razor edges

Evolution denial in the UK

2009-11-25T11:55:05Z

From today's Guardian: Most creationists in the UK are not religious.

Alexis Soyer's famine soup

2009-11-23T21:48:01Z

I was looking through Jane Grigson's book English Food, and caught a reference to Victorian celebrity chef (and inventor of the kitchen timer) Alexis Soyer:

The French chef of the Reform Club, the great Alexis Soyer, caused a sensation by nobly going over to Ireland in the potato famine to save Irish souls with his soup (like most benevolent soups of the time, it was not very nutritious).

Obviously, Jane Grigson is not to be argued with over statements like that any more than Elizabeth David is. I was curious about just how not-very-nutritious it was, though, so I went looking for the recipe.

4 oz leg of beef -- 250 kcal, 20g protein
2 oz dripping -- 900 kcal
2 onions or other vegetables -- about 90 kcal
8 oz flour (seconds) -- about 400 kcal
8 oz pearl barley -- 700 kcal, 20g protein
3 oz salt
1/2 oz brown sugar -- 60 kcal
2 gallons water

So that works out to 2400 kcal in two gallons of soup, meaning that one portion - which I'll estimate at a pint, partly to make the maths easier and partly because Mrs Beeton specifies a pint as a normal serving for one of the poor people she fed - gives

300 kcal
8g protein
a few vitamins here and there
about 10g salt

Soyer said that one portion of this, and "a biscuit", would keep a healthy man going all day^[1], and he estimated the cost at 2d (1847 money) per gallon. People who've made it say it's quite tasty. I'm not keen - especially because he could have done a lot better with the resources available to him.

One limitation, of course, is that it had to be All His, and uniquely so; he was an inveterate self-mythologiser, as you'd expect from a French celebrity chef at a great Victorian institution, so he couldn't possibly adapt something like Rumford's Soup^[2] - he had to be the genius inventor of recipes, as well as the kitchen logistics genius^[3].

Rumford's Soup (pearl barley, yellow peas, potatoes, salt, beer) sounds much tastier to me, but then so does Mrs Beeton's benevolent soup, which she estimated at 6d (1858 money) per gallon:

NB: this one makes 10 gallons, rather than the 2 Soyer's Soup makes.
1 ox-cheek
Trimmings of beef (around 4 lb)
A few bones
"Any pot-liquor the larder may furnish" - ie. whatever stock you have handy
1/4 peck of onions - that's about 1.5 kg
6 leeks
A large bunch of herbs
1/2 lb celery tops
1/2 lb carrots
1/2 lb turnips
1/2 lb coarse brown sugar
1/2 pt beer
4 lb common rice/pearl barley
1/2 lb salt
1 oz black pepper
A few raspings (ie. finely ground breadcrumbs)
10 gallons of water

Hannah More gives a very similar recipe, though less complex - "An ox cheek, two pecks of potatoes, a quarter of a peck of onions, one ounce of pepper, half a pound of salt, boiled together in ninety pints of water till reduced to sixty, any garden stuff may be thrown in." Still rather nicer-sounding than Soyer's, but then Soyer was working under two constraints that the others weren't; he needed to deal with the logistics of getting all the ingredients to the field kitchens (or more accurately, street-corner kitchens) and he was posh^[4]. Both Rumford and Mrs Beeton use beer in their recipes - that's because it has amazing amounts of nutrition, energy, and taste in it for its volume, and because it was incredibly cheap and plentiful at the time. I suspect either Soyer just didn't think of it, or he didn't want to be slated for encouraging the Demon Drink.

He did remedy a lot of his class shortcomings by 1861, when he published his Shilling Cookery for the People, although he did it in a very Victorian way - in Jane Grigson's phrase, he "set off to find out how The People lived as though he were going to Africa in search of pygmies".

Shilling Cookery will make some of tonight's reading, I think!

[1] That must be Quite Some Biscuit.

[2] Yes, that Count Rumford, the thermodynamics man and all-around genius. He also invented thermal underwear, smokeless fireplaces, and a kind of percolating coffee pot.

[3] And he really was that; he revolutionized the way the British Army fed its soldiers, after taking over the field kitchens at Scutari in the Crimea War. Mind you, given the way they'd been attempting to do it before, it probably involved a lot of dramatic clapping of the hand to the forehead (the Victorian equivalent of the modern *headdesk*) and a lot of entirely justified shouting.

[4] He'd been working for the Prime Minister of France, Prince de Polignac, in 1830 - that's how posh he was. Nevertheless, he still managed to remember the words to the Marseillaise when a mob burst into his kitchen.

White Poppies - Lest We Forget

2009-11-07T13:38:01Z

Again this year, I'm wearing a white poppy rather than a red one.

The white stands for pacifism and peace activism: the idea that, because a great many people die or are injured in wars, or have their livelihoods and families destroyed, we should therefore not have any wars.

This concept, as Chesterton said, has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

In the meantime, peace activists around the world will continue to do the things they've always done: drive ambulances, defuse bombs, roll bandages, fly SAR helicopters, drag illegal arms deals into the public eye, expose defence boondoggles, challenge war crimes, work with wounded soldiers, teach communities about each others' lives, and speak truth to power.

Seen once and again

2009-11-05T22:33:54Z

Twice recently, I've been researching something and come across a stray reference to something from another research project altogether.

As I was reading through Hunter's history of papermaking, a footnote directed me to Närrische Weissheit und Weise Narrheit: oder Ein Hundert so Politische als Physicalische, Mechanische,und Mercantilische Concepten und Propositionen, by Johann Joachim Becher (1682). This is, indeed, the same Becher who wrote (in Physica Subterranea, pub. 1703) something that used to delight me during my undergraduate years:

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty: yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that would I die if I would change places with the Persian king.

The second is the great cannon Zam-Zammah, in Lahore, mentioned in Khushwant Singh's History of the Sikhs, and which I first encountered in the opening scene of Kim twenty years ago. It amuses me that the name has since become a slang term for a penis.

Mining & indigenous peoples' rights in India

2009-10-31T12:25:49Z

I strongly recommend this Guardian/CiF article by Arundhati Roy to all of you.

Finished yesterday

2009-10-30T14:39:23Z

I have two of these - I'll be putting them into my Etsy shop shortly, unless anyone wants to jump in first. Comments screened, since it's nearly Christmas shopping time.

They're made from artist's mountboard, with six or so layers of acrylic and varnish, so they're lightweight, as strong as you'd normally expect non-metal jewellery to be, and waterproof.

WoT: TGS spoiler post

2009-10-28T14:53:32Z

I've posted a spoileriffic review over at the other blog, for those who're interested and have read it.

Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (no spoilers)

2009-10-27T21:47:23Z

It's well up to the standard set by past WoT books, and with the introduction of Brandon Sanderson the pace moves faster and More Things Happen. Several long-standing plot threads get cleared up (some of them offstage, thank goodness), a couple of long-term goals get achieved, a couple of characters who've been around since the early books die, and the action scene near the end is more fun to read than Dumai's Wells and less morally icky.

On the other hand, as far as character goes Sanderson paints with a very broad brush, which tends to amplify a lot of the rather tedious gender stuff which has always been a feature of the series. I'm not using "rather tedious" in the same sense as most fans, of course - it's blatantly obvious that the books are about male-female relations, and I have no problems with this. It's a fascinating subject to write about. On the other hand, Jordan always just kept hammering away with the same sledgehammer, over and over again. Yes, we know that often people don't talk to each other and thus cause problems. Yes, we know that sometimes people just try to manipulate each other rather than communicating, and that that's silly. The key words are 'sometimes' and 'often'. In this series, they're all at it, all the time, and it gets really rather depressing. Sanderson's doing the same thing still (though, refreshingly, we do get some actual information exchange between characters - some trust and some basic competence, and that's why the plot is suddenly moving) and it's still annoying.

Guardian, Trafigura, Carter-Ruck, &c.

2009-10-18T23:59:31Z

So there's been a huge mess on; you probably all know about it by now. Bunch of unethical corporate cowboys, gang of lawyers, Byzantine (not to say Kafkaesque) legal proceedings obsessed with letter rather than spirit, left-wing newspaper fighting back by sticking to the letter of Parliamentary procedure and making the spirit do triple reverse somersaults.

Not my field, so I'm not going to comment further on that, but I have just read the Minton Report (PDF link) and have some comments to make about the chemistry involved.

Most of them are unrepeatable, but can be summarized as "they did WHAT? WHY? What the BLOODY HELL did they think they were doing?"

In short, they found a nice-looking process to refine their partially treated crude, decided that using an actual chemical plant and some sensible procedures was too much like work, churned all the stuff together in the hold of a ship, and then slung in some more caustic soda for good measure, presumably on the age-old pharmaceutical principle of "well, if a little bit is good for you, a lot must be much better, right?"^[1]. After that, they separated out the bit they wanted^[2] and threw away the rest.

"The rest" in this case consisted of a total of about 285 metric tons of foul water, naphtha, caustic soda, and mercaptans. Mercaptans, also known as thiols, are the foulest-smelling substances known to humanity. One afternoon at Cranfield, I accidentally let about 10 cc of a harmless mercaptan loose from the fume cupboard (I'd been working with them too long, and couldn't smell them any more) and the entire School of Engineering spontaneously evacuated itself. It took me half an hour and a lot of waving the MSDS around to convince the builders working on the outside of the building that it was safe to go back to work.

When I say "harmless", I mean that it wasn't toxic, and that in those concentrations all it did was smell bad - we didn't get anyone choking and coughing, vomiting, or crying uncontrollably. That was mostly because it was a nice clear summer's day, with a good strong breeze, and it dispersed quickly. Most mercaptans will do all that, and are poisonous too; the ones released at Abidjan were. Oh, and there's another problem, too; when exposed to acid, mercaptans turn into hydrogen sulphide. H₂S isn't just the smell of rotten eggs; it's corrosive and highly toxic. UK Occupational Health guidelines allow exposure to 10 parts per million H₂S for 15 minutes. If the concentration goes over above about 20 ppm, it stops being possible to smell it, which means you breathe a lot more of it. The Minton report goes into a lot of detail on the dangers of these compounds, and the only other thing I'll highlight from there is that the waste dump is extremely environmentally damaging as well as toxic. Burning and salting the fields does not even make the list in comparison.

And they dumped this crap right there. If you're keen on the letter of regulations, it's possible to make an argument that what they did was not illegal yet; on the other hand, that's missing the point rather. It's also possible (and wearisomely inevitable) to make the eternal "That was the blokes we hired - nuffink to do with us, guv" argument, but I do hope none of my readers will insult our collective intelligence by doing that.

Trafigura have stated in several places since then that standard handling and disposal practices were followed. This is what we technically call "an outright lie". It may be standard if you happen to be a cowboy with neither common sense nor empathy; it may be possible to argue that that sort of slapdash unconcern comes as standard in the business; it does nobody any credit to do so.

[1] It isn't. It made the reaction less efficient and more wasteful, and made it produce a much higher proportion of more toxic volatiles in the waste.
[2] Which still contained plenty of mercaptans. This procedure doesn't even get more than half of them out.

Terre a Terre, Brighton

2009-10-11T13:13:27Z

mirabehn, mostlyacat, and I took the high road south to Brighton yesterday, for the joyous and long overdue occasion of angelislington and trukkle's wedding. It was an entirely delightful day, finishing in the Druid's Head (good beer, if a limited selection - Pride, Sussex Best, and Bombardier) by way of Brighton Pier. The sea air did us all good, and mirabehn was in transports and raptures of delight over finding a city with clean unpolluted air, at least on the seafront and in the south lanes.

We also stopped off for lunch at Terre a Terre, which I'd recommend to anyone^[1]. I had "Himmel und Erde" - "Potato, apple, onion and cheddar latkes with frozen fresh horseradish sour cream, golden and crimson pickled beet slaw doused with caraway and dill oil, finished with apple snappers." It very much lived up to the name - earthy and sweet, with a taste rising to heights of deliciousness. My only quibble would be that the promised "apple snappers" turned out to be one thin slice of dried apple. Rather nice still, but neither snappy nor plural. The chunky chips I ordered on the side were pretty much perfect (though definitely approaching the extreme upper limit of how chunky a chip can get before becoming a wedge), but the promised aioli was in fact slightly garlicky mayonnaise, which is really not the same thing at all.

[1] At least, anyone who isn't an obligate carnivore.

mirrorshard @ 2009-09-23T14:47:00

2009-09-23T13:47:10Z

Best wishes and blessings from Iona. More when I get home.

Irish history - two texts and five translations

2009-09-14T14:33:29Z

At 5am last night, I finally gave up on chasing through odd translations of dodgy early-modern Irish history, and went to bed. Nevertheless, I'm going to share the reason for it and the results with you anyway.

While writing this post (last in the Tigana re-read series) I had to look up the Hen Ogledd, which led me through the usual odd byways to the history of Ireland and the Partholonians. A phrase in the Wikipedia entry caught my eye -

But Delgnat was unrepentant and insisted that Partholón himself was to blame, as leaving them alone together was like leaving honey before a woman, milk before a cat, edged tools before a craftsman or meat before a child and expecting them not to take advantage. This is recorded as the first adultery and the first jealousy in Ireland. The island they lived on was named Inis Saimera after Saimer, Dalgnat's dog.

On one level - oh, sweet misogyny, how we have missed you. OH WAIT. On the other, though - edged tools before a craftsman, as an example of paramount temptation? That rocks. So I went looking for the original source. WP attributes the episode to "A poem in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, expanded on by Céitinn". (That's Seathrún Céitinn - to summarize, he's a Jacobite priest living in seventeenth century Ireland, and he wrote his Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (History of Ireland, roughly translated) in 1634 while hiding in a cave from British soldiers. And it's bloody good, too.)

It turns out there are four translations of Céitinn's work (he's known to the Sais as Geoffrey Keating, because we couldn't pronounce his real name. Honestly, it's a miracle he didn't end up being called Bob) and they're all available online. The earliest is by Dermod O'Conner, in 1723.

Partholanus, enraged at this baseness, began to expostulate with [Dealgnait], and upbraided her for her immodesty and breach of faith ; but she returned him this answer : “What could you otherwise expect? If you are so served, you must thank yourself ; for set honey by a young girl, or sweet milk by a child, or meat by a cat, or edged tools by a carpenter, or a poor weak woman with a brisk young fellow in private, and, on my word, they will not be long asunder.” Upon this occasion the poet had these lines:

A girl, with honey by her placed,
Smells to the pot, and longs to taste ;
A child sweet milk will cry to eat ;
A cat will ne'er refuse her meat ;
A workman eagerly desires
To use the tool his art requires ;
So man and woman when alone,
And the dull thing, a husband gone
Will toy and trifle, till they prove
The most endearing sweets of love.

Which is, er... very 1723. The next one is from 1857, by an Irish-American named O'Mahony.

When Partholan had rebuked her for this evil deed, the lady, instead of striving to appease him, insisted that her angry lord deserved more blame himself for this disgraceful act than she did. “Think you, Partholan,” said she, “that one may leave honey near a woman, or sweet milk near a child, or food near a generous man, or fleshmeat near a cat, or tools and instruments near a mechanic, or man and woman in a desert place, and that they will each keep clear of the other?” Here follow the words of the lay that records the fact:

“Choice honey near a woman leave; leave sweet milk near a boy;
To generous heart leave food in trust; trust flesh meat to a cat;
Shut up the cunning artisan in shop with store of tools;
Or leave a young pair all alone, and deem you run no risks.”

O'Mahony's got a lovely flowing prose style for most of it, but it's obvious he's aiming more for that than for textual accuracy, as we'll see next. In the 1890s, an Irish scholar named Patrick Weston Joyce did a new translation, as close to a word-for-word literal translation as he could.

and when Partholón reproached her, it is not an apology she made, but she said that [it was] more just the blame of that ill-deed to be on himself than on herself; and she said these words : - “O Partholón,” says she, “do you think that it is a possibility a woman and honey be near one another, new-milk and a child, food and a generous [man], flesh and a cat, tools or implements and a workman, without their interfering with one another : ” and she speaks the verse :-

Honey with a woman, new-milk with a child
Food with a generous [person], flesh with a cat,
A workman and his tools together,
One with the other, it is great danger.

I've transcribed the Gaelic for the italicised part above - if anyone wants to take a look at the original and possibly correct my transcription, please do! "A Phartalón, an ri, an raolir sur an eidir bean asur mil do bheith a s-comhsar da cheile, leamhnacht asur leanbh, biadh asur fial, feoil asur cat, arm no oirnir asur raor san chumurs ar a cheile dhoibh"

The relevant line in the quatrain runs, saor aroigh, asur faodhor, and Joyce adds a footnote saying that faodhor is "often used to denote edged instruments of any kind, whether workmen's tools or warriors' arms.” The linguist I had handy last night disagrees, and says "tools. Definitely tools." Saor translates as a wright or a carpenter - I'd suspect that it's more likely to be woodworker, artificer-in-wood. It almost certainly comes from the OHG stream, which has word variants meaning "cutting implement" - saw, seax, &c. Aroigh looks like a formation from aros, "house", which is interesting - presumably that's the source of O'Mahony's arabesques about shutting them up in a shop, and I suspect that the gentleman in question was referring to Daedalus-type myths there.

The last translation is by Comyn & Dineen, in 1898, and they acknowledge quite a debt to Joyce - indeed, Joyce acknowledges Comyn's help reading the proofs of his work.

and when Partholón accused her, it is not an apology she made, but said it was fitter the blame of that ill-deed to be on himself than on her: and she said these words: ‘O Partholón,’ says she, ‘do you think that it is possible a woman and honey to be near one another, new milk and a child, food and a generous person, flesh meat and a cat, weapons or implements and a workman, or a man and woman in private, without their meddling with each other’: and she repeats the verse:—
1.Honey with a woman, new milk with a child,
Food with the generous, flesh with a cat,
A workman in a house, and edge tools,
One with the other, it is great risk.

The verse in all four versions is one Céitinn pulled in straight from the Lebor Gabála Érenn - MacAlister's translation has

Honey with a woman, milk with a cat,
food with one generous, meat with a child,
a wright within and an edge[d tool]
one before one, 'tis a great risk.'

So I'm forced to conclude that the phraseology I found originally is an editor's rephrasing - in fact, looking at the revision history, it's two rephrasings by the same editor. In June 2005 she put this in :-

Dealgnaid had had an affair with her attendant, Todhga, and when challenged was unrepentant, saying, "is it possible for a woman to be near honey, or a child next to new milk, or a cat smell fresh meat, or a workman see sharp tools, or a man and woman be close in private, without meddling the one with the other?"

and then a month later changed it to this :-

But Delgnat was unrepentant and insisted that Partholón himself was to blame, as leaving them alone together was like leaving honey before a woman, milk before a cat, edged tools before a craftsman or meat before a child and expecting them not to take advantage.

I suppose that falls under summarization rather than quotation, and from looking at a different source - the second version swaps the cat and the child, following MacAlister. My considered opinion was either that MacAlister FAILED there, or more likely that he and Céitinn were working from different manuscripts. Céitinn, on account of being 400 years closer to the source than MacAlister, naturally had access to different, and probably more, manuscripts. I suspect that one of the scribes responsible for copying out that portion of the Book of Leinster (or whichever it was that MacAlister was using - my feeling is that Céitinn's reading makes more sense) had a brain fart and thought "cat - milk - Friday afternoon - ah feckit".

Benefits applications & disability

2009-09-08T18:50:02Z

Or, Why filling in the forms really is hard work, and why the process sent my mental health spiralling downwards.

A lot of you, O my readership, have been on government benefits or had a partner or close friend who has, and for you there is no need to explain that it really is unpleasant, counterproductive, interminable, and soul-destroying. On the other hand, there's a pervasive sense amongst some sections of the British public (and the media) that benefits are money for old rope; all you have to do is fill in a couple of forms, turn up to a couple of interviews, and then you're living the life of Riley.

One experience more or less all of you will have in common is the job interview, so let's use that as an analogy. You start by filling in forms and writing up your CV, and you want to tell them all about the wonderful things you've done and how competent and capable you are, how any company would be lucky to employ you. Maybe you stretch the truth a little, make out that a particular situation turned out better than it did, that you were the pivot that turned a failing team around, that it was your bright idea which took a company from ruination to roses in six months flat. That's fine; everyone does it a bit. Everyone expects it when they're hiring. That's how it works. And then you go for the interview, and you have to live the CV you wrote - you have to convince yourself, inhabit the bright shining persona you devised, fake it till you make it. And there's nothing wrong with that, because we're all performing our own lives, creating ourselves as we go along, becoming the person we want to be. And if somehow they don't realise you're perfect for them, there's plenty more out there, after all.

Try imagining doing it in reverse.

You've got the form; what the DWP want to find out from it is just how incompetent and incapable you are. If you aren't incapable enough, you won't get hired. If you have too much success behind you, if you've got solid accomplishments and learned skills, you're going to have to answer tricky questions about them, and prove that they aren't real and useful after all. And you're getting graded on your answers, and if they catch you out in an inconsistency then you won't even get to the interview stage. And this one's important; it's the only shot you've got at the only job you can do, with the only employer in town. So you stretch the truth a little, make out that a particular situation turned out worse than it did, that it was your disability that made a team collapse and fall apart, that if you were to get up and go into business for yourself you could lose a million in no time.

And then you go for the interview, and you have to live the CV you wrote - you have to convince yourself, inhabit the dull haggard persona you devised, fake it till you fail hard enough to satisfy them. And if there's ever anything calculated to reinforce a poor self-image, that's it. If anything can institutionalise failure, that's it.

And remember, your only points of contact with the system are an information-only website designed for the reading age of a bright 10-year-old by someone who'd never tried to use the system themselves, and a perpetually overloaded and underfunded call centre equipped with the best call-waiting system 1982 has to offer. You don't get to talk to the same person twice; you get a succession of interchangeable powerless cubicle workers who can't do anything more than talk to the confusing badly designed computer system on your behalf. Oh, and it's an 0845 number, which means it's only free if you're using a BT landline. So that's about twenty quid you've paid to apply, already.

There's a Jobcentre just down the road, but you're not allowed to go in and talk to them; you have to wait for a couple of hours in a phone queue (or even attempting to get into the phone queue) before you can make an appointment, and nobody has the time to help you work out what you really need and share the information through the system. Instead, you get shoved into the nearest square hole they can find, and Heaven help you if your situation is at all unusual.

It's possible to fill out the form online, but the process is confusing and complicated enough that I tried and gave up after ten minutes in favour of paper & pen.

Once you've sent off your completed form, they might well lose it; the best thing to do is take a photocopy, get it certified, and send that off. You have to mail it; you can't hand it in at a Jobcentre and get them to sign for it and send it through the internal mail any more. And they won't photocopy and certify it for you without an appointment, and there isn't any way to get one of those without three hours dealing with the phone line. You'd do best to send it recorded-signed-for, too, because then at least you know it's got to their mailroom. That's another fiver.

Which doesn't mean it's got to anyone who can read it and enter the data; it could take another two or three weeks to work its way through the system and start a response on its way to you. And then, if they have all the information they need, and if you have a complete set of doctors' certificates (which you might have to talk fast and argue your GP into giving you - I did) covering the entire period of your application without a break, they'll start paying you some money. You get a total of £54.90 a week, plus housing benefit if you applied for that too - which means another form and another bureacracy to negotiate with, and another set of supporting documents to give them in another place too.

And that's an interim payment; at this point, if they decide later you're not entitled to it after all, they'll not only stop paying you but make you repay what you've already had. For that matter, if there's any irregularity they'll suspend payments, without telling you they're doing it. An irregularity would be something like not getting a doctor's certificate for May before the one you sent them for April runs out; bear in mind that it takes three weeks for any given document to work its way through the combination of Royal Mail (two days) and the DWP mail routing & backlog (nearly three weeks). You'd better bear that in mind, because they won't.

In a while after that, they'll schedule you for an interview with a doctor at Atos healthcare, who will ask a lot of things you already told them and then check whether you can read with your glasses on. If you're really lucky, they'll ask you to suggest an interview day & time; if not, they'll just assign you one. You can change it once if it doesn't work for you; if you try more than that, the computer system won't let them put in another and sends you back to the DWP to start again. Atos, at least, pay your expenses travelling there... two weeks later, which means they had the use of £15 of my money for two weeks and I didn't. That's really quite petty.

The DWP also send you for an optional work-focused interview with a different private contractor, who ask you all the same questions and try and work out what you're capable of, and then sit back and ask "OK, how can we help you back into work?" as though, at that point, what you wanted was anything but for them to stop waving hoops around and just give you your money. It's optional, of course, because it's designed to help you. On the other hand, if you don't turn up or if they think you aren't cooperating, your benefits get stopped.

Then there's a different work-focused interview, with Atos again; I haven't had this one, because I had to reschedule it once ("No, I can't get to Romford for 8:45 AM. Sorry.") and then had to try that again ("I have swine flu. You don't want me to come in. ...I can't reschedule it? Computer says no? OK, so the DWP will send me a letter about doing it some other time... I'll wait for that, then. Thanks."). Still waiting, of course.

The bright side of that is that they're now paying me. I get a grand total of £160 a week, which has to cover everything including rent. That works out to an annual income of £8,320. And the reason that's so high is because I managed to convince them I was disabled not workshy, and because I'm over 25 and living in London. Otherwise, it could go as low as £6,500 or so. I'm lucky, of course; I don't smoke, don't drink much, and don't keep a car, and I don't have any dependents.

For comparison, the Rowntree Foundation's research has found that the general consensus in the UK is that you need £13,900 to pay for the essentials of an acceptable standard of living. If you can work, and find someone who'll hire you to work 40 hours a week at the national minimum wage, you'll get £11,900 or so.

It's been a hideously unpleasant experience, and it's taken me six months and left me quite a bit more depressed and less functional than I started. That was with my girlfriend filling in the forms for me, the CAB writing letters on my behalf, and a letter from my MP to JobcentrePlus. And I have bucketloads of privilege here, too - I'm a fairly well spoken white guy over 30, with letters after his name, who knows his rights and resources. I know enough to turn up in a suit and tie when I need to get them to take me seriously, and to wear the same T-shirt three days running before the interview so they don't decide I'm too together and capable to have depression. So yes, I'm coping with the process a lot better than most people with my condition do. And it's been breaking me.

Julio-Claudian family tree

2009-08-28T17:01:32Z

As promised! Click through for the full version - "All Sizes" will give you the huuuge one.

Filk - Roots

2009-08-26T12:58:29Z

Not complete; assistance appreciated. Source: Show of Hands, "Roots". Inspired by this LibCon article, quoting from the News of the World:

…local council candidates John Coombes, of Maidenhead, Berks, and Dick Hamilton of Marlow, Bucks, were sitting with others around a brazier.
Hamilton’s ghettoblaster blared out songs supporting Hitler and attacking “ni**ers”.

And a fascist thug said his hope and dream
Is events where everybody's white as cream.
Call it a festival? What d'you call
Events where no-one sings at all

And everyone stares at the same small dream
Losing at cricket and letting off steam
With piss-weak lager and combat boots
Whingers and thugs in cheap-ass suits

And we oughta be ashamed of all these trends
Of the way we treat our cousins and friends
Without their cooking or their sounds

How will we know where we're all bound?
I've lost St. George and the Union Jack
That's my flag too and I want it back

Laugh away boys, let them go
On and on in their lonely show
We've gained more than we'll ever know
From the open shores of England.

Barddoniaeth

2009-08-14T23:29:32Z

Byddaf yr hen iaith parhau!

Rwy'n gobeithio sefyll arholiadau beirddol y Gorsedd ymhen pum mlynedd. Trwy'r amser, rwy'n teimlo tipyn yn drafferthu pan rwy'n weld pobl yn galw ei hun feirdd heb adnabyddiad y cymdeithas traddodiadol, ond nid ydw i'n gwrthdystio; mae "bardd" yn deitl fel "shaman". Mae'n perthyn i'r diwylliant - i'r cymdeithas - penodol, ond dydi o ddim yn deitl fach fel "dug" neu "tywysog". Os nid ydych yn gall waith y fardd, does ddim ots eich galw felly; ac os ydych chi'n gwneud waith y fardd, does ddim ots beth yr ydych yn eich galw.

Information architecture

2009-08-11T17:10:36Z

I have managed to represent the Julio-Claudian family tree, from Atia to Nero, on one large piece of paper without needing any footnotes or relationship lines crossing the whole page. I am quite pleased with this.

One White Tree

2009-08-05T15:00:58Z

For those of you who don't read Eithin, or eithinarts, and because I wanted to show it off -

Original post here.

Prints will be for sale when I acquire a suitable number of spoons.

Things not to do while recovering from the flu...

2009-07-30T18:14:02Z

...forget the sysop password for your wiki installation, and then realize it doesn't have an email address set, necessitating a bit of flailing around before a bit of mediawiki and mySQL hackery solves the problem in an unnecessarily convoluted way.

Much more of this, and I'll no longer be able to say that I don't even speak SQL.

NHS Choose and Book

2009-07-23T13:00:28Z

So, my GP referred me for an allergy test, to find out what it is that keeps making me sneeze and generally feel like the living dead. The reminder letter I got (I've been putting it off because they insist on my using the phone and I hate doing that) tells me I can use the "NHS Choose and Book" service online to remind me of their phone numbers. So I do that. It wants me to log in with the number and password they gave me, so I do that, and keep the phone numbers onscreen, since I need my laptop and Google Calendar with me by the phone.

And the nice guy at the end tells me that he can't make my appointment, because they have to use the same system and he can't log in while I'm logged in. Presumably it gives extra functionality to them, since all it does for me is show me this. (It gives me an option at Homerton Hospital as well, but they're unrated and the only advantage they have is a 21-day wait time.)

General Allergy (LCH) - Allergy - Barts and The London NHS Trust - RNJ

* Distance: 3 miles from postcode E11 ***
* Approximate Wait Time: 41 days
* Location: THE LONDON CHEST HOSPITAL, BONNER ROAD, LONDON, GREATER LONDON, E2 9JX
* Booking Instructions: 0800 043 0143 Mon-Thurs 0800-1800; Fri 0800-1700; Sat 0900-1200

And then he tells me that it will take 20 minutes to release the lock on the system after I'm logged out, so I'll have to call back. WTFF? Even by the normal standards of government IT systems this is fairly epic comedy fail.

[Geek help] IM clients

2009-07-21T12:53:10Z

I'm looking for an IM client for Windows - specifically for use with MSN. I don't use other services as it stands.

The reason I'd like a new one is because I often find the new-message notifications on the official MSN client really stressful and intrusive.

So if any of you know of a client that will notify me visually but without any flashing or flickering, and preferably in a nice nonstressful colour, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Awesome

2009-07-16T23:59:09Z

(otherwise known as, I had to see it. Therefore, so do you)

Star Trek slash for kids, via harald387.

Priorities

2009-07-15T12:20:32Z

For a country that's simultaneously in the middle of two wars, a pandemic, and a serious recession, most of the population are really quite relaxed. Or obsessing over something completely different, of course.

View Poll: #1430133

Visualizing the All

2009-07-13T21:55:41Z

Which of these two pictures best represents the way the human race understands existence? Black stands for what we know, white stands for what we don't know.

NB: These are intended to be viewed on a white background. So any overall squareness you may see in the second picture is purely an artifact of the medium.

View Poll: #1429355

Job Opportunity

2009-07-07T22:43:44Z

Wookey Hole is looking for a witch-in-residence. £50k salary, must not be allergic to cats, need not necessarily be female. Anyone fancy applying?