Category: Miscellaneous

In a heroic attempt to be timely, I am writing a “Review of the [my blogging] year” post – it’s the first full blogging year for me.

A new feature after my first few months of blogging are book reviews: my house is full of books, and although I’ve read (nearly) all of them I can’t remember the contents. I don’t really consider my book posts to be reviews: they are notes on books for my own future edification. I generally only post on non-fiction although I did write more generally about science fiction. You can see all my reading for the year on Shelfari. The focus of my non-fiction reading is very broadly the history of science, I think my favourite of these was “The World of Gerard Mercator”; this is the story of mapmaking from a time when the full extent of the world was just being discovered. I’ve also read a lot about the Royal Society; this is their 350th anniversary year and, in Britain at least, it was at the heart of the scientific revolution. It’s through the Royal Society that I did my first bit of original source reading: “The History of the Royal Society of London by Thomas Sprat”, published in 1667. A strange experience stimulated by the people I have met on twitter.

Every so often I do a bit of hunting out of data; for example “A sceptical look at the economy” pulled together numbers on the deficit, the debt and how they have changed over time – a useful learning experience and something I refer back to. I also quite like “Occupations of MPs”, which shows that MPs are overwhelmingly barristers. News reports often fail to provide context to stories, and these posts are my attempts to find that context. At one point I even combined fiddling with data and the history of science in one post, extracting membership of the Royal Society data and plotting it: “The Royal Society and the Data Monkey”.

As a continuation of the data monkey thoughts, I did some blogging on computer programming which is my modern equivalent of fiddling about with projects in a shed. “That’s nice, dear” is an overview of programming and some pretty maps I made with election data, the title from my wife: it’s her usual response to me excitedly displaying my latest achievement! I also made “A set of blog posts on SQL” about which I kept very quiet. The hunting out of data and programming run together really, several of my data posts have been the result of significant amounts of programming, for example: “Yields from income tax”.

When I started blogging my intention was to blog about science, in a way that people who were generally not so interested in science might read. I’ve enjoyed doing this, my blog post on the periodic table is one of the most frequently accessed, possibly due to students doing their homework! Some of the scientific posts are on work I’ve done, such as “Understanding mayonnaise”, some are on things I simply find interesting: like “Fun with fluids” which features video of dolphins playing with vortex rings and others are about the life of a scientist, such as: “Publication, publication, publication”.

I’ve also done quite a lot of current affairs blogging, some of this is straightforward rant brought on by newspaper articles but some of it is party political. At the beginning of the year you wouldn’t have known I was a Liberal Democrat party member – I think everyone knows now! Amongst other things I did a post election summary here, and more recently I wrote a slightly more philosophical post. Perhaps most entertaining is my doom-laden post election “I was up for Evan Harris”, my most visited post for the year – I think because of graph, showing the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system, was linked from the comments in a Guardian “Comment is Free” article.

Personally the year was slightly eventful: alongside the usual holidays (Westendorf for skiing and the Lake District) I had a little operation after which, somewhat surprisingly, I was confined to the house for 6 weeks in September and October. It was an odd time, ultimately I found I got on quite well confined to the house reading and doing little things in programming disturbed only intermittently by the fear that, health-wise, things weren’t going to plan. I still struggle to understand where my blog lies with regard to personal and private, for a while I kept a diary which was like a blog. My diary was never particularly personal: it recorded facts and where I was when, with the odd diversion into slightly longer entries on books I had read.

Somewhat less common this year for me were photography blog posts, aside from the photos for a calendar, the holiday posts above and a solitary walk post, I don’t seem to have done many this year. Mrs SomeBeans aka The Inelegant Gardener has been much more active on the photography front.

This September we installed photovoltaic(PV) solar panels, to go with the thermal solar panels we got a couple of years ago. PV solar is made economic by the feed-in-tariff, which is exceedingly generous, on our East facing roof we generate approximately the same amount of electricity as we use during the late summer. Now, with the panels covered in snow, we generate nothing. This was also the year of Shiny, my new HTC Desire: not really used as a phone but more a laptop replacement for the home and I also got myself a Kindle ebook.

I’ve enjoyed reading through my blog posts; they provide reminders of my mental activities. I like to maintain the facade that blogging is just for me, but in truth I’m pathetically happy to see the viewing stats rising on a post.

Happy New Year to you all!

I am the under-gardener to The Inelegant Gardener, more specifically I am the under-allotmenteer. For those outside the UK, allotments are standard sized vegetable gardens enshrined in UK law. We took possession of our first half allotment plot on 1st October 2006.  I remember our visit to the colony to see the allotment; we’d taken our traditional Saturday morning wander around town when The Inelegant Gardener mentioned, apparently in passing, that she’d like to look at an allotment (or rather a half-plot). I was instantly wary of this idea, I remember watering and weeding on my dad’s allotment as a child, back breaking and boring work. But when I stood at the foot of the overgrown plot I was instantly converted. A strange feeling came over me, of land, food, honest toil and soil – it was like my own Soviet propaganda film. Here I could work the land and provide!

The half-plot on possession, October 2006

But more was to come: walking back to the car some months later, after working on the half allotment, I pointed and laughed at the risible start someone had made on digging a neighbouring whole plot. A sheepish Inelegant Gardener admitted to being the owner of the risible start and a new whole plot. It turns out she was an aggressive territorial expansionist, albeit a pathetic digger. The Inelegant Gardener did her best “feeble female” look, and I agreed to dig the new allotment. A task I was to complete some 18 months later, almost exactly two years ago.

A risible start to the digging of the whole plot, April 2007

As under-gardener my principle tasks are digging and construction: sheds, paths, compost bins and the like. It’s rather satisfying work compared to my day job, which mostly concerns generating abstractions inside a computer. Allotment work produces tangible output: an hours digging produces a patch of turned soil and a bucket of roots. Construction produces sturdy, useful structures of which a man can be proud. As a result of this toil I am able to identify perennial weeds purely from their roots: dock, bindweed, nettles, couch grass, horsetails, ground elder. I sometimes worry that The Inelegant Gardener will pimp me out to other allotmenteers for digging work.

The Inelegant Gardener is still subject to unrealistic fancies, having directed me to spread about a ton of farmyard manure on the potato-patch-to-be she seemed to believe the worms would quickly incorporate it into the soil. Bollocks would they, not in two weeks, not without the aid of little squad of wormy JCBs! It was muggins wot’ dug in the manure. I still think potatoes are magic though, turning over the soil with a fork and white egg-shaped edible things appearing – it’s magic. More realistically the potatoes came out all manner of shapes and sizes, several years they suffered from blight.

For us allotmenteering is a bit of fun, if a crop fails it doesn’t matter. Seeing the blight-wilted potato-tops and unearthing the rotten, stinking tubers gives an insight into what it is to rely so closely on the vagaries of nature for your livelihood. Seasonality becomes much more obvious; despite being relatively clued up about agriculture in truth I had little sense of when what vegetables were in season. Now I know, and it’s cabbage for most of the winter. Currently in season are courgettes (bloody hundreds of them), carrots, sweetcorn, potatoes, mangetoute, French beans, raspberries, beetroot. It’s fair to say we haven’t entirely cracked planting appropriate quantities, to start with we had one or two exemplars of any particular vegetable per meal, now we have massive, short-lived gluts.

We achieved a crop on our second visit to the allotment or rather Henry, a fellow allotmenteer, gave us some produce to keep us interested. He has continued to provide advice ever since, but now we swap vegetables and fruit. When we started only a small fraction of the plots on our colony were in cultivation, and Henry seemed to be keeping the place alive. These days most of the site is cultivated, it’s a friendly sort of place – most people will stop to say a few words as they pass on their way to their own plots. I can do a passable impression of a someone who knows how to grown stuff, if interrogated.

Our other neighbour at the allotments keeps chickens, at one point they had free range across the whole site they would come and supervise digging, jumping into the trench at inopportune moments to pluck out a tasty grub. Nowadays they are behind chicken wire, but still come to the fence if you’re digging or weeding by them, making approving clucking noises. There is something very reassuring about this companionship.

These days the allotment is looking almost ship-shape, at least it does when we’ve caught up with all the weeds. I continue to be proud of my construction efforts.

New paths! June 2010