stuff 'n other stuff

 Yunupingu, the former frontman of Yothu Yindi, has died.

I met him once, at a conference in Darwin about plans to create a project to record and digitize Aboriginal culture. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia may have had a culture that was sparse in terms of material artefacts but, as a group of preliterate cultures they were rich in stories and music recounting their history and beliefs.

 Yunupingu was an impassioned and articulate speaker on behalf of his culture and heritage and the need to capture and preserve it, should it be lost due to indfference or the seductions of ipods and easily downloadable rap music. At the same time he was heavily invested in the idea of providing access to digital technologies to the youth of his community so that they could make and record their own music, rather than simply consume what they could download.

Over a drink after the conference he told me of his interest in the pre European contact links between his people, the Yolngu, and Makassar traders from Sulawesi, something which opened my eyes to the complexity of these trading links, and that is something for which I will always remain thankful to him.

 Yunupingu was a passionate advocate for his people and for all the indigenous peoples of Australia. He will be sadly missed.

Suddenly, in the weird way that projects finish, the project I’ve spent three years on is done.

Actually it’s not done, the final reports need to be formally accepted, and the final invoices issued, but it’s over. No more documentation, timelines, unit tests or anything like that. Just that sudden realisation that everything is signed off and all the acceptance tests are complete, and it’s no longer dominating your life.

A strange, flat feeling. I remember one project I did there was a big launch with speeches and nibbles, and I should have been happy, but I wasn’t – sure I was glad it was over, but it was tinged with the realisation that it wasn’t mine anymore – it had been handed over to production.

About another project I wrote

End-dot

posted Wed, 24 Aug 2005 16:06:50 -0700

… and suddenly it all works. 

The asset management system passes all tests, we have a configured system. Now all we need to do is to learn to (a) use it and (b) customise it. 

projects are always wierd like this – suddenly they’re just done

Very true, and it’s something that they don’t teach you about on project management courses …

A long time ago, I did a simple analysis of the cost of buying books in Canberra versus buying them online – either as secondhand or new.

Since then I’ve moved over almost exclusively to the Kindle for my recreational reading, but I still buy some more ‘serious’ books in traditional format, in the main because they are either not available electronically, or are cheaper bought through someone like Abebooks, or as new books from BookDepository.

As my regular reader is aware one of my interests is the Russian Revolution and the Allied intervention, and I recently bought a second hand copy of Anzacs in Arkhangel. I bought it second hand because I’m a cheapskate at heart.

I bought it from a second hand retailer in the UK via Abebooks – when I ordered I naively assumed that it was a UK edition, but what do you know, when it arrived it was the Australian edition.

Now we know things like clothes and electronics are cheaper overseas, but how come it is significantly cheaper for a second hand bookshop in the UK to sell and post a 500g book to me ?

A few weeks ago we had the Roman toilet paper meme and the use, or not, of pessoi.

That seemed to have died down until a recent post by Caroline Lawrence set it going again.

Well I’m not an expert on Roman bottoms, but I’d say we know enough from Viking cesspits in York and some work on the Anglo-Saxons that people have used leaves, moss and grass, and there’s circumstantial evidence of Roman soldiers at Kintore and Bearsden using spahgnum moss.

Anyone who has ever taken an extended multiday bushwalk in remote country will recognise these as viable alternatives to toilet paper. Dockleaves are especially useful as they are large and cool to the touch.

I suspect that, just as in the remoter parts of Turkey today, most toilets came with a water bucket or jug and one cleaned oneself by using one’s hand, but this does lead to the problem of how to dry a damp bottom.

One could think of a scenario where one washed the are and then dried it with the grass or moss – this would also explain the cloth fragments found in roman cesspits – they were for drying not wiping and hence represent a more economical use of the material.

I was sufficiently interested to do a little googling for the evidence and came across this 2009 discussion on roman latrines. The proceedings don’t appear to be online but I did find a conference report (in German). Unfortunately Google Translate misrecognises the text as being in Dutch, and promptly falls over when one tries automatic translate, so I’ve put an English version up on Google Docs, as it’s the source for the suggestion around the use of sphagnum moss.

However the other interesting thing about this whole thread is the way it has raised the problem of cultural awareness. Other cultures do things differently. Some cultures of course use human waste to fertilise the fields and use well scoured buckets. Any plant material used in the cleaning process would just disappear into the manure pile.

There are tribal peoples in the far north of Thailand and Myanmar who keep pigs under their houses and whose toilet arrangements involve crapping into the pig shed, the pigs doing their bit for recycling.

The point about these arrangements is that any evedence of cleaning practices probably not show up on any archaeological record as it would be masked by the presence of pig poo and any other surplus waste fed to the pigs or other material in the manure pile.

We’re only able to speculate about what the Romans did because of what they left behind …

Withdrawing from social media is a meme of our times about which I’ve written a couple or three times.

The fact is that while I’m far from anti-social, I do relish moments of disconnection. These gaps pour destresser where on can think. And that, I think, is the need to take a break from social media.

However email, twitter and the rest are part of the world today. It is utterly impractical to go back to writing postcards and memos requesting or advising information as people did until well into the nineties. While we might fantasise about a nineteen seventies workstyle it is only a fantasy. The trick is to take the good aspects of the past and apply them to the present, and the trick to doing that is to make yourself some rules about how you run your day.

You need rules as rules give you a structure. You don’t need to obsess about them, and a bit of flexibility is always a good thing.

Some people say to prioritise. That’s not a bd idea but it means you have to make decisions about items. Having rules makes it easy to make the default decisions. Flexibility allows you to break them when necessary. Without rules, you end up like a rat in a skinner box reacting to flashing lights, you need to have a structure. Essentially, without one  you lose control of your existence.

The lack of control is what makes so many people stressed by the modern workplace by imposing and internalising an always on culture. Instant reaction is never good – you need some thought in the process.

So, let’s look at when I worked in a traditional eighties computer centre managing things:

in the old days, before the internet, one had a structure at work that was something like this

• check nothing had broken overnight
• deal with paper mail
• meetings, work, whatever you had scheduled yourself
• deal with afternoon mail and write memos in response to others
• do some more work
• check things and go home

That structure was imposed on you by the fact the mail came twice a day and no one could see your calendar unless you xeroxed you diary and stuck it on your office door. You still had to account for what you did, and you did get interrupted by phone calls, but most people wrote notes or else asked for a meeting.

You were basically in control of your own schedule, in large part because no one expected an instant response.

So here’s my suggestions for managing media:

• make a daily schedule
• diary skype and conference calls in you diary. If you can set your status to offline outside of those times do so
• don’t be afraid to let phone calls go to voicemail – but make sure you call back
• set aside a defined time to manage your email, check twitter and your rss feeds

and most importantly

• respond promptly to emails and always call people back if they call you

That way people know that you will respond and set their expectations accordingly. Failing to respond makes you look disorganised or rude.

The other advantage of doing this is that it makes it easier to plan your day and your workload. If you know you take an hour to deal with email and rss feeds that means you have six hours left in the day for work – six as even if you work eight hours a day you need to give yourself some headroom for overshoot. Knowing this means you can give reasonable estimates of how long it will take you to do things and again make you seem more dependable – but remember, if you say two days to do a report it had better be two days.

And because your reliable in your estimations more and more you’ll get control back, simply because you’re reliable.

So the keys are structure and discipline – build a structure that works for you and stick to it – and that way you set others’ expectations.

I have a paunch. Not a big one, but a definite paunch. To add to it my blood pressure and cholesterol are a little higher than they should be for a man of my age. In fact that’s part of the motivation for my exercise regime.

Unfortunately, while I feel fitter and have lost a kilo or two, I still have a paunch, and this annoys me. I feel I ought to be able to get my weight and cholesterol down by exercise but it’s not happening.

And then I watched Michael Mosley’s program about weight reduction yesterday. Essentially he chronicles current research into calorie restriction and describes his own adoption of a 5:2 strategy (five days eating normally and two days or a restricted intake of around 700 calories (slightly under 3000kJ).

Normally I’m extremely cynical about these kind of diets, but I also used to be an evolutionary biologist and psychophysiologist. (A long time ago, and I’m not up to speed but it does mean I can understand and assess arguments and know the basic physiology discussed).

Now there are these people who live on nuts and fruits and eat less than 1900 calories a day, and it does appear that such a diet does deliver benefits in some cases in terms of longevity and elevated levels of bad things in the bloodstream. This is not terribly surprising, as it’s probably not that different from the sort of diet our primate ancestors ate, and is still eaten by chimps and baboons.

Baboons, of course are monkeys, but as they live in savannah and veldt, rather than jungle, they may be a better model of our early ancestors behaviour than our direct cousins, the chimpanzees and gorillas, who are forest dwellers.

Baboons spend a lot of time eating, or more accurately foraging. Getting enough to eat is hard work for a baboon which is why they do hunt and kill small mammals, and in the process take the first steps towards co-operative hunting and enhanced communication.

We could say that baboons, because of their primarily plant based diet, are in near permanent calorie restriction.

One of the claims for calorie restriction is that the body repairing itself more and another is that it improves neural/sensory performance. Both make evolutionary sense, it being better in energetic terms to fix than make anew, and that in times of hunger your sense need to be more alert to the opportunity. Wether it’s true or not is a different question.

We also know that a plant based diet is good for cholesterol reduction so a move to that sort of diet makes sense, but, as I know from the years I was a reasonably strict vegetarian, you have to eat a lot of veggies and it can make life difficult if you are out in the world.

Interestingly we know now that just eating a bit less and exercising more can bring substantial benefits. After the Soviet Union collapsed Cuba lost it’s access to cheap oil, and a means of raising currency for food imports. The government rationed basic foods, encouraged people to grow their own vegetables, and if people needed to get anywhere they had to walk or ride a bike as there was little or no fuel for buses or trains. There was little or no private transport in Cuba, so the loss of public transport meant cycling on cheap imported Chinese bikes, or walking.

Cuba also has an excellent health system so they could record the effects of the period of austerity. We can treat this as a large scale experiment in calorie restriction and the adoption of a more plant based diet. It’s also a plug for increased physical activity.

So let’s ratchet froward from baboons to humans and to hunter gatherers and in particular the San of South Africa and Botswana. There were a few anthropological studies done on the San before they became heavily exposed to the joys of western society.

One outcome of the studies was that the San, or more accurately San women and children, spent a lot of time foraging for plant based foods, while the men seemed to basically do a bit of hunting, plus the San equivalent of sitting around and bullshitting. The understanding of the physiology of calorie restriction was not well understood at the time, but it was generally agreed that meat must provide a range of important additions to the diet not easily obtainable from a diet of nuts and roots.

As meat tends to come in antelope sized lumps, the San will tend to have a number of days where they have enough to eat followed by some days when things don’t work out, something that is mimicked by the 5:2 diet – 5 days when you speared the antelope and two days when things just didn’t work. There’s nothing special about the 5:2 ratio, it just fits into a seven day week. A 10:3 ratio would probably work just as well.

So what we have is a set of three components for weight reduction

• increased plant based diet – we eat a lot of plant fods already but this probably means more wholegrains and less bread and pasta
• increased exercise – happening already
• periodic calorie restriction – meaning we eat less

The interesting thing about periodic calorie reduction is that people seem not to eat to excess on full days to compensate – and as someone who is careful about what I eat I don’t see a problem.

So, always the scientist I’m going to experiment on myself. I’m not going to be as strict as the regime Michael Mosely has developed but two days a week I’m going to skip dinner and have a smaller bag lunch, while eating the same size breakfast, which should roughly halve my calorie intake on those days. I’m also going to record my weight and girth and see what happens.

This is not a real scientific experiment but more of a ‘what-if’. We’ll see what happens

A long and unseasonably warm drive down the freeway to Victoria.

We started just after seven and broke for a coffee at the bakery in Holbrook sometime after 10.30. The drive down had been uneventful though a dry yellowing autumn landscape and afterwards we pressed on to Benalla where we had a picnic lunch in the Botanic gardens next the art gallery. It had been forecast rain but it was unseasonbly warm and dry reaching 28C in the afternoon. Just after we turned off the freeway, somewhere short of Woodend the heavens opened and the temperature dropped ten degrees in as many minutes. Then we drove on across country Victoria, which has a rolling hilly landscape and small fields and coppices that gives it a looks of a half-remembered England, through towns with very English sounding names and streets of nineteenth century wooden houses to the little village of Musk, where we had rented a cottage for a few days.

Musk consists of a row of houses and a store by a creek, and lies about 5km outside of Daylesford, which was a nineteenth century spa town and resort for the well to do of Melbourne in summer to avoid the heat. A bit like an Australian Llandrindod Wells.

Daylesford’s origins were a littel more prosaic, it started as a gold mining settlement called Wombat and was laid out as ‘proper’ town by the colonial surveyor’s office in the late 1850‘s, at which point the surveyor decided to rename it Daylesford after a village in Devon as he thought Wombat did not have the right tone.

The gold of course ran out, but not before they built a railway line to it, and some local entrepreneurs started promoting it, and its quite foul tasting mineral waters as a spa cum summer resort.

These days, and the railway, are now gone but the town still has an air of faded gentility and some quite nice nineteenth century shop buildngs in the main street. Nowadays it promotes itself as a weekend destination for Melbourne and trades more than a little on its Victorian past, but that does mean a plethora of places to stay and some more than half decent restaurants and cafes.

The whole central highlands area of Victoria is pretty nice, quaint, englishy without the pompousness of England, and with old empty gold towns like Maldon left to dream of the good times before the gold ran out and now just a dream of wrought iron and period features, including a nice selection of colonial period mail boxes.

In the course of our few days there we basically just drove about, went for a few gentle walks, took photgraphs of unspoiled nineteenth century architecture, read and unwound.

Again, we were, by accident rather than design, off the net for a few days. While most places had decent 3G mobile network connections, the quaint, japanese style cedar built cottage we were staying in did not – it was in a hollow, and while you could get a network connection or make a phone call that was all and they would drop out unexpectedly.

Still, that was to the good and we were free of technology and the world, in fact we were amazingly ignorant of the world over these few days – while there was tv in the cottage we were usually out at dinner when the main evening news was on, and we didn’t bother with newspapers, and of course surfing the web for news sites was out of the question.

We did have an ulterior motive in visiting Daylesford for a few days. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re beginning to think about retirement and, Daylesford, or more particularly these old nineteenth centrury gold towns in the region are eminently affordable for us, a bit warmer than Canberra but cold enough to have temperate seasons, and, because Victoria still has a rural train network, somewhere where going to a big city for the day is easy and saves the hassle of driving (and parking).

After Daylesford we went to see family in Mornington on the peninsula. Rather than drive down through Melbourne and pay tollway fees to drive through the city – paying fifteen bucks for the privlege of sitting in a traffic jam on an urban tollway has never been my idea of fun we drove to Queenscliff (it did have a final ‘e’ in the nineteenth century but it got lost along the way) south of Geelong, and got the ferry to Sorrento across the mouth of the bay.

Queenscliff is a small pleasant town with a massive post office building dating from the late nineteenth century when the government obviously thoght the town was need of the stamp of authority. The ferry was, compared to the Kangaroo island ferry last year, a model of efficiency, and while driving, and sitting in traffic jams, would have been cheaper it was definitely a much more pleasant experience.

Mornington was Mornington, where we did Mornington things, such as brunch in Docs an italian cafe cum restauant cum providore, talked, barbecued and reconnected. After that it was the long drive home via Bruthen and the famous Bruthen pie shop.

A busy but fun week …