To be frank, I thought the auld battle axe was dead already. I can't say it is with any particular bitterness, neither is this with any tears I write.
As a vehement anti Thatcher student in the late 80s, it made my blood boil as she removed housing benefit from us while forcing people in need of social housing into over priced private housing paid for by of course, housing benefit as a massive subsidy to the Rachmans and rip off merchants.
On the other side the UK benefits greatly by having competitive modern industries, a unique financial sector and a large private service economy. There by a net tax income which was able to fund ambitions of the last three Labour governments until the finance crisis ( which they seem to get the blame for when it was bankers, not known for their societal sympathies, who actually caused the collapse in the credit system). Also enough of the good old Keynsian economic cycles to help maintain one of the lowest unemployment rates for Europe, excluding oil rich Norway and countries like Switzerland and Lichtenstein where unemployment is illegal....
Later I discovered both that private industry is best left to flourish and the efforts of business people is more important to the economy than the actions of government. Also I discovered a lot of the hypocrisies of the Thatcher years and subsequent governance, which have lead directly, to the finance crisis and so much social inequality in the Uk and much of the world.
I believe that Thatcher deserves far less credit for for the changes in the economy than she gets, and far more credit for the negative effects on poor communities and marginalised people than is attributed to her reign: Tories blame those people for their own fate, while they are the weak people government should set about providing for where the market mechanism will never.
However, the tory landslide of 1979 was as deterministic in the future wealth on the one hand, and the bad health of the country as that of Clement Attlee defeating Churchill in 1945. Victory over the fascists at the end of WWII, and in 1979 victory over the communist fringes of the labour movement who commanded too much power even by the Labour party's own admission then (with the failure of Ted Heath to tackle the unions in the energy crisis years) and the creation of new political climates under which the country could recover and eventually thrive.
The one dire legacy is the "I'm alright jack" view point of life I touched on above: which is now pervasive in the UK, especially England: a view that everyone should be nice middle class Christians who run small businesses and don't have any need for the devil of social workers and the NHS. The view of life of denial that any other life is acceptable and that people who aren't "successful" in middle class terms are failures. A self centred view point, as Thatcher had also to the positive in ignoring the old public school gaurd of stodgey conservatives. A view point like that of Queen Victoria, who deemed that Homosexuality amongst women need not be illegalised because lesbianism did not exist in Britain. An affluent middle class, and the coy working class small business people, that fail to understand people who are not just like them.
That is a very fundamental conservative weakness which limits social mobility and demonises people with long term illness: A weakness in being myopic. A lacking by having no empathy for people who are different to them: ordinary working people, people with mental health problems, poor families with intelligent kids, single parent families, people of non Christian religion, gay people, starving people, dying people.
"Labour isn't working" was the poster, lots of young tories queuing up in 1979. More people were on benefits when she left office than when she entered, and inflation and the national debt were only eventually offset by the IT revolution enabling growth, and knowledge based industries emerging as competitive on a world arena.
Thatcher did some hard, proper work against the unions and against subsidies to manufacturing industries." As our first female Prime Minister She Achieved Much Against All the Odds" which is true. However she got really lucky at several points in her time in office: Britain was almost bankrupt in her first couple of years, as companies who were on the brink, went under and people were paid to be inactive rather than economically active in subsidised industries. ITN had a job counter. In Scotland long before the coal pit closures, it was ship building, tyre plants and biscuit factories that fell in the early 80s and that was due to a lack of long term investment more so than them being unionised.
.
She and Reagan are kind of being given more credit than Gorbachev himself for the Glasnost-Democracia-Perestroika reforms, which have lead to what? They didn't help when he was dumped in favour of drunken puppets and eventually an anti democracy leadership. That is the legacy there. Better the bear we knew and a slower revolution than the belief he was given by the vaneer of those strong personalities. Gorbachev became over confident in relation to his political personality and wieght he could punch to alone: He killed the monster of the old politburo while his rather academic personality, his discursive nature and even a kind approach to reform were weaknesses and he was not strong enough to contain the wolves which rushed into the power vacuum he had created himself on the flames of belief which were ignited by the other two world leaders.
House ownership: an over priced bubble housing market only held up from catastrophe by labour policy on repossessions. A large proportion of the country with more than four times family income
'invested' in this rash-and-crash market. Social housing as I say, becoming a subsidy to landlords with little caps on housing benefit available for local authorities to impose.
Today marks a passing of an era to which we live in debt to now: literally, we live in the debts created by a run away banking system which was open to abuse and corruption in both the private sector and the interface to governance vis a vis the sub prime catalyst
Who can manage capitalism best?
On my labour party membership card, bourne also by the self confessed marxist-leninist hijacker loony left fringe, there was in black and white clause 4 of the constitution, " the means of production should be owned by the state except where industry can deliver better" . Really this should have been turned by 1984 into " the means of delivery of social services, education and health should be owned by the people and industry should be supplied with nothing more than roads, rails and healthy, well educated people".
I think it was inevitable that industries like Rover would go under, run by the stock market or by the government. The miners striked, the coal came from communist poland and also coal from New Zealand: subsidised. Followed by closing the industry in massive swathes and allowing american protectionism to continue while aritficially denying British Steel value adding capacity such as the strip mill Gartcosh. Basically then forcing many communities who had no culture for enterprise or migration for working, into being benefit center dependents
On Europe, well there she has had some of her own way: dominant national interests demanding that weaker members pay their way. An obsession with privatisation and compulsory tendering. Strasbourg being a paper tiger and token to democracy, a lost chance for a europe who's citizens are involved with its running, while instead the strongest national interests call the tune. She would like that, but of course little Davey Cameron isnae in the driving seat and can be an unruly teenager to appease the eurosceptics, the island monkeys who have some strange belief that the UK would be better off without access to the EU markets on an even basis. Those who beleive in the British Empire, expanded once by military conquest and commercial piracy and reigned over by the largest beaurocracy the world will ever see.
Her victory in 1979 was as inevitable as the right's defeat in France in their last election for President: the last epoch had run its course and needed radical change, even if some of that change was going to be unpopular and cause long term damage to society. The damage would be larger if the old epoch had continued.
Today the old epoch in need for change is the result of Thatcher-Reaganomics: they started the long run to anarchy in the banking sector and over borrowing on the promise of liberalised economy return in growth ( public borrowing went grossly up in the 1980s to pay the dole and for Trident). We are seeing countries facing austerity across Europe and further a field, and we will see the resulting rise of political movements who want to redress the imbalances of distribution of wealth.
With Margaret Thatcher's death then we can also lay to rest the excesses of the laisez faire and weak governance of the financial markets and at some point soon, the public will re-examine social justice on a national and global scale and ask what it is we want to acheive with democracy and good governance, and not what we want to achieve with allowing the rich to run the place.
Monday, April 08, 2013
Friday, April 05, 2013
The Truth and First Hand Experiences With ADHD ?
Having been exposed to ADHD and the surprising diagnosis in several adults in our circles, we really wonder why this has become such a common illness or malaise amongst youth? Why ADHD ?
Firstly the big truth is that ADHD/ADD syndrome is not a single disease. Rather what is thrown into this diagnostic pot here is a general spectrum of behaviour and personality traits which have several neurological or quite possibly only partially psychological causes.
In fact just as there is a plethora of nuances in what is an ADHD behaviourism, so is it just as likely many underlying causes. What falls into the pattern and how people with the types of affliction are perceived is somewhat subjective, or in a societal norm bias. Underlying this diagnosis by symptom, is a nebulous super nova, there are quite possibly many gametes for ætiologists to uncover.
One general agreement however on the molecular neurological side, is that hyperactivity associated to attention deficiency has ætiological origin as an under stimulation in one or more systems, functional regions or more complex pathways, or circuits if you like, in the brain.
This consensus must have come as a surprising proposition some years ago. You can imagine that many psychologists, physicians and frustrated parents would have concluded from the superficial evidence that it was the hyperactive high's which lead to an out of charge status, the A.D.D. aspect. However the reverse seems to be true: the brain super-stimulates itself with neurotransmitters in an effort to kick start the pathway from the "Low" point.
Our Experiences with Family Members and Close Friends Afflicted
We find ADHD to be classically cyclical. Taking "the grave yard slot" and getting out of bed: A:D:D. A task with many details not being accomplished, nor in fact, that the presentation of the task was actually listened to in the first place. Then being awake long into the night with blinding flashes of insight on the one hand, while mental overload kicking in with random, rambling thought often linked to paranoia or unduly negative outcomes, or the converse, unduly positive outcomes of imagined actions.
One thing we maybe then can agree on with the experts, is that a low time leads to a high time, which is chaotic. Both sides make the ADHD afflicted intolerable at times, and hard to feel comfortable with as a family member or of course as a colleague. Particularily the clash between domineering, overly assertive parents or managers and the ADHD child or employee.
Lows and Highs
We call the low ADD cycle the "glue brain time". Thoughts are difficult to form and gher with cohesion. Assertiveness is often absent, with either a tendency to resentful submission or an emotional defensive stance. Or just an apathetic stance which later is regretted once the situation can be seen in the cold light of day.
The diametric opposite high times are more complex: anger, creativeness, rambling, overly-chatty, poor listening, biased conversations, erratic body language, rapid speech, euphoric episodes, hyper-focus-periods, and most of all insomnia and irritability. These are all that WE have experienced in those around us with both diagnosis ADHD and those who are clearly over the given threshold and in the body of the church of hyperactivity and bubble glue head.
The bipolar nature of the disorder lead to a 15 year misdiagnosis for genetic depression with a large reactive element in two adults near to us. Bipolar depressions are quite probably mostly attributed to having ADHD mechanisms in root cause.To the contrary however, it may be interesting that a reactive depression caused by stressful events, traumatic experiences or long term mental exhaustion shows bipolar symptoms which are easily associated to ADHD. This may help establish causes or predispositions by being an environmentally induced ADHD. Longitudinal studies of patients presenting with such a history, but no previous affliction by deficit-hyper symptoms, could then show how the brain reverts to normal patterns as the patient goes through therapy centered on the environmental cause of the depression. This could lead to the use of shorter term antidepressive therapy for some forms of 'familial' ADHD and coping strategies and self help which can move the brain into positive cycles. An interesting alternative to long term maintenance on Ritalin.
However for those with ADHD who are not unduly unhappy, it would seem that in fact there is little environmental influence at the root. It is either inherited or has become a long term pattern of cyclical brain activity due to some unknown mechanism.
Diet and Conformist Society
Diet can help abate the worst symptoms of ADHD and probably have such a beneficial effect on light-sufferers as to amiliarate the disease to a level which....well which is kind of socially acceptable - nearer the "norm".
The very nomenclature of the syndrome has a clear origin in the cultural norm: "attention-deficit"- this is the symptom that those with supposed authority in society, get ignored by the afflicted. In fact the ADD side is more a general lack of higher level thought and reasoning. It is evident to authority as a lack of paying attention.
Hyper activity too is a subjective label: I was brought up in a very presbyterian epoch where very few young teachers even in the 1970s, dared to diverge from the conventional and sought a quiet and obedient class and were irritated as much by over performance, conversational agility, questioning, creativeness (as in brain waves, or brain storms) as they were by "bad" behaviour. By then we were only metaphorically beaten into submitting to the norms. So hyperactivity is judged in a social context where the boundary to "disease" is blurred by what some call the "liberal permissive society".
Here I go off on two tangents: firstly there is a lot of ADHD false diagnostic here in Norway because the social norm has for a long time been the very laid back, thoughtful, even cold, and most of all conformist person. A mixture of presbyteriansim and not being a "tall-high-poppy" in the field.
So when cultural influences become wider and other influences place an emphasis on seeking personal attention and social gratification for standing out, it is not suprising that many extrovert and intelligent while not academically inclined youth here get diagnosed. Bored at school, influenced by hyper children's media and the culture of the youtube snippit and the facebook platitude.
Many children and youth diagnosed such then, are probably just lower than average intelligence with a high degree of narcissism as a character trait, and resulting attention seeking behaviour is disruptive and self centered.
Sifting Out Bored, Disruptive Attention Seekers from True ADHD Sufferers.
It must be quite difficult to differentiate a patient presenting with these type of ADD/ ADHD symptoms which are long outside the social norm in a culturally conservative land like Norway. Being bored and disruptive at school seems enough to get tagged with both ADHD and Tourette's syndrome. The patient with a biochemical ætiology will benefit from the Ritalin medication, the former disruptive pupil may experience the reverse, where the stimulant only over stimulates the brain and fuels the disruptive behaviour.
The ducking stool approach: if they drown they were not a witch while if they don't they'll be burnt as a witch.
There Was No ADHD in 1976 ....
There was no ADHD when I was a kid. There was remedial, and a nodding smile "aye he'll be a good mechanic, or even a football player maybe ?" On the wider end those with learning difficulties due to an ADHD disease, were placed in remedial and sidelined from ordinary levels of expectation of performance ie task oriented behaviour norms.
Coming full circle from this tangent, as all parallel lines meet in the universe! ADHD is not caused by diet in the long term : ADHD sufferers may even unwittingly seek out or fall into the high sugar, low fibre diet due to their "glue brain" episodes and their hyperness driving instant gratification seeking behaviour. Some studies on statistically significant sample sizes (ok that is the wrong way around) are showing that a high sugar, high salt diet has quite little to do with behaviour as long as there are enough calories and vitamins injested to support lifestyle.
Conclusion; The Over Diagnosis of ADHD - Cry Wolf Dilemas and a Solution
Well how do you sort out the sick from the bums?? The answer is to medicate the lot of them, and get the ones who respond badly to Ritalin type preparations, in becoming much more hyper, get them to drop off the course and do some kind of socialisation such as team sports, self help groups or mentoring, which arrests their disruptive behaviour by engaging them in other forms of socially satisfying activities and trains them in goal oriented behaviour patterns as a route to reward.
Firstly the big truth is that ADHD/ADD syndrome is not a single disease. Rather what is thrown into this diagnostic pot here is a general spectrum of behaviour and personality traits which have several neurological or quite possibly only partially psychological causes.
In fact just as there is a plethora of nuances in what is an ADHD behaviourism, so is it just as likely many underlying causes. What falls into the pattern and how people with the types of affliction are perceived is somewhat subjective, or in a societal norm bias. Underlying this diagnosis by symptom, is a nebulous super nova, there are quite possibly many gametes for ætiologists to uncover.
One general agreement however on the molecular neurological side, is that hyperactivity associated to attention deficiency has ætiological origin as an under stimulation in one or more systems, functional regions or more complex pathways, or circuits if you like, in the brain.
This consensus must have come as a surprising proposition some years ago. You can imagine that many psychologists, physicians and frustrated parents would have concluded from the superficial evidence that it was the hyperactive high's which lead to an out of charge status, the A.D.D. aspect. However the reverse seems to be true: the brain super-stimulates itself with neurotransmitters in an effort to kick start the pathway from the "Low" point.
Our Experiences with Family Members and Close Friends Afflicted
We find ADHD to be classically cyclical. Taking "the grave yard slot" and getting out of bed: A:D:D. A task with many details not being accomplished, nor in fact, that the presentation of the task was actually listened to in the first place. Then being awake long into the night with blinding flashes of insight on the one hand, while mental overload kicking in with random, rambling thought often linked to paranoia or unduly negative outcomes, or the converse, unduly positive outcomes of imagined actions.
One thing we maybe then can agree on with the experts, is that a low time leads to a high time, which is chaotic. Both sides make the ADHD afflicted intolerable at times, and hard to feel comfortable with as a family member or of course as a colleague. Particularily the clash between domineering, overly assertive parents or managers and the ADHD child or employee.
Lows and Highs
We call the low ADD cycle the "glue brain time". Thoughts are difficult to form and gher with cohesion. Assertiveness is often absent, with either a tendency to resentful submission or an emotional defensive stance. Or just an apathetic stance which later is regretted once the situation can be seen in the cold light of day.
The diametric opposite high times are more complex: anger, creativeness, rambling, overly-chatty, poor listening, biased conversations, erratic body language, rapid speech, euphoric episodes, hyper-focus-periods, and most of all insomnia and irritability. These are all that WE have experienced in those around us with both diagnosis ADHD and those who are clearly over the given threshold and in the body of the church of hyperactivity and bubble glue head.
The bipolar nature of the disorder lead to a 15 year misdiagnosis for genetic depression with a large reactive element in two adults near to us. Bipolar depressions are quite probably mostly attributed to having ADHD mechanisms in root cause.To the contrary however, it may be interesting that a reactive depression caused by stressful events, traumatic experiences or long term mental exhaustion shows bipolar symptoms which are easily associated to ADHD. This may help establish causes or predispositions by being an environmentally induced ADHD. Longitudinal studies of patients presenting with such a history, but no previous affliction by deficit-hyper symptoms, could then show how the brain reverts to normal patterns as the patient goes through therapy centered on the environmental cause of the depression. This could lead to the use of shorter term antidepressive therapy for some forms of 'familial' ADHD and coping strategies and self help which can move the brain into positive cycles. An interesting alternative to long term maintenance on Ritalin.
However for those with ADHD who are not unduly unhappy, it would seem that in fact there is little environmental influence at the root. It is either inherited or has become a long term pattern of cyclical brain activity due to some unknown mechanism.
Diet and Conformist Society
Diet can help abate the worst symptoms of ADHD and probably have such a beneficial effect on light-sufferers as to amiliarate the disease to a level which....well which is kind of socially acceptable - nearer the "norm".
The very nomenclature of the syndrome has a clear origin in the cultural norm: "attention-deficit"- this is the symptom that those with supposed authority in society, get ignored by the afflicted. In fact the ADD side is more a general lack of higher level thought and reasoning. It is evident to authority as a lack of paying attention.
Hyper activity too is a subjective label: I was brought up in a very presbyterian epoch where very few young teachers even in the 1970s, dared to diverge from the conventional and sought a quiet and obedient class and were irritated as much by over performance, conversational agility, questioning, creativeness (as in brain waves, or brain storms) as they were by "bad" behaviour. By then we were only metaphorically beaten into submitting to the norms. So hyperactivity is judged in a social context where the boundary to "disease" is blurred by what some call the "liberal permissive society".
Here I go off on two tangents: firstly there is a lot of ADHD false diagnostic here in Norway because the social norm has for a long time been the very laid back, thoughtful, even cold, and most of all conformist person. A mixture of presbyteriansim and not being a "tall-high-poppy" in the field.
So when cultural influences become wider and other influences place an emphasis on seeking personal attention and social gratification for standing out, it is not suprising that many extrovert and intelligent while not academically inclined youth here get diagnosed. Bored at school, influenced by hyper children's media and the culture of the youtube snippit and the facebook platitude.
Many children and youth diagnosed such then, are probably just lower than average intelligence with a high degree of narcissism as a character trait, and resulting attention seeking behaviour is disruptive and self centered.
Sifting Out Bored, Disruptive Attention Seekers from True ADHD Sufferers.
It must be quite difficult to differentiate a patient presenting with these type of ADD/ ADHD symptoms which are long outside the social norm in a culturally conservative land like Norway. Being bored and disruptive at school seems enough to get tagged with both ADHD and Tourette's syndrome. The patient with a biochemical ætiology will benefit from the Ritalin medication, the former disruptive pupil may experience the reverse, where the stimulant only over stimulates the brain and fuels the disruptive behaviour.
The ducking stool approach: if they drown they were not a witch while if they don't they'll be burnt as a witch.
There Was No ADHD in 1976 ....
There was no ADHD when I was a kid. There was remedial, and a nodding smile "aye he'll be a good mechanic, or even a football player maybe ?" On the wider end those with learning difficulties due to an ADHD disease, were placed in remedial and sidelined from ordinary levels of expectation of performance ie task oriented behaviour norms.
Coming full circle from this tangent, as all parallel lines meet in the universe! ADHD is not caused by diet in the long term : ADHD sufferers may even unwittingly seek out or fall into the high sugar, low fibre diet due to their "glue brain" episodes and their hyperness driving instant gratification seeking behaviour. Some studies on statistically significant sample sizes (ok that is the wrong way around) are showing that a high sugar, high salt diet has quite little to do with behaviour as long as there are enough calories and vitamins injested to support lifestyle.
Conclusion; The Over Diagnosis of ADHD - Cry Wolf Dilemas and a Solution
Well how do you sort out the sick from the bums?? The answer is to medicate the lot of them, and get the ones who respond badly to Ritalin type preparations, in becoming much more hyper, get them to drop off the course and do some kind of socialisation such as team sports, self help groups or mentoring, which arrests their disruptive behaviour by engaging them in other forms of socially satisfying activities and trains them in goal oriented behaviour patterns as a route to reward.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Switches in the Body. The Latest Twist on the Low-Carbo Diet: Fasting Days
The latest twist in the tale of low carbo diets is the "two day fasting" which means only two consecutive days on ultra low carbo - followed in fact by 5 days on a diet without self-indulgence.
Really what science is unveiling is something it already knew: that the body responds to carbohydrates and exercise in balance. However the many years of looking at graphs had blinded them as to the fact that at some point there is a "switch" over to a new prevalent metabolic regime or lasting effect. In the case of the former, after sustained low carbo intake, the same as extended duration exercise, the body switches to burning fat and utilises fat reserves possibly in preference to fat which is under digestion, vascular transport and conversion in the body. On the other hand High Intensity Training with even very, very short bursts of sprint activity also turns a switch in the body.
Back to the latest fad of tangential low carb diet: the two day carbo fasting diet: The clinical "proof" is down to one Phd with 100 women in a blind study, who incidentally is selling a book about it. However it is a single blind study and a statistically significant difference between ordinary dieters, calorie counting that is, and this combined with two days on low carbs.
I am basically doing this on a daily basis, weekend excluded. Dinner around 6pm is a normal, but very healthy meal followed by a small yoghurt and sugar free chocolate as a treat with decaff coffee. Then breakie consists of a light salad, eggs and parma ham. Quick and simple, and about 15g net carbs as against a traditional bread, fruit or cereal based breakfast which could run into several hundred grams with a high proportion of sugars and readily digested starch.
I often walk 40 minutes to work after that.
Lunch is then high fibre : bread, salad, small amounts of fat and actually fruit only once in a while. No sweets usually, just jam and fruit juice to break the usual atkins diet type.
On this then I am in effect, fasting carbo's for about a net of 11 hours given full carbo digestion after dinner. I have lost weight and have the classic ketone-pee quite often.
In combination with this, I have increased the duration of exercise. I can put that down to a good ski season with light early evenings and the use of a head torch! However before in life I was "The Gristle" - well trained but like beefy Botham, chubby. This was down to 1) self indulgence on high sugar, high fat foods 2) snack eating immediately after exercise while actually making dinner 3) eating later into the evening, and thus allowing the body to engage a fairly well desecribed mechanism of laying on fat after late night meals more than those taken 4 hours or more before la-la time.
So for me, the change has been quite marked and I had a benefit immediately by following the Atkins strictly (after one abortive attempt due to travel: it is still impossible to buy a low carbo meal in Airports and you get a roll for breakfast in flight) and instead of going onto the ordinary maintenance phase, instead upping the amount of exercise and then being careful with meals and avoiding mid week snacking. The benefit has been a positive synergy in both loss of weight, and loss of such a gorging appetite, particularly post exercise. If I can nail the munchies with beer, which I only "learned " later in life then I would be a lot better off.
Back to exercise;: I have been conscious in doing much more, forcing myself in particular to walk to work by leaving the car in the company garage so next day, come rain or sleet, I have to walk to work. In addition, being heavy, any endurance training has a larger calorie use than a man of say 80 kg. Peaking to High Intensity Exercise, HIT kind of comes naturally because on the hills I have to give it all sometimes and on the flat I can give it a bit of sprinting.
Dr Jamie Timmpns, an oddly chubby *wegie who is conducting HIT research as part of a multicentre study. which confirms that the majority of people just doing a very few 30 second super intense sprints per week, have a positive effect on insulin response, thus this represents a training form which can help defend against diabetes. Secondly, for those with a r"responder" gene profile VO2 Max is significantly increased in the course of a few months of this very short duration ype of training.
It seems we are dabling now with different switches in the body which are something than humans actually used in antiquity to have optimum energy use and fitness for the lifestyle as a hunter gatherer.
Really what science is unveiling is something it already knew: that the body responds to carbohydrates and exercise in balance. However the many years of looking at graphs had blinded them as to the fact that at some point there is a "switch" over to a new prevalent metabolic regime or lasting effect. In the case of the former, after sustained low carbo intake, the same as extended duration exercise, the body switches to burning fat and utilises fat reserves possibly in preference to fat which is under digestion, vascular transport and conversion in the body. On the other hand High Intensity Training with even very, very short bursts of sprint activity also turns a switch in the body.
Back to the latest fad of tangential low carb diet: the two day carbo fasting diet: The clinical "proof" is down to one Phd with 100 women in a blind study, who incidentally is selling a book about it. However it is a single blind study and a statistically significant difference between ordinary dieters, calorie counting that is, and this combined with two days on low carbs.
I am basically doing this on a daily basis, weekend excluded. Dinner around 6pm is a normal, but very healthy meal followed by a small yoghurt and sugar free chocolate as a treat with decaff coffee. Then breakie consists of a light salad, eggs and parma ham. Quick and simple, and about 15g net carbs as against a traditional bread, fruit or cereal based breakfast which could run into several hundred grams with a high proportion of sugars and readily digested starch.
I often walk 40 minutes to work after that.
Lunch is then high fibre : bread, salad, small amounts of fat and actually fruit only once in a while. No sweets usually, just jam and fruit juice to break the usual atkins diet type.
On this then I am in effect, fasting carbo's for about a net of 11 hours given full carbo digestion after dinner. I have lost weight and have the classic ketone-pee quite often.
In combination with this, I have increased the duration of exercise. I can put that down to a good ski season with light early evenings and the use of a head torch! However before in life I was "The Gristle" - well trained but like beefy Botham, chubby. This was down to 1) self indulgence on high sugar, high fat foods 2) snack eating immediately after exercise while actually making dinner 3) eating later into the evening, and thus allowing the body to engage a fairly well desecribed mechanism of laying on fat after late night meals more than those taken 4 hours or more before la-la time.
So for me, the change has been quite marked and I had a benefit immediately by following the Atkins strictly (after one abortive attempt due to travel: it is still impossible to buy a low carbo meal in Airports and you get a roll for breakfast in flight) and instead of going onto the ordinary maintenance phase, instead upping the amount of exercise and then being careful with meals and avoiding mid week snacking. The benefit has been a positive synergy in both loss of weight, and loss of such a gorging appetite, particularly post exercise. If I can nail the munchies with beer, which I only "learned " later in life then I would be a lot better off.
Back to exercise;: I have been conscious in doing much more, forcing myself in particular to walk to work by leaving the car in the company garage so next day, come rain or sleet, I have to walk to work. In addition, being heavy, any endurance training has a larger calorie use than a man of say 80 kg. Peaking to High Intensity Exercise, HIT kind of comes naturally because on the hills I have to give it all sometimes and on the flat I can give it a bit of sprinting.
Dr Jamie Timmpns, an oddly chubby *wegie who is conducting HIT research as part of a multicentre study. which confirms that the majority of people just doing a very few 30 second super intense sprints per week, have a positive effect on insulin response, thus this represents a training form which can help defend against diabetes. Secondly, for those with a r"responder" gene profile VO2 Max is significantly increased in the course of a few months of this very short duration ype of training.
It seems we are dabling now with different switches in the body which are something than humans actually used in antiquity to have optimum energy use and fitness for the lifestyle as a hunter gatherer.
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
The Storm in Professional Public Services
As pundits call it all, the real sickness in public services is the 'three Ms' : managerialism, marketism and measurementism.
We had all these before thatcher in fact, only without the isms but with the professions forming their own competent structures.
The structures were however vague in the 'roll up, wall street like figures' . They did things often expertly but could say how much better they did it in the term of a parliament over the last one.
All the above 3Ms do one thing overall: they take money away from front line delivery of public services. They place power often in the hands of failed and ailing private sector managers with no relevant profession. The 3 big isms hve been here since the thatcher years and new labour fed the beasts with deproffessionnalisation of front line delivery, opening careers for wannabees who could make the grade as nurses, teachers and police. Fine if they were only helping extra hands and bum wipers, but often they are given more responnsibility than they command or just water down the budget for professional head count and long term cover for sick leave.
Extra hands can be good, and with the exception of the police, assistants existed before with clear cut roles. (you could say traffic wardens at a push).
Measurement and management is good, but for gods sake put it in the hands of professions and let them do MBAs as sabbaticals for example, biut dont place failed middle managers from the private sector as bosses. By all means introduce good practice, apply or develop ISO standards, let management consultant sample-measure but stop piling on costs for management.
Marketism has its place, but i take the principle that the user , customer in the public is not at liberty to choose when they are in need of care, attention or education. A full market economy police is absurd. Placing artificial market structures whereby hospitals compete is not as good a remedy as developing regional centres of excellence and national ISO standards for best practice.
The beast has to be killed before the front line proffessionals become any more disenchanted and the new fascist right have enough ammunition to privatise health, social welfare and education and further deproffessionalise provision outside the more affluent areas.
Firstly i would encourage the Scottish and Scandinavian parliaments to steer managerialism over to the sabbatical and career development route for established proffessionals. Separate out secondary managerial functions like accountancy and building services and by all means, place them out to tender. Trust the proffessionals to manage, and give them the route to the skills they need.
Secondly i would say that there must be best practices taught as such, and maintained by management measuring at point-of-provision. Iso standards, yes ENs , international standards or national standards tailored to provision and building upon established excellence.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Doomed to Repeat History by Our Very Nature
We are doomed to repeat history, no matter how much we study human history. Far better to study psychology and sociology on today's inmates of the prison of nature: our meta structure aka society may be seemingly different from previous empires, or economic regimes but it is governed by much the same underlying principles of human nature.
We are all amateur psycol/socio- ologists. All of us. However the professionals keep on uncovering some simple and uncomfortable truths. Two studies which came to the medias flitting lime light and caught my attention were the front-loaded- monopoly experiments and a socio-anthropological reality of actually being in the jungle WITH real jungle people and just presenting it all as it is, as it happened, explaining the experience as if it were visiting something completely jamais vu.
These two flashed into my little bubble of nuclear family supermarket budget economics, and reminded me of who I am and what I beleive. From really a teenager I thought that history was a lot of bunk, just as in Huxley and Orwells greatest works: he who understands how to control people can control history and therefore can control destiny.
I took psychology for a couple of years to avoid maths. One thing that was lacking in the lecturing was the sense that the personal, or individal can be universal. I went on to major in genetics, where the universal is often proven by the unique : within diversity there is a universality and to that whole there is a plethora of detail, of tangents and of red herrings which actualy bring you back round to the whole centre: DNA encodes in one operating system for everything, be that then a new metastatic operating system ontop of the original coding, you can trace it to the code and to some extent it is bound to do what the code allows it to do.
I am not now going to rant about nature versus nurture and some of the really quite disturbing "determanilistic" studies linking genes to behaviour and even personal success in business. However I am talking about the universality of man's behaviour.
To then not say that the core of the onion is inevitably DNA, I am rather saying that the outer layers of the onion we see as "society" or a grouped sociological phenomenology, are governed by layers of universal psyhcological principles or patterns to which history and technology are just bunk : they are the flaking layers of the onion which are most visible yet belie an underlying simplicity which is to be unravellend in a concentic manner.
From Putin to any given organistaional structure, I am saying of course there are very, very scarey underlying or even fundamental behaviour and personality types which make these organisations operate in often imoral and egoistical ways. In effect what I am writing about is that we are a species which thinks we have come a lot further than we actually have, by very virtue of being able to think like that. When in effect we have had very little time in evolutionary terms to change as individuals in order that we can naturlly coexist with the planet and without being so outright antagonistic and often destructive with each other at the "tribe" level.
So here we dive in: "my tribe": THe papua new guinea experience with the naieve idiot savant approach: see as if never before, jamais vu. What and why is cannabilism to get the media to fund your tour. Flesh eating, to shit your enemy out or to just to be fed, is just a side show to the really frightening nightmarish lesson.
The real bush tribes were very, very sceptical and agressive to the visitors. Bows half drawn, nervous, negative facial expressions. A gambitof tobacco made, the ice hardly melted. Then some more gambiting, going mostly naked and smiling and having neutral body language. So there was the old tribal defence behaviour "Not us, not of us, not for us?"
Soon however, the personal contact grew. Food, hgunting, shiting and language exhcange happened. miles and laughs went both ways. By being small, the explorer could come in large. He was able to not only win their confidence, but within a week, become a friend of theirs. THey would cry for his loss.
Then we came back to the really scarey part: okay this part above shows that we are xenophobic, and can appear to each other as largely threateneing, while we actually could all be friends or lovers. But they then went to the core: why cannibalism? Well it is about killing and not eating for survival directly.
One tribes man claimed to have killed three and eaten at least one. His claim for three kills was maybe exagerrated but he had killed one "ghost stranger" - a man on their terratory. He was afraid, he identified them as a stranger and just killed him like a hunted animal. What transpired was theat this ghost enemy was from a neighbouring tribe who were largely at peace and even freindly with their "long house". We learned later that the man had to pay compensation to the widow.
I don't think I have the time to go into the front-loaded-monopoly experiments now; but for me the story above awakened my own burning belief that how we behave as groups, tribes, nations even Soviets or Unions, is actually detemernined by some enevitabilities of individual behaviour: people are xenophobic and tribal, leaders are strong often blinded types, and leaders make organisations work along lines of fear and tribalness. The layers of the onions become an epi-phenomenon to this howver I believe that society is just bunk without our overcoming our fundamental illogical, racist, zionist, tribalist, religious xelotous behaviour and come to being a species which can act more logically about how we exist with each other and the planet.
People like me never want to lead the foolish and we just casually follow the brave. We just loose our ideals and pay the bills, while those "who want to work hard and get ahead"...by standing on other people, get to run organisations or at least are contenders.
This is always the great weakness of most liberal, socialist or humanist movements: great ideas, some of which could really work and HAVE really worked in say Scandinavia and Canada, but they lack the reptilian brain leadership of the right: the simple, we will win, we will dominate, we dont blink an eye if we need to cheat to get there. People get tired of that too, and as in the liberal back lash in the 90s who could feed off the right wing successes in the west in re-aligning the economies of the west, or in the UK Labour Landslide of post VE 1945. People want progress, they want cooperation , they want "big society" but they like me just hope it all happens whule the people hungry for power are the types who dont care about cheating or morals or anything else really as long as they win for there tribe.
George W eat your heart out.
We are all amateur psycol/socio- ologists. All of us. However the professionals keep on uncovering some simple and uncomfortable truths. Two studies which came to the medias flitting lime light and caught my attention were the front-loaded- monopoly experiments and a socio-anthropological reality of actually being in the jungle WITH real jungle people and just presenting it all as it is, as it happened, explaining the experience as if it were visiting something completely jamais vu.
These two flashed into my little bubble of nuclear family supermarket budget economics, and reminded me of who I am and what I beleive. From really a teenager I thought that history was a lot of bunk, just as in Huxley and Orwells greatest works: he who understands how to control people can control history and therefore can control destiny.
I took psychology for a couple of years to avoid maths. One thing that was lacking in the lecturing was the sense that the personal, or individal can be universal. I went on to major in genetics, where the universal is often proven by the unique : within diversity there is a universality and to that whole there is a plethora of detail, of tangents and of red herrings which actualy bring you back round to the whole centre: DNA encodes in one operating system for everything, be that then a new metastatic operating system ontop of the original coding, you can trace it to the code and to some extent it is bound to do what the code allows it to do.
I am not now going to rant about nature versus nurture and some of the really quite disturbing "determanilistic" studies linking genes to behaviour and even personal success in business. However I am talking about the universality of man's behaviour.
To then not say that the core of the onion is inevitably DNA, I am rather saying that the outer layers of the onion we see as "society" or a grouped sociological phenomenology, are governed by layers of universal psyhcological principles or patterns to which history and technology are just bunk : they are the flaking layers of the onion which are most visible yet belie an underlying simplicity which is to be unravellend in a concentic manner.
From Putin to any given organistaional structure, I am saying of course there are very, very scarey underlying or even fundamental behaviour and personality types which make these organisations operate in often imoral and egoistical ways. In effect what I am writing about is that we are a species which thinks we have come a lot further than we actually have, by very virtue of being able to think like that. When in effect we have had very little time in evolutionary terms to change as individuals in order that we can naturlly coexist with the planet and without being so outright antagonistic and often destructive with each other at the "tribe" level.
So here we dive in: "my tribe": THe papua new guinea experience with the naieve idiot savant approach: see as if never before, jamais vu. What and why is cannabilism to get the media to fund your tour. Flesh eating, to shit your enemy out or to just to be fed, is just a side show to the really frightening nightmarish lesson.
The real bush tribes were very, very sceptical and agressive to the visitors. Bows half drawn, nervous, negative facial expressions. A gambitof tobacco made, the ice hardly melted. Then some more gambiting, going mostly naked and smiling and having neutral body language. So there was the old tribal defence behaviour "Not us, not of us, not for us?"
Soon however, the personal contact grew. Food, hgunting, shiting and language exhcange happened. miles and laughs went both ways. By being small, the explorer could come in large. He was able to not only win their confidence, but within a week, become a friend of theirs. THey would cry for his loss.
Then we came back to the really scarey part: okay this part above shows that we are xenophobic, and can appear to each other as largely threateneing, while we actually could all be friends or lovers. But they then went to the core: why cannibalism? Well it is about killing and not eating for survival directly.
One tribes man claimed to have killed three and eaten at least one. His claim for three kills was maybe exagerrated but he had killed one "ghost stranger" - a man on their terratory. He was afraid, he identified them as a stranger and just killed him like a hunted animal. What transpired was theat this ghost enemy was from a neighbouring tribe who were largely at peace and even freindly with their "long house". We learned later that the man had to pay compensation to the widow.
I don't think I have the time to go into the front-loaded-monopoly experiments now; but for me the story above awakened my own burning belief that how we behave as groups, tribes, nations even Soviets or Unions, is actually detemernined by some enevitabilities of individual behaviour: people are xenophobic and tribal, leaders are strong often blinded types, and leaders make organisations work along lines of fear and tribalness. The layers of the onions become an epi-phenomenon to this howver I believe that society is just bunk without our overcoming our fundamental illogical, racist, zionist, tribalist, religious xelotous behaviour and come to being a species which can act more logically about how we exist with each other and the planet.
People like me never want to lead the foolish and we just casually follow the brave. We just loose our ideals and pay the bills, while those "who want to work hard and get ahead"...by standing on other people, get to run organisations or at least are contenders.
This is always the great weakness of most liberal, socialist or humanist movements: great ideas, some of which could really work and HAVE really worked in say Scandinavia and Canada, but they lack the reptilian brain leadership of the right: the simple, we will win, we will dominate, we dont blink an eye if we need to cheat to get there. People get tired of that too, and as in the liberal back lash in the 90s who could feed off the right wing successes in the west in re-aligning the economies of the west, or in the UK Labour Landslide of post VE 1945. People want progress, they want cooperation , they want "big society" but they like me just hope it all happens whule the people hungry for power are the types who dont care about cheating or morals or anything else really as long as they win for there tribe.
George W eat your heart out.
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Danger of The Super Poor, Super Rich Divide for Scotland and Europe
A quite amazing fact is that Angola receives more in international aid than it's top ten mining and oil companies pay in corporate tax to the country. Also they pump out in their sector and over in Congo, more than the UK sector of the North Sea does today. Yet they are poor and conflict ridden.
With the mass redundancies around Europe announced today, and the wave of public sector down sizing about to crash in the coming two quarters in countries including those in the UK, the recession is likely to continue for most ordinary workers outside some key growth industries like petrochemicals and oil field technology.
The real danger here is that society becomes split for ever with the power of politics resting with the rich and international corporates who will proceed in the way Starbucks has and the way in which companies operating in Angola do: government is either in their pockets or powerless to do anything.
Another divide opened in the 1980s in the public sector in the UK, and is starting to widen here in Scandinavia now: the technocrat and public sector management divide in pay, conditions and actually responsibility taking for failure. This is driven by both efficiency drives and in the entire outsourcing and tender management process. For the former this stems from the demand for measurement of the start point of the public sector "mis-performance" - the perceived inefficiency of health services and all that is not private. However in the UK in the 1980s this lead to the very invisible, beaurocratic inefficiency which resulted in an NHS with more non health line managers than there were beds. Secondly the tender process means that people from outside any health service expertise are employed and bring their own baggage and power attitude to confuse the system by destroying good practices with newer often just as good practice as was in place, but change for the sake of change and showing they weild power. They learn along the way of what the health service needs are, and then become super consultants or are estalted to management with six figure, non health industry matching salaries.
The real hope of the newer new Right, is to completely de-unionise the health industry : for instance there is a concerted campaign to remove union representatives from payed positions in the NHS in the UK because it is seen as socialist waste. However, that in Germany and Scandinavia such partnerships are very often seen as good industrial relations where an employee is dedicated to the workers side, and also another internal watchdog for health and safety should line management wish to cover cracks or hide bad practice from middle and upper management.
In achieving de-unionisation, they will make the health industry at the point of care for those not doctors or with the highest training, an uncompetitive career and the whole tender process will go round in cycles of quality repremands, legal demands for more cash to deliver things not completely black and white in the provider's contracts and of course bankruptcies and judicial closure of companies conducting illegal practices.
Health and Education are two of the last battle grounds for right wing dogma which is in a fight against common sense and good, proven practices. even the introduction of best-practice (ISO EN's for example in some routines or medical procedures) because the new Right want new social engineering in the School system and revision to systems without actually first establishing what is working and best practice. The baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, and today there should be a humiliating defeat for the English Tory Party as they admit that scraping a well established system is wasteful change-for-change's-sake and will of course confuse employers who do not feel the need to spend time comparing say a 21 years old's education in 2022 with a 27 year old's. Rather employers in all sectors want more people to do the standard skills, more people to be helped with maths and physics and more people to be highly computer user-ware literate as school leavers.
On this point we lead to another very wasteful part of the dogma of market mechanisms for education, which is upside down: the market is for young people as consumers, and the suppliers are the insittuions with the subsidy being loans supported and underwritten by the Government. This is across the board in many countries. The problem being that middle class teenagers are pandered too, and want either glamerous careers in media or to just take the easiest route back to the womb of education as a teacher or academic in what they prefer to read at school when they are 15-17. This is a completely upside down approach.
Luckily many countries including the UK have seen the value of apprenticeships in practical skills for various industry and public provision. However for University level, there should really be a slashing of places in those purely academic subjects to allow only the best, most committed students to study say Philosophy or Medieval History. Sure run courses on ethics and history for engineers, taught by academics from these dusty cloisters, but make them relevant.
Access to education is though now becoming more and more an affluent middle class focus rather than a means of social mobility adding value to individuals and the entire economy. This is happening all over Europe, because Students are too big a money bucket for the rich owners of housing and for companies looking for cheap, non "waster" part time and seasonal employees. So here we have a dilema that talented working class or even subsistence- class offspring cannot afford to go to the best Universities if to a university at all or have to work so much on the side that their studies suffer. At the same time, middle class students shun subjects with ample career prospects for those which few succeed to actually establish themselves in , as mentioned media and academia.
Funnily enough through out Europe there is a consensus or kind of positive moving status quo on one area once staunchly government owned: that is transport. However most transport has in fact been run for a very long time along the lines of either private sector or indeed the military ( or both if you take that much of management practice and hierarchy in English institutions was quite closely evolved from how army and empire were run) so in a way it was an easy privatisation for Governments while a hard take over for the private sector: "institutional memory" and the usually very well established safety routines have meant the private sector have struggled to make glamerous city margins, while also outright failing on many capital projects or maintenance ( site: channel tunnel, network rail, Norwegian privatised rail maintenance fiasco)
It all really comes down to the aim to bring wages down and get people to work longer hours for the same pay, while the rich, no...correction...such that the rich and bourgeoisie can get richer.
With the mass redundancies around Europe announced today, and the wave of public sector down sizing about to crash in the coming two quarters in countries including those in the UK, the recession is likely to continue for most ordinary workers outside some key growth industries like petrochemicals and oil field technology.
The real danger here is that society becomes split for ever with the power of politics resting with the rich and international corporates who will proceed in the way Starbucks has and the way in which companies operating in Angola do: government is either in their pockets or powerless to do anything.
Another divide opened in the 1980s in the public sector in the UK, and is starting to widen here in Scandinavia now: the technocrat and public sector management divide in pay, conditions and actually responsibility taking for failure. This is driven by both efficiency drives and in the entire outsourcing and tender management process. For the former this stems from the demand for measurement of the start point of the public sector "mis-performance" - the perceived inefficiency of health services and all that is not private. However in the UK in the 1980s this lead to the very invisible, beaurocratic inefficiency which resulted in an NHS with more non health line managers than there were beds. Secondly the tender process means that people from outside any health service expertise are employed and bring their own baggage and power attitude to confuse the system by destroying good practices with newer often just as good practice as was in place, but change for the sake of change and showing they weild power. They learn along the way of what the health service needs are, and then become super consultants or are estalted to management with six figure, non health industry matching salaries.
The real hope of the newer new Right, is to completely de-unionise the health industry : for instance there is a concerted campaign to remove union representatives from payed positions in the NHS in the UK because it is seen as socialist waste. However, that in Germany and Scandinavia such partnerships are very often seen as good industrial relations where an employee is dedicated to the workers side, and also another internal watchdog for health and safety should line management wish to cover cracks or hide bad practice from middle and upper management.
In achieving de-unionisation, they will make the health industry at the point of care for those not doctors or with the highest training, an uncompetitive career and the whole tender process will go round in cycles of quality repremands, legal demands for more cash to deliver things not completely black and white in the provider's contracts and of course bankruptcies and judicial closure of companies conducting illegal practices.
Health and Education are two of the last battle grounds for right wing dogma which is in a fight against common sense and good, proven practices. even the introduction of best-practice (ISO EN's for example in some routines or medical procedures) because the new Right want new social engineering in the School system and revision to systems without actually first establishing what is working and best practice. The baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, and today there should be a humiliating defeat for the English Tory Party as they admit that scraping a well established system is wasteful change-for-change's-sake and will of course confuse employers who do not feel the need to spend time comparing say a 21 years old's education in 2022 with a 27 year old's. Rather employers in all sectors want more people to do the standard skills, more people to be helped with maths and physics and more people to be highly computer user-ware literate as school leavers.
On this point we lead to another very wasteful part of the dogma of market mechanisms for education, which is upside down: the market is for young people as consumers, and the suppliers are the insittuions with the subsidy being loans supported and underwritten by the Government. This is across the board in many countries. The problem being that middle class teenagers are pandered too, and want either glamerous careers in media or to just take the easiest route back to the womb of education as a teacher or academic in what they prefer to read at school when they are 15-17. This is a completely upside down approach.
Luckily many countries including the UK have seen the value of apprenticeships in practical skills for various industry and public provision. However for University level, there should really be a slashing of places in those purely academic subjects to allow only the best, most committed students to study say Philosophy or Medieval History. Sure run courses on ethics and history for engineers, taught by academics from these dusty cloisters, but make them relevant.
Access to education is though now becoming more and more an affluent middle class focus rather than a means of social mobility adding value to individuals and the entire economy. This is happening all over Europe, because Students are too big a money bucket for the rich owners of housing and for companies looking for cheap, non "waster" part time and seasonal employees. So here we have a dilema that talented working class or even subsistence- class offspring cannot afford to go to the best Universities if to a university at all or have to work so much on the side that their studies suffer. At the same time, middle class students shun subjects with ample career prospects for those which few succeed to actually establish themselves in , as mentioned media and academia.
Funnily enough through out Europe there is a consensus or kind of positive moving status quo on one area once staunchly government owned: that is transport. However most transport has in fact been run for a very long time along the lines of either private sector or indeed the military ( or both if you take that much of management practice and hierarchy in English institutions was quite closely evolved from how army and empire were run) so in a way it was an easy privatisation for Governments while a hard take over for the private sector: "institutional memory" and the usually very well established safety routines have meant the private sector have struggled to make glamerous city margins, while also outright failing on many capital projects or maintenance ( site: channel tunnel, network rail, Norwegian privatised rail maintenance fiasco)
It all really comes down to the aim to bring wages down and get people to work longer hours for the same pay, while the rich, no...correction...such that the rich and bourgeoisie can get richer.
Friday, February 01, 2013
XC SKi Waxing: Klister TIme!
Only february and a big thaw back and re-freeze comes to spoil the party. Runs are over 200m alt. And icey, old snow which has however been lovingly churned up and patted back down into what looks like a normal winter run, but is actually made of hard, large ice crystals on an icey base.
Ski-able it was however, very much so. While we await affordable "zero" wax skis to hit the market and cover say -10 to +5 , (the latest nanotech skis or otherwise synthetic textured kick zone inserts), we have to resort to the necessary evil of clister.
We turned up and it was -10C today with the sun now of course a little higher on the sky. Starting out 1150 on a day off from work, this was not just relaxed but practical- conditions would be a little softened and the air easier to breath with the sun up a while.
Having base wax, two layers, and some blue hard wax left, I just decided to plug on with lots of layers in the recommended pyramid of layers, more in the middle of the kick zone. Ignoring the advice to use clister.
Why ignore good advice from people who ar finished for the day and have done 12-18km!?? Well I hate using clister out on the day. It is horrid stuff. In the SmøreBu, it can atleast be heated or ironed on. On a cold day, it becomes like a resin and the fish bones become like a wax free pattern because they won't smooth out.
2km in and nearly all my wax was warn off, so out with said clister, still -9C and on with wishbone pattern of it then this hard resin like state.
Clister will go on top of hard wax effectively, it is just messy, but actually maybe easier to get off than using just clister types from the base upwards so to speak.
On the first hill it felt like having skins on: good grip! At the top, the clister was a mess of blobs with ice crystals hanging out them. No good for anything but up steep hills.
With the sun high in the sky, on a day truly stolen from heaven, the idea struck me to 1) heat the clister on the skis in the sun to soften it. 2) Hold the tube in my armpit for a while to soften the damn stuff.
The black skibase warmed up such that the ice melted and the clister became much more pliable, I was able to smooth off the blobs and then add more clister flowing now from the tube, to acheive kind of one and a half layers. Good effect. This lasted to the top another 4km away.
Even at the top, the heel area was bare and so more or less to protect the base and have some kick for some of the little "stops" ie short, steep slopes which break up the general down hills stretches. This then lasted enough all the way home, 6km or so.
So nice enough at the car park again, there was less clister and it was hard on the ski surface as the sun had left the lower parts of the course some time ago. So I could pack the skis. BUT don't forget them, especially not at the end of season. They have to be cleaned, if only to stop your annoyance at how mobile and sticky the stuff gets at anything near room temperature.
Okay, so you have no wax iron, or would rather not use your new pro bit of kit on the bloody effing glue stuff.
Putting Clister on At Home with No Iron Around. :
( pierce the metal seal of a new tube and put cap back on )
Put the tube on a water-radiator or in an oven set to 40-50*c . Check it does not get too hot to hold. Let cool to warm enough to hold.
It will be really runny now, kind of like a squeezy.honey. So open the top carefully. Then apply it on either side of the ski base taking care use it sparingling. If it is really runny then a line down the middle of each surface can be laid, and then spread out. If it is easier to control, then the classic herring bone application with dabs down each side of the groove can work. Smooth out with the tool and then of course clear the groove. Cool the ski outside, and then re-warm the glue sorry klister, and apply another layer.
Bind your skis at each end of the bow ie well clear of the kick zone where the skis meet each other "face to face" so to speak.
For really really hard days, you can then apply another layer in the car park and check for wear underway.
Getting Clsiter OFF, no Iron Around:
You want to absolutely avoid skis getting near anything about 150'C. So a fire or what ever can be too hot. However, most cabins and houses in the north and the mountains have a heated floor or two, so that can be the heat source. Take a 70 to 80cm long layer of the synthetic base cleaner cloth and lay it on the kick zone. Press on. Now take kitchen roll a little longer and place on, and use poly-bands or masking tape to make this paper layer into an effective wrapping. Lie face down on the floor and leave for an hour.
Get base cleaner out, with more paper and the spatula tool. Take off the paper,Run the tool down the synthetic cloth, rolling it then over on itself, and then dumping the excess onto the roll of cloth as you go. Be hygenic! Take off the whole legnth in this way and then discard responsibly. Use then base cleaner and cloth to remove the last.
The benefit of using the tool is that you can also take off the now useless was base if you started out with that like me today. Not all of the clister will stick to the cloth, but a lot will soak and run into it, thus making for a very quick and quite rewarding job!
You maybe want to clean back from the heal and reapply a little glider here because clister travels backwards into the glide zone just enough to be irritiating.
I just put right on a hard base wax spray once the ski is dry of all solvent, and I am happy to put clister on the top of this again or cross my fingers than new snow comes and I can avoid glue!
Ski-able it was however, very much so. While we await affordable "zero" wax skis to hit the market and cover say -10 to +5 , (the latest nanotech skis or otherwise synthetic textured kick zone inserts), we have to resort to the necessary evil of clister.
We turned up and it was -10C today with the sun now of course a little higher on the sky. Starting out 1150 on a day off from work, this was not just relaxed but practical- conditions would be a little softened and the air easier to breath with the sun up a while.
Having base wax, two layers, and some blue hard wax left, I just decided to plug on with lots of layers in the recommended pyramid of layers, more in the middle of the kick zone. Ignoring the advice to use clister.
Why ignore good advice from people who ar finished for the day and have done 12-18km!?? Well I hate using clister out on the day. It is horrid stuff. In the SmøreBu, it can atleast be heated or ironed on. On a cold day, it becomes like a resin and the fish bones become like a wax free pattern because they won't smooth out.
2km in and nearly all my wax was warn off, so out with said clister, still -9C and on with wishbone pattern of it then this hard resin like state.
Clister will go on top of hard wax effectively, it is just messy, but actually maybe easier to get off than using just clister types from the base upwards so to speak.
On the first hill it felt like having skins on: good grip! At the top, the clister was a mess of blobs with ice crystals hanging out them. No good for anything but up steep hills.
With the sun high in the sky, on a day truly stolen from heaven, the idea struck me to 1) heat the clister on the skis in the sun to soften it. 2) Hold the tube in my armpit for a while to soften the damn stuff.
The black skibase warmed up such that the ice melted and the clister became much more pliable, I was able to smooth off the blobs and then add more clister flowing now from the tube, to acheive kind of one and a half layers. Good effect. This lasted to the top another 4km away.
Even at the top, the heel area was bare and so more or less to protect the base and have some kick for some of the little "stops" ie short, steep slopes which break up the general down hills stretches. This then lasted enough all the way home, 6km or so.
So nice enough at the car park again, there was less clister and it was hard on the ski surface as the sun had left the lower parts of the course some time ago. So I could pack the skis. BUT don't forget them, especially not at the end of season. They have to be cleaned, if only to stop your annoyance at how mobile and sticky the stuff gets at anything near room temperature.
Okay, so you have no wax iron, or would rather not use your new pro bit of kit on the bloody effing glue stuff.
Putting Clister on At Home with No Iron Around. :
( pierce the metal seal of a new tube and put cap back on )
Put the tube on a water-radiator or in an oven set to 40-50*c . Check it does not get too hot to hold. Let cool to warm enough to hold.
It will be really runny now, kind of like a squeezy.honey. So open the top carefully. Then apply it on either side of the ski base taking care use it sparingling. If it is really runny then a line down the middle of each surface can be laid, and then spread out. If it is easier to control, then the classic herring bone application with dabs down each side of the groove can work. Smooth out with the tool and then of course clear the groove. Cool the ski outside, and then re-warm the glue sorry klister, and apply another layer.
Bind your skis at each end of the bow ie well clear of the kick zone where the skis meet each other "face to face" so to speak.
For really really hard days, you can then apply another layer in the car park and check for wear underway.
Getting Clsiter OFF, no Iron Around:
You want to absolutely avoid skis getting near anything about 150'C. So a fire or what ever can be too hot. However, most cabins and houses in the north and the mountains have a heated floor or two, so that can be the heat source. Take a 70 to 80cm long layer of the synthetic base cleaner cloth and lay it on the kick zone. Press on. Now take kitchen roll a little longer and place on, and use poly-bands or masking tape to make this paper layer into an effective wrapping. Lie face down on the floor and leave for an hour.
Get base cleaner out, with more paper and the spatula tool. Take off the paper,Run the tool down the synthetic cloth, rolling it then over on itself, and then dumping the excess onto the roll of cloth as you go. Be hygenic! Take off the whole legnth in this way and then discard responsibly. Use then base cleaner and cloth to remove the last.
The benefit of using the tool is that you can also take off the now useless was base if you started out with that like me today. Not all of the clister will stick to the cloth, but a lot will soak and run into it, thus making for a very quick and quite rewarding job!
You maybe want to clean back from the heal and reapply a little glider here because clister travels backwards into the glide zone just enough to be irritiating.
I just put right on a hard base wax spray once the ski is dry of all solvent, and I am happy to put clister on the top of this again or cross my fingers than new snow comes and I can avoid glue!
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
David Cameron Talks...Britain Suffers
David Cameron Talks...Britain Suffers
David Cameron talks a good talk. That's why his rich backers in the UK are so pleased with him, and the top rate tax reduction in April.
However like Mitt Romney's billions of campaign dollars, they will fall on the stoney ground of a British Electorate which will not vote Lib Dem ever again, and is seeing the economic injustices and imbalance as creating a US , laisez faire ghetto-and-condo society.
In April the new lower rate comes in for top tax payers. In fact I am not against a lower rate for those earning up to £60,000 a year: it actually isn't a lot of money in London and also these are people in positions of responsibility often in the public sector who at least declare all their income. However of course in the same month, the very poorest subsistance families and those WORKING families on a single minimum wage will have their kids clothes, their holidays, their christmas presents stolen by Dear David and his rich chums, all in the aid of "balancing the books and getting people back into work".
This is where his rich pals and former Eatonite fund managers can't paper over things: it was his rich, yuppie funny-money backers who caused the recession. It was them who leant money and took their cut and made a housing market boom based on a house-of-cards of credit. But it is they who don't have to pay, and in fact will pay less after April. It is many of them who are defering their bonuses based on some recovery from abject failure in 2012 into the April tax year. Britain is becoming an obscene party for the rich as the expence of a public, with the Tories trying very hard to blame labour for the catastophy.
Labour of course did over spend or rather spend in relation to the up phase of the "economic cycle" lasting for another term. So did many other states, and several conservative governments. They tried this trick in the US too, blaming the president who sat on top of the Bush approved bubble and a congress and senate legislature largely strangled by the super rich backed fascists and oligarchs in the Republican party and right of the democrats.
However raising taxes at this top rate doesn't always work of course: they are the very high earners who can employ accountants and find tax effective mechanisms, and they have enough power within their organisations to negotiate further bonuses, share options and foreign employ to avoid tax. But this is not the whole picture: now there are many more highly paid middle managers, engineers and technocrats. So there is a rich seam to be taxed above around 55K and of course a new super rate could be imposed above 80K for example, to claw back in some cash from those overpaid GPs for example. This also forces more people in the private sector into actually buying shares or indeed setting up their own private companies to supply their expertise and take a profit while enjoying the business tax-write-offs.
Effective taxation means maximising revenue. If you raise top rate too much, then you don't bring in so much tax. However as there are far more salaried high earners who don't have ready access to "mechanisms" then let them eat Dan Cake.
The Great PR Fraud of the Century
All governments try to blame the last outgoing who now sit in opposition. The problem is though that Labour despite having a very good opportunity for winning the next election, are losing the PR battle because the Tories are much better at it.
The tories know who they represent " the hard working types who want to get on" which is the same types who think there is no need for minimum wage OR benefits and that is kind of implied as in Labour then getting the " wasters who want to turn up and take the cash and deliver poor services" which the tory voter believes in, and many of those struggeling on low incomes also see as time wasters. We could come in a situation like in the USA where white-trash vote republican because of this aspiration-desparation effect. Their lives will get worse under a right-wing slow down but they will still aspire and blame big-bad-government.
Labour have lost their way and the big PR machine for the rich the Tory party is, will slowly convince enough people that labour are the route of all ills, and not their rich backers who favoured the laisez-faire, puny-weak governance of stock and capital markets. I hope the press do not forget this.
David Cameron talks a good talk. That's why his rich backers in the UK are so pleased with him, and the top rate tax reduction in April.
However like Mitt Romney's billions of campaign dollars, they will fall on the stoney ground of a British Electorate which will not vote Lib Dem ever again, and is seeing the economic injustices and imbalance as creating a US , laisez faire ghetto-and-condo society.
In April the new lower rate comes in for top tax payers. In fact I am not against a lower rate for those earning up to £60,000 a year: it actually isn't a lot of money in London and also these are people in positions of responsibility often in the public sector who at least declare all their income. However of course in the same month, the very poorest subsistance families and those WORKING families on a single minimum wage will have their kids clothes, their holidays, their christmas presents stolen by Dear David and his rich chums, all in the aid of "balancing the books and getting people back into work".
This is where his rich pals and former Eatonite fund managers can't paper over things: it was his rich, yuppie funny-money backers who caused the recession. It was them who leant money and took their cut and made a housing market boom based on a house-of-cards of credit. But it is they who don't have to pay, and in fact will pay less after April. It is many of them who are defering their bonuses based on some recovery from abject failure in 2012 into the April tax year. Britain is becoming an obscene party for the rich as the expence of a public, with the Tories trying very hard to blame labour for the catastophy.
Labour of course did over spend or rather spend in relation to the up phase of the "economic cycle" lasting for another term. So did many other states, and several conservative governments. They tried this trick in the US too, blaming the president who sat on top of the Bush approved bubble and a congress and senate legislature largely strangled by the super rich backed fascists and oligarchs in the Republican party and right of the democrats.
However raising taxes at this top rate doesn't always work of course: they are the very high earners who can employ accountants and find tax effective mechanisms, and they have enough power within their organisations to negotiate further bonuses, share options and foreign employ to avoid tax. But this is not the whole picture: now there are many more highly paid middle managers, engineers and technocrats. So there is a rich seam to be taxed above around 55K and of course a new super rate could be imposed above 80K for example, to claw back in some cash from those overpaid GPs for example. This also forces more people in the private sector into actually buying shares or indeed setting up their own private companies to supply their expertise and take a profit while enjoying the business tax-write-offs.
Effective taxation means maximising revenue. If you raise top rate too much, then you don't bring in so much tax. However as there are far more salaried high earners who don't have ready access to "mechanisms" then let them eat Dan Cake.
The Great PR Fraud of the Century
All governments try to blame the last outgoing who now sit in opposition. The problem is though that Labour despite having a very good opportunity for winning the next election, are losing the PR battle because the Tories are much better at it.
The tories know who they represent " the hard working types who want to get on" which is the same types who think there is no need for minimum wage OR benefits and that is kind of implied as in Labour then getting the " wasters who want to turn up and take the cash and deliver poor services" which the tory voter believes in, and many of those struggeling on low incomes also see as time wasters. We could come in a situation like in the USA where white-trash vote republican because of this aspiration-desparation effect. Their lives will get worse under a right-wing slow down but they will still aspire and blame big-bad-government.
Labour have lost their way and the big PR machine for the rich the Tory party is, will slowly convince enough people that labour are the route of all ills, and not their rich backers who favoured the laisez-faire, puny-weak governance of stock and capital markets. I hope the press do not forget this.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Brand .....and www.Brand Again
There are a couple of remarkable things about the internet: its early incarnations have mirrored themselves later on but somehow snowballed out into a mass market instead of merely being repeated into a fragmented market.
Why did the brands get so big on the internet? We all have finally a mechanism to deliver individually shaped products, communities and brand experiences while in fact we flock to the big brands: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter Amazon, E-Bay and the ancillary Skype, Bitly and of course not to forget the Google owned Blogger.
The really remarkable thing is that these brands turned the whole advertising world onto its own arse!
The mega brands of the internet grew outside the old model of advertising awareness: of off line brand build and banner ad drift. Instead they snowballed by word of mouth ( or rather invitation often) , and peeping over each other's shoulders in the office or the playground. Then the BRANDS sucked in the advertising industry or rather the revenue.
The mold of trad' marketing was not just broken, but pulverised, melted down and recast into something no trad' marketeer would have spent time or money on fifteen years ago.
As I say, community oriented web brands have repeated themselves: google being the longest standing, the others like Facebook and Twitter, being essentially repeats of similar mechanisms for social communications and vanity-information display. I think, therefore I am: am on the internet, therefore I exist. Take it back to phone freaks, or the private messages the early telegrapher sent each other. You put a comm's system up and humans will either use or abuse it to be sociable and vain.
The trad' mindset was that online brands would need to be built by offline brand building. Wrong, how very, very wrong that proved to be. It all went "viral" and WOM. However, one other big thing missing out in the old mind set in how to grow on line brands c 1998-2002, was the consumption part of branding. The true brand relationship, the personal brand equity of which the entire equity is the sum, is actually only consummated upon consummation, sorry consumption. It is only in the experience that you gain the satisfaction, the purchase confirmation comfort, the elation of spending too much.
Take a BMW driver, they need to not only drive a pretty good car but be seen to be driving the advert around: either as someone who knows their car, but more likely someone who wants to show they have made it up the management echelons or a bung on being self employed. They have actually (apart from the 1 series or a used M3 /M5) just spent far too much on getting from A to B on rather Teutonic seats. But everyone can see they have spent too much, sorry have earned it and can afford it. That is where the satisfaction comes in.
With facebook versus the earlier personal-home-pages, yahoo groups, and of course friends-reunited, the brand worked in consumption. It was a delicious free candy, with no-holds-barred for those who had a mutual need to get in touch with each other. No fee for connecting finally, no limit to how many connections. The candy remained delicious and "free", being payed for by Amazon and many, many wanna be brands. Then came more "personalisation", which meant holiday and loan ads in the side bar. Very unpersonal. Yes they know more about your profile, but purely to their benefit in getting a half a percent more percent response from a smaller group filtered for never-will-buys. Now FB is at a turning point with mobile content ad's "suggested likes" filling up our newsfeeds seemingly and repetitive invitations to quiz, dart and golf tours from the charming local pub we (once) Liked. Also more freinds are using social-network-marketing and massaging their posts between the two: personal touch on the branded "independent consultant/brand champion for brand X Cosmetics and smelly detritus" and linking out to said page on their personal pages.
I think two things are for sure; one FB will become more commerical and place income over personal freedom from spam. Two, there will be a new big, independent web brand which may somehow replace once again, an earlier epoch. My crystal ball says that this will be some form for video-audio communication coupled to a personal-posting page. So Skype meets FB and then some. Alternatively of course there could be a consolidation of the need to shop-at-best-price which so far has been largely a market place and not a "request for tender". There is a fragmented market, FB is in there in local used-buy and barter and "my tenders" for house work.
What ever comes next on the net, it is likely to follow the new model and be a tasty little fancy cake in the mouth of the consumer and grow exponentially on word-of-email and invitationss.
Why did the brands get so big on the internet? We all have finally a mechanism to deliver individually shaped products, communities and brand experiences while in fact we flock to the big brands: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter Amazon, E-Bay and the ancillary Skype, Bitly and of course not to forget the Google owned Blogger.
The really remarkable thing is that these brands turned the whole advertising world onto its own arse!
The mega brands of the internet grew outside the old model of advertising awareness: of off line brand build and banner ad drift. Instead they snowballed by word of mouth ( or rather invitation often) , and peeping over each other's shoulders in the office or the playground. Then the BRANDS sucked in the advertising industry or rather the revenue.
The mold of trad' marketing was not just broken, but pulverised, melted down and recast into something no trad' marketeer would have spent time or money on fifteen years ago.
As I say, community oriented web brands have repeated themselves: google being the longest standing, the others like Facebook and Twitter, being essentially repeats of similar mechanisms for social communications and vanity-information display. I
The trad' mindset was that online brands would need to be built by offline brand building. Wrong, how very, very wrong that proved to be. It all went "viral" and WOM. However, one other big thing missing out in the old mind set in how to grow on line brands c 1998-2002, was the consumption part of branding. The true brand relationship, the personal brand equity of which the entire equity is the sum, is actually only consummated upon consummation, sorry consumption. It is only in the experience that you gain the satisfaction, the purchase confirmation comfort, the elation of spending too much.
Take a BMW driver, they need to not only drive a pretty good car but be seen to be driving the advert around: either as someone who knows their car, but more likely someone who wants to show they have made it up the management echelons or a bung on being self employed. They have actually (apart from the 1 series or a used M3 /M5) just spent far too much on getting from A to B on rather Teutonic seats. But everyone can see they have spent too much, sorry have earned it and can afford it. That is where the satisfaction comes in.
With facebook versus the earlier personal-home-pages, yahoo groups, and of course friends-reunited, the brand worked in consumption. It was a delicious free candy, with no-holds-barred for those who had a mutual need to get in touch with each other. No fee for connecting finally, no limit to how many connections. The candy remained delicious and "free", being payed for by Amazon and many, many wanna be brands. Then came more "personalisation", which meant holiday and loan ads in the side bar. Very unpersonal. Yes they know more about your profile, but purely to their benefit in getting a half a percent more percent response from a smaller group filtered for never-will-buys. Now FB is at a turning point with mobile content ad's "suggested likes" filling up our newsfeeds seemingly and repetitive invitations to quiz, dart and golf tours from the charming local pub we (once) Liked. Also more freinds are using social-network-marketing and massaging their posts between the two: personal touch on the branded "independent consultant/brand champion for brand X Cosmetics and smelly detritus" and linking out to said page on their personal pages.
I think two things are for sure; one FB will become more commerical and place income over personal freedom from spam. Two, there will be a new big, independent web brand which may somehow replace once again, an earlier epoch. My crystal ball says that this will be some form for video-audio communication coupled to a personal-posting page. So Skype meets FB and then some. Alternatively of course there could be a consolidation of the need to shop-at-best-price which so far has been largely a market place and not a "request for tender". There is a fragmented market, FB is in there in local used-buy and barter and "my tenders" for house work.
What ever comes next on the net, it is likely to follow the new model and be a tasty little fancy cake in the mouth of the consumer and grow exponentially on word-of-email and invitationss.
XC Ski Wax tips for Tourists/ Training
New snow on the way, with and old, hard crystaline snow on the ground above 200m where there is still skiing to be had. Time for a wax in the non Brasilian sense.
The best tips for someone like me who wants to have a decent tour - to "smørebu" ratio are these: based on Swix range:
1) Clean off your skis from last year or last klister!
To get clister off first take the skis into a warm room or better still upside down on a cable warmed floor. Or use a hair drier/ paitn stripper gun on low. Once warm scrape as much as you can then use the roll of synthetic cloth: lay on top a couple of layers and then use an old iron to heat off the klister ontop to cloth.This will take the stubborn crap off and then you can just use base cleaner and the roll to wipe down and take the rest. Do this end of season or whenever there is new snow and cold weather forecast!
2) For a good base prep in the kick zone I tape off the edges and use Swix Green Base wax spray: this is a hard wax which will quite likely last a whole season up to stripping back for clister.It goes on easy and is smoothed out with the spatula and really seems as good as ironing on wax.
Put the skis outside after you have an even layer, and after 10 mins , cork them down and reapply another layer.
Green Base Spray-On WaX is also a killer good rust protector for screw heads and bald patches on car paint work.
Then use a glider on the cleaned end sections outside the zone with the tapes moved inboard to the kick side. Roll on glider with flouride seems to be fine and helps for fast ice free skis without arseing about with melting wax. ( Wet and dry sanding should be done I suppose on the skis each year before all this, and definietly when new)
You can leave your skis with this and glider on the glide zones over summer.
3) Principle of Layer (laminating) : Soft on Hard
When ready for use you can go by the rule of thumb on Warmer/softer wax on top of Colder/harder wax. To extend base layer life you can take either green solid or standard blue wax over the green base and cork on from hard wax whcih is at room temperature. Let the skis cool off outdoors before then taking the days coiver on.
4) Do it all Top Wax ?
I prefer Swix Lillac VR45 -6: +1 : it seems to cover a wide range of conditions right to the edge of clister conditions (which is like UHU for those who dont XC ski) However it does need reapplying on harder snow while on tour, and does maybe attract snow "clabbing!" in some conditions so Red or clister may be better. I must have a go with a VR flouride version of lillac, which is expensive but prevents "clabbing" . Lillac is a lot less messy than Red and so easier to put on in thin layers and I hardly ever use red now, going over to clister instead for hard or wet snow.
There is also a special V50 lillac which is nicer to apply than Swix Red and works lower than Red even though it is a very narrow range on the can: -2 /0 new snow, -1/ +1 on old. This was " a secret weapon" for snow melting and freezing around zero but probably you want a fluroide VR type for racing these days, or a set of smørefri or Zero skis for top performance.
5) For colder conditions as forecast, with old snow I would put another layer of green spray base on virgin skis with their two layers waiting for any top coats. For skis which have been out already, then I take several layers of blue from room temperature, cooling each time the night before while then applying wax kept inside the car once on site.
6) you can slap universal clister on top of wax and you can have a reserve in the groove of the ski : messy but it will keep you kicking if it gets mild or the spores bet icey hard. Just scrape off stuff and ice crystals underway and reapply or spread out from the groove.
7) for a long time of clister conditions forecast : you should clean the kick zone back to plastic by scraping and using roll and cleaner. Dry off in a warm room.
Heat the clister tube in an oven at 50'C if you dont have an old iron or dislike ironing the on. From the oven, it will be very runny so expect it to flow out on the slightest pressure. Use the ski spatula to spread a thin layer on each side of the groove completely cover the kick zone. Cool off the skis and repeat. Clean off any excess on the edges of the skis or in the groove each time. Use then end straps or two ski straps each side of the kick zone / binding to hold the skis together so the clister doesnt stick to anything, whiole not compressing much of the "spenn" in the ski:
8) Apply the clister of the day ( i just use universal for all this) using a slightly cooled tube of clister so it is easy to apply in small fish bone stipes. Smooth on with the too and take excess out of the groove and off the edges with the tool and roll if needs be. For very icey stuff oir longer tours, let the first layer of this set in the cold and add a second layer. Scrape for gubbins under way and reapply very sparingling from the ends of the kick zone inwards when on tour,
9) Waxing Underway on Tour
Remember than you cannot apply harder wax onto alot of softer wax left, but if it is hard conditions then a stripe of blue when you have worn down your top layers will help save the base layers you spent time at home on!
For colder days or hard days when you need to reapply often, keep the day's top layer wax in a pocket which gets body heat. It makes it easier to get an even, thickish layer on, or a quick, even and thin layer. in hard, -6 to +1 I just use lilac and as soon as I loose kick I stop and apply either two thin layers or more, or one big thick application to get me up a hill for example. Good excuse for a rest!
As said above you can in principle put softer wax ontop harder stuff but Swix RED does not site very well on the do-it-all Swix Lillac: however if the lillac is worn off then red can go on and preferably onto a new application of blue.
10) Clister for Long Uphills and Melting/Freezing conditions: As above also, you can slap clister onto wax actually: messy but it will keep you going at easter time especically, when it goes wet or icey hard. Also you can use clister for long uphills of course : if you have a tour uphill a hut or the end of day is up to the car, then you can clister up the whole ski instead of using a skin as a "felle" : just be prepared to have a mess in the car and a lot of cleaning and reapplying of glider and wax layer. If the tour next day from the hut is mostly down hill then you can just leave it on and it will help you brake down hill!
11) End of season and storage: Back to square one, I lilke to prep up with green base wax. At the start of the season I also have a cheap pair of jumble sale skis which I leave tied up with base clister layers so I can avoid dewaxing the usual skis for days which will be rubbish anyway on ice or slush!
Damage on the ski surface should be sanded out I guess for small stuff and "hairs" but bigger scores or worse should be taken to a decent shop or experty pal for advice. Damage revealling the wood core is most serious and should maybe ne sealed up somehow temproarlity/ over summer before pixing.
NEVER leave a pair of skis compresses with a ski strap for any legnth of time: it is best to either have then loose or bound on each end, and the two new types of ski ties do this: the sponsor pro type holds the skis parallel, and then the stretch on end type you use on each end with a pad of neoprene in them.
Appendix on Other Stuff:
11) Old Waxless skis: the scale pattern on waxless skis wear out eventualy . However this does not mean the ski is dead. You can have a pair then with a base of hard Green to protect them as above and even out a little of the old fish scales, and then use then as clister skis or a spare pair. You could also leave a set of skins (feller) on them , see below:
12) Feller / Skins: These are actually a very good idea to have with you for touring and for hard conditions. At end of the short season 2012 here, the trouble was lack of snow and quite cold conditions making for just hard packed ice. One spritely 50 year old girl was winging her way round "drivheie" on skins at a good pace : she did two rounds wiith all the spore being hard as steel and had good kick all the way uphill. I guess you can use "zero ski" flouride appl,kications to stop snow gathering on them in wetter or fluffy conditions.
Skins brake you a lot down hill making for a juddery descent sometimes in plough, but do help for beginners too if the tour is just fish-boning up hill and ploughing down with few flat sectioins.
I don't know how they help or hinder telemark turning : I guess actually they make it easier on ice and maybe help you brake a little on steeper, soft or off piste hills on tour skis ?
Thursday, January 03, 2013
2013...Finally Convergent!
There were two things which really brought home that finally, after ten or more years of talking about it, we will have a meaningful convergence of internet devices.
In 2005 people were talking about the big year for convergence: internet TV, TV with PC cards, and your toaster running http.
But somehow it did not happen quite quickly enough.
What did we expect from convergence and what can we actually define the term by?
Well my own definition is that yes, our communication devices become on line, all time. But more over the operating systems and inter-compatibility becomes seamless in appearance and cross device functionality. Basically a PC monitor becomes a TV, that TV gets a touch screen, that touchscreen is down sized to a tablet, that tablet is just a big mobile which you also have.
The big move I hear on the BBC today is Ubuntu running on mobiles. Mobiles have actually been powerful enough to run pretty good windows GUI type environments for a while, it was just that no one wanted to release a windows 3.11 or apple OS6 on a mobile. Unebknown to me, it is linux at the base of Android OS. So now that phones are all powerful, you can install and run Ubuntu, and then the writers have to follow suite and run a device detect, or make a special downsized version for the small screen or expect the hardware to handle it out to a HDMI screen.
The next thing will be semi intelligent, "thin client" remote devices such as blue tooth touch pads/keyboards/scribes, mobile mini dialer handpieces, more advance headset/handsfri, and most of all mobiles.
The next big revolution is already there and has been for a long time with the military and plane transport: talk. The internet for now is a visual-touch interaction by in large. Sound is for basic alerts and entertainment. Although handsets and tablets now have uptime link to google oral translation and text reading, the ability for you to get richer non visual information is there and will get bigger.
Also this lends itself to convergence of more devices: cameras which talk their exposure settings ac focal range to your ear piece, toaster which e-mail you when they are done, voice mail on facebook, notebook apps with voice to text on just about anything,
Talking web sites is something I wanted to do as a charity project when I was an internet project manager, but in its own right, to do it right and cover even a basic description which is comprehensible, it is actually a pretty major undertaking. However the tablet interface with rumble response lends itself much better to a more user guided non visual interaction with the media, which is intuitive for blind people and becomes so as an aid or just pleasure for sighted people.
Shut your eyes people, the internet is right in front of you.....
In 2005 people were talking about the big year for convergence: internet TV, TV with PC cards, and your toaster running http.
But somehow it did not happen quite quickly enough.
What did we expect from convergence and what can we actually define the term by?
Well my own definition is that yes, our communication devices become on line, all time. But more over the operating systems and inter-compatibility becomes seamless in appearance and cross device functionality. Basically a PC monitor becomes a TV, that TV gets a touch screen, that touchscreen is down sized to a tablet, that tablet is just a big mobile which you also have.
The big move I hear on the BBC today is Ubuntu running on mobiles. Mobiles have actually been powerful enough to run pretty good windows GUI type environments for a while, it was just that no one wanted to release a windows 3.11 or apple OS6 on a mobile. Unebknown to me, it is linux at the base of Android OS. So now that phones are all powerful, you can install and run Ubuntu, and then the writers have to follow suite and run a device detect, or make a special downsized version for the small screen or expect the hardware to handle it out to a HDMI screen.
The next thing will be semi intelligent, "thin client" remote devices such as blue tooth touch pads/keyboards/scribes, mobile mini dialer handpieces, more advance headset/handsfri, and most of all mobiles.
The next big revolution is already there and has been for a long time with the military and plane transport: talk. The internet for now is a visual-touch interaction by in large. Sound is for basic alerts and entertainment. Although handsets and tablets now have uptime link to google oral translation and text reading, the ability for you to get richer non visual information is there and will get bigger.
Also this lends itself to convergence of more devices: cameras which talk their exposure settings ac focal range to your ear piece, toaster which e-mail you when they are done, voice mail on facebook, notebook apps with voice to text on just about anything,
Talking web sites is something I wanted to do as a charity project when I was an internet project manager, but in its own right, to do it right and cover even a basic description which is comprehensible, it is actually a pretty major undertaking. However the tablet interface with rumble response lends itself much better to a more user guided non visual interaction with the media, which is intuitive for blind people and becomes so as an aid or just pleasure for sighted people.
Shut your eyes people, the internet is right in front of you.....
Thursday, November 15, 2012
The Eggs and Walking Diet.....
I am currently losing a lot of weight by some very much smaller life changes than i expected. Basically the "walking and eggs diet".
To kick start your spare tyre into usual road use and wear it down later I recommend the Atkins diet phases 1 and 2 which are fully available on the itnernet.
I must say I found it hard after the two weeks of phase I to keep on going on only a slighly increased carbohydrate intake. Therefore I decided to do more exercise.
So for phase II and III I did reduce carbos: firstly, salad and some protein for breakfast and the same for lunch, with alot of non-root veg and high protein for dinner and low sugar snacks like Atkins bars and sugar free chocolate (which has some carbs in it!)
I increased the exercise to three and four days a week walking to work. This was only a small change, up half an hour earlier, out in all weathers. The walk takes just over half an hour so even in quite heavy rain it is both bearable and good exercise without being a labour. Infact rather meditative and I notice immediately the hassle level rises when i drive ( 6 minutes) or cycle (10 minutes) especially.
Into phase III earlier with the knowledge of the following:
1) I was still switching on fat metabolism each day early
2) I was burning glycogen down to keep fat burning going
3) I do not snack before lunch
4) My appetite is less and I have better self control over impulsive second helpings
Phase three I upped the carbos at evening meal, but usually meaning only a small portion of potatoes or rice. Also I began with very high fibre bread at lunch.
Sunday, November 04, 2012
007 Repositions the Brand...bit of a yawn
National cinema day and Bond is back in action....or rather a bit of brand repositioning for the post cold war period which they never quite completed with Brosnan at the helm.
Skyfall was billed as the best Craig and possibly the best bond film ever, so I came with expectations on being wowed and left a little non chalant.
The trouble is that Daniel Craig just doesn't cut the mustard as Commander Bond. He is a bit of rough, where as Bond is Mr. Smooth. He has a kind of polish looking face, ultimately suitably for east european or germanic baddies such as in The Da Vinci Code.
It is really in his eyes too, he lacks the eyes for a hero, always on the edge of vulnerability. He lacks the accent and intonation of a Bond. Even Lazenby and dull old Dalton did the classic bond one liners much better, Moore had his wry way and of course Sean Connery had both the tone and the slight cynicism to carry off the original cheeky scripts and classics like "shocking" and "she should have kept her mouth shut" (well after Niven and Jimmy Bond).
In this bond they finally come to grips with making Bond relevant for the cyber terror and unkown enemy era. This could have been left to the audience to pick up between the lines, but rather this "brand repositioning" is conducted with heavy mono- and dialogue to the political back drop. The reality of the earlier cold war and the Al Queda period are enough of a stormy back drop for the films for them to handle the repositioning by just getting on with the action, in classic bond way: a quick brefiing from M, a trip to Q for his new gadgets and off on action.
Here however in Skyfall, we are confronted with "what is Bond's relevance for the cyber terror age, discuss in a dramatised screenplay". We see bond drinking beer and copious amounts of Macallan rather than his usual Voddie Martinis.
Bond doesnt suprise us either. The opening scene is pretty amazingly weel put together, but it is carried off with a screen play and cinematography which does not suprise. There is a digger, he uses that ...rather than, where is bond ? Oh he's in a digger knocking the guy about! THe first three bond actors (broccoli era) were always in some element of tension, vulnerability and suprise. Daniel Craig has an air of supremacy about his prescence, the physical arrogance of a hard door watch or a boxer before the fight.
Another thing is Daniel Craig is getting old, really looking old with greay stubble and wrinkles. They introduce his vulnerability as both physical and political.
Xavier Bardem although by no means miscast, esepcially after no-country-for-old-men, is given a plasticy set of monologues and him as a computer genius, evil despot is just not carried off. He just goes on a bit too much and it gets a bit boring. Also he is too close to the action: we prefer our bond baddies as puppeteers who can at any point vapourise into the back ground when their foot soldiers are all lying dead. In fact I think he could have been a "Blofelt" for the next film or jump over a film.
Skyfall then as a name, is just not believable as a title for a Scottish Highland estate. Skyefall, or some gaelic scots wording, but the name sounded like a parachute attempt.
Realistically, they should look to do a remake of Thunderball which stands as one of the very best bonds with a more believable plot than Gold Finger and Dr. No, while having more action and pzazz than the perhaps most realistic film "from Russia with Love".
Anyhows, back to Skyfall, which has a semi believable London scene and then a "back to basics" scene with a mansion house computer imposed from a suffolk mere to a west highland Lochhead. Dame Judy Dench suffers the ignomosity of having to work for a living and also being fatally wounded. Exit stage left for bus pass dame Judy, enter Feinnes as the new M.
Bond, on the ground, iPad and facebook free, is then delivered his next brief, and this is actually the most satisfying part of the film: cloak and dagger is maintained to fight in a new and hopefully better bond scenario.
Skyfall was billed as the best Craig and possibly the best bond film ever, so I came with expectations on being wowed and left a little non chalant.
The trouble is that Daniel Craig just doesn't cut the mustard as Commander Bond. He is a bit of rough, where as Bond is Mr. Smooth. He has a kind of polish looking face, ultimately suitably for east european or germanic baddies such as in The Da Vinci Code.
It is really in his eyes too, he lacks the eyes for a hero, always on the edge of vulnerability. He lacks the accent and intonation of a Bond. Even Lazenby and dull old Dalton did the classic bond one liners much better, Moore had his wry way and of course Sean Connery had both the tone and the slight cynicism to carry off the original cheeky scripts and classics like "shocking" and "she should have kept her mouth shut" (well after Niven and Jimmy Bond).
In this bond they finally come to grips with making Bond relevant for the cyber terror and unkown enemy era. This could have been left to the audience to pick up between the lines, but rather this "brand repositioning" is conducted with heavy mono- and dialogue to the political back drop. The reality of the earlier cold war and the Al Queda period are enough of a stormy back drop for the films for them to handle the repositioning by just getting on with the action, in classic bond way: a quick brefiing from M, a trip to Q for his new gadgets and off on action.
Here however in Skyfall, we are confronted with "what is Bond's relevance for the cyber terror age, discuss in a dramatised screenplay". We see bond drinking beer and copious amounts of Macallan rather than his usual Voddie Martinis.
Bond doesnt suprise us either. The opening scene is pretty amazingly weel put together, but it is carried off with a screen play and cinematography which does not suprise. There is a digger, he uses that ...rather than, where is bond ? Oh he's in a digger knocking the guy about! THe first three bond actors (broccoli era) were always in some element of tension, vulnerability and suprise. Daniel Craig has an air of supremacy about his prescence, the physical arrogance of a hard door watch or a boxer before the fight.
Another thing is Daniel Craig is getting old, really looking old with greay stubble and wrinkles. They introduce his vulnerability as both physical and political.
Xavier Bardem although by no means miscast, esepcially after no-country-for-old-men, is given a plasticy set of monologues and him as a computer genius, evil despot is just not carried off. He just goes on a bit too much and it gets a bit boring. Also he is too close to the action: we prefer our bond baddies as puppeteers who can at any point vapourise into the back ground when their foot soldiers are all lying dead. In fact I think he could have been a "Blofelt" for the next film or jump over a film.
Skyfall then as a name, is just not believable as a title for a Scottish Highland estate. Skyefall, or some gaelic scots wording, but the name sounded like a parachute attempt.
Realistically, they should look to do a remake of Thunderball which stands as one of the very best bonds with a more believable plot than Gold Finger and Dr. No, while having more action and pzazz than the perhaps most realistic film "from Russia with Love".
Anyhows, back to Skyfall, which has a semi believable London scene and then a "back to basics" scene with a mansion house computer imposed from a suffolk mere to a west highland Lochhead. Dame Judy Dench suffers the ignomosity of having to work for a living and also being fatally wounded. Exit stage left for bus pass dame Judy, enter Feinnes as the new M.
Bond, on the ground, iPad and facebook free, is then delivered his next brief, and this is actually the most satisfying part of the film: cloak and dagger is maintained to fight in a new and hopefully better bond scenario.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Books are a lot of.....The Internet, the Uk Ecomomy and De-Growth
"The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 marks the entry of the book into the industrial age" as written in Wikepedia, but as many commentators point out, the reverse is actually true. It was the printing press with type-set which itself laid the foundation for the industrial age by enabling the mass reproduction and dissemination of knowledge, the printed word, yet also by the very nature of the scalability and standardisation of the machinery.
Today we have lived with the internet and social media for less than two decades. We are in effect still learning to be comfortable with the medium before it has more profound effects on our way of life, for the better ends than tweets and purile FB posts. The type-set, printing press also took time to influence our culture, science and economy while also its effects lasted centuries.
There is in fact an underlying principle in an enabling, scalable and reproducible technology here which Gutenberg by no means stumbled upon: The wood cut printing press had already been invented but was economically limited by materials and skills, and in fact due to this was probably easy for the authorities of church and monarchy to stifle. What Gutenberg invented was actually a machine tooling system for the more durable metal type face, which could then make a standard "machine tool" ie the type-face-printing-press, and a mass produced end product. Quite uniquely and most probably for the first time in modern, western history and this marks the turning point towards the renaissance.
The key machine tool or rather set of tools, were the punches made to stamp the soft copper face-dies used then as molds for the casting of soft tin-lead alloy which made the type face characters. This was a combination of two previous technologies- punch forming ,as for coins, and die-casting.
Taking an immediate parallel to modern technology: we had the personal computer and we had the digital telephone network*. It was the integration of the two on a simple, scalable set of technologies which enabled the explosion of a new media which is sweeping away the old.
As a gold smith and maker of religious mirrors, Gutenberg had the skills to hand-make these punches, which took time , maybe a year per set, but also he had the savez to understand the principle of scalability. Thus from one investment in labour to create a standard system, he had scalability that would reward that investment many times over.
However for the world this had a quantum impact on western culture. For western societies it marks the paradigm shift from religion as the media and feudalism as the economic system, to the freedom of the secular society and the eventual development of free market economics.
Gutenberg was politically astute if not actually a cynical parasite as some Roman Catholic commentators have proposed. A gold smith in the 14th and 15th pre-renaissance society was a supplier to the church and to the wealthy. His first printing project was of course, what else, the Holy Bible. Within a hundred years political figures such as Martin Luther were able to disseminate their message in an economic format to a new market made literate by printed books and pamphlets.
It is then really the englishman Tim Berners Lee who gave us this new type face , HTML, which was simple, light on processing and band width, open source and therefore fully scalable.
Part II The UK High Employment Rate Stagnant Economy and Degrowth
The largest irony that the traditional media has now stumbled over, often such being avoided in it's own partisan view of all strong governance, is that the UK economy has never had so many people in employment, and never so many of them in full time employment.
I contest that this marks a new era for western societies and how the economy is viewed. I think that this marks the successful evolution of the tertiary economy: and it shows that we can enjoy high employment and a relatively affluent average standard of living without growth.
It shows that a modern tertiary economy can lock value creation and flow of that value, into enough local cyclic elements that such societies can learn to move towards sustainability.
The recession since 2008 is a "correction" which is going to actually take a decade and more to effect our tertiary, post heavy-industrial societies and return them to national and local democracy and personal involvement with society. It is a correction on many levels: a correction in corruption as a possible driver of wealth; a correction in the expectations and greed of people at all levels of society; a correction in the creep towards total "laisez faire" attitude of governance and castration of democracy; and most of all a correction in our view of consumerism and what sustainability can mean for our lives.
The Internet and the Next Paradigm Shifts in Society
So here we are now, two decades into the internet revolution and we are still just getting comfortable with it. Just as Gutenberg first published the Bible in print, so have we had a first epoch of brochure, social media and news-bite habituation. We have re-evolved meta societal networks, which mirror our social behaviour and to some extent, realinged expectations of personal interaction and interaction to organisations.
As individuals we have avoided contentious discussions by-in-large on the internet. Also avoided both large and tedious purchases. We will move more quickly now into an era where we, as a majority of consumers, challenge traditional thinking and methods of supply and consumption.
So far trade is drifiting over to the internet rapdily (quotes abound from different statistical bodies and economists on the rate of this and proportion now and.) We shop progressively more via the internet and this although not reducing price on most items, this has helped to peg retail inflation. The current young adult often called generation X who grew up 1996-2006, are fully confident in not only shopping via the internet, but also replacing some services and experiences with cyber interaction.
However the great irony I propose is that the internet will be the key enabling factor in the principle of de-growth: it will become an interface to the local economy and sustainable life styles. Local markets will be able to evolve in a demand cloud where the economies of scale and the saving in transport in the supply chain facilitate the rapid growth of sustainable, carbon neutral and high perceived value suppliers.
Local entrepreneurs, cooperatives and social enterprises will be able to carry out feasability studies in the demand cloud. They will be able to determine how large the "local" market has to be for a product or service and then they will also be able to evolve very quickly in responding to consumers.
Another factor which I believe we will lead to sustainability over expansionist-consumerism is the imediacy of financial transparency, planning and control available via the internet and the personal data machine. This will be an important tool for consumers to right-size, either in a conscious movement to personal sustainability, or (and) by market forces or infact by credit enforcement.
The link between personal financial planning, getting value for money ie shopping around, assessing the purchase objectively in terms of impact, transparency in spending relative to budget, income and discretionary income and finally the outright limitation of finite credit by authority, work together to help consumers behave more rationally in their purchasing: This is the greatest threat to the current materialistic and wasteful consumer markets. Super markets and branded wares are inextricably dependent on our physical presence and disconnection as individuals from local social values, in order to exploit on the one side our wasteful impulse shopping and lack of price comparability when locked into hypermarket shopping, and on the side of branding that we require to send out social signals by conspicious consumption to replace the older sharing of values in local societies and collective organisations.
Currently people spend enormous amounts of their spare time, and indeed time when they should be working, on social media. This is a forerunner to people extracting more value through societal interactions than by conspicuous consumption. This has already come full circle in several forms : tweetmeets (twitter virtual friends and intellectual networks meet up in person) , actions of democractic petition, local charities, the rise of the used market for qaulity wares, and even just appeals for help.
The sustainability movement's principles of reduction, recycling and replacement become more apparent and realisable in a medium which creates pico markets. By enabling "tiny thin economic interaction" this provides supply in the market with very low thresholds to entry in a given that market and those markets can be perishable or totally transient: in other words, individuals can communicate in ways which facilitate less travel and transport, shorter distances, local matching of expectations to latent or emergent demand, and services delivered in sustainable ways which we subsitute more wasteful practices and products to experience sustainably.
======
Summary
In this essay I have explored the concepts of how new media is a catalyst for positive societal change. There is a direct parallel to be drawn between Gutenberg's invention of the "type set" printing press as a reproducible, scalable, dissemable system and the development of the internet, in particular the foundation of HTML and http.
We have seen that the lack of growth in countries which did not totally over expose themselves to public and private debt has in fact not been catastrophic and is not as dire a situation as the media and political circus will have us percieve and experience.
These two discussions are very much linked to the expansion of sustainability, de-growth, as a force in society which has now the means to establish itself as in "guerilla" economic systems via the medium of the internet enabling the very contradiction of globalisation.
========
Footnotes
* It can be argued that the internet existed since the 1960s as a military datanetwork. However this on the one hand utilised phone lines ( probably with analogue pulse bit data), while on the other was from a controlled, closed source computer system. The same can be said for Acnet, where academia had closed systems and networks. It was the synthesis of the digital telephone network, the personal- home computer and the software, languages, protocols and connectivity hardware which then allowed the internet and world wide web to explode. This is somewhat analagous to book production prior to print presses; then the wooden print press, restricted by lack of scalability and undoubted political control; then the printed word from metal type set crept out in academic circles and later became the main media in society, taking over from verbal and labourous handwritten communications and the media organ of the church network.
Today we have lived with the internet and social media for less than two decades. We are in effect still learning to be comfortable with the medium before it has more profound effects on our way of life, for the better ends than tweets and purile FB posts. The type-set, printing press also took time to influence our culture, science and economy while also its effects lasted centuries.
There is in fact an underlying principle in an enabling, scalable and reproducible technology here which Gutenberg by no means stumbled upon: The wood cut printing press had already been invented but was economically limited by materials and skills, and in fact due to this was probably easy for the authorities of church and monarchy to stifle. What Gutenberg invented was actually a machine tooling system for the more durable metal type face, which could then make a standard "machine tool" ie the type-face-printing-press, and a mass produced end product. Quite uniquely and most probably for the first time in modern, western history and this marks the turning point towards the renaissance.
The key machine tool or rather set of tools, were the punches made to stamp the soft copper face-dies used then as molds for the casting of soft tin-lead alloy which made the type face characters. This was a combination of two previous technologies- punch forming ,as for coins, and die-casting.
Taking an immediate parallel to modern technology: we had the personal computer and we had the digital telephone network*. It was the integration of the two on a simple, scalable set of technologies which enabled the explosion of a new media which is sweeping away the old.
As a gold smith and maker of religious mirrors, Gutenberg had the skills to hand-make these punches, which took time , maybe a year per set, but also he had the savez to understand the principle of scalability. Thus from one investment in labour to create a standard system, he had scalability that would reward that investment many times over.
However for the world this had a quantum impact on western culture. For western societies it marks the paradigm shift from religion as the media and feudalism as the economic system, to the freedom of the secular society and the eventual development of free market economics.
Gutenberg was politically astute if not actually a cynical parasite as some Roman Catholic commentators have proposed. A gold smith in the 14th and 15th pre-renaissance society was a supplier to the church and to the wealthy. His first printing project was of course, what else, the Holy Bible. Within a hundred years political figures such as Martin Luther were able to disseminate their message in an economic format to a new market made literate by printed books and pamphlets.
It is then really the englishman Tim Berners Lee who gave us this new type face , HTML, which was simple, light on processing and band width, open source and therefore fully scalable.
Part II The UK High Employment Rate Stagnant Economy and Degrowth
The largest irony that the traditional media has now stumbled over, often such being avoided in it's own partisan view of all strong governance, is that the UK economy has never had so many people in employment, and never so many of them in full time employment.
I contest that this marks a new era for western societies and how the economy is viewed. I think that this marks the successful evolution of the tertiary economy: and it shows that we can enjoy high employment and a relatively affluent average standard of living without growth.
It shows that a modern tertiary economy can lock value creation and flow of that value, into enough local cyclic elements that such societies can learn to move towards sustainability.
The recession since 2008 is a "correction" which is going to actually take a decade and more to effect our tertiary, post heavy-industrial societies and return them to national and local democracy and personal involvement with society. It is a correction on many levels: a correction in corruption as a possible driver of wealth; a correction in the expectations and greed of people at all levels of society; a correction in the creep towards total "laisez faire" attitude of governance and castration of democracy; and most of all a correction in our view of consumerism and what sustainability can mean for our lives.
The Internet and the Next Paradigm Shifts in Society
So here we are now, two decades into the internet revolution and we are still just getting comfortable with it. Just as Gutenberg first published the Bible in print, so have we had a first epoch of brochure, social media and news-bite habituation. We have re-evolved meta societal networks, which mirror our social behaviour and to some extent, realinged expectations of personal interaction and interaction to organisations.
As individuals we have avoided contentious discussions by-in-large on the internet. Also avoided both large and tedious purchases. We will move more quickly now into an era where we, as a majority of consumers, challenge traditional thinking and methods of supply and consumption.
So far trade is drifiting over to the internet rapdily (quotes abound from different statistical bodies and economists on the rate of this and proportion now and.) We shop progressively more via the internet and this although not reducing price on most items, this has helped to peg retail inflation. The current young adult often called generation X who grew up 1996-2006, are fully confident in not only shopping via the internet, but also replacing some services and experiences with cyber interaction.
However the great irony I propose is that the internet will be the key enabling factor in the principle of de-growth: it will become an interface to the local economy and sustainable life styles. Local markets will be able to evolve in a demand cloud where the economies of scale and the saving in transport in the supply chain facilitate the rapid growth of sustainable, carbon neutral and high perceived value suppliers.
Local entrepreneurs, cooperatives and social enterprises will be able to carry out feasability studies in the demand cloud. They will be able to determine how large the "local" market has to be for a product or service and then they will also be able to evolve very quickly in responding to consumers.
Another factor which I believe we will lead to sustainability over expansionist-consumerism is the imediacy of financial transparency, planning and control available via the internet and the personal data machine. This will be an important tool for consumers to right-size, either in a conscious movement to personal sustainability, or (and) by market forces or infact by credit enforcement.
The link between personal financial planning, getting value for money ie shopping around, assessing the purchase objectively in terms of impact, transparency in spending relative to budget, income and discretionary income and finally the outright limitation of finite credit by authority, work together to help consumers behave more rationally in their purchasing: This is the greatest threat to the current materialistic and wasteful consumer markets. Super markets and branded wares are inextricably dependent on our physical presence and disconnection as individuals from local social values, in order to exploit on the one side our wasteful impulse shopping and lack of price comparability when locked into hypermarket shopping, and on the side of branding that we require to send out social signals by conspicious consumption to replace the older sharing of values in local societies and collective organisations.
Currently people spend enormous amounts of their spare time, and indeed time when they should be working, on social media. This is a forerunner to people extracting more value through societal interactions than by conspicuous consumption. This has already come full circle in several forms : tweetmeets (twitter virtual friends and intellectual networks meet up in person) , actions of democractic petition, local charities, the rise of the used market for qaulity wares, and even just appeals for help.
The sustainability movement's principles of reduction, recycling and replacement become more apparent and realisable in a medium which creates pico markets. By enabling "tiny thin economic interaction" this provides supply in the market with very low thresholds to entry in a given that market and those markets can be perishable or totally transient: in other words, individuals can communicate in ways which facilitate less travel and transport, shorter distances, local matching of expectations to latent or emergent demand, and services delivered in sustainable ways which we subsitute more wasteful practices and products to experience sustainably.
======
Summary
In this essay I have explored the concepts of how new media is a catalyst for positive societal change. There is a direct parallel to be drawn between Gutenberg's invention of the "type set" printing press as a reproducible, scalable, dissemable system and the development of the internet, in particular the foundation of HTML and http.
We have seen that the lack of growth in countries which did not totally over expose themselves to public and private debt has in fact not been catastrophic and is not as dire a situation as the media and political circus will have us percieve and experience.
These two discussions are very much linked to the expansion of sustainability, de-growth, as a force in society which has now the means to establish itself as in "guerilla" economic systems via the medium of the internet enabling the very contradiction of globalisation.
========
Footnotes
* It can be argued that the internet existed since the 1960s as a military datanetwork. However this on the one hand utilised phone lines ( probably with analogue pulse bit data), while on the other was from a controlled, closed source computer system. The same can be said for Acnet, where academia had closed systems and networks. It was the synthesis of the digital telephone network, the personal- home computer and the software, languages, protocols and connectivity hardware which then allowed the internet and world wide web to explode. This is somewhat analagous to book production prior to print presses; then the wooden print press, restricted by lack of scalability and undoubted political control; then the printed word from metal type set crept out in academic circles and later became the main media in society, taking over from verbal and labourous handwritten communications and the media organ of the church network.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Cars More Efficient than the Train ?
http://www.estudiomc.es/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/transport-energy-consumption.pdf
This was of course a bit of a wheeze of academia.
I wonder very much if Univ. Lancs wanted to attract some wonga from the car industry?
The ground breaking iMECHe paper is strangely not available on google now, probably because as a it did not stand up to scrutiny as a published academic work. In other words they seem to have got their sums wrong and not thought at all about the apples and the pairs, the swings and the roundabouts as we mere mortals love to laugh at : a lack of common sense and a lot of finding what you want to.
Firstly the measure is wrong actually, a completely wrong calculation in terms of benefit: the measure is fuel per seat per mile. It is apples and oranges- the car takes 8 to 10 hours, the 225km train half that, the 350 train would then be about 30% faster (with limited stops), 20% faster with the current stops. The actual calculation then which is the cost-benefit ratio is fuel per seat per hour: or just fuel by hour.
Example Table CO2 emissions 2011 which shows the IC 225 on its sub 5 hour journey being only slightly poorer than the 9 hour bus run. The plane is pretty awful compared to a Prius or a Polo blue motion, but is actually much better than anything Jeremy Clarkson would choose to drive in a traffic jam at 6.30 am to get to the beeb.
So train and plane get you there faster: the collective transport versus car comparison is then either bus or non super-express train ( ie 140 kmh). Then you have a like to like comparison, and in fact I find modern busses about as comfy as DMU/EMU trains and in fact given me as the driver can snooze, read, face book and even stretch legs at driver swaps. Buses weigh between 14 and 20 tonnes, and at an occupancy of even 50% than means they are taking more passenger per tonne of vehicle than cars. Bus fuel consumption varies. So does that of cars.
Averages for per mile were based on published mpg for the car, on a track at the most economic constant speed, and in fact not an average based on constant, artificial speed, but was that a total consumption kwh for the trains as measured on the actual journey? So it is likely to be a theoretical car versus an actual consumption IC 225 train, or an average per real 100km in use on say the ECML (east cost main line) - the plane seems to be this too: ignoring the large amounts used on take off and landing and idle on say, Edinburgh - London: 15mins idle, 20mins climb, 10 minute descent, 10 minutes idle. The IC 225 and its replacement use small amounts while ideling at rest or deccelerating as mentioned below, less per the whole stock than supplying say the motorway service stations, over head lights and the airport air conditioning that are all part of the cars system.
The load factor is the next interesting qausi statistic: firstly you have to take the above into account: the car does not get 56mpg on the M1 at 85mph max and an average of about 60mph without stops, 45 with stops. With load 25% that is one passenger per 1.2 tonnes approx. At load 25% a 450 seat train has then 125 people which is then worse at 3 to 5 tonnes per passenger depending on train. However the train is then lighter and uses below average consumption. As loading goes up the car decreases fuel economy because the magical 56mpg is with 1.0 test driver with 0.0 luggage on a barmed track for 100 miles, or the metric equivalent. The train does not decrease in efficiency as much at 100% because relative to rolling resistance it increases its energy requirement less. The IC225 train has a peak of about 7000hp but continuous averaging about 2.4 kw / 3000hp. So that is the same hp per tonne per passenger as a car but comes from a source of energy which on the ECML is electricity and therefore open for increasingly renewable sources or CO2 bore well storage. Weight in a plane is far more prominent an issue in fuel consumption that pilots must calculate in to determine safe range, safe stacking time over destination, and when to refuel.
The train actually needs to be heavier per 25% loading which is and the need in fact for momemntun due to the way electrical gearing works ( the train must essentially roll on momentum to "change gear" it must roll through the slight pause of the electrical shift in volt/ amps) Also the train per tonne will coast very much further without making power and electric locomotives actually have had recirculant (rheostatic) electrical breaking where the motors act like generators and supply power to the system when decreasing speed.
Also the car occupancy is in fact 1.6 per car on average in the uk, in peak times, when most people want the benefit of fast, efficient travel. When public/ collective transport is over 100% per seat due to standing room.
So if you left London in peak time to make Edinburgh for dinner time in a car, even non stop, you would be leaving at rush hour or meeting a rush hour somewhere on the M1 or if you left later, you would meet Newcastle or Edinburgh rush hour. Then your very ambitious, steady driving passat 56mpg can be forgotten. You go down and down as you sit keeping the motor warm in the rush hour. Trains are in fact little affected by the rush hour because their advertised, and actually very dependable timetable aka "diagrams" are fixed and there are procedures and sidings used in clearing conjestion which have evolved with the railway capacity at peak hours.
It is very frustrating when a train or signal or points fails. But on an express you can most often get up and buy a coffee. Outside the M6 RAC building north of Wolverhampton you will have had your coffee and be in need of a urologist by the time you reach spagetti junction.
Of course London to Edinburgh is some imperialist hangover of a yardstick: Manchester /NW to London SE is a more likely journey and as Jeremy Clarkson knows his v12 merc will be using gallons per mile as he even hits the RAC building at 0645. The 0710 train from Manchester glides out as you sit and look at the RAC building, and continue looking at it. I have sat outside its 1km vista and thought of the Irony that it lies before the motor cars worst. Or Bristol to London. Or anywhere to anywhere big which already has good collective transport solutions, and most of the key employment centres outside Slough, Swindon and Basingstoke, have excellent public transport links.
Both Jeremy Clarkson and "The Temporarily Smug blue motion Passat driver" with other half and two kids would be very pleased then that more people chose the train, because then they who choose the car get to destination, Edina -the shortbread tin capital- with less ques. But the passat driver in using 8 hours saves himself and family a lot over the price of intercity rail faires, capital costs of the car excluded.
This was of course a bit of a wheeze of academia.
I wonder very much if Univ. Lancs wanted to attract some wonga from the car industry?
The ground breaking iMECHe paper is strangely not available on google now, probably because as a it did not stand up to scrutiny as a published academic work. In other words they seem to have got their sums wrong and not thought at all about the apples and the pairs, the swings and the roundabouts as we mere mortals love to laugh at : a lack of common sense and a lot of finding what you want to.
Firstly the measure is wrong actually, a completely wrong calculation in terms of benefit: the measure is fuel per seat per mile. It is apples and oranges- the car takes 8 to 10 hours, the 225km train half that, the 350 train would then be about 30% faster (with limited stops), 20% faster with the current stops. The actual calculation then which is the cost-benefit ratio is fuel per seat per hour: or just fuel by hour.
Example Table CO2 emissions 2011 which shows the IC 225 on its sub 5 hour journey being only slightly poorer than the 9 hour bus run. The plane is pretty awful compared to a Prius or a Polo blue motion, but is actually much better than anything Jeremy Clarkson would choose to drive in a traffic jam at 6.30 am to get to the beeb.
So train and plane get you there faster: the collective transport versus car comparison is then either bus or non super-express train ( ie 140 kmh). Then you have a like to like comparison, and in fact I find modern busses about as comfy as DMU/EMU trains and in fact given me as the driver can snooze, read, face book and even stretch legs at driver swaps. Buses weigh between 14 and 20 tonnes, and at an occupancy of even 50% than means they are taking more passenger per tonne of vehicle than cars. Bus fuel consumption varies. So does that of cars.
Averages for per mile were based on published mpg for the car, on a track at the most economic constant speed, and in fact not an average based on constant, artificial speed, but was that a total consumption kwh for the trains as measured on the actual journey? So it is likely to be a theoretical car versus an actual consumption IC 225 train, or an average per real 100km in use on say the ECML (east cost main line) - the plane seems to be this too: ignoring the large amounts used on take off and landing and idle on say, Edinburgh - London: 15mins idle, 20mins climb, 10 minute descent, 10 minutes idle. The IC 225 and its replacement use small amounts while ideling at rest or deccelerating as mentioned below, less per the whole stock than supplying say the motorway service stations, over head lights and the airport air conditioning that are all part of the cars system.
The load factor is the next interesting qausi statistic: firstly you have to take the above into account: the car does not get 56mpg on the M1 at 85mph max and an average of about 60mph without stops, 45 with stops. With load 25% that is one passenger per 1.2 tonnes approx. At load 25% a 450 seat train has then 125 people which is then worse at 3 to 5 tonnes per passenger depending on train. However the train is then lighter and uses below average consumption. As loading goes up the car decreases fuel economy because the magical 56mpg is with 1.0 test driver with 0.0 luggage on a barmed track for 100 miles, or the metric equivalent. The train does not decrease in efficiency as much at 100% because relative to rolling resistance it increases its energy requirement less. The IC225 train has a peak of about 7000hp but continuous averaging about 2.4 kw / 3000hp. So that is the same hp per tonne per passenger as a car but comes from a source of energy which on the ECML is electricity and therefore open for increasingly renewable sources or CO2 bore well storage. Weight in a plane is far more prominent an issue in fuel consumption that pilots must calculate in to determine safe range, safe stacking time over destination, and when to refuel.
The train actually needs to be heavier per 25% loading which is and the need in fact for momemntun due to the way electrical gearing works ( the train must essentially roll on momentum to "change gear" it must roll through the slight pause of the electrical shift in volt/ amps) Also the train per tonne will coast very much further without making power and electric locomotives actually have had recirculant (rheostatic) electrical breaking where the motors act like generators and supply power to the system when decreasing speed.
Also the car occupancy is in fact 1.6 per car on average in the uk, in peak times, when most people want the benefit of fast, efficient travel. When public/ collective transport is over 100% per seat due to standing room.
So if you left London in peak time to make Edinburgh for dinner time in a car, even non stop, you would be leaving at rush hour or meeting a rush hour somewhere on the M1 or if you left later, you would meet Newcastle or Edinburgh rush hour. Then your very ambitious, steady driving passat 56mpg can be forgotten. You go down and down as you sit keeping the motor warm in the rush hour. Trains are in fact little affected by the rush hour because their advertised, and actually very dependable timetable aka "diagrams" are fixed and there are procedures and sidings used in clearing conjestion which have evolved with the railway capacity at peak hours.
It is very frustrating when a train or signal or points fails. But on an express you can most often get up and buy a coffee. Outside the M6 RAC building north of Wolverhampton you will have had your coffee and be in need of a urologist by the time you reach spagetti junction.
Of course London to Edinburgh is some imperialist hangover of a yardstick: Manchester /NW to London SE is a more likely journey and as Jeremy Clarkson knows his v12 merc will be using gallons per mile as he even hits the RAC building at 0645. The 0710 train from Manchester glides out as you sit and look at the RAC building, and continue looking at it. I have sat outside its 1km vista and thought of the Irony that it lies before the motor cars worst. Or Bristol to London. Or anywhere to anywhere big which already has good collective transport solutions, and most of the key employment centres outside Slough, Swindon and Basingstoke, have excellent public transport links.
Both Jeremy Clarkson and "The Temporarily Smug blue motion Passat driver" with other half and two kids would be very pleased then that more people chose the train, because then they who choose the car get to destination, Edina -the shortbread tin capital- with less ques. But the passat driver in using 8 hours saves himself and family a lot over the price of intercity rail faires, capital costs of the car excluded.
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