Although I’m broadly in favour of this, I agree with one of the commenters (RO) that care must be taken to protect sensitive wildlife.

I also agree that care must be taken to enable swimmers to protect themselves. (This is very different from preventing swimmers from swimming!) Here’s what I mean:

In order for people to be able to make an informed judgement about the safety of swimming in a given body of water, there are two things they must have information about, besides knowledge of their own abilities:

1. Physical hazards existing in the body of water;
2. The quality of the body of water (i.e. is it biologically or chemically contaminated).

Point 1 should, I think, be handled as follows. If the hazards are obvious (e.g. white water), then nothing needs to be done, since no-one ought to brave those hazards unless they’ve got the skill and training to do so. If the hazards aren’t obvious (e.g. submerged drains, weirs (which are more dangerous than they look because of the back-currents and aeration they produce), or suchlike) then signposts should be placed nearby warning of the hazard(s). Fortunately, this is already done by landowners or local councils in most places.

Point 2 is trickier, but surmountable. It would be very useful if there were a website one could visit that would be updated weekly with reports of the water quality in popular swimming spots. Visitors to the website should be able to add swimming spots to the list of spots to be checked (much as they add ideas on this website), with all spots receiving at least a certain number of requests automatically being added to the list of spots for the checking agency to consider.

The agency/agencies responsible for checking the water quality at the swimming spots ought to ensure that no time-wasting redundant measurements are made (e.g. multiple measurements close together on the same body of water). Once that’s done, it’s just a case of sending off a bloke in a van (or better still, on a bicycle) to collect samples once a week and bring them back to a lab. The lab would then assess the water quality and post the results on the website.

Those who don’t mind swimming in algal blooms, etc, would still be free to do so; the rest of us, if the website reported the presence of that sort of contamination, could make an informed choice to wait for the contamination to clear before returning to that swimming spot!

A side benefit of the system I’ve proposed is that it would motivate people to consider the quality of their environment. After all, if you learn that your local swimming spot is chemically or biologically contaminated, that’s a good incentive to pressure your council to investigate the local farms, industries or sewage works that might be causing the contamination. This would increase the transparency, of local politics and of the water!

Let’s dissect that assertion, shall we? It’s designed to transfer responsibility away from the metal and on to the user. But is it fair? Are guns really no more dangerous than spoons?

Give somebody an ordinary dessert spoon, even one loaded with chocolate peanut butter ice cream or some other such popular and unhealthy foodstuff, and that person will not become suddenly fat, even if they use it on themselves. I’ve spooned ice cream like that into my body on multiple occasions, and I’ve never been particularly fat.

Give somebody an ordinary loaded gun, on the other hand, and if they use it on themselves they may well become suddenly dead.

Factor in human frailty – the capacity to make a mistake – and the risk of a gun killing someone (this poor boy, for instance) is obviously infinitely larger than the likelihood of somebody becoming fat because of an instance of misusing of a spoon.

Finally, lets compare the severity of the outcomes. Being fat isn’t necessarily a big deal, as Health At Every Size research shows, and even if it does bother you, you stand a good chance of being able to do something about it. Being dead, on the other hand, is so universally undesirable that everyone reading this – yes, you – is without doubt currently pursuing multiple strategies to try to avoid it.

(A quick aside: there are many companies providing copy shop services, some independent, some parts of larger retail chains. The interesting thing about Kinko’s, to me, is that it’s so ubiquitous in the US that (a) Kinko’s has become practically synonymous with copy shop, and (b) people know which services they will find on offer at branches of Kinko’s, and at what cost. This sort of combination of scalability and predictability is, I think, useful for customers, even though it is in other respects a rather sadly homogenising influence on modern consumer culture.)

Now, in an urban environment where room is scarce, flexibility is key, and travelling distances are short, companies like this make a lot of sense. Students, hobbyists and professionals alike may well need the services Kinko’s offers, but may not have the space or the budget to accommodate the necessary equipment or operators. Kinko’s, essentially, allows these customers to time-share their equipment, staff and floor space, on an as-needed basis. Even for those customers who have the facilities to print/scan/etc themselves, having a Kinko’s is useful: it provides a backup option in case the customer’s own equipment goes kaput shortly before a deadline.

That’s all well and good, but let’s get back to fab labs. Increasingly, students, hobbyists and professionals are interested in manipulating 3D information and materials for prototyping purposes, or for very limited production runs. New recipes for rapid prototyping tools like 3D scanners, 3D printers, CNC routers, electronic fabrics and items that can be made using them appear frequently in the pages of Make magazine, Instructables.com and other modern DIY publications. This does increase the affordability of such things but the trouble is, even the basic tools (drills, saws, etc) and materials required to follow some of these recipes take up a fairly large amount of space relative to the size of a small urban apartment or office. If you want more sophisticated options like 3D scanning and printing to be available to you as well, then you need even more space. This is much like the problem once faced by students, hobbyists and professionals who needed 2D information tools like photocopying available to them; the problem Kinko’s business model is based on ameliorating.

I’m going to advocate that someone – maybe even FedEx (the owner of Kinko’s); it doesn’t really matter who – creates a chain of Fabrication Stations that operate on roughly the same principle as Kinko’s. For a small fee, these outlets should offer to perform, either with the customer’s assistance or while the customer waits, such services as:

• 3D scanning
• 3D printing (at least one kind)
• PCB manufacture
• Sewing (using conventional, high-tensile, or conductive thread as desired)
• Drilling
• Cutting
• Grinding
• Sanding
• Buffing
• 3-axis milling/routing

Just as Kinko’s stocks various kinds of paper and ink to run their equipment, so the Fabrication Stations should stock standard PCB boards, commonly-used construction fabrics and threads, and any consumables necessary for their 3D scanning and printing devices.

This isn’t so far-fetched – several universities already have fab labs providing these services – and it needn’t require a large amount of real estate: it’s possible to fit a fab lab into a trailer (and they come in many other shapes and sizes too).

It’s likely that Fabrication Stations having commercial viability as their primary requirement might differ somewhat from the standard fab lab specs, which seem to assume a non-profit environment, but although this might mean they would be slightly less suitable as educational tools, they would appear to be a socially valuable proposition nonetheless.

Why am I writing all this? I’ve got a list of handy things I’d like to create, but I don’t have the time or equipment to make them all. Having a Fabrication Station in my neighbourhood where I could get some of the more equipment-intensive parts of the fabrication completed would tip the balance in favour of getting (these) things done rather than putting them off, and I’m all in favour of the former!

… and after a moment’s thought, I’ve identified it. It is that voterpower.org.uk takes as a premise the falsehood that 1≠1 (i.e. 1 vote ≠ 1 vote; I quote: “statistical analysis by the new economics foundation shows that one person in the UK does not have one vote”). Believe a premise like that, and politics is the least of your problems. Each British citizen has one vote in a general election, by law.

On another note, I’ve never been a huge fan of first past the post, but no other voting system – proportional representation, for instance – is a perfect panacea: after all, which kind of proportional representation should one choose?

I find that the mathematics of voting can be astonishingly bizarre and intricate even without the doublethinking rubbish promulgated by sensationalist sources like voterpower.org.uk. It’s a shame that the New Economics Foundation is tarnishing its reputation with that kind of codswallop.

A totalitarian might well conclude, from reading or watching Harrison Bergeron, that governments are quite right to act in the way portrayed therein: citizens should be largely uniform subjects, and should be handicapped compared to their rulers.

I, on the other hand, am in favour of neither of the above conclusions, since both of them appear to have extremely dangerous corollaries. I am in favour of levelling up the disadvantaged; but only so far as can be done without altering the ordering of advantage within the social spectrum. (Why is it important not to interfere with the ordering of advantages? Because people work to gain greater advantages — to re-order the spectrum — and interfering with the ordering from outside would reduce an incentive for people to work. Reducing incentives for people to work risks economic catastrophe.) The destitute can and should be helped out of destitution, but must remain the poorest members of society unless they work to increase their wealth and advantage. The wealthiest can and should be taxed to fund this, but must remain the wealthiest nonetheless, unless they stop working hard or smart enough to retain this position in the face of competition from others. And so on through the intermediate spectrum, mutatis mutandis. In addition, it is critical that these efforts be carried out as unobtrusively as possible.

At least, that’s my current position.

How, then, should you go about disposing of a compact fluorescent light bulb in the UK? I’d suggest putting the bulb back into its original box (or else a toilet roll tube or similar) to reduce the risk of breakage, and then doing one of the following, in descending order of preference:

• If convenient, take the bulb to a designated recycling point for gas discharge lamps (use the options on this form to find one near you).
• Otherwise, if convenient, take the bulb back to a branch of the store where you bought it, and ask them to recycle it for you. Explain that under WEEE guidelines, the store should help you recycle the bulb.
• Otherwise, if convenient, take the bulb back to a branch of another store that sells CFLs, and ask them to recycle it for you.
• Otherwise, if convenient, take the bulb to the reception desk of your local council’s main office, explain to the receptionist that you’d like the council to provide kerbside recycling collection of CFLs but that in the meantime you’ll leave your old CFLs at the council office for the council to recycle.
• If none of the above is even remotely convenient, then wrap the boxed bulb in a couple of small plastic bags, and put it in a rubbish bin. The plastic bags should reduce the rate at which the mercury from the bulb will leach into the environment if the bulb breaks.

Is it really worth going to all this trouble? Well, yes.

The SSCS mostly toes, but perhaps sometimes crosses, some delicate lines in the overlap between international conservation law and maritime law. Since I'm interested in conservation, in law, and in peaceful protest as a means of social change, the SSCS makes an interesting case study.

When I read that the SSCS's boat Ady Gil had been sunk by the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru 2, I was initially a little sceptical, essentially for the same reasons outlined in this Christian Science Monitor piece. But having watched footage of the collision (see below), it seems fairly clear that the Shonan Maru 2 did indeed deliberately strike the Ady Gil. Watch closely, and you can see that with the latter almost stationary and positioned off the Shonan Maru 2's starboard bow, the Shonan Maru 2 turns sharply to starboard just in time to force a collision, and then turns just as sharply to port once the damage has been done.

It seems obvious from the video that the rate of turn of the Shonan Maru 2 was more than sufficient to allow its captain a free choice either to force a collision with the drifting Ady Gil or to avoid one. If so, then the SSCS's claim that the Ady Gil was deliberately rammed must be true.

Interesting. I guess I don’t see such a sharp divide; more of a rather blurry spectrum.

We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.

Ah, so in Visser’s ontology, obligatory giving is an oxymoron, but obligatory gifting is not, because the former is in the private realm, which is nonjudgemental, and the latter is in the public realm, which isn’t. (Approximately.)

I guess she and I come from different cultures. I grew up with the impression that when someone gives you a gift in the private realm, you are obliged to that person for that gift. As such, gift-giving is usually done with an obvious opportunity for reciprocation in mind, so that the recipient will be able to discharge the obligation without trouble, as otherwise, the gift is burdensome on the recipient.

I’m finding it fascinating and useful to see how powerfully the giftonomies we grow up with shape our perceptions of what constitutes generosity and how to handle it, and also to learn how difficult it can be to translate between giftonomies.

Dear Mr Brodman,

I write to you with some concern that T-Mobile may have misled customers over the use of tethering apps on the Android phones T-Mobile sells. Specifically, you suggested, I believe, that tethering apps would not be blocked. Yet it appears that at least one has been removed from the Android Market in the US.

I call on you to openly address your customers' concerns, and to work with Google to ensure that of those customers, the Android users who wish to use tethering apps can do so with the aid of the delivery platform that the Android Market provides.

Yours sincerely,

Sam Kuper

The first problem was a series of broken spokes on the rear wheel, when the bike was around two years old. I had the wheel rebuilt (at some cost!), and this stopped the spoke breakage. Unfortunately, the shop mechanic who rebuilt the wheel messed up the rim tape while doing so, and also left some burrs on the spoke nipples inside the rim, which caused me a series of punctures until I figured out where the problem lay and fixed it myself.

Next came a crack in the seat tube. This necessitated a new frame, though fortunately this was covered under warranty. Still, it meant the substantial hassle and expense of shipping my bike back to the original dealer for repair, and hiring a replacement for the interim.

Now, about a week ago I had my bike serviced. I thought it probably needed new pedals - or maybe bottom bracket, or both - because I could feel a clicking/popping/grinding when I was pedalling. It turned out it probably did need new pedals, but the clicking and popping wasn't due to the pedals, it was due to a crack in the rear rim. The staff at the shop where I'd had my bike serviced said they hadn't been able to source any suitable rims and suggested that I try elsewhere.

Naturally enough, I tried the dealer I originally bought the bike from. They told me that a lack of rear rims for Dahon Piccolos and Dahon Curves was a longstanding problem, but that entire rear wheels (spokes, hub gear and all) were available for £145. That's half the new cost of the bike! Asking some other Dahon dealers the same question produced the same answer.

So, I had a choice between buying a whole new rear wheel or a whole new (or second-hand) bike. Blech.

A bit of spread-sheeting later, and I eventually opted for the new rear wheel. None of the second-hand bikes I enquired about had their original receipts available, which made me suspect they could have been stolen; and the new bikes I looked at worked out a little dearer than the Dahon per year of warranty remaining, since my Piccolo's frame, forks and handlepost are still under warranty for about another year and a half, and presumably the new rear wheel will be covered for a year.

Still, I'm disappointed. All bike manufacturers should recognise that it's in their interests to do what's in their customers' interests; and it's in their customers' interests to make spare parts readily available. Brompton does this, and so does Bike Friday. Why can't Dahon?

Next time it comes to a crunch like this, chances are it'll be more economical for me to get a new bike instead of repairing the Piccolo. And I don't think I'll be buying a Dahon again.