London Bodies

Happened across the exhibition in the Wellcome Institute on Euston Road in London about London bodies. Skeletons from two thousand years of the city's history lie laid out in glass cases, with tantalising notes beside them.

An elderly man with evidence of rickets in childhood and another bone bending disease in adulthood. A baby with smallpox. A prostitute with syphilis. A young woman with no obvious disease.

The light is low, the skeletons all look roughly the same at first glance, and only the careful and brief notes with them distinguish one from another. Then, a shock. William Wood, exhumed from his grave from the 19th century. How would I feel if one of my 19th century ancestors had been laid out in this way for all to see?

The Institute is of course a temple to science, and scientific methods. It looks at the human and sees only the flesh and the bones... the things which can be measured, touched, documented and studied. But the remains of human bodies, these skeletons... once they were people, and they loved and lost and lived and died... maybe it should make no difference whether they are a nameless man from a Cluniac monastery from six centuries ago or a beadle from the 19th century, but somehow... it seems disrespectful, wrong, to bring someone out of the grave after so short a time in it. How would I feel, similarly displayed, in 2170?

We looked at them with interest, tried to compare the teeth of the Romans who ground them down, and those of the 18th century Londoners... rotten. I wondered what sort of lives these people represented... mostly hard I guessed, with broken bones badly mended, and signs of vitamin deficiencies.

Mostly I felt uncomfortable in a world which ignores our deeply spiritual nature, which cannot be neatly filed away in a box, in favour of the material witness to our existence, numbered and stored away for future reference.

However, it's very interesting - more detail here.

Keith Barry TED Talk magic

Indebted to BoingBoing once again for a link to an interesting Ted talk... Keith Barry seems to be from the same school of magicianship as Derren Brown.

I just had to add it to my mysterious miscellany.

Communicating dishonesty

Clicked on a banner on BoingBoing this morning that purported to be about a marathon chat using the IM system, which apparently raises money for good causes while you chat on Windows Messenger or Windows Live.

There was a character called Parker...here's what he apparently says about himself:

who am I & why am I doing this

My name is Parker, and I’m just a guy with a computer and good intentions. A couple of months ago, I found out about the i’m Initiative.

It’s a Microsoft program that gives to a social cause every time you use Windows Live Messenger or Windows Live Hotmail. I saw an ad that said, “The more you talk, the more we give.” So I thought, if I get a bunch of people talking for 30 days, how much will they give?

I hope you join me. Thanks for checking out the Talkathon!

So I started looking around the page, and it didn't take much intelligence or diligence to find this message at the bottom of the page:
Disclaimer:

If you’re reading this, your BS detector is chirping like a smoke detector with a dicey 9-volt. As you’ve probably guessed, this blog is fictional, but the causes, and the i’m Initiative most certainly are not. The purpose of this blog is to raise awareness of the i’m Initiative and the worthy causes it helps. If we rubbed you the wrong way in the process that wasn’t our intention, so “sorry, our bad.” The alternate was something called an “e-mail blast.” But, believe us that’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds. A herd of well-compensated legal professionals in Redmond, Washington, says we also need you tell you something:

The Parker Whittle character depicted herein is fictitious and his activities are described for illustrative purposes only.

Rubbed me the wrong way in the process?? RUBBED ME THE WRONG WAY IN THE PROCESS??

YES you rubbed me the wrong way in the process. The marathon is supposed to be about communication - people talking to each other. How, pray, am I supposed to communicate with a fictional character? This initiative illustrates all that is wrong about old marketing and why it is going to be really bad for companies if they don't think more carefully about how they communicate with their customers. Pages of negative comments, interspersed with a few people who seem to have traded in their bullshit detector for an ass-licking course (and are they real, or undercover Microsoft employees desperate to put in some positive comments?).

Everything in the who am I and why am I doing this is a lie, fabrication, artificial. Why couldn't they have wheeled out the truth? Presented the marketing man or PR company employee who came up with the idea and pitched it to Microsoft? Or found someone who could sign up to the idea with their own name and personality intact? Of course, it is true that I am terribly suspicious of any person purporting to promote anything nowadays... but this just seems so tacky and so artificial it is really not just annoying but insulting.

Whoever came up with this, didn't think about the impact it would have on the sort of people who signed up to the IM campaign in the first place. People who hope they are contributing to something by signing up. Genuine and caring people... the last people any company should wish to annoy. It's only day 2 and they have already managed to diminish any respect I had for the company... which is at an all time low anyway, as I am struggling with problems caused by Windows Vista fighting with Second Life (vista is winning).

I'm wondering why the site blog has gone blank and what will appear there now.

Update: Even stranger... I have found a real person, maybe, maybe not, called Parker Whittle on myspace. It's beginning to mess with my head all this... is he and his myspace page real or not? If he IS real and not a figment of Microsoft's imagination, is he just being paid to do the Talkathon thing or will he see them in court? I think we should be told....

It seems likely they pulled the blog posts to be able to pull the comments which were pretty negative. I wonder if they will return when they fix up the posts? Any fule know that you don't pull posted posts unless desperate - or sober after an alcohol-fuelled ranting.

Blogs and writers

Two new blogs came to my attention in the past week. When I say new, I mean new to me, both seem to have been going for some time. It's odd, I was listening the other day to someone on the radio talking about how the photographs we take nowadays are mostly hidden away on desktops and in cameras, rather than being printed and shared with other people. It occured to me a long time ago that there is more and more stuff being written, but less and less of it is worth keeping.

Writing a blog is a special thing, so different from writing a journal which is for yourself and posterity only, there for your surviving family to read and possible burn. A blog is a living document, one in which it is possible to have a dynamic conversation with the readers, and within which you learn who those readers are, what they like and dislike about your blog and your writing.

The trouble is, the dynamic nature of the blog changes you. It has to. I didn't realise this when I first started my first blog, 10 years ago. I was a pioneer, blogging with a handful of other UK writers, when the BBC site was mostly unobtainable because it was more or less the only commercial site in the country, and on a dial up connection, more often timed out than not.

I was ignorant of the differences between journal writing and blogging, thought it was just an online journal. Ot was some time before I realised that a web log whould have details of your travels across the then much smaller web, with active links.

I wrote it initially like my diary, with names and places more or less unchanged. Soon I realised there was a dilemma between being honest and being able to say what I thought about people and places, and being identifiable. It meant that I wasn't just confiding incidents about my day, but the days of my friends and family. That I might hurt or enrage someone inadvertently...or advertently.

I tried to conceal my identity, but that too is fraught with dangers and deceit. If you are a middle manager living in a large town and enjoy the odd drink in the pub and watching your favourite football team at the weekends, I have no doubt you can probably blog away with a John Doe pseudonym and no one would find you out. But the combination of being a Quaker, being a home educator, working in Second Life and doing genealogy is a pretty unique one.

So... I could turn from a Quaker to a Buddhist, write my children out of the picture and mention no work and no genealogy... but then, would that still be me in there? It would cut out huge swathes of my life, and make the blog so much less interesting.

So... I could simply ensure that I don't say anything to embarrass or upset my nearest and dearest, and blog about safe things. Well yeah, that's more or less what I have done, apart from the occasional rant about commercial companies in SL. But it also cuts out that part of my life where I feel upset, angry, happy, frustrated or just plain bored, where I want to confide in my computer or my reader, and can't, in case I upset someone.

I'd have thought the same problems may beset the two blogs I have found this week. Bitchy Jones is a blog by a dominant woman, and is very definitely full of not-safe-for-work content. I don't agree with a lot of what she rants about, but the ranting is interesting and intelligent and fiery and alive. She's sometimes not very elegant, often badly spelled or typed, but it sparks and flashes, and is full of challenging and thought provoking ideas about dominance and submission and society.

The Grace Undressed blog was BoingBoinged which led the writer to withdraw most of the posts for a day while she checked through them with a fine toothpick to see if she had left identifying information which might lead the crazy posse to her doorstep. She is simply a fantastically brilliant writer, and I will be sad if she doesn't find a way out of stripping (her current job) into writing, which she does elegantly, poetically and with an honesty and authenticity that shines through the bleakest of posts. She is a truly gifted writer, don't let the stripper thing hoodwink you into thinking she has nothing to say... she speaks to me, and obviously to many people, because of the wave of people who followed the link from BoingBoing to her blog. I wish I had written the following, which she wrote about a 12-year-old who ran away from home and ended up in a strip club:

"I don't know what that girl had seen or felt or thought or done before she ran away. I know a lot more about what her life was like after. I can say for sure that the club was dark, and that it smelled of damp carpet and upholstery saturated with 15 years-worth of cigarette smoke and sour bodily excretions, and blizted over with a hundred cheap body sprays scented like would-be flowers and would-be musk. I know that the customers sat against the wall heavy-lidded, impassive, impenetrable. I know the other girls walked past her in a sweep of sheer fabric and high-heels and straight-ahead stares."

Then again, her experiences aren't my experiences. I can't write her life any more than she can write mine. But you can see, her writing is exquisite.

Picture of water affected by emotions

It's been a while since I visited the HADO site, the wonderful world of Water. Dr Emoto discovered that the same samples of water behaved very differently when they had different words written on them. Sample of water from different places showed different results too.

There is a video about the preparation of samples of water, pictures of frozen water crystals, but most interestingly, a page of links to articles which show how "love" anbd "demon" written on a bottle of water changes its crystalline form.

I don't know what's going on, or what the research shows, but I find the results fascinating and beautiful.

Amazing interactive disaster map

In looking for pictures of the lightning storm around the Chaiten volcano in Chile, I discovered this amazing interactive disaster map.

The map does not distinguish between a small accident involving 17 people and a collapsed fairground ride, and a disaster like the China earthquake involving thousands, and shows the most recent events as radiating circles in red or yellow.

If you click onto any of the icons on the map, you will get a page which offers a description of the event, updates, photographs and location details.

I think this is most useful when you want to get updates on events which have slipped from the mainstream media, like the Chaiten Volcano, although that volcano icon, which should be in southern Chile, occasionally appears in the middle of the Indian ocean, for reasons I don't understand.

Doc Martens design competition

Found a fun advert for the Doc Martens design competition and made a simple but attractive design I hope.

Go vote for me. Or make your own design and let me know so I can see and vote for it!