There’s a lot to be said for a softly-softly approach, but when three or four impatient drivers have delayed several dozen others and created a hazard for cyclists and pedestrians alike, by wilfully ignoring a box junction’s markings, why shouldn’t they be booked for it?

I’m glad I was able to persuade the policemen to heed my point of view, but I shouldn’t have had to.

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!

I asked one of the volunteers whether the aim was to count species, or members per species per unit of time, or something else. She shrugged and directed me to a man carrying a large folded butterfly net.

While I walked over to Net Man, I noticed several of the other volunteers passing around a glass vial. Each of them sniffed it gingerly, pulled a face of disgust and passed it on to the next volunteer.

Net Man told me the aim was just to count species. For each specimen, if the species were readily identifiable, that species would be entered in the log immediately; if not, the specimen would be collected for a more detailed examination.

At this point, he was interrupted by an eager beaver volunteer, who passed him the vial. You’ve got to sniff it! said Eager Beaver. Net Man swung his torch up to the vial.

That’s a Nicrophorus, he said, A sextant beetle. I’m not sniffing that! Anyway, it’s covered in mites.

Nothing wrong with that, Eager Beaver countered. Go on, sniff it!

They make my skin crawl, replied Net Man. He turned to me with the beetle. I thought for a moment he was going to make me sniff it (which I was quite prepared to; I’ve not sniffed a Nicrophorus before), but he just held it up so that I could see it better. Under the bright torch light, the mites were clearly visible. A quick glance and you might mistake them for patterning, but hold your gaze a moment longer and you’d notice them moving. The flow of their movement reminded me of cows grazing.

It’s basically just a bus, volunteered Eager Beaver. The beetle’s the bus; the mites are the passengers. The people on a bus don’t make your skin crawl, do they?

Well… said Net Man. They laughed heartily. Given the stories I’ve heard about the remarkably strange people my friends have encountered on Cambridgeshire buses, this was a predictable joke.

Net Man returned his attention to the beetle, who, in its spot-lit crystal canister, was now being gazed upon by several curious onlookers.

These beetles, he declaimed, Are remarkable carnivores. They like nothing better to eat than mice. They’ll work together to drag a mouse into a hole in the ground. Then they chew up the insides and lay eggs in the middle so the larvae can eat what’s left of the mouse on the way out.

That must make the mouse’s skin crawl, I suggested. This brilliantly humorous observation evidently marked me out as the most lay of laymen, because it was immediately ignored by all present. Somebody muttered something about going to join his friend who was looking for bats. Far off in the distance, an owl hooted.

I wished Net Man and Eager Beaver good luck in their survey, and resumed my jog. Crossing the narrow span of Coe Fen Footbridge in the gloaming, I very nearly tripped over a man huddled to the railing in dark clothing. He excused himself by explaining he was looking for bats.

That’s right folks, I want my outdoor meals to make me smile like this man:

But you can’t buy Fancy Feast in the UK! I hear you cry.

Well, worry not, friends, because Andrew Skurka’s article gives away the tin’s dimensions: it’s 2.5″ in diameter, and by holding up a ruler to my screen I was able to estimate its height too. Converted to metric, it’s approximately 3.3cm tall and 6.4cm in diameter.

To my surprise, no-one batted an eyelid when I whipped out a tape measure in the canned goods section of the nearby Asda supermarket. (I know, I know: Asda = Walmart = bleurgh. I normally avoid the place. But it has the largest canned goods aisle of any of the supermarkets I’m aware of on my side of town, and I happened to be passing.) I found three products sold in cans of very nearly those dimensions:

• Princes Tuna Chunks in sunflower oil. Comes as a pack of 3×80g tins.
• Princes Tuna Chunks in brine. Comes as a pack of 3×80g tins.
• Essentials from HiLife Tuna Royale cat food. Sold in single 85g tins.

I recommend the latter. It’s about half the price of either of the others, per can, and because it’s sold in single tins you don’t need to buy any excess. Also, although both products claim to be dolphin friendly, Princes has a poor corporate responsibility record (and besides, the cat food is probably mostly made of waste meat). Furthermore, the Princes cans have reinforced rims top and bottom, whereas the cat food cans just have a reinforced top rim. The catfood cans are therefore closer in spec (and may well be identical) to the cans Andrew uses.

Now I just need a cat and a hole punch.

So far, so handy. Handier still is the fact that these Google Calculator features can also be accessed in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Want a cell in your spreadsheet to show the value of $250 (US) in pounds sterling? Enter this in the cell:

=GoogleFinance("CURRENCY:USDGBP")*19.9

Great! Now you can, for instance, compare the cost of international products or services no matter which currency they’re given in.*

Want a second cell to show what 1lb is in kg? Enter this in the second cell:

=GoogleLookup("1lb","in kg")

There’s a gotcha here, though. The above will give you 0.45kg. That’s not just 0.45 with a cosmetic kg: it’s as though you’d typed 0.45kg into the cell. Having some non-numerical information in the cell (the kg part) makes Google Docs treat the entire contents of the cell as text rather than numerical data. That means you can’t use it for mathematical calculations unless you process it first to strip away the non-numerical part. Here’s an example of how to do that:

=substitute(GoogleLookup("1lb","in kg"),"kg","")

Now, go forth and multiply!

* If I’m not mistaken, Google updates its currency information 20 minutes after the live currency exchange markets. This means you probably shouldn’t use Google Docs for, say, currency trading… but since ethically speaking you probably shouldn’t trade currencies anyhow, I won’t be sorry if you make a fat loss on the currency markets by trying to use Google Docs as your analysis platform.

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!

The drummer in Maths, Alfie, reminded me of how I used to look and act when I was playing in Abjure, although none of his sticks, cymbals, stands, pedals or drum heads broke so I suppose he must be a gentler chap.

Jairus were on good form. This was the first time I’ve seen them with the new line-up, and they rocked the Portland solidly. Symon Minter’s work with Jairus is among my favourite drumming, but Doug Jenkins worked hard and lived up well to the difficult task of replicating Symon’s beats and fills on the old songs. The new material set the joint reverberating wonderfully.

Pneu were like Lightning Bolt, but more intense. Between songs, as well as keeping a beat going, the drummer kept motioning to the audience to come closer. The crowd became a gathering. He played some drum fills on the beer glass of a lady standing next to the drum kit, and some other fills on the guitarist’s guitar neck. He played the hi-hat with his elbows. Everyone in the room was smiling. It was beautiful. At the end of their set, I overheard a very cute woman in the audience say, I wouldn’t want to be up after them.

Shield Your Eyes were up after them. Not quite my cup of tea, but on the plus side they seem to have a new bassist and she’s very impressive.

… 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.