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Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked,” he told me. What alarmed him was that ”the methane bubbles were reaching the surface. That was something new in my survey of methane bubbles,” he said.

“The conventional thought is that the bubbles would be dissolved before they reached the surface and that microorganisms would consume that methane, and that’s normal,” Box went on. But if the plumes are making it to the surface, that’s a brand new source of heat-trapping gases that we need to worry about.

“The Arctic is our most immediate carbon concern,” Box said, referring also to the CH4 escaping from the melting permafrost. But the sentiment can be expanded to all of climate change:

“We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it,” he said. “We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place.”

whole story is here

The Murder Room by P D James

As P D James died 2 days ago and I had admired her sharp mind so much, having seen her on TV and heard her on the radio, I decided to read one of her famous Adam Dalgliesh books. I don't like his name: he sounds like a dour Scot. But I am enjoying this book both for its literary descriptions and its brilliant analyses of what motivates people in living their lives. First she describes the outer appearance of her characters, and later she gets into them and tells you all about their childhood, their disappointed hopes, their careers and their sex lives in an omniscient way that is remarkable and rather disconcerting. How much do people give away to a gimlet eye like PD James's??

Man in corridor

I like going to my college. I'm only teaching part time so it's not too much of a burden - all my colleagues are very competent and friendly.

Yesterday I saw a man in the corridor who looked very preoccupied: he had dark, almost black hair, a black shirt and a familiar look. However, he was not simultaneously arrogant and shambolic, and therefore he wasn't the man I feared.  Now I do find myself missing my hopelessly uncommitted Turkish student, who used to remind me of the man I used to miss!

Addendum

Turkish student has returned, is in Sarah's class, - so nice to see him in the library!  and asked me about improving his handwriting (he used to write from the bottom of the character rather than from the top). Will get him a handwriting copybook.

A Kiss before Dying by Ira Levin

This is a completely brilliant thriller. It is about a psychopath of course - but the brilliant writing has the effect of cheering one up. It was written in the 1950s, which means all the medical forensics we are used to reading about now were not available, and the social mores in the story are also outdated. The pace is fast, but even so, I skipped bits because I couldn't bear the suspense. I thoroughly recommend it!

Grayson Perry:Who Are You?

This art exhibition was also a TV series on Channel 4 looking at how to explore questions of identity in a portrait. The people Grayson chose to explore did not have a straightforward identity, apart from Chris Huhne, the Great White Male, who seemed to Grayson to be incapable of change - unbearable really, so he made his portrait as a pot and then smashed it, mending it with gold. It was to remind Huhne that vulnerability can be an asset.

Grayson has portrayed himself as a map of days - a walled city, with things inside and outside the walls - a map that takes a long time to take in. He has portrayed the British with a huge, brightly coloured comfort blanket, with all the many things we love and identify with on it.

Grayson lived with the Jesus Army for sometime, observing how they have rescued people from their old self-destructive ways or life on the streets, to become a family in a shared house with a shared way of life. They sing in the evenings and instead of watching TV and they also share their money so he made their group portrait in the shape of a money box styled like a reliquary. Rather wittily it has "Jesus Saves" written at the top.

Another person who was going through an identity crisis was a man who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and this was also shattering for his wife. All their shared happy memories were disappearing. I loved the pot Grayson made them - the wife's scarf making a protection for them both, her face buried in his chest, perhaps with grief, and his face smiling - but vacantly, not understanding the nature of the problem.

You can see the exhibits here.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/grayson-perry-who-are-you-national-portrait-gallery-review-sublimely-beautiful-9820710.html

We could have spent hours looking at this.

This is on at the National Portrait Gallery, where the portraits are mostly rectangular objects with paint on them. But none of Perry's portraits are that. There were a lot of people looking at the Perry exhibits and talking about them with great animation and awe.

Southbank: Turkish film Winter Sleep

This was very interesting. Set in Turkey with fascinating exteriors in a strange, stony, humped landscape with the weather getting colder and the snow coming, and also lovely detailed interiors, it consists mainly of long Chekhovian conversations; people criticising each other and analysing their unhappiness!

The central character is a middle-aged man, and he lives with his sister and his wife. he spends most of his time in his own room: his study, writing a column to the local paper, and criticising his society for its mixture of religion and secularism but without having much desire to change minds or see change. His sister points out his contradictions quite unmercifully.

Meanwhile his marriage is bitterly unhappy and his interaction with his wife is quite destructive. She cries but can't really explain why she feels such intense antipathy for him. It's all a puzzle.

At the end of the story the women don't move on but the man does. Perhaps his sister's misery and pithy comments change his mind, or perhaps it's the long drunken conversation at the end when he realises that everyone's a critic and the more dedicated, the more ridiculous.

It is the kind of long, slow film that you don't often see. Stan and I went to take pot luck and see whatever was on.

Not the blog it was meant to be

When I started to write this blog, it was going to record my down turns as well as the good times: hence the title Ups and Downs. In a way I hoped to make sense of the mood swings. However, I found I didn't want to bring my negative states of mind to the attention of the public. You could call me proud, in that I wanted to keep up a good shop window, but I also know that people were hardly going to want to read those entries. For a while I kept up 2 blogs, the miserable blog and the less miserable one. I got bored with the miserable one after fewer than 10 entries. I wanted to say something about anti-depressants but what is there to say about them, except that they help a bit?

I also thought that my blog pictures would cheer me up - reminders of all the interesting and arresting things there are to find out about. However, when I am in a bad state of mind nothing does that for me, really. I can't settle to anything.

Talk on search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence with Prof Brian Cox and Dr Adam Rutherford and film, Contact, at BFI

I do love our jaunts to the South Bank. I feel like going to lots of literary / cultural history things, but I rarely do, I like to see my literary heroes but I also like to expand my knowledge of what is going on in the world.

Adam Rutherford

Prof Cox didn't seem too lively last night, he said he had recently come back from Australia and his body didn't know what time it was; from my seat near the front clearly he was tired and longing to be at home on the sofa with the kids and the blooming missus. But Dr Rutherford is jolly super! He is a natural -born leader to whom orchestrating a large audience of questioners is a simple joy. He speaks easily and confidently and one judges his brain to be on tip-top form.  He kicked the conversation along and tried to prod old Coxy into wakefulness, and Coxy did his best. Sometimes Brian Cox is best when he is a bit acerbic, as he is with conspiracy theorists. He just cuts them short. I had already heard him say (on Monkey Cage which I have on my iPod) that he thinks intelligent life like us is incredibly rare, even though they have now found 2,000 planets in our galaxy which look good for supporting life, and he said that again, also tried to explain wormholes, and the fact that gravity doesn't exist.

40 years ago we sent a transmission into space, which is called the Arecibo message. Arecibo is in Puerto Rico (very beautiful trees) where the big radio telescope is. Cox and Rutherford explained the origin of the message and what it means.  It sounds a well thought-out message but we only transmitted it for 3 minutes!!

the Arecibo message

They both loved the film they introduced - Contact - with Jodie Foster playing a scientist they both approved of: single-minded, brave, fighting like a lion for funding, being done down by a senior man who wants all the glory after she's done all the work. She is obsessed with listening for a message from space. Other scientists think she's crazy, but the film is called Contact, and the scene where she at last hears something (loud!!!) is very exciting. It's directed by Zemeckis (Forest Gump) who is particularly strong on special effects and it is based on a book by Carl Sagan. Brian Cox seems to have been greatly impressed by Carl Sagan but the counter view seems to be that Carl Sagan was messiahnistic (OK that's not a word, is it?)

The film was 2.5 hours long and I was really uncomfortable in my seat too close to the front and way off to the side (it was cheap) but I was gripped the whole way through. Jodie Foster played a blinder and one felt for her so much.  I recommend this film as a story and a spectacle. I don't feel as though I am now convinced that there is intelligent life elsewhere but it did give me a glimpse into what scientists dream of. They dream of aliens who give them difficult puzzles to solve and behave like father-figures. In spite of the billions of people on our planet they feel lonely and think that there is an answer "out there". 

However, the film does point up the parallels between those who have faith in a God that no one can see or prove the existence of, and those who experience other phenomena ... but I don't want to give the plot away. See the movie !! Recommended by scientists!

Here is a lecture on genetics by Adam Rutherford.

Taking up the poppies at the Tower of London

I enjoyed my morning pulling up poppies. There are armies of volunteers - so we have made a good inroad into the work, and because of the recent heavy rain the moat is becoming very muddy and slippery. The poppies are on metal rods that are starting to rust, and trying to pull off the rubber fixings is slow work. I spent most of the time filling boxes with the ceramic flower heads, which have been sold. We agreed these look more like Tudor roses than poppies, and some of them are a shiny red but most are a rusty red. These are going back to ??Derby to be washed and put in presentation boxes. Some of us had to make up loads of boxes, some had to sort out 3 lengths of metal rod. These had to be bundled, which I think must be the worst job. We were supervised by a young female equivalent of Sergeant Wilson, awfully well-spoken but ... not an organizer by nature, and vague in the extreme. Maybe she has learned by now that every work party finds their own way of doing things and she lets them get on with it.

Some of the poppies have fallen over probably because of the rain and wind and some are damaged, and I think this makes them more moving really, because they are individual and fragile, and they fall down in the mud ... it will be a morass before they are all taken up.

this is what I was doing most of the time

the volunteers were not all English - some were American and I also heard German spoken.  Great, huh?

Scientists on the TV

Scientists on the TV: in my opinion they need to have personality, and if it is a bit eccentric so much the better: a bland personality and a subject like science is going to be a turn off. The late Patrick Moore was great because he was terrifically knowledgeable and a passionate educator. His correspondences with keen schoolboys could be unending as Chris Lintott remembered on the Life Scientific, listen here and he brought many children to astrology by writing books as well as by being a posh uncle figure on T.V.

There are many pictures of Patrick Moore as a fat old dear, when he was young he was rather handsome.

Chris Lintott does the Sky at Night now and he is very good himself. I like his enthusiasm for getting the public involved in classifying stars (and there are lots left to classify!) click here to find the site to start classifying.

Prof Brian Cox is very good because he has an attractive voice and has enough personality without making the show about himself. I used to dislike his crew for making B.C. look gorgeous everywhere he went, bathed in a golden glow from a lovely sunset in the desert/ up a volcano etc. but in his last series they let other human beings have their turn in the golden glow, children, young girls, old men, the lot. In this series BC's thesis seems to be that the whole point of the human journey, from our earliest wrigglings in the primordial soup  is.... space exploration! But I haven't watched the last episode so maybe I have misinterpreted it. It seems ironic that he tells you the meaning of our lives is the ability to explore the universe while the cameraman is shooting National Geographic-style pictures of goat-herders and nomad children who are too busy scratching a living from the dry earth to be interested in space exploration. So what about these people, Brian? No point to their lives?

Now Brian Cox is attractive to look at as long as you don't dwell on his mouth: the rest of him is fine and I like him in jeans and T-shirts. The best thing is that he is really not thinking about what he looks like.

Prof Alice Roberts has been taken on by my University, Birmingham, to spread the word about science to the masses, and I can't get on with her at all. She is too cute for words with her big smiley smile. I love her clothes and jewellery, hate her over-enunciated voice, and find everything she says boring and unclear possibly because if you take her away from anthropology, which is her subject, she isn't that confident. I liked her doing Wild Swimming, but I was already a convert (in theory rather than practice), and I daresay everyone else found it a bit bland. She is a presenter first and a scientist second, sadly.

James Burke (still with us, but not seen on TV) was very good at explaining science and communicating its importance without being a bore. Possibly he was over-exposed in the 1970s and he needed to be saved for short doses. Interestingly, he was at one time a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (like me) and his degree was in Middle English, not science, but he became well-known as a science writer and a consultant to a SETI project. (After years of watching science programmes I know what this means).

Nobody was a better presenter than Jacob Brunowski. His sentences were based on a lot of thought. Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. Wikipedia

He had a good way of stopping after sentences and waiting for the next one to form in his mind. Not many do that these days, which is a shame. 

I wish we had more ecologists on TV. There was an excellent programme on the global threat to habitats on the radio last night: an entrancing conversation by very committed grownups: sad and serious though. Please try to spare some time to listen : Shared Planet

whoops: forgot to link to a personal review of science progs and science fiction on TV by Brian Cox, with Alice Roberts and Brian Blessed.

Quick: only here for 1 month

Sandham Memorial Chapel: paintings by Stanley Spencer

Sandham Memorial Chapel. Although I am a big Stanley Spencer fan I haven’t seen this before. It is a long way to drive and quite small but the pictures are full of love. They must have been Spencer’s way of coping with his memories of WWI. Although it is ostensibly a memorial to a chap called Sandham who died of disease after fighting in the Macedonian campaign, it doesn't show Sandham's experiences as Spencer could really show only his own memories: he had been a medical orderly in the UK (in Beaufort hospital near Bristol) and then? in Macedonia.

In this picture the orderlies are washing the wooden lockers (open shelves) in the baths and Spencer shows himself finding a moment of peace and calm between the baths, which were magenta in colour, and he liked them.

 He shows views of orderlies making beds, fetching tea urns, sorting the laundry, tending to frostbitten feet – and he shows the soldiers resting on the ground, getting water from a stream and filling their bottles, putting up tents, shaving under mosquito nets. And this being Spencer, there’s also a big picture of the Resurrection of the Soldiers. The soldiers get up and see their plain white crosses and some of them hand them back to Jesus, some just heap them up, the mules (that did all the heavy work) come back to life too, and the soldiers start to roll up their puttees (canvas bandages around their lower legs). For some people, the Great War destroyed their faith (how could a good God allow it to happen?) and for Spencer it was the other way (God must have more in store for us than this mess!)

The pictures of his hospital orderly experiences seem the most calming and organized. He had tried to see his menial daily tasks as a devotion to God and his faith was such that he remembered the time as very spiritual, mentioning “the progress of my soul” in these surroundings. It was very hard work and the shifts were long, between 10 and 14 hours, and he was at the hospital (in Bristol) for three years and was not able to paint in all that time. Obviously, he was unhappy, frustrated and lonely, but he was helped by his religious desire to please God by performing these menial tasks with love.  With Spencer the compositions are very complicated. Individual figures are simplified into curves and straight lines, but the design as a whole is difficult to see, with the eye being led all about the picture.

Stanley Spencer: Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there was no war, the feeling of that corridor, the sergeant-major and his dog - anything so long as it gave me the feeling and the circumstance gave me! If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn't know there is a war on, I could do it. I envied him the mental agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in the corridor now. And I will paint it, with all the conviction I feel now, in a belief in peace being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that whether war is on or not is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul.

This picture is called Ablutions. It shows the patients washing themselves and in the middle there's an orderly (prob a self-portrait), with an apron that ties up at the back, painting a man's wounds with iodine. It looks a little like a scene from Christ's life in renaissance painting - the man with the towel could be wearing a toga. The man at the back is pulling up his braces - something most men today have never done. 

In his Beaufort days Stanley had not yet formulated his ideas on the meaning of what he came to know as love, nor were the inspiring mental transformations he later experienced possible in his circumstances then. His current inability to master the significance of the atmospheres he was meeting or to discern the connections in them so vital to his creativity not only alarmed him but turned eventually into a source of desperation for him.
He was so disconnected that he became convinced in later life that the war had damaged beyond repair the cherished pre-war Cookham-feelings which had sourced the pristine glory of his early work. 

the above quotation is from a well-researched website with plenty of interesting thoughts about Stanley Spencer.

In this picture Spencer is on the right front, scraping dead skin off the feet of the man who is suffering from frostbitten feet. Another orderly has round slop pails over his shoulders making him look a little like an angel. There are eggs in nests all over the wallpaper, and this is probably something Spencer remembered as he liked to be precise about details.It is unlikely to be a conscious allusion to sex as this was something Spencer tried not to think about. There is a rare female presence in this picture: the sister right at the back through the doorway.

Stanley Spencer: I would like to explain what was at the back of my mind when I began to want to do these pictures. Well, when I first enlisted I began to feel I was dying of starvation, spiritual starvation, and this feeling intensified my desire for spiritual life, and then suddenly I began to see and catch hold of little particles of this life in the scrubbing of a floor or the making of a bed; and so everything I did meant a spiritual revelation to me. Everything at the hospital became a key to my conception of spiritual life, and so it came about at last that tea urns, bathrooms, beds etc all became symbols of my spiritual thoughts, things sacred to me by association.

when I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.