Something going on behind the scenes?

A certain web forum that I spend time looking at has been allowing a particularly obnoxious individual to make the experience of visiting said web forum a particularly challenging experience.

That particular person either jumped or was pushed a week or so ago. But it took weeks of shit before this happened. Fair enough. I like the fact that this particular site is laissez-faire about what people choose to say, although if someone is genuinely disruptive, and doesn't respond to polite requests to change, I think at some point, the bouncers have to step in and throw the guy out on the street.

But there's another particular person, who posts abstract poetry. Has done so for years. The greatest transgression of forum rules this poet commits is to post these poems in inappropriate parts of the suite of forums. In this case, as soon as site admin become aware of the poet's latest identity, he is banned, and his posts are removed.

So I find myself intrigued at what has gone on in the past to cause poet person to become persona non grata for years upon end.

One suggestion I've heard is that the poet is actually a music journalist. Perhaps he's done a particularly negative and vitriolic review of the site owner?

By the way, this post takes me to 154 posts for the year, exactly equalling my total number of posts for the years 2008 and 2009 combined. Way too much time on my hands, obviously.

It's also 5 days since I had a cigarette. I haven't had one of those nauseating chewing gum things today either. Now the real battle starts. Since I've not had a cigarette for that long, I know that if I do have one I will get a wonderful 10 second buzz from one if I do smoke it. Doesn't seem worth it, intellectually speaking does it, but we're not really rational creatures, or not solely so anyway.

Edit:

Ah, fuck. He jumped, and he had a bunjee.

Seriously, I've seen so many discussion boards utterly ruined by mentally ill people. What can you do?

Further edit:

Life's a riot, I tell thee!

Chances are, if you're reading this blog, you also spend time on the discussion board I'm talking about. Maybe you even watched events unfold?

Just in case you missed it, Captain Caveman once again went into the breach with all guns blazing. And got hit by a withering broadside. And then, to really rub his nose into it, the site admin isolated the withering broadside in question, gave it a thread of it's own, and locked the thread so that Cavey couldn't carry it on.

Class! I don't know if they banned Cap'n C, but I doubt if he'll be back.

Huzzah!

My blog list.

Do a lot of bloggers do this kind of post, at least once?

If so, here's mine. If not, well, here's a post explaining what's on my bloglist to the right of this post, and why I've included them.

The blogs are ordered according to when they were last updated. I could have ordered them alphabetically but it also helps me to keep up with what other people have to say.

Accordingly, right now, at the top of the list is Insert Pie Here

This is one of my other blogs. I also have a third, which was part of trying to raise my profile as a driving instructor when I was working for myself. Insert pie here was inspired by a picture on the BBC news website of a football fan (Burnley?) with his arms aloft and his mouth wide open. I just wanted to put a big pie in that hole, and the idea grew. Pies have been inserted into the mouths of musicians, politicians, sportsmen, supermodels. Actually, not supermodels. She didn't get one.

It will gradually fall to the bottom of the list because while I had fun with the idea, it was never going to run very far. So I have declared a moratorium on new posts, at least for now. I suppose at some point I may resurrect it, but I'm saying all I want to say here really.

It's quite pleasing on the eyes. This one looks quite dark and cluttered in comparison, and I might move some design elements over to here at some point.

Next is Bristling Badger

This is the blog of Merrick Godhaven, an environmental and social justice activist who's been an inspiration to me ever since I first encountered his writings over at Head Heritage. He's helped me mature enormously through both what he has to say, and the way he chooses to say it. And it's not all po-faced polemic either. Merrick is definitely a subscriber to Sex, Drugs, and Rock and roll. He knows his stuff, but there's a real human warmth and understanding in what he says too.

Chicken Yoghurt

is the blog of Brighton based writer, Justin McKeating. It's a useful source of information, and is updated frequently.

Tilly Dance

This is my wife's blog. She has two, both of which are listed here. This one is her alter ego. The person she wants to be. Someone with drive and energy. A high flier in the local art scene.

Arty Farty

This is the "real" Brenda. This blog also focuses on stuff outside of the photographic and artistic arena.

Richard Black's Earth Watch

This is a BBC blog, devoted to climate issues. A sensible and authoritive voice on the issues.

The Quiet Road

Mild mannered janitor by day. Jim Bliss turns into an expert on psychology and resource depletion, on which he writes, passionately and knowledgeably here. Jim is another person I met over at Head Heritage, and has probably done more to develop my awareness of the issues facing Humanity than anyone else. His blog archives are a rich mine of wisdom.

One author Jim turned me on to was...

Richard Heinberg

An international author and academic, what Richard doesn't know about Peak Oil could fit in a very small barrel. He offers a sobering analysis of our prospects in the face of declining supplies of... Well, everything, in a detailed, referenced but eminently clear and readable style.

George Monbiot

George needs little introduction. He's one of the most high profile writers in the ecology, environment and social justice areas.

Mark Lynas

Finally, Mark Lynas. Mark's blog postings are infrequent, but always thought provoking and backed up by years of research. He's written a book called 6 degrees which condenses thousands of articles and studies into how the world would be affected if global warming rose by each of the degrees from 1 to 6. Scary stuff. Yet he generally offers a less strident voice than George Monbiot.

So, that's my blog list.

Thought I'd something more to say...

I haven't been able to log in to blogger for the last few days. Viewing my blog(s) has been tortuous. Getting in has been totally impossible. Connection time out every time.

I suppose I could have committed my thoughts to a text document, and then shoved them onto the blog when things sorted themselves out, but I never thought of it. One for the future I suppose.

So what's been on my mind?

I've been thinking about how fiction can contain real wisdom. that follows on from my Books post I suppose.

I saw an article about sky burial that got me thinkiong about how we deal with the shell that's left behind once consciousness has departed.

There's a breakdown of my blog list. What's on it, what will be on it, what used to be on it, and what will not be on it.

I've been thinking about doing a sort of Google Earth based biography of my Dad.

And there's a driving one, explaining how where and why one of my pupils failed his test.

The driving one's coming up next...

Fields and Agriculture

One thing that caught my eye was the US mid-west. The reason it caught my attention was because of its' incredible regularity. The reason it's regularity was startling was because I'm used to seeing the land as a patchwork of irregularly sized and shaped fields.

Here's a random part of rural England, from about 20,000 feet up.

See what I mean? It's a jigsaw of interlocking field boundaries that follow and adapt to the contours of the land.

I suppose this tells a story of a land that's owned by lots of individuals who have carved things up, sold and bought little bits to each other, etc. But it was never really a blank canvas. Not for millenia. If I wanted to make a road or a fence, I had to take into account what was already there.

But the US is a different kettle of fish.

This picture is taken from about the same height above ground level.

Notice how regular it all is? It's arranged on a grid pattern, aligned to the cardinal points (the verticals go north-south, the horizontals go east-west) and it goes on and on for miles and miles and miles in every direction. Within those squares, there is some variety, but not to anything like the same degree that you'd find in England, or for that matter, Europe, where strip fields seem to be more in vogue.

Also, irrigation is much in evidence. Take a big square, put a squirty thing in the middle of it, and you end up with a big square with a nice fertile circle in the middle of it.

Like this bit, taken from about 20,000 feet above the ground in Colorado:



Equally this must tell a tale. Take a land and colonise it and you get to put a pragmatic and efficient structure in place. The people that built America didn't have the same constraints as people in Europe, and this is the result.

I do have more to write on this post, covering Europe and the rest of the world. I'm not an agriculture expert. I just find the differences interesting. Once spotted, you really can't miss the patterns.

Finally, here's an equally startling (in it's own way) pattern of fields from Denmark. I can't find the particular one I was looking for, but again, a discernable pattern exists. In this case, the fields radiate out from the villages, like the rays of the sun or the spokes of a wheel. Blame the vikings for that one. Forever messin' around on bikes, the buggers.

What all the fuss is about.

You can get google earth by clicking

>>> HERE! <<<

Google Earth is basically a huge montage of aerial and satellite photographs overlaid onto a sphere. You can move around, zoom in and out, and the terrain rises and falls on the globe to create mountains and valleys etc. Because it's like sticking photograhphs onto a globe, what you get is a slightly impressionistic view of the world, particularly when flying around. Trees don't stick up. They are flush with the terrain for example, but overall the effect can be spectacular. Many areas, particularly in less developed parts of the world, are pretty low resolution, taken from space, and not particularly detailed.






Here's an example taken from roughly a kilometre above ground level. ( 54°37'22.40"N, 89°24'9.29"E) It's near Chërnoye Ozero in Russia apparently.

A few years ago, more of the map was like this, but google are gradually replacing satellite imagery with much higer resolution aerial photography...













Like this image of Derwent Water in the Cumbria, England. Also taken from about a kilometre above the ground. The co-ordinates for this one are ( 54°34'56.56"N, 3° 7'58.34"W) by the way.

Clicking on either of the pictures will open full sized versions. Obviously the level of detail is much higher using aeroplanes than it is using satellites. High enough to make out cars, people, even sheep in fields. This has led to concerns about security and privacy. Generally google have complied with governmental requests not to use hi res pictures of sensitive areas.

Google earth contains optional layers, often created by its' userbase. You can click on webcams, hi res panoramic photographs, layers highlighting environmental concerns, such as boxes giving emissions data for large factories. Most of these layers will have just a few icons on the globe, but clicking on them gives you the option of showing them all. Clicking on the boxes these open in google earth will often open up a webpage in your browser of choice, giving you further information and links to other similar things.

Most options can be toggled on and off by using the sidebar on the left. This too can be toggled on and off to give you a full screen display, or a mixture of display and options.

There's much more to it, but that'll do for now.