Trains

I said don't get me started on trains. It turns out to be unnecessary because David Mitchell has done it for me. I'm always impressed by Mitchell's rants; he is thoughtful, rational and wonderfully, grumpily liberal.
See here and here.

Some thoughts inspired by Inception

This year we're taking it easy at the Fringe. We haven't booked a flat in Edinburgh and we've only got three days of shows booked. This is the most lightly programmed Fringe we've done together. 


Having woken up a little late on Sunday and lolled around in our dressing gowns for most of the morning we conceived a plan. We would wander over to Hamilton and eat a late lunch at Amigo's with salty margaritas then go to see Inception. Julian had already seen Toy Story 3, our first choice, and Sally had recommended Inception. Martin Easterbrook had too, but my vote was swayed by Sally. And the fact that it was skiffy.


So. Inception. I loved it. A nested thriller that communicated unease and terror amazingly well. How scary to have a technique that allows someone to enter your dreams to take information or, worse, to implant something that isn't so. 


Once in the dream, time passes more slowly so that the operators have time to achieve their mission. It is possible to enter a dream within a dream, which is complicated, much deeper and has another slowdown of time passing. Wonderfully, what is happening in the dream level above the one you are in affects you, so when in one level the sleeping bodies are falling, in the waking dream they are in free-fall. 


In the big operation central to the film a set of four nested dreams were planned. It had been established at the beginning that if you die in the dream you wake up back in the real world. Somewhere, though, in the early stages of the big operation it is revealed that the technology and choice of drugs means that this time there is no safe release from the dream. With the time extension afforded by the dream the protagonists could be lost in the underlying chaos state for decades. This change increases the tension many fold. 


I am fascinated by the nature of reality - one of the worst things you can do, in my faith system, is to hide truth from someone. This is a huge betrayal because it doesn't allow a person to make reasoned decisions based on reality. (Whilst I'm typing this Alec states, 'An engineer might steal your wallet, sleep with your wife but he will not lie to you on technical issues.) 


We all do hide truth, of course, mainly to protect our own fragile ego. Last week, for example, Sam came to look at my house because I have some work that needs doing. I thought about spending every evening of the week cleaning and tidying so that, as I told Ali, he wouldn't know what I was like. The two things that stopped me were not moral principles, of course, but laziness and futility; should he spend any time at my house the thin facade of tidiness would end up on the floor with all the other detritus and half-read books. 


Well, yes, Inception was a film that I was expecting to find morally bankrupt but, surprisingly, it was a supremely intelligent thriller that made the danger of this manipulation concrete and clung hard to the need to reattain reality. The most moving moment in the film was when the central character abandoned the dream of his wife and determined to return to his children and responsibilities. And that was the other strength of the film. The characters had some depth and I cared about how it turned out for them.


There were moments reminiscent of 'Better than Life'. There have certainly been times when I have why anyone would ever step outside that game. The Red Dwarf crew certainly had no responsibilities to ground them in reality. Perhaps I'll dig the DVDs out and re-watch them. 


Later, we spent the evening watching last week's and then this week's Sherlock Holmes. I'm sort of thinking that I might make it the other reason to turn  my TV. Other than Dr Who. The new Sherlock Holmes is a Moffat & Gatiss idea that brings the stories into the 21st century. Sherlock is both beautiful and monstrous and Watson is the only truly sympathetic character. Unlike most of fandom I've never read any of Conan Doyle's books and the films I've seen have never made me want to, but this update has tempted me to reconsider the books that are, again, all about discovering the truth.




It occurs to me that following the rules of the Inception world you could 'live' almost forever if you submerge yourself in deeply nested dreams. This would, however, require you to have a completely happy subconscious so you don't undermine your world, a bloody good imagination to people your world with and/or a fully compatible companion, and someone to keep your body maintained in the real world.

The 3, a sorry tale

I've received replies from South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (SYPTE), First (the bus operator) and Ian Auckland, the Cabinet Member with responsibility for transport in Sheffield City Council. The answer is, 'sorry, nothing we can do'. It's a commercial decision. I guess that since the Arts College on Psalter Lane has closed the income from the route has fallen. I'm not sure why we continue to think of it as public transport.


When you get a group of older people together in Sheffield they often hark back to the golden age, an age where buses were cheap and deregultion (curse that buggering woman*) had not yet happened. A time when cars were few, congestion was low and herds of ham sandwich coloured buses trundled, belching clouds of particulates, through the narrow canyons of Sheffield's streets. A time when buses were so cheap that only posh and/or stupid people drove their cars into the town centre. A time when it was feasible for the ticket machine to be a mini photocopier. These days, with £1.30 fares to go less than a mile, the ticket could easily be 6 foot long (130 x penny width and a bit for spacing). Oh those happy days!

In these deregulated days there is a fight to run the lucrative routes nut no-one wants to run the necessary but sparsely populated routes. You would think that on the popular routes, with two companies competing, the service would be excellent. There are two reasons why this does not work. One is that the two operators seem to run at the same time, leapfrogging each other through the too narrow roads, causing traffic safety problems and leaving passengers waiting twice as long as necessary. The other reason, of course, is that the popularity of bus services has fallen due to high costs and lack of reliability, which means more cars on the road increasing congestion and reducing reliability still further; a positive feedback loop.

The problem with our current 'public transport' is that some routes pay well and others pay poorly but are necessary to the people living along those routes. In the days of regulated public transport the 'profits' from the lucrative routes subsidised the rest. These days the bus companies   can make their money on one route and let another languish on the grounds that running more regular buses would not be commercially viable.

From an environmental point of view, attracting people onto public transport would both reduce carbon emissions and congestion, resulting in improved journey times for everyone and better local air quality. This is not something that will happen due to market forces. For this to work public transport needs to be provided that is truly public. I'd vote to re-regulate our bus service.

And don't get me started about trains...     

*to quote my Grandad

What was I thinking?

I'm sat in Ian's house, listening to Ian and his friend, Alec, grumbling and bickering and punning, waiting for Julian to arrive, late and grumpy. Then we'll be ready for a week of Fringe fun. During all the time I've been coming up here I have never been the only woman on the team. This year Julia has abandoned me to go to Worldcon in Australia, leaving me with the three stooges. I may survive. They may survive. I'll let you know.


Later
OK! So Julian has arrived and things have livened up. We've chatted about Ponyo (the mother arguing by Aldis lamp is particularly nice) the Fermi Paradox and Old Jews Telling Jokes. It's mildly amusing.   


OMG They're whistling the theme to Zed Cars. It's related to a comment about Brian Blessed. No idea. I'm still not sure we can survive the week. 

Interesting link

No really. Worth looking at. I regularly browse through a very few blogs and websites. Generally there are a fair number of things of interest which keep me coming back again and again. I look at Ran Prieur's blog daily. He doesn't write huge long posts these days but what he says is often worth reading and he is my best source of fascinating links such as this one titled 'Places to Intervene in Systems'. I know it's on a software site (which is why I love Ran's links - I'd never look there myself) but it is a fascinating look at how systems work. Systems? Why would you be interested?


We all live inside systems. We live inside ecosystems and societies and we work within systems called companies or local authorities or schools. I make my living helping organisations put together environmental management systems but this is only a formalising and regularising of an already existent system and part of a bigger organisational system. When we try to change a system we have to think about how it operates at the moment.


Wikipedia defines systems thinking as 'the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy.'


The article referenced above was written by Donella Meadows and talks about how we look for leverage points where we insert our lever and push. Unfortunately, as she notes, we usually seem to push in the wrong direction. She identifies 10 leverage points and orders them in effectiveness from numbers (taxes etc) to the power to transcend paradigm. It may sound a little dry but have a look. Just a taster, from material stocks and flows: 

'When the Hungarian road system was laid out so all traffic from one side of the nation to the other had to pass through central Budapest, that determined a lot about air pollution and commuting delays that are not easily fixed by pollution control devices, traffic lights, or speed limits. The only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong is to rebuild it, if you can.

Often you can't, because physical building is a slow and expensive kind of change. Some stock-and-flow structures are just plain unchangeable.'

I particularly liked the example given, in the goals of the system, about Ronald Reagan. Go look.

Harumph!

Ian and his friend Alec are having fun in Ian's ephemerally tidy house, ploughing their way through a box of Chocolate Club indulgence with cruel glee and being generally horrid and I RESENT THIS!
I'll probably feel better once I can think of some suitable revenge. Other than drinking Ian's reserva pinot noir all on my own. 

A very English barbecue

We had a barbecue after work on Friday. Follwing a sunny intervals kind of week, Friday had a glowering look. Inevitably, as packing up time approached, the drizzle settled in. Cunningly I had failed to finish my presentation (BREEAM* awareness and rather a struggle) so I let the more efficient people faff. As the rain intensified and the light levels diminished (heading for dreach) a flurry of emails drifted into the right hand corner of my screen. Should we cancel? I hacked away at my presentation, reducing the 187 slides to 80 (still too many I know), whilst the bodging began. When I finally left the post-operative remnants of my presentation the building was eerily empty but there was a substantial jolly racket outside. The double doors of the garage had been opened and a huge blue tarpaulin stretched over the yard, held in place by straining bungee cords. Two barbecues were tended by the inevitable men; Tom, one of our ecologists sported a woman in underwear and stockings type of apron (sartorial elegance for BBQs) and John, Shona's chap, was togged out most attractively in a red and white spotty pinny with layers of ruffles. At the back of the garage, among the accumulated rubbish, a tiny MP3 player was attached to a set of speakers and pumped cheerful music out into the gloom whilst geoscience's coolboxes, only slightly grubby from carrying soil samples, had been filled with ice and beer. 


You can probably imagine the rest. Billows of smoke, burnt sausages, toddlers splashing in the puddles, increasingly loud chatter, intensifying rainfall, darkness gathering and a huge amount of fun. Oh, and someone, usually Catherine, occasionally emptying the accumulated rainfall off the tarp to avoid collapse. The beginning of the break-up came as toddlers got increasingly grumpy and were carted off to their beds. We stacked chairs, let barbecues cool, finished up all the open bottles and wandered off into the night. Ed and Ali kindly gave Sally and me a lift home through the deluge. The young ecologists set off for the pub and then probably the clubs.


Would it have been so much fun if it had been a sunny evening? Well yes, probably. But the adversity was fun too. We're quite good at that.


* BREEAM - building research establishment environmental assessment method


Now with additional apron photo - sorry about the blurriness - it was taken on Catherine's phone.