Utterly amazing

There is a certain beauty in the most terrible things. I came across this photo a while ago, and sent it to a friend, asking if he could guess what it was. Although he is a PhD in Physics and works in a highly technical field, his guesses were all, understandably, around organic objects - viruses, fungi and so on.



In fact, it is a nuclear explosion. During the American nuclear tests of the 1940s, they needed a fast-action camera to capture the explosions and the events of the milliseconds following, as part of the research. Harold Egerton developed the Rapatronic lens, which could capture an exposure of one ten-millionth of a second, and this photo (and the ones below) are the result. The exposure was made less than a millisecond after detonation, when the advancing front of the explosion has not yet reached the ground. The glowing spikes below the ball are an example of the 'rope trick effect', where the ropes holding the tower absorb the intense light of the explosion, heat up and vaporise. The following images show the same scene a couple of milliseconds later.





I find these images both eerily beautiful and terrifying.

Utterly stunning.

Explanations here, here and here.

Oops

The very conservative Americal Family Association runs a news service called One News Now. It seems that the server has a little filter that changes 'objectionable' words for ones which are more wholesome and family-friendly. So when the sprinter Tyson Gay ran the 100 metres in 9.86 seconds during trials for the Olympics last June, this was the result.

What do you make of this?

I used to be proud of the BBC - great British institution, utterly impartial, envy of the world, all that. Well worth the trivial licence fee.

Now I think it should be scrapped. It's not because of any overt bias - they can wheel programme controllers out ad lib whenever they like to 'prove' that the coverage is even-handed. It's because of the subtle mind-set which seems to pervade almost the entire output. It reads something like:

We all know what is good and what is bad.
We know that all our listeners (well, the ones that matter) agree with us
Therefore we can speak as if we were with friends
Anyone who disagrees is outside the consensus and can be dismissed as extreme.

It's conveyed by tone of voice and subtle gesture, by the choice of issue and speaker, and by the entire editorial approach to certain issues. The only way this could be done is if almost all staff were of the same bien-pensant centre-left mind - as evidenced by the reports of empty champagne bottles rolling about the corridors of Broadcasting House on the morning of 2 May 1997.

So the BNP are always referred to as 'right-wing racists' (they may be racists, but their politics are Old Labour). Eurosceptic viewpoints are always dismissed as swivel-eyed lunacy[1]. Any challenge to the theory (yes, it is still only a theory, not a proven fact) of climate change is either not given air time, or presented as a bull-headed refusal to accept facts that we all know to be right.

I've got used to the BBC being the mouthpiece of New Labour. But I have never, ever, seen anything as blatant as this. Watch it closely. See how she tries to attract his attention. See how he waves his hand - don't make it too obvious, love - before an aggressive onslaught to try to silence IDS. And look at the expression on her face as she does this.

The incoming Government should sell the BBC to the highest bidder. Let them see if there is a market for this kind of thing, or if it's only possible when you have a cosy relationship with the governing party, your paymasters.

H/t to Counting Cats.

[1] A reliable test of this is if the interviewer begins a question with the words "but surely ...". This is a way of saying "I know you are wrong, and the viewers know you are wrong; in fact, the world knows you are wrong. You surely don't expect us to believe the utter bilge I know you are about to come out with ...". You can almost see them looking over their shoulder at the camera and winking. Kirsty Wark and John Humphrys, I'm talking about you. At least Paxman doesn't hide his contempt; and he has the virtue of being funny.

Losing it

I feel desperately sorry for this guy.

Not many facts are in the public domain as yet, so any comment would have to come with a health warning that it is based on limited and possibly biased information. But it looks to me as though the guy has just, finally, once and for all, lost it. I doubt if anything was premeditated - just a sad case of a decent man being pushed too far, once too often.

I got out of teaching 14 years ago. I believe that I left at the right time. I started in 1977, when in retrospect things in education were very rosy. Children were generally well-behaved - or at least could be persuaded to behave well by a modest amount of coercion. Parents generally supported schools. Government generally trusted teachers to get on with it. Teachers generally were competent, well-intentioned and respected. (I am aware I have used 'generally' a lot there. Education is always a complex issue, but that is the picture I retain of how it was then.)

I never had any difficulty with discipline, and (at least judging from the number of contacts I get through various networking sites) seemed to have been reasonably popular. And yet by the early 90s, there was a new atmosphere. Pupils were no longer willing to listen or co-operate. and strategies to get the teaching done came to rely more on pleading, coaxing and bribing the kids into working, rather than expecting it because that's what schools were for. Parents were much more demanding and hostile. And school heads were working to inspections, targets and budgets that meant they were more often against their own staff than supporting them. From my point of view, it had stopped being fun, and something isn't fun, you don't do it. I had to take a break due to a serious illness, and took that as the opportunity to duck out permanently. I don't regret it one bit. (Well, I regret losing the holidays and the pay. It was only last year that I managed to get a private sector employer to pay me more than my last teacher's salary, fourteen years later. The holidays were wonderful, but then I was working 70-80 hour weeks in term time, so I suppose it evened out.)

I have only been into a school once since then, when my employer asked me to represent the company on an Industry Awareness event in a local school. I was meant to go and help them with information on how to apply for jobs, what employers would be expecting of them, that kind of thing. I was appalled. Any sense of order was absent, and pupils simply refused to do things if it didn't suit them. The teacher I was paired with was clearly a very intelligent and capable young woman, but she was utterly impotent.

So here's my take on the story above:

Good teacher, well-liked and capable (according to one source I heard, parents were passing his solicitor notes of support even in the middle of court), likes children and loves his subject.

Awkward pupil, awkward age, silly hairstyle, cheeking teacher and refusing to co-operate to make all his mates laugh. Quite possibly been in trouble before with the same teacher, and found that the head and the system favoured him when push came to shove. And says or does just one more thing that pushes teacher over the edge.

Years of frustration, low morale, lack of respect, poor conditions, unrealistic expectations, carrying the can for headteachers' ambitions and politicians' experiments, a decent guy brought to snapping point, and just one word or gesture ...

And he decks the little bastard with a blunt instrument.

I never did anything like that, or even came close to it, but I can understand, and I can sympathise. Dealing with teenagers who know they have you over a barrel makes you lose all self-respect.

So one teacher will probably go to prison, and certainly will never teach again. And one little scrote, assuming he recovers (and despite all the above, I hope he does) will return a hero, and no-one will ever dare to tell him what to do ever again. Which lesson will be keenly apprehended by all his mates, and everyone who reads the story in the press or sees it on TV.

Teachers are powerless.
You can do what you like.
There are no consequences.

And they wonder why there is a recruitment problem. Good luck, Peter Harvey.

Juliette has a good post on the subject here.

I should cocoa!

Spotted this in this morning's Times:

White parents are pulling their children out of schools where they are outnumbered by ethnic-minority pupils, according to a report that shows increasing segregation in Britain.

The Institute of Community Cohesion (iCoCo) studied 13 areas, including Bristol, Bolton, Sunderland and Blackburn, and questioned parents.

Middle-class parents — who are usually white — were removing children from schools with growing populations of ethnic minorities because they didn’t want them to stand out, the authors of the report said.

WTF??? I didn't know we had an Institute for Community Cohesion, although I should have guessed that something of the kind must exist - jobs for the Righteous boys (and girls). But who the fuckity fuck dreamed up that name? iCoCo - do they expect to be taken seriously?

Objections:

1. It makes me think of "I should cocoa", which, for those not familiar with the phrase, is an old-fashioned British way of saying "not bloody likely."

2. It contains, phonetically at least, the word 'cocoa', which has a kind of comic force of its own, reminding one of bedtimes and fluffy pyjamas and teddy bears.

3. It contains InterCaps, which is the lazy tosser's way of making a dull word look interesting - see CompuServe, MasterCard, EastEnders, PowerPoint. See, it comes from computing, so it shows were are edgy, modern and switched on. (Technically speaking, it's actually called CamelCase, from the bumpy appearance - and the two Cs would seem it make it a perfect Bactrian, but InterCaps is a generic term.)

4. It manages to start with an initial lower-case letter 'i', which allows it to share the cutting edge neon-lit technoglow of the iPod, iTunes and so on.

In short, it's risible and crap, and was probably invented by the teenage son of a Labour back-bencher on work experience.

A quick search of the Charities' Commision website suggests that it is not a charity (I immediately suspected it was one of the growing number of 'fake charities'). It describes itself as

"a not for profit partnership, which aims to build capacity at all levels and in all local and national agencies to promote community cohesion."

Why am I not surprised that in 2009 it is thought that we need yet another bloody quango to make us talk to each other, say 'Hi' in the street, and not burn each others' houses down? I see they are promoting The Big Lunch, which appears to be what we used to do all by ourselves (remember the Silver Jubilee in 1977?) but now we need to be cajoled and prodded and monitored by an 'official' organisation. And I bet someone has a set of ambitious but achieveable targets to meet over local participation.

"Nick Johnston, one of the authors and a policy director at the iCoCo, said that parents did not want their child to be odd ones out. “People don’t mind a diverse school but what they do mind is their kid being in a visible minority."

I beg to disagree, Nick. People seem to mind diversity very much and are voting with their feet.

File under "waste of time", "waste of money" and "leave us alone, you interfering tossers."