choir Stalls, fantastically ornate and clearly difficult to dust:

Choir Stalls

Frustrated at trying to take photos of difficult to photo things, I thought I’d try something easier: the floor tiles:

Tiles

That went well, I’ll do some more!

Tiles

A detail of the ceiling in the the East Nave:

Detail of the ceiling in the East Nave

Stone detail in the Cloisters:

Stone detail in the Cloisters

Out into the Cloister gardens where there is this fine sculpture by Stephen Broadbent, from here we could hear the croaking of what sounded like ravens, however the little tinkers remained hidden in the heights of the cathedral tower so it was difficult to be sure:

Stephen Broadbent's Water of Life sculpture

 

I found cathedral photography rather challenging, the problems are that it’s dark and where it isn’t dark it’s very bright! The human eye-brain combination is terribly clever, it seamlessly accounts for enormous variations in brightness without any great degradation in the user experience. As a photographer this all becomes very obvious. There are workarounds: you can provide your own lighting or you can ramp up the sensitivity of your virtual film (increasing the ISO number), use a tripod (if that’s permitted) to allow longer exposure times, and take multiple shots at different exposures melding them into one shot (known as high dynamic range (HDR) imaging).

High dynamic range imaging and display are hot research areas. The problem on the display side is that if you display a picture of a bright window with a dark surround, even an HDR image, then the surround will “look” too dark. What you need to do is vary the brightness of pixels according to their surrounding pixels – it’s called “tone mapping”, precisely what algorithm you should use to do this is the subject of research.

Most of these shots were taken with my new Canon 50mm f/1.4 although a couple were done with the Canon 28-135mm. Next time I think I’ll try out my ultrawide angle lens: 10-22mm, handy for those smaller corners and perhaps a bit less prone to blur.

Jan 20 2012

More on blogging…

Thanks to Athene Donald* at Occam’s Typewriter for nominating me for a Versatile Blogger Award:

versatile-blogger

I like to think I am a versatile blogger: I post on books, science, politics, photography, gadgets, and science policy. This is one of those slightly pyramid schemes, in which I’m willing to partake since I fancied listing a few of my favourite blogs. The rules of the scheme are as follows:

  1. Nominate 15 fellow bloggers (gosh, that’s a lot)
  2. Inform the Bloggers of their nomination (I could do this in the style of a twitter spammer!)
  3. Share 7 random things about yourself (see below, tick)
  4. Thank the blogger who nominated you (see above, tick)
  5. Post the award badge. (see above, tick)

My blogging nominations:

  1. The Inelegant Gardener by @happymouffetard. This is my wife’s blog as you can see she has been making me cake, normally she blogs about plants and gardening.
  2. Shakespeare’s England by @daintyballerina. A blog about early modern England, quoting extensively from contemporary sources.
  3. Georgian London by @lucyinglis. It does exactly what it says on the tin: a blog about Georgian London from a social history perspective. A bit quiet these days as Lucy is writing a book of the same title.
  4. The Quack Doctor by @quackwriter. Vignettes of quackery, mainly through the medium of old adverts. Quackwriter aka Caroline Rance is also author of Kill-grief – a story of gin and Chester, both close to my heart.
  5. Billynojob by @billygottajob. We met him first when he was unemployed, now he’s gotta job! Thoughtful commentary on current affairs.
  6. The Renaissance Mathematicus by @rmathematicus. Angry ranting about the history of science.
  7. Reciprocal Space by @Stephen_Curry. Mainly about science policy and processes but also some science.
  8. Purple Persuasion by @Bipolarblogger, who has bipolar disorder. She blogs about things relating to her illness including handy hints for bystanders, which I value greatly.
  9. Andromeda Babe’s Blog by @andromedababe. An occasional blog, mostly about entertaining small children which I read anyway but feel will be essential in the near future.
  10. Stages of Succession by @morphosaurus. Blogs about teaching and a gecko, we “met” because she knew that tunicates “ate their own brains” at the end of their larval stage.
  11. RealClimate, “Climate Science by climate scientists”. This is what I look for in a science blog, up to date, sufficient detail to satisfy a scientist from outside the field.
  12. In Pursuit of History by @GentlemanSykes. A history blog, somewhat quiet since he has been freelancing his writing.
  13. Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen by @shanselman. Computer things from a Microsoft perspective but also the last point on this.
  14. A Life in the day of a BASICS doctor. Reports from a British Association for Immediate Care doctor, harrowing and deeply moving.
  15. Zygoma by @PaoloViscardi. Mainly mystery objects from the Horniman Museum (on a Friday).

Perhaps a little surprisingly I don’t follow many science blogs, I get my science fixes from New Scientist, Nature, Physics World, and Communications of the ACM, three of them I even get on paper!

Seven random things about me:

  1. At the age of 41, I am to become a father for the first time!
  2. I grew up in Wool
  3. I carry the  ΔF508 variant of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene
  4. In 1986 I was at the top of the score table for Spindizzy in Computer & Video Games magazine
  5. I have no middle name
  6. For a few years I was a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.
  7. I think Jerusalem Artichokes should be classified as “poisonous”.

And so I pass on to the next members of the chain, who should feel under absolutely no obligation to do anything about this at all!

*More properly Professor Dame Athene Donald, FRS who led the group I worked in at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Jan 18 2012

Strike 2!

PatI’m on strike again today, as I was at the beginning of December when I took the opportunity to write quite generally about the role of trade unions (here).

This time I thought I would write a bit more specifically about why I am on strike.

I joined Unilever in 2004, at the same time joining the final salary pension scheme – I have a leaflet in front of me now explaining the “excellent benefits”. In 2007 the company announced it was closing the final salary scheme to new employees but it said that existing members could remain in the scheme, paying higher contributions to retain their benefits, this is what I have been doing since April 2008, when the changes took effect.

In April 2011 the company announced that it was intending to close the final salary scheme to current members, announcing the start of a statutory “consultation” process.

I’m one of those at the softer end of the impacts: I stand to lose 13% of my pension, prior to the consultation I stood to lose 20%. This is because my already accrued benefits will be eroded by a cap as well as the new career average scheme being less generous than the current scheme, my longer serving colleagues (of which there are many), stand to lose more.

To use an analogy: if you offer to cut my leg off but on consultation decide to only do so below the knee then you’ll find I’m not particularly impressed and explaining that you had “improved” your offer is frankly insulting.

It turns out there are specialist “Pensions Communications” companies, Unilever is using Andrew Hodges Consulting. I’m not sure if it was their idea for Unilever to use jolly little cartoons in the post-consultation communications – but it has been the most effective recruiting sergeant for the strike action!

Much has been made by Unilever of the unions “walking out” of the negotiations – this is a rather partial presentation: the unions left because the company refused to discuss any means by which the final salary scheme could be retained and would not discuss the pre-existing career average scheme in isolation with the unions.

It isn’t as if Unilever is doing badly in terms of profits and executive pay, and even the pension fund is in a pretty healthy state: as of March 2011 the scheme was 91% funded, rising from 89% in March 2010 and 69% in March 2009 – it was effected by the recession but was recovering well. With the career average scheme already in place for new employees, the liabilities of the scheme would have been reduced over the coming years. Contrary to the impression companies might give life expectancy is not improving in great leaps and bounds, it is steadily increasing in a predictable manner and has been for many years.

The company has made much of a “no-fly zone”, an offer to make no further changes for a period of a 2 or 3 years. I don’t expect to draw my pension for another 25 years or so – therefore I can anticipate a good few more changes before I retire. My view is that the company intends to have us on a defined contributions before too long. It highlights the problem with pension schemes in the private sector: how many companies can look forward for the 60 years that a pension requires?

Until recently I was proud to be an employee of Unilever, a company that led the way in looking after its workforce as well as its consumers; a company whose vision for the future was to double the size of the business without increasing the size of its environmental impact.

Today I am no longer proud to work for Unilever.

Jan 16 2012

“Nick Clegg plans more employee ownership”

In the news today: “Nick Clegg plans more employee ownership”, based on a speech to an audience in the City, citing John Lewis as a model of employee participation. John Lewis goes beyond simple employee share ownership, I own shares in Unilever – sadly this hasn’t enabled me to prevent them from cutting my pension. Channel 4’s Fact Check blog has confirmed that employee-ownership often makes for better companies.

Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, Chuka Umunna response was:

…Mr Clegg was following Labour’s lead on responsible capitalism…

he should really check out the 2010 Liberal Democrat General Election Manifesto 2010, on p27 it says:

We believe that mutuals, co-operatives and social enterprises have an important role to play in the creation of a more balanced and mixed economy. Mutuals give people a proper stake in the places they work, spreading wealth through society, and bringing innovative and imaginative business ideas to bear on meeting local needs.

(source)

I’d argue that Labour was following the Liberal Democrats on this.

Chuka Umunna is also the chap, who said on twitter of Ed Miliband’s Radio 4 interview:

Very strong, assured performance from @Ed_Miliband on@BBCr4today this a.m

Funnily enough, Peter Hain said exactly the same thing:

V strong and assured performance by @Ed_Miliband against Humphreys @BBCr4today

Not strong evidence for original thinking.

Footnote

Screenshot here, if you don’t believe me.

Jan 12 2012

Freedom!

Scottish independence is in the air again; the Scottish National Party (SNP) won an overall majority in the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May 2011, independence for Scotland is the SNP’s signature policy and they have been pushed to state their intentions by the UK parliament (source). Independence is a natural successor to devolution which was achieved by Scotland in 1999 (source). Devolution transferred some powers from the UK parliament to the newly formed Scottish Parliament.

There is at least one anomaly in the current system: the “West Lothian Question”, originally put by Tam Dalyell, member of parliament for West Lothian in 1977:

For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

The label was coined by Enoch Powell.

This is not a hypothetical question: in January 2004 the then Labour government won the vote on university top-up fees by dint of the votes of Scottish Labour MPs whose constituents were unaffected by the changes since university fees are a devolved matter (source).

The West Lothian Question has not been addressed in part because for the instigators of devolution in modern times it is troublesome since it presents the possibility of a government that has a majority in the UK as a whole but not in England and Wales. The logical solution is equivalent devolution for the English regions or indeed all of England; the English regions have never shown much interest in this idea – England has not been given the choice.

From a Conservative point of view, Scottish independence now would have very welcome electoral benefits; at the last General Election, in 2010, Scotland returned 41 Labour MPs, 11 Liberal Democrat, 6 SNP, and 1 Tory MP (source). It did this on vote shares of 42%, 18.9%, 19.9% and 16.7%. The proportional result is 25 Labour, 12 Lib Dem, 12 SNP and 10 Tory. The oft-repeated quip that there are more pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs is another quirk of the first past the post system. Despite this there is unanimity amongst the national Westminster parties against Scottish independence, presumably they are all reluctant to give up territory, and the glory that Andy Murray brings.

Personally, Scottish independence would make no difference to me; experience with the European Union has shown how freely people can move for work and leisure within the Union, the likelihood is that ties between England and Scotland would be stronger than those with other EU countries. It seems such opinions are not uncommon, YouGov carried out polling after the May 2011 elections which showed 41% of respondents in England and Wales in favour of independence with only 29% of Scots in favour (source). Which begs the question: “Why aren’t our elected representatives representing our views?”

Alex Salmond finds himself in an interesting position, given current opinion poll ratings he would lose an independence poll, and if he won – where would he be? Unrequited desires for independence are the best sort.

Scotland should be entirely viable as an independent country, it has a population of around 5 million, the UK currently has a population of around 60 million. Looking at the populations of other European nations: an independent Scotland is comparable in size to Denmark, Finland and Norway and a little larger than Ireland.(source). Scotland appears to have a fairly diverse economy, financially it would seem that financial flows between Scotland and the rest of the UK are close to balance (source).

I believe in localism: that power should be devolved to the lowest practicable level. Scotland clearly is viable as a country, so my logic is that is how it should be treated.